This is the second part of a two-part entry.
I wrote the first part at Christmas-time, before I went to visit my father's family in France. The night before I wrote it, I was sitting outside the coffee shop next door to my apartment reading Alessandro Baricco's "An Iliad" and waiting for some friends to pick me up to go to a party when an old man asked me for some change. He had a pinched face, his features loose and dry, like a lemon squeezed of all its juice. Gray stubble covered his cheeks and chin. He was thin, with longish hair, and wore a sweatshirt and a knit cap. He looked old, but could have been anywhere from 45 to 75. I gave him a dollar; it was Christmas Eve. He walked away and I continued reading. It was dark out but not cold. Greek soldiers fell to their glorious deaths across the pages in front of me.
A few minutes later, the man came back and sat down at my table. He was now holding a large paper cup full of orange soda. He started to tell me about his life: in and out of rehab, getting by on the streets, adding whiskey to his soda to keep from shaking too much, the disability checks he survived on. I nodded and asked a few questions every now and then when he went silent. I wasn't the one of us who needed to talk.
Much of what he said, I couldn't understand or even hear. The irony of someone opening up only for their words to get lost in the brisk air pained me. I wondered if there were a placebo effect that would make up for it, a release that came just from talking and not necessarily from being heard, as well.
Eventually my friends arrived and I left, wishing him a Merry Christmas.
What distances can be bridged by conversation? The liberal humanist answer is that, given patience, openness, and warmth, any. We are all humans and humans converse, discourse, reach out to and reach each other through words. But what must be in place for such an exchange to function?
When I sat down to write the next day, it was not just Baricco's text that had me occupied with questions of translation, but also the experience of sitting next to someone and not being sure if anything either of us said ever made it across.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Sunday, February 18, 2007
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Saturday, February 03, 2007
The Bodies of Words
How do we interact with the tangible bodies of words? Most often, it's on a page of some sort, be it a handwritten entry in a diary, a greasy swath of newsprint, or the infinitely malleable page of a Microsoft Word document. Rhetorically, these pages blur into a single one and we often speak of the proverbial page, a plane with no depth, a surface that cannot be penetrated for behind it, beyond it, all is void. A painting may have perspective, but a sheet of text is subject to only two dimensions. What beings could inhabit such a desolate landscape? All species of letters, from the spiny and rigid to the flowery and fluid, thrive on the page as if two dimensions were all they ever dreamed of, and so we come to think of words, too, as being flat and essentially without mass.
We speak of long stretches or large collections of texts as bodies -- we refer to a body of work, a corpus of many documents. But the body of an individual word? Words are more often figured as tokens: objects of fixed value that can be redeemed at any dictionary for their full worth; using a single word instead of the entire sentence that would summarize its meaning is a matter of phonemic frugality. According to this logic, a word with several meanings is actually a collection of separate tokens, each with a different value, that just happen to be printed with the same design. As with other kinds of currency, words are flat. The only information they carry is on their surface, for surface is all there is.
The other night, while visiting a friend in a chic Twin Peaks apartment, looking out over a San Francisco whose net of lights appeared like a pool of reflected stars, I was introduced to the game Password. Something like reverse Taboo, the game is played by several teams, one of whose players tries to guess the word printed on the card the first player has drawn from the deck. The catch is that the first player may only provide the second player with one word per round to guide them; the word may not even be hyphenated. So, player 1 offers a clue, player 2 guesses. If player 2 does not get the word, the word is passed to the next team, where player 3 offers a second clue, and player 4 guesses, and so on. As the word continues through round after round, clues accumulate and guessing becomes easier, until finally someone figures it out. We didn't keep score, but if you do, then fewer and fewer points are awarded the more clues you have by the time you figure it out.
Here's an example:
Luke said plug; I guessed drain.
Heather said market; Kristen guessed traffic jam. (She was thinking of Market St. in San Francisco.)
David said publicize; Matt guessed advertise, and was right.
I said facade.
Matt said offensive.
Kristen said fake.
I said forward.
Matt said door.
Kristen said first.
The word was front.
Although I have no experience in geography, I imagine this is what it feels like to stomp off into the mountains with a measuring tape, a set of binoculars, and a calculator and figure out how the hell high up you are, to gather data in the form of several known points or distances and use those to locate another point or distance: to triangulate.
