March 19th, 2024 – general update
Taipei, Taiwan
The characters unpack like suitcases.
I did not know.
I understood there was a tension, not like conflict, but like a string pulled between two fence posts, and you could pull it back and let it go, between your thumb and index finger, and it would sing on release.
“Why is this taking so long? Why does this seem so difficult?” – I am asking myself, as I watch someone very smart struggle with something that seems straightforward. Not that it’s easy, but that there’s a direct path.
Except, I am seeing that there is not. There is not – a direct path.
I know that the English language is wonky.
The nonsense pronunciations and the aggregate synonyms that have meaning under the surface, under the hood, with the hoses and gaskets and bubbling fluids and timing belts ; things there is no way for you to know unless you’ve cooled your heels in the water on a summer day, and grabbed at the sand of the bed under the stream down the road with your toes and felt the texture buzz like a barrel of drunk honeybees.
Like a blanket of fairy dust, the odd poetry of this truth is falling on me, and the sparkles are getting caught on the skyward tilt of my eyelashes.
So here we are, in a conundrum.
The odd truth that makes me laugh out of the side of my mouth – to create simple but detailed sentences that reflect reality, you must use the odd words, the ones that, in a translation exercise, would be far down the list.
Consider the nuance of motion.
To lower, to raise, to let sink, to press, to open downward, to allow to rise, to follow at a delay, to push, to move, to be at, or near, or nearby, or next to, or in the vicinity of; the contraindications of mentioning a palm, a hand, a wrist, the direction of fingertips, the degree of grip through the arena of activated knuckles. God forbid we must suggest the metaphorical power of the elbow and the different ways it might bend!
These things are absurd and gibberish when translated directly, but describe exactly the esoteric necessities of the art of Tai Chi.
Absolutely wild, this consideration.
I’m certain I’m not the first person to wonder about this – more likely the billionth. But if it were easy to make poetry from poetry, to create accurate distribution of starlight across the cosmos, from native understanding to native understanding, it would have been done eons ago.
And so I am here, pondering the possibility of this bridge and how to skip across its broken wooden planks, shifting in the breeze above the river Jordan.
I used to have a suitcase, orange and busted, sunsoaked, parched, fraying, and inside I kept my most precious things.
These characters, the ones I can neither recognize nor speak – they fit inside this suitcase at the same time the suitcase fits inside each of them.
