This One Will Do

On Language and Longing

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Dear Readers,

This week’s newsletter has been a struggle. I have a notebook full of ideas of things I want to write about, but whenever I looked at my lists I couldn’t muster up the excitement or energy to write about them. I knew that if I just opened my laptop and began to type something would come out, because my hands never fail me, but I wanted to do better than that. I wanted to be excited and give you something that came from my whole being.

Looking at my stats and comments, I can see that the posts that most resonate with my audience are the personal ones. You like when I am vulnerable. Nobody comments much on the more intellectual posts and they get fewer readers.

At first I was disheartened by this and may have even chalked this up to American anti-intellectualism, but since at this point I know most of my readers, I also know you are intelligent, curious, widely read and informed. Maybe you do want to read about the difference between the fabula and sujet and how the way a story is told is just as important as the story itself, or can’t wait for the Part II I promised you of my essay from two weeks ago, “What’s In A Name?” But I doubt it. That was my least-read post.

This got me thinking. Do we really need any more ideas? It seems we have plenty, even good ones that could avert the climate crisis, eradicate poverty and war, and enable us to live sustainably on earth. As my former employer, a mechanical engineer used to say, “We have the technology.” We just aren't using it.

This morning I read this in The Guardian:

“Cheyenne teachings elevate our thinking, whereas western genocidal and exploitative thinking has brought us all to the brink of extinction. I call it a mind virus: it is oppressive and does not value diversity.”

I was in tears reading this article by traditional Northern Cheyenne Chief Heove ve ‘kese, Phillip Whiteman, Jr.

(Click here to read the full article, “Only Love Can Stop War.”)

I also read a post on Instagram this week by Ke’oni Hanalei of Pohala Hawaiian Botanicals that shook my world. In it he relates how, according to Mū tradition, spoken language had its genesis after the cataclysms that disrupted life on Earth. Before that beings communicated telepathically through the electrical grid of the heart. After, communication occurred through the brain because it was about survival.

“For instance,” writes Ke’oni, “After the fall of telepathy spoken language became a necessity, and in a desperate way. Tones were chosen to broadcast prey, targets, danger, hiding, deception, predators.

The communal repetition of these tones created the agreement and were established as such. This is why it is a warring broadcast (spoken language).”

I despaired at ever doing any good with my gift of language.

I’d been through this before as an undergrad in the 90s studying literary theory. I remember being crushed reading Helėne Cixous and Jacques Lacan and thinking since the phallus was the transcendental signifier I’d never be able to write anything that wasn’t in the language of the oppressor, at least not anything enjoyable. When Gertrude Stein tried to shift the transcendental signifier onto the female body we got “Tender Buttons.” I don’t know about you, but I enjoyed “David Copperfield” a lot more.

I was torn between two lovers-academia and poetry. The door to an academic career was wide open for me, but I didn’t walk through it. I chose the heart, the poet’s path, alchemizing my struggles and triumphs in words.

We do need new ideas, but we need poems more.

That is why you like my personal stories more-not because you’re anti-intellectual. When I make myself vulnerable I show you how loss opened my heart.

All week long I’ve been missing Block Island so much. I see my ghost standing at the edge of a field watching a deer, head down, graze on clover. I’m waiting for her to hear my exhale and leap over the stone wall. A buck runs alongside me as I bike home under a full winter moon.

Thousands of miles away, I am still following deer tracks for miles along the coast. Just when I think I’ve lost the trail another cloven heart appears in the sand.

I keep walking. Walking the edge of the island and its interiors; looking in the mirrors, listening for the unspoken.

Throwing the old language out is the action of a rebellious adolescent. This one will do.

The unspoken isn’t meant to be spoken. It’s not an either/or. It’s the herd watching me lie down in their dune nests from some place secret I’ll never discover.

I can’t in English, but I am not a victim even though my longing makes me vulnerable. I write of my longing, reveal my heart to the hunter at dawn, reclaim my mother tongue by acknowledging what’s been lost as it’s measured and divided by these very words.

That is a contribution. A way, as Chief Heove ve ‘kese, Phillip Whiteman, Jr., to elevate our thinking.

So that is what I did today, and will keep on doing. Here, readers, is the result:

Driving home at night during rut season

was dangerous, bucks running bold as brass

down the road’s yellow line

like an obstacle course, but that day I was walking

off-road,

far from town in search of an old cemetery.

That day when the crow flew south above me in silence

one buck watched me from a dying thicket

chewing on what little tenderness

was left to it.

Soon he would be eating apple bark in abandoned orchards

where branches that hadn’t been pruned in a hundred years

dipped to earth and splashed back up

like falling water towards the sky.

If I could have flown with the sharp-shinned hawk

over the open field I would have stayed right there

watching him turn his head on his shoulders

to show me his young antlers,

chewing slowly to get the most juice

out of every bite.

How did the baby snake know

to emerge from under the porch stairs

just moments after loss shattered the morning

like a broken glass at a Jewish wedding?

It could have been chance, synchronicity,

hubris-or lazy thinking, like how butterflies

keep flapping into my poems even though

I keep telling them they risk becoming cliché-

weaving their own chrysalis shrouds,

dissolving themselves in acid

only to reform with wet wings

that somehow know the way back to pine forests

in the Mexican Sierra Madre-but still

there it was, a newborn snake

letting us see it just after we heard

our friend had died last night

on the side of the road

when we’d been lying in grass

looking up at stars.

I’ve heard the sound of thousands of petal-soft wings

is a kind of silence

where you drop to your knees

and the crow doesn’t caw a warning,

and the buck knows you’re not a threat, too.

That will come later when gunshots

crack the autumn dawn open.

What comes after the broken glass?

10,000 sunrises if we’re lucky.

Dreams where we can fly.

I can tell you the buck took a step toward me

on the narrow path in the deep hollow.

I can’t tell you why.

Was it the holly sprig I carried?

The eight red cardinal feathers in my fist

plucked by a hawk from the sky?

The butterfly I’d lifted out of the whitecaps

so its wings could dry?

Some kind of silence inside me.

Broken glass.

Black feathers on the roadside.

The graves were so old

the ground had sunk above each coffin.

Inside one was a wife who’s husband

had carved roses on her headstone.

Lichen and moss flourished.

Shooting stars on summer nights.

I left the sprig of holly by the gate,

made a star of the eight red feathers

at the base of the grave carved with granite roses.

Kō aloha la ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen