Have you ever listened to a stream of water running over rocks? Sat in the late summer grass under the swirling yellowgreen foliage and listened deeply to what the river had to say? The sheer babble of it,—can’t you almost make out words?
Milton called words Dragon’s Teeth, a reference to the prized objects of grecian myth,—and he was right: these small strange scribbling shapes of letters that make up words strung out across the page, gnarled, seem always ready to gnash themselves together to crush the whitespace from between the lines, squeeze it out like toothpaste. They’re lifeless objects that speak their own language; they’ll speak to you if you understand that they’re trying to say anything at all.
These words are the rocks over which the water (the air of your throat) moves, whistling, whirling, making voice. The printed page’s a purely natural music,—the tower of babel realized, a tower you can step into with a cold brew and a joint or two to explore, experience bewildered, with your feet firmly down underneath you, whenever you open up and immerse yourself within a book like the proper third space that it is.
Last night I dreamt of Sopranos characters drinking diet sodas out of bendy straws and I woke deeply satisfied with a smile laid across my brain. Ahh. Good sleep. A gust of wind trounced the maple outside my window, a cool breeze coming through. AHHHH. Looking at the ceiling now. The other day I ran into someone I knew from years ago. I was walking down Roscoe and we made fleeting eye contact and nope,—I felt like running and jumping from an overpass to splash into the asphalt.
Like anyone who didn’t get out nearly enough in their teens, my twenties have been a steady squeegeeing out of all the childishness left inside of me. Awkward fallings out stick around for some reason. You always think you can get away from people in a big city but there’s just more people, and the same people.
I find myself thinking about last fall, when I met someone from Nice, France at Café Mustache’s karaoke night, and I started to say “Baguette” and “Le Eiffel Tower” in a shitty imitation of a french accent with a a lot of oui ouis and fake throaty laughter, and with all of this being something he did not find amusing I still feel bad. I still think back on how stupid I was for doing a french impression to a french person, how discouraged he seemed in the moment by this stupid american kid.
I’ve only stumbled into pissing people off,—been taken seriously against my will,—maybe once or twice, but just the mere happenstance of my embarrassing myself in such a way (what a callous idiot I was!) haunts me like a petty strain of abrahamic guilt, an oil stain on what was once a white shirt. I thought I would get along with everyone, that the right intentions would overcome any miscommunication, but then I would send a snarkydrunk text to my friend at 3am when I was 19, impulsive, drunk, and irritated about something they had said,—or something I ~was told~ they said, with the thought that “oh I can probably just apologize later,”—and then suddenly there’s another point of guilt in this lifetime of stumblings and misunderstandings, another something I said that’ll bounce around my head way longer than it will theirs. And worse, what if it bounces around their head too? Oh godd.
That’s all to say, us as individuals and the language we happen to speak are always going to be at odds, bitter frienemies, because our language is not ever truly our own, and because our intentions will always be taken with the whole of the intentions circulating around our cultural usage.
Your words are not yours. These words are not mine. We’ve come to something of a mutual understanding here with the words we speak. It’s how language works. There’re real constraints to the grammar we use; there’re real constraints to the cultural usage. There’re alternatives, sure,—but even those alternatives have their own drawbacks. It takes a long time to spell things out in ASL, you know? And so Language will forever be truly foreign to us unless we put our heads underneath the waters of the people around us or the corners of the internet where we spend our time.
When I was small, my mother read to me enough so that I could almost read before I could speak. Speaking felt like an afterthought until I had to open up the cork in my throat finally in school. I mumbled for years, felt scared of saying things. I went to speech therapy, did poorly in phonics lessons. None of it made much sense; I felt locked behind a glass shield of my lack of knowing of what to say or how to say it, how contribute to what other people are saying, how to ask questions. This is all very midwestern of me. I got it down, eventually, but only after two years of working part-time in a restaurant, serving tables, talking constantly to strangers. Performing music and singing for strangers in the Madison DIY scene also helped a great deal.
The best description I know of describing this shitty feeling of being trapped behind your own language while you’re coming to terms with the relationships in your world comes from James Joyce (in what’s likely his most widely read passage, from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man):
The above’s a description of a child (Stephen) scrambling under the circumstances of their world and finding that even cowering away from those circumstances is sinful. And like Stephen’s world, the connections interlacing our individual world are not ours,—though our joy is always ours.
The contradictions are systemic, not completely intuitive, and this is a terrifying shock to realize, almost as bad as discovering death, that it’s so dreadful to simply exist at all within these structures! Not understanding leads to mistakes and fumblings and fuck ups, and then, especially in Joyce’s Ireland, a deep sense of shame and guilt. Joyce himself was chased out of Ireland. He wrote most of his works in France. And then comes the dreadful hammering: Apologise, pull out his eyes, apologize…
A lot of people who approach Joyce get caught handwringing about the references and the connections, the depth of the allusions, and they spend their reading experience digging deeply into them all, going at a snail’s pace,—but I think that kind of mindset ignores Joyce’s intention in creating a reading experience of almost infinite mysteries.
The mysteries laced into his books are the vibe he’s going for. You can do some gumshoe work of course, figure out what something’s in reference to,—but mostly it’s a wash of mysteries. The terror of not knowing there’re great monsters beneath the small seafaring craft of your eyes reading left to right, you can only sense their colossal shadows moving underneath the surface. How terrifying. The point is to not know. And in our modern world, to not know is a personal failing and so guilt sets in.
Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake also portray this same kind of weary world-hardened fear and trembling one feels when existing in the mental limbo between the unknown becomes the known,—that space being that which Joyce operates within,—except now the unknowing’s grown older and become even further alienated from the reader and from the protagonists, in Dubliners behind Irish Catholicism and in Ulysses behind walls of stream-of-consciousness themselves alienated from the real world by the rules of language, genre, and abstract institutions (I’m talking catholicism, political news, and, yes, even literature), and then finally, we (re)arrive to Joyce’s Wake, a 620 page tome of a book that seems at first glance schizophrenic nonsense and at second glance something indescribably ambitious.
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