Erþe toc of erþe, erþe wyþ woh
Odd to come around a corner and be confronted by the face of Andrei Codrescu peering up at you with intense and game skepticism. And, more often than not, met with the VOICE. Codrescu has been at the school where I teach for two days, speaking and wandering the halls, waiting for his speaking sessions to begin. He was lovely, patient, and studiously sane-- only occasionally reminding us that he retains the prerogative to make wild pronouncements and to answer the questions we ought to have asked rather than the ones we did ask. He was great.
He made the case in a number of ways that language has as much to do with how you hold your body as it does with the words that you say. You can understand every word that someone is saying and fail to answer the real question, or conversely understand very little and come right to the nub by watching as they speak. I went to my doctor this week to have a neck injury checked out. She called back the next day to reassure me that my MRI showed no evidence of a stroke. A stroke? says I. Um, nice--what about my neck? Somehow we weren't talking. And yet the oscillating rhythms inside the MRI tube made me euphoric even through waves of claustrophobia. Made me feel cared for, grokked. Dr. Ghafoor, competent as she is, not at all. I prefer the great womb of the Machine Mother.
Codrescu lives with ghosts speaking several languages from the wreckage of several cities, including Baltimore. Lots of talk of speaking across borders of language and culture and history, always darkness and light in his tone. We ate Afghan food on Wednesday night, the day after the announcement that the U.S. will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to make more ghosts. The wine was Portuguese and pleasantly viscous, Turkish coffee. We started talking about Jim Carroll's song, "People Who Died," and then about that poetic form of listing the dead, invented by whom? Ginsberg? the prophet Isaiah, maybe? perhaps Death Itself? And then about Alice Notley's wonderful haunted book, The Descent of Alette, in which a woman is trapped beneath the surface of a desolate city and beset by ghosts and demons as she attempts to find and confront the source of the evil. It is a book about ghosts, Codrescu, says. First her husband Ted Berrigan died and then, quickly, a new young husband whom she married a year later. His talk is a tower of Babel of names, gifted people who appeared, who appear, for an incandescent moment and then were gone, are gone.
Thursday morning he spoke to a group of students, ostensibility on The Writing Life, but somehow none of us could let go of the topic of immigration and seeking refuge, the odds parts of the self that are lost and replaced in flight. He is, as it turns out, Jewish; his passage out of Romania in 1966(?) was bought from the Soviet government by the state of Israel for around $2000 U.S. The school where I teach is full of these stories, full of the children of the Jewish diaspora, and of the half-remembered places and languages they carry with them.
He mostly found his way through the morning by taking questions. When did he start to dream in English? Is thought prior to language? A very quiet, dark girl asked him from near the front, when you return to Romania, do you feel alien? Dark hair across half her face, her eyes moving tentatively between Codrescu's eyes and her own folded hands. He tilted his head at her, took a half-step forward, and began to answer to her in Romanian. And she spoke back in Romanian.
I hadn't known that Stefana was adopted from a Romanian orphanage at the age of six, and Andrei had no way of knowing besides whatever it was that he saw in her face or heard in her voice. It was her mouth when she talked, he said.
The needs of our divided and immigrant nation require us to understate how deeply and permanently we are formed place and ethnicity. But our mouths keep the shape in which they were first held--keep this shape across oceans, continents, decades, even generations. The shape can even survive the death of hope and love. I walked past Stefana in the hall yesterday and wondered what that moment meant to her. Was it a moment of being found by something that she thought she had lost? Like losing your glasses and finding them, after an infuriating search, on your nose. Or yet another moment of her strangeness confirmed? Or did the ghost of that moment just enter the room where her other ghosts mill around speaking in tongues? I don't think I have words to ask her.
Digging. Digging.
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