The elements have passed through here, elements that i think are invisible to me, but not quite odourless, because i get a minuscule whiff of something else, something that evades the pointed weight of my finger. It has rained, and snowed. It has dawned, then dusked. It has dayed and nighted and eclipsed, and i, distantly na(t)ive, have put my departed hand in this pocket of earth, feeling the grooves of racinations: a favourite activity perhaps because this hand keeps clutching, pulling, feeling a weight give, then come up to the surface with clumped dirt, warm, yet no root. It knows there's something there, it just can't quite hold it. And i feel some sort of sadness in me, though not an abstract, but a pre-sentiment, somefeel umbral, about that clutching. I've been in Romania for nearly three weeks, and tried writing my feelings down, but the words i want to use are not the words i can use. I want to use Romanian, but i realise that my grasp of Romanian has diminished, perhaps limiting my ability to use it to comprehend, for often i'm not so aware of connotations. And i'm thinking that this place isn't one that can be translated for grasping in another place, like New Zealand, nor can that place be brought here.
It's more accurate than i initially thought, to say that this is a different world. It's constructed differently. That perhaps has to do with the language itself, the story of it and its own impact on the place it is used in. I struggle to imagine a Romania built using the English language. It would be something else. And i struggle even further to imagine it because i note grinding linguistic edges that creak frictively when Romanians use English. Globalisation, advertising, capitalism, other tions, ings, and isms, have collectively chipped at the imaginary body of Romanianness, probably boring holes into it (sockets?) and allowing hybrid beings/double-citizened beings like myself to fit a little better. But the electricity, the communication that passes through such channels, doesn't find the same solitude of journey, of understanding, of clarity, as it would be if it were Romanian spoken to a Romanian, or Englishman to an Englishman. This probably means that the Romanian no longer exists, if it ever did. Pithy English phrases and instantiations of Fuck leak into friends' Romanian, pooling into a sense of gone-by, a sense that visitation has happened during the night (from aliens) and in the morning, they find they are able to communicate slightly more efficiently. I wonder whether they feel probed anywhere.
With my own language use, it feels like i have been probed and taken away for ten years for testing in a corner of the universe, and then brought back here to test-drive my capabilities, and the implanted intelligence. Shortly, i'll be ported back to Middle Earth, where that intelligence will serve causes there, but it seems somehow like my being in Romania is a programmed/expected spike in the machine, a want of return, back to, back to then, subsequently met by dissatisfaction, by an inability to compute happenings here within the framework developed back there. That feels sad. The robot can feel things. So returning, doesn't really strike me as returning, but rather retuning, and in this, coming to terms that, not living here, not forming the mindset of here, i'm not able to comprehend it, to figure it out and feature as data in it.
Perhaps if i'd kept up Romanian... but Romanian away from Romania is not the same thing, as i'm now bridging that French away from France is not the same thing. French being closer to Romanian though, i perhaps subconsciously saw merit in learning it back when i chose to study it in high school, in 2005.
I've been reminded several times to remember my roots. All i have so far been able to do, though, is to feel them underneath my feet, something i'm far less able to do in New Zealand. There is a quiet happiness in knowing that the roots are here, but being unable to hold them. I tell people: New Zealand doesn't feel like home, and Romania doesn't feel like home, either, and i let that thought dangle in front of me as i say it, watching it curiously float, aware that it can easily get tangled in conversation. I further say that i don't feel at home anywhere, but i wouldn't say that i am homeless. In Romania, i feel something. Something i perhaps cannot put words to, something that does not word. Emil Garleanu, an author, wrote a book called "Din Lumea celor care nu Cuvânta" which translated, means "From the world of those who do not speak." This book is about animals, if i recall correctly, and it contains stories about animals, with animals. I'm interested in the last word of his title, "cuvânta," which means to speak, but more concretely refers to wording something. Cuvânt means word. And i want to say that the feeling of home that is underneath this particular earth, one that is everywhere here, in this place, its connotations i recognise, its corners and wall faces, its gestures and quotable troubles, its air and airwaves, is something i'm probably not going to be able to cuvânt to anyone, not even my double-citizen self. To end, i word this: the 'i' graphemically represents my being with some pointed accuracy. The bottom 'stand/base/body' remains steady and holds up the 'head/ornament/globe' which floats above it. The head is separate from the body, though they are undoubtedly linked. Even though my head has been constructed double-hemispherically, both here and there, it cannot grasp the piece of earth below it, wherever it finds itself. What it is doing, however, is enjoying the air and gravity that's holding it, sculpting it, eroding it.
