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I read it, then I wrote it again
(This is not more of an experiment than regularly posting meme results. You are still tossing things out to see what kind of splash comes back. One is. I am. I want a new language; this one is unwieldy. But this is going to be a contemplation with no take-backs. It started in the shower.)
I spell Hanukkah as I grew up on it. This is a strange place to be in: that while I am Jewish, I run on a ritual calendar foursquare in deciduous latitudes. The significance is candles against the dark, for remembrance; eight lights in a coral of wax are a menorah in my family, our windowsill temporarily a temple, each night lit for something, love, peace, the children, wisdom; votives for the coming year, not a holdfast against Hellenism. My father descends from wild geese, my mother from the Pale. Where my grandfather grew up in Brooklyn, even atheists had a mezuzah on the door. I can read the language of the Seleucids, not the Hasmoneans. I can also read the languages of the rulers of Babylon and the destroyers of the Second Temple, all of whom I have, if I synecdochize myself, outlasted. Don't start with Yiddish. Who exactly is being assimilated here?
(These are the words I was trying to hold on to while washing my hair. The hot water always runs out before my thoughts do. The next paragraph is a convergence, not a consequence.)
What does it take to be a neo-Neoteric? There should be a movement called the New Alexandrians. (There is, but it's not literary. How do you reclaim a term no one knows has gone missing? Die neue Alexandrinischen. Why are all my fictional artistic movements from Weimar Germany?) Compressed, allusive, assured and obscure equally in vocabulary and mythology, handy with epyllia and hapax legomenon. Some days I want to be called the eleventh muse, some days the yangsi of Lykophron. I am not insulted to be incomprehensible to an audience whose articulacy does not impress me: "Im so done with best new fantasy, the storys are boring me and this one listed above I couldn't tell what its talking about....and sonya taaffe-s dybbuk in love. What the frick??? anyway dropping this book, because I hated what ive read so far aside from two storys..." Google, the endlessly responsive hall of mirrors. I want that excerpted for the back of my next collection, What the frick??? But there is a story for which I stole shamelessly historical details from both sides of my mother's family, folksongs, Zola, retellings of Ellis Island, and threw in references in languages she does not speak and lyrics she has never heard. My grandmother, on meeting her prospective in-laws, was told she had Yiddish you could break a leg on. Mine is learned from a headlong collision with German; I know both interchangeably and imperfectly. What is my right to either? Is it more or less presumptuous than to style myself in descent from δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες or μέγα βιβλίον, μέγα κακόν? These are not new questions. I read at least two poets who have spent their lives negotiating their diction and register. English doesn't borrow from other languages, it coshes them on the head in dark alleys and goes through their pockets for loose vocabulary. Two of the sentences in this paragraph, I wanted to have written in an inflected language.
(I can never type fast enough.)
I spell Hanukkah as I grew up on it. This is a strange place to be in: that while I am Jewish, I run on a ritual calendar foursquare in deciduous latitudes. The significance is candles against the dark, for remembrance; eight lights in a coral of wax are a menorah in my family, our windowsill temporarily a temple, each night lit for something, love, peace, the children, wisdom; votives for the coming year, not a holdfast against Hellenism. My father descends from wild geese, my mother from the Pale. Where my grandfather grew up in Brooklyn, even atheists had a mezuzah on the door. I can read the language of the Seleucids, not the Hasmoneans. I can also read the languages of the rulers of Babylon and the destroyers of the Second Temple, all of whom I have, if I synecdochize myself, outlasted. Don't start with Yiddish. Who exactly is being assimilated here?
(These are the words I was trying to hold on to while washing my hair. The hot water always runs out before my thoughts do. The next paragraph is a convergence, not a consequence.)
What does it take to be a neo-Neoteric? There should be a movement called the New Alexandrians. (There is, but it's not literary. How do you reclaim a term no one knows has gone missing? Die neue Alexandrinischen. Why are all my fictional artistic movements from Weimar Germany?) Compressed, allusive, assured and obscure equally in vocabulary and mythology, handy with epyllia and hapax legomenon. Some days I want to be called the eleventh muse, some days the yangsi of Lykophron. I am not insulted to be incomprehensible to an audience whose articulacy does not impress me: "Im so done with best new fantasy, the storys are boring me and this one listed above I couldn't tell what its talking about....and sonya taaffe-s dybbuk in love. What the frick??? anyway dropping this book, because I hated what ive read so far aside from two storys..." Google, the endlessly responsive hall of mirrors. I want that excerpted for the back of my next collection, What the frick??? But there is a story for which I stole shamelessly historical details from both sides of my mother's family, folksongs, Zola, retellings of Ellis Island, and threw in references in languages she does not speak and lyrics she has never heard. My grandmother, on meeting her prospective in-laws, was told she had Yiddish you could break a leg on. Mine is learned from a headlong collision with German; I know both interchangeably and imperfectly. What is my right to either? Is it more or less presumptuous than to style myself in descent from δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες or μέγα βιβλίον, μέγα κακόν? These are not new questions. I read at least two poets who have spent their lives negotiating their diction and register. English doesn't borrow from other languages, it coshes them on the head in dark alleys and goes through their pockets for loose vocabulary. Two of the sentences in this paragraph, I wanted to have written in an inflected language.
