It felt right in recent weeks to be more in the silences, having experimented in September with throat-activation, throat-opening...having to speak, not in the abstractions of diary-here, but to real people, about my work, in real ways.
Even so, I was able to still summon my regular elliptical rhythms—my roundabout manner—with those 2:4 hermit-opportunist tendencies or as my mom told me yesterday on the phone, my mode of half-speech, talking through a push-pull where you never quite know what's going on, but from fragments of information, conditions, variables, a narrative begins to unfurl:
introducing my practice by transferring water from one container to another, pouring it into a bowl, reading a text, having the water collect the words, sending my classmates to the window, me out the door, heading downstairs to the little smokers' patio, while they watch from above, at an angle, as I take my shoes off and walk to the only solitary bush, and sprinkling the water on or before it, I say, hello.
The first step, I suppose, in staging for this new landscape, untold,"neutral", a micro-alchemy of my micro-universe, an autopoietic circuit of private, specific passions.
The next day my professor comments: you were reading a bit too fast for non-native English speakers, of the text I had chosen for the occasion and where the language is complex, with some words made up, as I explain to a colleague who didn't catch them all, but could nonetheless tell that language does, for me, have a certain importance. I am touched by her observation, or by its indication, that something of "me" is discernible.
I will see what happens to my love of linguistic play now, living among those for whom the entire lexicon is, to some degree, made up, fictive: we cohabitate in a mutual (agreed upon, or at least functional) fabulation, the others converge on English as a space of betweenness to join the islands of their individual tongues, English as a boardinghouse, so that it becomes a brocki English with the marvels of parts collaged and renegotiated, and when I listen to their "finds", tertiary meanings installed prominently in unexpected corners, no, as someone wondered, I am not necessarily frustrated; on the contrary, it seems like a gift: freeing and joyful, revealing convergences, correlations, etymologies, roots, inviting me to go deeper, though perhaps not in my immediate circumstances, but once I arrive "home" (recall the familiar, slightly fetishistic template of Beckett working in French, Jhumpa Lahiri in Italian—what is made possible by freshness). There is the inverted symmetry of the fact that, because English is my primary, like them, I have the privilege of re-drafting its interiors: building parapets, extensions from historical blueprints, I can furnish these lushly, absurdly, A Rebours or Arakawa and Gins style. Regardless of location, I have long been inclined to devise an English that even from inside, is uneasy, where you must hold onto the walls, yet that still aspires, because of a default (shifting?) baseline of dominance, to be understood.
I agree with him, my teacher, that I went through the piece too quickly: my voice was shaky during the "ritual", it was so strange and discomfiting in the moment and yet in concept, natural, this need to perform, to instigate a chain of events, a process of—favorite, overused term—transmutation. Did it help you, though, was it useful for your work, he continued, and I say, it's always helpful for me to conduct myself more publicly, to give myself what elsewhere I have termed "due berth", or to bring the great Within out into a larger Zone of perception. Actually, I have been thinking lately about Stalker, about independent ecologies, quests and so-called "wastelands" and what we can neither demarcate aloud nor turn back from detached, when instead we are forced into momentum, movement towards a violent yet nebulous core.
