Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections
Downpour
he
loved words.
not in
the sense in which
love is
so easily professed these days
but in
an old-fashioned
genuinely
romantic sort of way
spiritual
but
with a material component
the
word made flesh
so to
speak
and
flesh become word
in a
way
it was
not in the least
an
abstract obsession
with
some ideal Logos
no, the
articles themselves
where
his articles of faith
while
the verbs in all of their doings
screwed
up his soundest vows
of
silence
and
inaction
to use
an expression
it was
the real utterances
misspoken
and squeaking
that he
was enamored of
it was
their
ineffably
mysterious grunts
seeming
to make sense
when in
fact
they
were the merest puffs
of
clunk and whimsy
(oh,
that meaning could so be written
in the
air!)
and so
he despaired
when he
could not find
the
right one
inanity
though it be
but
loving them as he did
he did
sometimes seem
to put
them at their ease
and
they would come
unannounced
speaking
for themselves
telling
their own stories
almost
verbatim
and it
was in this act
(no act
at all
but
genuine interest and concern)
that
they at last perhaps
relaxed
into his embrace
and
there, mumbling
all the
way
he
would caress them
one by
one
let his
lips pout and pucker about them
reveling
in their
fricatives
and diphthongs
his
tongue
would
tease and tap out
codes
from the sleek cavities
of
their open vowels
until
for lack of a better word
their
meaning howled
and
then stretching and intertwined
vowel
harmony or not
they’d
string each other out
in a
long foreplay of whispering
a sotto
voce
lilting
and building
until
it passed
that
singular point. and emerged
full
voice
at the
beginning of a new sentence
some of
them he found to be
much
deeper than he had expected
others
turned out to be
rather
vapid and even
tepid,
but in a lovely way
a
denouement
of
simplicity and overstatement
a
giggled shiver of pretense
but no
longer tense
just
become
a
plainspoken
“it is
what it is”
straightforward
declarative
as
poetic as any
comparative
and so
it went
not so
much a verbal promiscuity
as a
desire to use them all
in
fevered raidings of the OED
and
tricks he’d learned from how to manuals
he
dabbled even in the dark arts
of
neologisms and foreign loan words
of
mantra and trance-dictated scat
oh how
he moaned with
the
heaved utterances
of heaven-sent
glossolalia
a
hundred and one peaceful and wrathful multilingual deities
no
longer sure who was saying what to who or how
while
all along
a
million velvet ears convulsed
and
maybe it was this
Passion
that
lead him to a dawning angst:
he kept
recognizing words
he’d
used before
and the
thrill was gone
he
noticed that the more
he
spoke clearly
the
more he clearly spoke
what
was now too
literally
understandable
it was
making too much sense
in a
sense
and the
mystery of the not quite said
the not
quite inexpressible
was now
gasping like a fish
on sand
so much
for understanding
in his
desperation
to
reignite the flame
he
began searching
in
exotic corners
for
languages not oft heard
he
hired a Navaho
to
translate his selected verse
into
the language of The People
and
would sit nodding sagely
as it
was read back to him
restoring
the harmony
of the
Hrozo
of the
veil of unknowing
his
selected essays
he had
rendered into an untranscribed
Bushman
sub-dialect
to hear
again in the pattern of the
clicking
and the glottal stops
something
of what he had meant to say
but
even to these sublime obscurities
he
eventually became habituated
and
raging for his ineffable fix
he
fixated on yet more radical plans
of
translation:
he
placed microphones in the woods
to pick
up the sound of wandering winds
digitized
the output and
randomly
assigned them based on direction and decibel level
to
trigger
famous
passages of
Thai
love poetry and Tibetan opera
but
more and more
it was
the sound of the winds themselves
which
seemed to soothe him
he
wanted desperately to be saying what he was saying
not
alluding to it, not pointing to it
not
describing it
he
wanted the saying itself
to be
the saying
or at
least to be
an
inextricable part of the saying
and it
must be perfectly clear
all
walls down
and yet
and yet
perfectly
indescribably
strange
a
whatness without a witness
a
wildness imbued with suchness
so he
collaborated with a
quantum
physicist
and a
hidden wizard
to scan
each raindrop
into a
database
cross-referenced
with every baby name
in
every known tongue and
every
name of every god and goddess
and
heck some really quite minor deities
thrown
in to be sure
so that
the sacred falling of each drop
would
sing its uniqueness
to each
of the other falling perfections
and it
was a beautiful
music
that spanned the electromagnetic
rainbow
a
lyricism that swelled and awed and yet was
wet and
humble
and yet
it too
at last
did not
suffice
and so
he wept
and
laid his head down in the grass
and
turned to face the downswelling sky
and
opened his mouth
and
swallowed it all
and so
was born his peace
no
telling of
no
yelling out
the
telling now was seamless with the told
and
what was told of
was
also what was telling
was the
telling itself
was the
loudest quiet never heard
was
better than
a god
in rut
was the
magnificently
simple
coitus
of the
rain
