FIELD REPORT: Not On My Lips Look for Your Mouth

November 27, 2012

– VIENNA

I am a stranger amidst the governing rules of most human languages. A deserter – trespassing outside the confines of vocabular comprehension. I appear in most corners of the world, and I can neither give nor take any meaning. In that place, to be illiterate is to be destitute – there is no commerce of communication.

I cannot ask you for a drink of water. I cannot ask you for your dreams. I am in this way penniless. Yet look – here are shells and talismans exchanged, perhaps, in an alchemical, gestural arcanery…a nod, a hunched shoulder, a flippant wrist, a close-watched rise and fall of chest and breath, and we’re off –

And there are a few crevasses in the cosmos where, as though by candlelight, I can just sense out the shapes of something familiar. A broken bone that still speaks of leg. A soft contour here that reminds, evokes, and beckons.

Oh, it’s a rare and poignant bitter sweetness when half-remembered tongues re-appear.

Perhaps my most easily-beloved aspect of travel is to dwell in those alcoves of the globe where I can understand absolutely nothing of the words around me – written, spoken, sign-posted. As a writer, it’s a kind of delicious conceptual quieting – an eyemask for language. Darkness and rest. The only language that can be heard is the voice inside: all else vanishes into a linguistic mist: there is no eavesdropping, no intrusion of meaning, no command or question or injunction, no proposition or prohibition or intimation – just a drift dive through the motions of mouths moving. Words become marks with meanings that I can pass through with neither comprehension nor restriction – indeed, an unseen god without boundaries. I cannot command, and I cannot be commanded.

And then there is the far more wrought realm – a fairytale land of lands where a language is half-known, a first tongue forgotten and exhumed. Linguistically liminal. A place of borderlands. A word, a half-awakening of memory of meaning… Another word arrives – it’s an emissary of supposition. What might it mean.  And yet deep down I know, I know that I know this word, this half-remembered word, this knowing of this word that washes over in a tide of emotion that arrives long before its meaning.

In this feeling sea, when a word emerges…and another…each one half-familiar, caught by eyes and ears but also by a thick heart. Each barely recognized word examined with a rush of feeling and a sad formality – a shy, frantic, reticent desperation: did I once know you? can you still be known? do you remember when last we were together, you and I? are we too far away, now, to meet again?

It’s re-encountering the vocabulary not only of a language, of a communication – it’s re-encountering the talismans of memory.

A steamer trunk in the shadowed attic of the brain – it is dusty and forgotten. It grew cobwebs since the last voyage. It is a ship of memories. It leaks and heaves and tilts, and yet it sails on, unlikely, beneath the moon. Foreign tongues once learned – their words heard again – they emerge from within an opacity, a vessel from within a membrane of night and fog. The light inside it glows, but it’s only an vehicle. It’s eerie and prescient, this ghost ship of language. Are there souls a’board? The word knows more than I do. The details of its journey towards me must be extrapolated and exhumed, invoked and interpolated. It carries more than I can conjecture through my aching spyglass.

It’s a ship in a bottle. It’s a love letter missing all its consonants. An insult of only vowels (a howl). In the land of the half-remembered language, the chasm between intent and impact are an Oslo Graben into which one could fall interminably. One could die, bereft.

One word brings hope – and I hang on it like a rope. Yearning.

There is no more powerful of these for me than German – and when I arrive in its lands my mind shudders into deep memory – a clumsy reawakening, a wrending ressussitation of a heavy, loved tongue. A repelling and compelling language of nightmare and loss. But it’s old in me, it is the first language, the forgotten language of remembering.

Vergessen.

And the night train to Vienna. It is as ever: I always try to arrive to German in the night. When my censoring English-speaking brain is dismantled. When the contemptuous brain and the ravenous brain, the forsaken brain, the ancient lonesome mind and greedy future mind seethe and roil amidst themselves, and not one of them holds sway.

To drift through language on a train, in the night, slipping on steel through darkness, moon glow from the window and being pulled to a promised destination – unwilled. That is how to arrive. Half awake, half asleep, suspended in a dislocated consciousness that upends my everything. Catch it in a dreamtime mist – sensual. Phantasmagorische.

And here I am in German, again, amidst an always resentful, graceless reawakening of my primitive, heavily-Dutch-accented German words, and my medieval pronunciations, and my archaic, anachronistic mis-definitions that yearn to seek out sparks of something I can cling to. I resent, and I resist this language that will always reek to me of genocide, and yet I am yearning, leaning, keening into a fathomless mouth that speaks of some strange love below the loss.

Adrift, adrift, but floating.

 

CRYSTAL by PAUL CELAN

nicht auf meinen Lippen nach Ihrer Öffnung,
nicht vor dem Gatter für den Fremden,
nicht im Auge für den Riß suchen.

not on my lips look for your mouth,
not in front of the gate for the stranger,
not in the eye for the tear.