memory is Hell (a museum)

[ashcanprobably]

Someone asked me if I joined in the Hispanic-American Immigration walk-outs/marches of the past few weeks, being that I'm Mexican and darkly so. Did I feel any obligation to attend? Nope, not at all, I'm no copper ingot. I was there at the very first rally downtown, not totally, I was merely there. I woke up that morning in a mood to go swimming,

Comments

[ulyart]

I am Chinese American, living in France. Chinese is my shabbiest language; on occasional Skype video conferences with my parents, I find myself searching for the right word in Chinese, and often capitulate and give the ready English equivalent for the sake of convenience.

French I speak with my friends and to my dog. For me it is the language of street signs, newspapers, television and the radio. French is quite transparent to me, but it's still a delight to encounter a new word, or to hear a word used in live conversation of which up to now I'd only had the vaguest impression, having read it in a book.
Yesterday in the Vincennes forest Gaspard said, on seeing Timeo meet another dog, "tu vois comment ils fretillent la queue?" ("See how they're wagging their tails?")

Then and there this image of the word fretiller was seared into my memory-- two dogs under the sun in a grassy field bordered with trees-- and only now, looking the word up on the Internet, have I to been able to confirm that fretiller means to wriggle or fidget. Fretille is a beautiful word, not just because of the throaty French "r", but because the -ille is pronounced "ee-yuh," similar to Spanish pronunciation, with the tongue never touching the palate.

English, though, is what I speak to myself. My inner narrator takes note of the marble paving stones of the street, the cyclists in the warm summer air, the gelato melting in its paper cup, all in English. Every week I bike out to the American Library and borrow to the lending limit. Ten hardbound books in English, a good weight in my backpack. Some of these tomes I devour in a single sitting. Others I dip into, to taste the familiar cadences of the language of my intimate thoughts.

English jostles for prevalence with music, the other language that accompanies me constantly.

From time to time, especially when I have a trip planned to Asia, I'll resolve to study a bit of Chinese daily, so that I can express myself with some sophistication, instead of prattling like a fifth-grader, able to point only at the most obvious aspects of each situation.

Reading in Chinese is a bit of a chore for me, so I'll only do it in one of these short-lived self-improvement campaigns. Otherwise, it seems there are already so many excellent books in English waiting to be read. I do wonder what I am missing in all those Chinese books I am not reading. Whenever I do read in Chinese, the characters are so complex, petaled spiral enclosing others, it's like a formal game.

The big picaresque Chinese novel is the story of the "monkey god", Sun Wu-Kung, who offends the Gods with his antics (including gorging on the Peaches of Immortality in a celestial orchard) and to absolve himself accompanies and protects a Buddhist monk who is making a perilous foot journey from from India to China, bringing the Dharma.

The other great Chinese novels include the Water Margin-- stories of bandits and warriors, corrupt officials and shifting allegiances-- and Dream of the Red Chamber, about an aristocratic family drifting gently downwards, that spends its days calling on each other, drinking tea and writing rhyming couplets.

These books are so disconnected from modern reality that I'd only read them for the classical language.

In the end, maybe that's what counts. The writer throws up a shimmering screen of words, beyond which we can make out another world, or the same world, intensified, distilled into saturated hues.

You want your readers to criticize more; you want the Indians to put up a fight, but whatever for? Your struggle is with yourself. You've conquered language; it does your bidding. So now what do you bid it do? Nobody can answer this question for you.

[uberdionysus]

I was reading this and thinking, "He should be on my f-list," and then I looked at your user-info and realized I was already on your friend's list. How did that happen, and how did I miss it? How did I miss someone adding me?

Anyway, I've added you back.

[ulyart]

I liked reading Luis's posts and, suspecting like-minded people would be drawn to his journal, I clicked on his friends list and that's how I found your posts.

Yeah, it's been a few months now that I've vicariously followed your super-charged life. Sorry I didn't introduce myself earlier. I think you must be surfing on a current of energy, the way you make art, take in films, exhibitions and party late into the night and document it so extensively in words and images.

I almost commented on one of your posts, when you said Matthew Barney was an example of nerd art-- someone absorbed in his private imaginary world, preferring it to the messy, real world. (if I interpret you correctly).

I thought, James Joyce, Borges, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami... would all be nerds, wouldn't they?

[uberdionysus]

Barney, like geeks, and unlike Joyce and co., is interested in the arcana of hermetic systems. It's not just about creating and living in a private imaginary world, but about the obsession with arcana set up by others in closed systems with codified rules of behavior.

I guess it's less 'nerd' and more 'geek' in that Barney is passionate about particular areas and subject that are obscure, difficult, and complex. Which makes sense because there are plenty of sports geeks who can rattle off arcane facts about some baseball pitcher from 1932 and how he performed in the World Series of that year.

I think Barney is closer to Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace then any of the authors you mentioned.