(I can never type fast enough.)
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Nine
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Mostly I just drip on the keyboard.
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Also: "Whee!"
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Sometimes I think my best ideas occur to me at moments when I cannot possibly write them down . . .
Thanks!
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Alexandria is a dream I have.
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You would be foremost among them.
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Everybody wants to build the New Jerusalem. Why does no one want to build the New Alexandria?
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Yeah. There is actually a book called The Prince and the Wild Geese (1983) about, if not an actual ancestor of mine, at least a traceable relative in the mid-nineteenth century. When I was a small child and had not yet read it, I thought it was a fairytale—swan maidens, hills of glass.
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Intense jealousy! Wow!
That's so cool...
Gonna go stick my head in a bucket to get rid of the jealousy. Seriously--how cool are your ancestors? Answer: VERY COOL!
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Hmmm ... I feel that I have just eaten a delicious meal in which I recognized about 80% of the ingredients and had to ask about the rest. Thank you - that was fun!
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Which ones do you want to know about?
Thank you - that was fun!
You're welcome!
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I need to learn to read Greek, at least enough to sound things out a little, someday.
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Thank you. This is my brain on hot water, late at night.
I need to learn to read Greek, at least enough to sound things out a little, someday.
It's a very beautiful language.
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Been there. ;)
Why are all my fictional artistic movements from Weimar Germany?
Ummm... Because they had every conceivable OTHER strange artistic movement? Or maybe watching Comedian Harmonists one too many times...
I need to learn to read Greek, at least enough to sound things out a little, someday.
Dedükè men ha selanna kai plëyadès.
I still don't know what it means, though. And 'Big Book, Very Bad'???
Cool post!
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This is probably true . . .
I still don't know what it means, though.
It's from a fragment of Sappho:
δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐδαες, μέσαι δὲ
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχετ’ ὤρα,
ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.
The moon has set
and the Pleiades, it is mid-
night, and the hours pass
and I lie alone.
And 'Big Book, Very Bad'???
Yes! It is famously attributed to Kallimachos (Athenaios of Naukratis, Deipnosophistae: Ὅτι Καλλίμαχος ὁ γραμματικὸς τὸ μέγα βιβλίον / ἴσον ἔλεγεν εἶναι τῷ μεγάλῳ κακῷ), professing his preference for the neat, sweet, and concise rather than the overblown epic. Ink has been spilled over exactly what he meant by this.
Cool post!
Thank you!
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"Now the Great Bear and Pleiades
where earth moves,
are drawing up the clouds
of human grief
breathing solemnity in the deep night."
Written by Montagu Slater, derived from a poem by George Crabbe, it is the beginning of the title character's principal aria from Britten's Peter Grimes.
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I love that text.
But if the horoscope's
bewildering
like a flashing turmoil
of a shoal of herring,
who can turn skies back and begin again?
I hope it's connected; it would be very suitable.
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and the Pleiades...and I lie alone.
Ah. The fox's favorite poem in Til we have faces. Cool to know it exists!
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I hope you do something with that image.
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Would you mind very terribly if I declared my passionate and undying love for you?
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Not at all. Although I should warn you that I think I stole the sentiment, if not the precise wording, from a button I saw once in Pandemonium.
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Oh, really?
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Thank you! It's like the fact that
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Fascinating post, here; I'm still chewing on it. A lot of things I can relate to. Ceist na teangan is half the threads the Norns wove into me; it's also the worm gnawing at the root of my own self's world tree.
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Write about this?
Happy Hanukkah!
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When I've the time. Papers are coming up due.
Happy Hanukkah!
Thanks! Not sure I've ever been wished that before.
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Your constructed inarticulate audience sounds rather like least favorite sister, though at least she can spell and punctuate correctly. She does not take it well when my response to her attempts to dictate what I write is, "You are not my intended audience." At least I don't have to say it to my father anymore.
I know one language, the boiled-down essence of the ones my most recent ancestors spoke, or the corrupted mishmash of same, depending on who you ask. I figure, family was speaking the doom of heroes and the end of gods, the loss of Faerie and old country and way of life, was singing fish into nets and schooners across prairies and angels down from the heavens to point west. They handed me this tangled wood bordered by boiling seas, thrust through with mountains. I don't know if I'm cutting at the root or hanging on a branch, but I speak it in this tongue, my tongue. I can make the sounds that waves make and say bramble, thorn, pomegranate. I can read a compass. There is a berg in my maiden name, raven, wolf, rune in the one I wear now. They serve.
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Likewise!
I know one language, the boiled-down essence of the ones my most recent ancestors spoke, or the corrupted mishmash of same, depending on who you ask. I figure, family was speaking the doom of heroes and the end of gods, the loss of Faerie and old country and way of life, was singing fish into nets and schooners across prairies and angels down from the heavens to point west. They handed me this tangled wood bordered by boiling seas, thrust through with mountains. I don't know if I'm cutting at the root or hanging on a branch, but I speak it in this tongue, my tongue. I can make the sounds that waves make and say bramble, thorn, pomegranate. I can read a compass. There is a berg in my maiden name, raven, wolf, rune in the one I wear now. They serve.
You should put this down somewhere more formal than a reply to someone else's post. It is worth reading.
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