A single word, like a single point, provides very little information because it points in so many directions. A hair plug? An electric plug? A tobacco plug? At the same time, we must guess at the relationship between plug and the secret word. Are they synonyms? Antonyms? Do they fit together somehow? Do they appear side by side in a familiar expression?
But adding just one more word to the equation is like adding a whole new dimension, and so the questions becomes: what line leads from plug to market? Sometimes, even two points are not enough for us to know where we are, and it is only the third or the fourth or the fifth that sets us on our feet. The process of triangulating a word based on its relationship to other words forces us to see the word as a many faceted object. Often, words have faces of similar shapes, like those of plug, all of which refer to a thing that fills a hole, whether the prong of an electric plug that fills a socket or the thatch of hair that fills a follicle. Seeing all the faces at once, as side by side in a dictionary, can be like looking at a cubist painting that flattens an object while preserving its various surfaces by slitting it up the back and spreading it out on the canvas in a Mercator projection of a person or a bowl of fruit.
Regardless of the relationship of a word's many faces to each other, Password confronts us with the relationship of each face to the word as a whole and we begin to see that each word is a landscape of peaks and planes, cliffs and hollows, a body that casts shadows, a body not just representative of but full of, full with, meaning, a round, spinning world unto itself.
We speak of long stretches or large collections of texts as bodies -- we refer to a body of work, a corpus of many documents. But the body of an individual word? Words are more often figured as tokens: objects of fixed value that can be redeemed at any dictionary for their full worth; using a single word instead of the entire sentence that would summarize its meaning is a matter of phonemic frugality. According to this logic, a word with several meanings is actually a collection of separate tokens, each with a different value, that just happen to be printed with the same design. As with other kinds of currency, words are flat. The only information they carry is on their surface, for surface is all there is.
The other night, while visiting a friend in a chic Twin Peaks apartment, looking out over a San Francisco whose net of lights appeared like a pool of reflected stars, I was introduced to the game Password. Something like reverse Taboo, the game is played by several teams, one of whose players tries to guess the word printed on the card the first player has drawn from the deck. The catch is that the first player may only provide the second player with one word per round to guide them; the word may not even be hyphenated. So, player 1 offers a clue, player 2 guesses. If player 2 does not get the word, the word is passed to the next team, where player 3 offers a second clue, and player 4 guesses, and so on. As the word continues through round after round, clues accumulate and guessing becomes easier, until finally someone figures it out. We didn't keep score, but if you do, then fewer and fewer points are awarded the more clues you have by the time you figure it out.
Here's an example:
Luke said plug; I guessed drain.
Heather said market; Kristen guessed traffic jam. (She was thinking of Market St. in San Francisco.)
David said publicize; Matt guessed advertise, and was right.
I said facade.
Matt said offensive.
Kristen said fake.
I said forward.
Matt said door.
Kristen said first.
The word was front.
Although I have no experience in geography, I imagine this is what it feels like to stomp off into the mountains with a measuring tape, a set of binoculars, and a calculator and figure out how the hell high up you are, to gather data in the form of several known points or distances and use those to locate another point or distance: to triangulate.
A single word, like a single point, provides very little information because it points in so many directions. A hair plug? An electric plug? A tobacco plug? At the same time, we must guess at the relationship between plug and the secret word. Are they synonyms? Antonyms? Do they fit together somehow? Do they appear side by side in a familiar expression?
But adding just one more word to the equation is like adding a whole new dimension, and so the questions becomes: what line leads from plug to market? Sometimes, even two points are not enough for us to know where we are, and it is only the third or the fourth or the fifth that sets us on our feet. The process of triangulating a word based on its relationship to other words forces us to see the word as a many faceted object. Often, words have faces of similar shapes, like those of plug, all of which refer to a thing that fills a hole, whether the prong of an electric plug that fills a socket or the thatch of hair that fills a follicle. Seeing all the faces at once, as side by side in a dictionary, can be like looking at a cubist painting that flattens an object while preserving its various surfaces by slitting it up the back and spreading it out on the canvas in a Mercator projection of a person or a bowl of fruit.
Regardless of the relationship of a word's many faces to each other, Password confronts us with the relationship of each face to the word as a whole and we begin to see that each word is a landscape of peaks and planes, cliffs and hollows, a body that casts shadows, a body not just representative of but full of, full with, meaning, a round, spinning world unto itself.
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