Gnarly weather, gnarly life, has me thinking about yesterday, though nothing happened yesterday. Nothing, that is, save for diurnal necessities and pedantry of discursion. At least today’s ugly weather was accurately forecast. I woke to a mostly warm apartment but the bathroom window was wide open, allowing waves of cold to blast through, the spittle-like air gnawing dramatically at that far corner of my extravagant living space, shivering me timbers as I brushed my teeth.
I remember a poem I heard, a poem inserted into a story, a throw-away poem in which a young man is mentioned, a young man who can turn anything into a poem. He describes his mother, his mother saying over and over that she has so much to do around the house, so much to do, but that once she’s done with the dishes and done with the laundry and done making dinner she swears she’ll sit in the chair and relax. And so she does this, she finishes her work and sits in her chair and she looks out the window and sees nothing.
Nothing.
That is how I remember the poem. Her work done the woman sees nothing.
I’ve had in this mind a long poem, though for today I can summon but 2 words, those 2 words comprising but one word repeated, with an exclamation point after each word.
A few weeks ago I wrote a long poem, written mostly whilst sitting by this window watching the lives pass by. Today I find that long poem and see the typical weaknesses of superlatives and obviousnesses. Someone should craft a word processing plug-in that highlights extreme words, words vacuously all-encompassing: Ultimate and All and Everything and Complete and other linguistic crutches, crutches made not even of solid wood but of water.
I might write a poem around the first time I ever said “Fuck you,” an incident about which I wrote a short story, but which happened so long ago that I cannot fabricate or even claim mental access to a genuine narrative. That story was supposed to be less about my grade-school cursings but generally about the flimsy splat of invective.
God, I remember the foul clouds of language out on the school yard, youthful eructations of vulgarity, blasted free and far into the air, away from the clutches of the teachers’ and the nuns’ remonstrance. How we youngsters spewed the bile out on the school yard, teams of Tom Sawyers and Fuckleberry Hinns competing for primacy in the orgy of dirty words.
All of life is text. Centuries of centuries are represented to us now by little more than a few lines of text (with footnotes!). For me the very site of text, especially poetry with its intentional indentations and abruptions of perspective, sets something ablaze in my mind. I react similarly to musical notation, especially when I have not seen it for a while. Something about the code of languages sets a blender churning in my head.
As I was saying over here, I think I need a new language. A new spoken or written language. Arabic looks beautiful at a glance, and esoteric. Japanese, for as much as I understand of the way it works, might be the easiest for me to pick up, and for the moment at least it may be the Japanese whose intellectual workings I want most to understand.
Since youth I have harbored a feeling that something is missing in the English language, something from which our language arose but which went missing — a history of expression, a heritage of context from which today’s words and biases of articulation evolved. With little more than a collegiate reading of Lacan and a summer spent listening to the conspiracy theories of failed talk radio shows I imagined that today’s English is but a headline, a “Daily News” version of reality which is linguistically baroque but nevertheless only symptomatic, symptomatic of the rising, the rising of ideas from sparsity to baroque and back to sparsity, the same ideas trading places back and forth across centuries.
I usually feel a certain constipation when reading materials translated from other languages into English. This should come as no surprise, but when I first discovered this sense of cluttered detachment I remember next moving from those translated texts back to “natural” American English and feeling the same unease, the same sense of gruff inarticulateness moldering in the words that swirled like mud on the page.
I imagine something is missing in the tools of human communication, and I perhaps foolishly imagine that understanding the nuances of communicating in another human language might open windows on that abyss. I do not imagine, though, that other cultures and societies have answers that America itself lacks. Such attitudes suggest elitism and even racism (two more elements of culture I would like to understand). Should I master every language used on the human stage I would still not expect answers, only questions. If I do pursue speaking or writing/understanding other languages then it would not be a culturally- or politically-motivated pursuit but an earthly-human and possibly spiritual one. I have never trusted language as a documentary tool and yet lives and civilizations are regularly reduced to a few lines of text. Nothing communicates chaos and unrest like text. War and violence and love and passions and our lifetimes of hard hard work are but ephemeral passages — but text, text is forever, lingering in the mind and in the air where propagandas evaporate.
Gnarly weather. Gnarly weather. Sleep ’til noon. Sleep ’til noon. The changing of the seasons walloped me these past couple of weeks. My sleep patterns have been all over the place. I wake up splayed in positions that seem impossible to have reached from the point at which I commenced the unconscious theater. How strange might it be to watch myself sleep, or even to just listen. The body asleep is an alien, an extremely vulnerable alien, its mind smooshed down like your mouth under a tongue depressor. The body has no authority at sleep — or does it? It would be strange to watch myself, but I might pursue this distraction — not out of morose weirdness but to understand that portion of my life, and to mine it for clues. Maybe this earthly vessel is at theatre for those long hours. Maybe the bodily tics punctuate and explain the incoherent nonsense that drowns the sleeping mind with seeming clarity, that fabled clarity vanquished like those watery crutches of weak language.
