(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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