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I inherited English, I can’t change that. It’s mine – with no shame, and with no pride. I mine it I polish it I wear it ... and I don’t dispossess myself of it.
I play in English, play out my characters.
I call on the English medium for seances in which I receive the French poets and the Urdu poets.
But: I feel intimately soothed by the sound of Sanskrit; I know Telugu and Hindi (enough); I feel comfortable around Tamil and Cantonese and Mandarin; I go past Kannada and Marathi; I tap into many other resources to nourish my composition, the composition of my self.
When I hear the respectful second person address in Hindi – aap (you) – I am reminded that one person is many people. When someone says, in Telugu, that she had a dream - kala kannanu – I note that she did not just have a dream, she gave birth to a dream, and this immediately tells me that our children are the perpetration of our illusions. When I hear, in Hong Kong, in English, he has not come back yet, and I know that it really means he has not come in yet – although I don’t understand Chinese, I absorb one of its tensions, about tense. But none of my sources are overt, because I don’t write about them, their springs are usually well-hid, even from me, and when I see them it is usually with hindsight.
There is an image in this text that arrived from Hong Kong:
Tomorrow below today
Below tomorrow, the day after
Below on below we go
To the earth to be planted
I caught it from Chinese wall calendars, where a page/day is torn off to reveal the next page/day. This image crystallized when I met the less-popular word for tomorrow, Xia Yi Tian – which literally means next/below-one-day. (The more popular word for tomorrow is Ming-Ttianie tomorrow-day.)
And this image flew in from New Zealand:
Out of the corner of my eye I catch silvereye, just standing there, waxy, staring at me.
The spook in that line comes from the deconstructed presence – as a spirit and as a quality – of the Silver Wax-Eye, a bird species that I met in New Zealand.
When my composition is decoded, it reveals languages I write and speak and hear, places I have been, and mythologies I picked up, and made up.
Some of the frustration with language and the pain about its limitations, that I seem to write so much about, can perhaps also be traced to an awareness of other languages offer. Eg:
When feelings combine, how do you combine words?
Horror + Sadness
Anger + Disgust
Faith + Unfaith
I’d known a word for anger + pride in Hindi: kshobh
As for the shape of sound in my writing, I’d point to the mantric imprint. I feel one with the geometry of a type of chanting, and find in it the right fit for my interest in trans – transgression transformation transcendence. Both inheritance, and investment.
Incantation is a sound pattern, air architecture. Winding and trailing, drawing in and out of measures of breath (duration) while between the parts there operates a mathematics, or a firm relationship. Example:
At the sun to see how it never changes, at the moon to see how it does, algae slipping beneath our feet, roots traveling and dewdrops dying in visible speed.
There is no need to breathe in this line until I get to door:
Arranged again in parallel lines my bare feet face the door welcoming the railroad of time, space.
The line achieves progression in loops and by modified repetition.
The longer we look, the more we recognize and anything we could say is too obvious. The songs we like are the songs we know, and every song on the radio is about us.
Dogged repetition manifests as alliteration.
A clay clasp cooler than your hand.
Sounds exercise the parts of the mouth.
We squeaking in our boychoir voices.
Enunciation.
Good job clipper, scrakes the rake
While Indian languages have made my mouth adept with sounds like ksha – gha - nna - gnya, listening to Chinese for a decade must have opened up my hearing range and must have had a say in how I write while I colonize English, write into it.
Beyond the alertness to sound I noted, there are other mantric codes I believe I use. A mantra is a group voice and the achievement is a collective achievement that draws its strength from the agreements and additions (differences) in voices. The split into louder and softer, aside or omniscient chorus, creates the dramatics.
Life begins when the children are out of the house
and the dog is dead, I said.
She laughed
Dyed her hair black
Made me stay.
TIME BRINGS CHILDREN.
THEY BURN HOLES IN OUR STOMACHS.
POP OUR BELLY BUTTONS.
DEATH MAKES SENSE.
Weightless in your sticky fluids
Too long you kept me in
Mythologies and identifiers are also related to the tradition. Writing is a riddle constructed, and a revelation decoded.
Sounds embedded must work invisibly; you have to find your own way to your half of the key for what’s in this text:
Nothing sticks
Not even mythologies
The day you melt
Recurring personal motifs come with a legend – a history, and a purpose – and there are some key personal legends in text. Snakes, for instance.
As if coming from an oral tradition, I often put in a code, my name or signature inside the writing.
His voice
is like a vowel gliding
between m and n
But the name is not always this visible.
I am certain many readings are plausible; this is just a wild surmise. Just a watcher of the skies.