Ironically, figuring out where i am is a bit like scratching the bottom island jutting out of my chin, hoping to unearth the cables that tie it to the ground. Maybe they will have been labelled with bar codes, numbers, the names of proprietors, addresses to corners in unvisited rooms since Communism. Maybe it falls down to smoke listening over land, unnatural to my nostrils but grazed on thirstily anyway. The reason i pick up the pages is that the sense of deciphration tickles.
There are several versions of the line that you can draw. i am bi an unfoldin, tapered as a wick child waiting for its saluting blaze. there was a summer on that hill.
i didn't let the piano finish, now it has to start again.
so es i sei, i am bi an unfoldin in the world, sitting thinking about whether i should be sitting while sleeping with part of myself tucked away. it doesn't look like anything, if you're asking. here's a question: have you ever wondered what the world would be like if there were just shadows, and no peaks nor pencils to cast them. just silhouettes and witnesses noting surfaces as they creep along the sun, which would exist, so as to cast.
the piano just started again,
and an uphilling grace that pushes me to encounter. imagine a world of paper, you fall into it and the folds and creases soften your gravity, and you amble through, folding the world as you go looking for where you're going. you look back and see a long trench marking where you have walked, a long way from hope and aspirations. this world just holds your attention and the attention you paid to where you were going. it learns you as a crane, as you fold.
this time the piano finished
there's the contour of the keys, a long white set of teeth in a stuck jaw that manages to voice its concern by being pressed into its gums, and we take that for melody, you and i. we take that for beautiful. but i think i'm finding something else, bi this unfoldin: the question whether i am inside the unfoldin. the air is perfumous, slowly condensating on the walls of my nostrils and my ears are whispering the breezes of the chattering songs. i'll find questions, when i'm asking questions as i am now, bi this unfoldin. i find myself wondering whether i should be in motion, shifted
then there's a silence, and my awninged eyelids want to fall for the night, so i resume my place bi the unfoldin, from where i'd never left but through door's thinking, and i continue to wander
Signifying is more like pushing a paper boat on a fountain bed, ripples outwarding edging whoknowswhere shores (and less like closing a fist tight enough that nails sculpt the palm
Meaning is pointing in the general direction of the horizon, spanning a string (invisibled the length of one corner of the eye to th'other. Tying one ripple's end to understanding, one to naught, and passing it between teeth, chewing each getting-at, (metaphorically and getting stuck
It's hard to begin, because even before beginning i ask the question, how should i begin? Usually i'm self-conscious about beginning with the singular first-person pronoun because it sponges importance in its columnar etchedness. It assumes there is a ceiling and a floor, a crust and a welkin between which it exists, like a passerelle. So i thought then to begin with this beginning and to each time i write the passerelle to stop, almost like a quiet stun where i can nearly feel the distance between my right middle finger and the black concave surface of the key it presses upon a second later.
