Anciance

My dear friend Jenna has a word for a concept which is otherwise cumbersome to explain repeatedly. The word, which she says she learned from a French woman once, is perhaps spelled anciance, or maybe encience? The concept it describes is the feeling you get when something is so beautiful, so perfect that you just want to hurt it. A feeling of desire and love so intense that it manifests itself as a jaw-clenching wish to squeeze the life out of something.

And but so, by way of illustration:

Barry: I don’t want to hurt anything ever, but what I’m talking about is—have you ever held a little puppy or a little kitten and it’s just the cutest, softest, most precious thing in the world and out of the blue you get this feeling in your gut and all you wanna do is squeeze it. Just fuckin squeeze the shit out of it. To take a little puppy and smash its skull…just so precious, so beautiful. Just so god damn wonderful and cute you wanna smack it and kick it and love it. Fuck. I don’t know. I don’t know. And you, you…I’m looking at you and I just…your face is so beautiful I just wanna smash it, just smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it…you’re so pretty.

Lena: I know. I know. I know. I just wanna chew your face and scoop out your beautiful, beautiful eyes with an ice cream scooper and eat ’em and chew ‘em and suck on ‘em. Fuck.

The thing is, it seems this term, this “anciance”, probably doesn’t even exist. At least not in any spelling I can invent for it. And googling leads me only to a similar Spanish term, “nervio,” which is similar in meaning but not as satisfying conceptually.

Whatever the case I think it’s important that we have words like these, even if they’re fake. To express our shared experiences, the stuff deep down in our guts that we feel a kind of shame about. Like nobody in the world feels this way, until one day you find out that someone does and in fact has made up a perfectly false word to describe it. A purely verbal shorthand for our common fuck ups and shared insecurities.

Narrator: I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all the French beaches I’d never see. I wanted to breathe smoke.

Tyler: Where’d you go, psycho boy?

Narrator: I wanted to destroy something beautiful.

(With apologies to you and indeed myself for quoting Fight Club)

I think I’ve been holding the things I love too tight. I’m gritting my teeth and just squeezing the life out of them.