the drive to connect
Because it is possible, in the lowest of moods, to post a status message to facebook in a language that most of my 'social network' does not understand (I have a rule by which I am only allowed to be publically self-pitying in Turkish, or occasionally en français), only to have one of the people who knows my foolish head inside out see it, and instantly grasp--navigating via an Urdu cognate--perceptively and precisely what I was thinking. And with kindness, write that understanding back to me, in laughter, with love. What would I do without such friends?
Somehow I never got around to posting it before, but this blog almost ended up being named '(the dream of) a common language', in reference to the last line of this poem-fragment, instead.
Somehow I never got around to posting it before, but this blog almost ended up being named '(the dream of) a common language', in reference to the last line of this poem-fragment, instead.
Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon- Adrienne Rich, from 'Origins and History of Consciousness'
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.
No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
posted by kitabet at 8:42 PM
6 Comments:
Hasret çekiyor, evet? I saw that and it made me smile because in my own warped way, I do understand.
And I do understand about friends. I have some like that and really, thank god for them.
....ve hâlâ hasret çekiyorum. uzun bir hikaye.
It occurs to me that you may be the only one who could catch me out via both languages at once!
does hikaye have something to do with telling a story? that's the only cognate i could understand this time.
sorry, just trying to figure you out, dear ;)
I'd have called such mysterious references to things that only your even more mysterious friends can understand an exercise in coyness--but you're not coy. You're just, uhmm, complicated? Would you please ask your friends to explain? In even *one* language? Or are you too shy? Are they? We're engaged in this conversation in the public sphere, and hence, I guess, my vulgar display of boldness.
ya amitava:
oh I'm perfectly capable of being coy (successfully or otherwise) but you're right, I wasn't trying to be such here: reticent, perhaps. I wanted to give a sense of the poem's embeddedness in a moment. But to tell the full story would reveal too much, because parts of it are not fully my own; they implicate others. And as you say, here we are in the public sphere.
This blog operates increasingly as a sort of set of intersecting, multi-layered conversations--since many of the readers who write back have encountered me in person, and several are close friends. There are others with whom I've corresponded by email at length, though never met, and there are also presumably random people reading this who have no connection with me whatsoever. (Hi, random people. Feel free to comment sometime!) Given that I am not securely or fully anonymous, I feel certain reservations about sharing personal stories here, especially when they involve people who haven't given me explicit permission to narrate them as such. So there are contingent retellings and couched references, initials or aliases.
I hope that it usually still works on those multiple levels, even for readers who don't know the personal context--that here, for example, I managed to convey my amusement & delight at the feeling of being totally transparent to someone, and linked that experience of being known, understood, to the 'common language' of the poem. (The story also touches on a personal obsession, previously chronicled here, with the loanwords & cognates that run back & forth between Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani: allowing a sort of eavesdropping language-hopping that I find delightful.)
But since you asked, I'll tell a bit more of the story--somehow the comments section allows a sense of greater latitude. Over the weekend I was feeling sad about circumstances in my personal life. And feeling the need to somehow acknowledge my mood, changed a status message to "hasret çekiyor": meaning yearning/longing/thirsting, in the present continuous. Now, none of my friends who speak Turkish are aware of the particulars of the situation, and none of the friends who know the details speak Turkish. So I was heaving a sigh aloud, indulging myself in a little bit of performance, but discreetly, without making a spectacle. No one, presumably, would have all the relevant information-- narrative or linguistic--to get it.
A scant few hours later I got a message from one of my closest friends (the 'anonymous' above. She can reveal more if she wishes, but it's her choice). She wrote, "your updates always fascinate - mostly because i can't understand them, but want to understand them ... hasrat in urdu means longing, yearning. same in turkish??? ... in which case you are again sending messages to [...] in a language [...] does not understand. god, i love it."
And I was so very much caught red-handed. Pwned, as they say on the internets. Pinned to the metaphorical wall. It is a funny thing to have one's mind read from across an ocean, via a different language. The Adrienne Rich poem came to mind for a specific reason: again, it's not a story I can tell here; I haven't figured out yet how and where to do that. But that passage has a history for us: I found it and sent it to my friend many years ago, during a time when Rich's verse seemed like an uncanny documentary of real life. There was, in fact, a white wall papered with poems, and there was a crisis, and amidst it all several people found a common language, in poetry as much as in anything else. If we still speak in allusions and references today, that's half the reason why.
goodness, that was a long comment. and i forgot to tell dear anon that 'uzun bir hikaye' means 'it's a long story.' as she knows!
szerelem, incidentally, speaks both Hindi/Urdu and some Turkish. Among other things. I'm trying to catch up with her.
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