It's curious i'm speaking of personal pronouns, because the i i am is riddled with gladwrap, so much so that i feel cocooned in between words and supposings, and by that i mean whatever fills the non-air around my cranium and the crania of others when we're in a room, sounding out verbatia. It's as if we come into a classroom, we position ourselves with elbows on tables and become pumps of cloud. And as we talk, as we lesson, or "learn," the air becomes progressively more misty in a deceptive fashion, because i can still see you and you can still see me and my lips moving. But the air has changed and what i thought i was outside that room has now been lost among powdered thoughts that we mortared. i want to talk about you. i and you, and why you have three letters and i only one, but mine is normally assumed to be the one that's more important. i'd really become someone else, that is, someone next to myself, when i was I, for i thought myself taller than i was. But i freed myself from the gladwrap after enough sweating inside. And that's to say that you helped me by cutting it, so that i could wriggle out, wormy and digested, but still intact, that is, newborn. Preserved. Pre-served: what i was before i made myself into someone, a human capitalised worm. i was thinking about who you are and graduation and the yam with the trencher that you drew. And if i were still cocooned, I would have felt envious at being shown such appreciation, at having affection articulated. And I would have felt angry, furious at my inability to nudge and create something wonderful, like you did. I would have thrashed, and maybe fallen off from the nook where I'd been spidered. I would've broken something, like a tooth, or a promise. and i got to thinking about the blog post you'd written, that you'd addressed to you, and my not being sure who you really was. i wanted to think it was me, and then i thought about one of your friends who it could have been. and then you replied to my text and i thought i shouldn't ask you who it was, though i wanted to know. i wanted it to be me. or I wanted it to be me. but what do i want, now that i've slalomed out of the slithering confusion of columnar self and atlassed self (the i, visually, is like Atlas holding up the firmament, or a globe) and found myself again, mapped here, at the co-ordinates 0, 0. i don't need it to be me, that you that you wrote while in your midnight high. and while i can still feel the wiggling thoughts squirming in my crenelations (cranium-elations), i feel a sense of freedom to let them fidget and turn. i'm happy, you know. drawing brackets around this moment is probably the best thing we decided to do. and for that, i thank you. because i know that between these two concave dividers, i can meet you. we set out a place, and on any map that is where i can find you: at (0, 0). i want to give you words, better approximations each time hopingly but probably, probably you know too, this, that we may get closer, which is where we're meant to get with words, maybe, but we'll never quite find our way to where x meets y that chromosomal parenthetical birthplace.
maybe we'll set (here's an idea) our hooks in the water (are there fish) and take no anchors, just drift ice floats with a beanie, a nose, and take over the word by sea.
we could wave in all sorts of languages and all sorts of inscriptions, and there's something funny and tragic about how each time something is said that sounds true, there's a visceral embrace, and then when it's said again, i am looking at it across something, a sea, or nothing, but there's a distance. it gets abstract and polysyndetonic and troubled, in the French sense.
then after words, we're different, though we find ourselves at (0, 0) once again, and we realise it's you and i i and you you, i i, you (0, 0) like we've been reset. and then we notice the comma between us, and i or you ask you or me whether we've been using that as a cane or a contact lens. then we think ourselves as circles and ends to things, and precisely not venn diagrams. then we're thinking about it too much, because it gets nebulous, so we stop again. there is still this comma between us, an orthographical sign, one that you and i have both internalised. i'm thinking of it as the worm, or the remnant of the worm, the thought there in the space, between the parentheses, the thought that takes us outside our dividers. the thought that we leave there as an escape route. maybe it's mine - i feel some responsibility for it. but i venture you would say the same thing, because there are thoughts in your mind, too, niggling, wiggling and making you pause. so it's mine, and it's yours, so it's ours.
it's good we can see it. i want to end this. so i will end it. i say it's good we can see it, because it's written, and it's material, and it's a change in intonation, so it's discernible, visible, visceral, bodily, and it stands outside, permanently outside, though internalised by us. it remains outside. although we've brought it in, and used it as a tool, and are still using it as a tool (whether we've wrung it into a word, or a letter, or an excuse, or a joke), it's not of us. it's ours - we anvilled it into a speck from what it was, or from what it really is, and put it between us. and although sometimes it angers me, when it's a leech or a seaweed, sometimes it helps me see, like when it's a looking glass, or the branches of a tree.
no tears i could imagine coins slipping into machinery friction against narrows even clinkety placeholders [ ] no change hitting the plastic wall save two fingerprints from spending too much silence with loud interruptions meals by windowpanes eyes wiping pupils and driving cars and the occasional contours of front teeth in front
i glimpsed a limpness a node knotted that was being together not forever out of order at the bottom of cheeks accumulated on the jawline, actually those placeholders wobbling on rickety foundations built a house [ around ] without doors and windows in which to fumble was to read palms stretch out skins to make floors hand fissures at feet leading to the ] walls
outside it suns face basks i'm imagining fine, ok as an [ unfinished
You can also find me on tumblr at http://hyphonowlet.tumblr.com/
Thank you for your presence and readership. And upon leaving, may you take a pocket of stillness with you, and a smile within, to share with everything.
