by Rosmarie Waldrop
1
Language the condition, not only of transmission. Without its frame
nothing but vague volition. Vision? Window? In the story, she’s been
out in the rain. Strains in vain to see a bit of blue blown cloudless, to
line up fovea and love. Or does she covet the neighbor’s garden with
the maple swaying, making the space move? Not trying to focus a
spotlight on sentence structure as you would, but like a child simply
taking in the forms in front of her eyes. No matter if words or the
clutter of the physical world. No matter if it lessens alpha waves and
sense of self.
2
It is possible for both space and time to be finite without any edges
or boundaries, but not for language to be without speaker. Air
turbulence at teeth and lips. Bone. Ivory. Flesh. Shakes her wet
head. Does not often hold her dreams up for scrutiny: to be a femme
fatale? to have your name imprinted in her body? Babies as young
as one month are more responsive to the sounds of speech than to
any others. This does not explain how we develop the uncertainties
of “if” and “though.” Or the emotional balance that makes a
paragraph.
3
Three persons in the verb. One speaks, one’s spoken to, one, as the
Arabs say, is absent. Groom awaited by the bride? Death, by the
widow? Knows she must curb her eyes from touching you if she
wants to take in anything else. In vision, as in language, much
depends on interpretation. A tree trunk as a lover. A statue as
something to point at. So that, at least in German, it will have
meaning. The mass of the sun bends spacetime in such a way that,
although the earth follows a straight path in the four dimensions, it
appears to curve along a circular orbit of three-dimensional,
saturated feeling.
4
The pouring-down rain, the pouring-down rain. Says it over and over,
as if to drain the words from the system they are part of. Warm
refrain to make her a first person, if only temporarily. Children born
blind say “I“ only after they’ve learned to play with a doll. Meanwhile
turns in little quarter turns to dry herself. Almost a waltz. A reel.
Smile. The arrangement of auditory pathways in the brain is similar
to those for vision, not moving in a straight line at the same speed.
Stampede. More like thinking philosophically, branching perspective
into balconies swinging out over the void.
5
Of course one has to think. For thinking, categories are a help. Less
so than the forty phonemes of the English language, especially when
in local ink, pronounced with the entire face. Stands in front of the
fireplace, blinking. Legs wide apart. The acquisition of personal
pronouns is connected with the capacity for symbolic representation
in which vision plays a central part. But how slow she always is to
wake her eyes to the light while galaxies are moving apart
everywhere. Then notices your erection and feels her good morning
link to a deeper space inside her.
6
“I” says the speaker, the subject. I oppose thumb and index to invite
you into discourse, my reality. And yours. She, the third person, is
barred from speaking for herself. A pleasure almost like eating and
drinking. Or love, for which the Oxford English Dictionary has no less
than 24 columns of definitions. They neutralize emotion by “see
above,” spilled semen, no point scored. Stored. Reward. We might
think that meaning fixes a word’s place in the language, as anatomy
or skin color that of a person in the house or back of the bus, but
relativity has put an end to absolutes of space and time. Still, we can
compare parts of speech with lines on a map that have a different
function each: frontiers, roads, rivers, meridians, merriment. This is
almost as exciting as grammar.
7
Not a substance whose molecules you could rearrange, the units of
language can be defined only by their relation—to hours after
midnight, snowfall, genitals? Lies down on top of the newspaper,
which is arranged in columns like the nerve cells in the folds of the
cortex. Noun. Frown. Her own. The retina detects rather than
suspects, traces a series of small details to report to the brain. If
she’s told enough yarns, she wonders, could she reknit ties to the
child’s ability to drink in the new? Which she yearns for. No matter
where. But especially in the emotional landscape where she
measures time by how often she gives in to blind kiss-compulsion.
8
The third person remains beyond the threshold while I and you
resemble each other. This makes her wonder: Is she really a
person? And if no person, what? Touches the printed page as a
talisman, as if its precise reference could teach her to be
acknowledged by your stare even when the maple, the rain, the
street, the park, all turn absent. What of the hypothalamus, seat of
happiness? Do we need to name it, the way the child in her first year
needs to attach a name to at least one person? Time runs more
slowly near a massive body like your mother, its gravitational effect.
She tells you to put the words where they belong. Then you’ll
possess something and incidentally yourself.
9
The third person, because not a person, can respectfully address
majesty as easily as annihilate you. Is she mere interval? Between
presence and present? Then time itself would be in pieces. No
middle between shards of a singularity where theory’s broken down.
As when the eyes are prevented from moving, the signals fade within
a second, and no picture can be seen. This frustrates the brain’s
program to seek out human features. There are other means of
contact, she might say. Like touching hands, cheek, earlobe, neck,
breasts, lips, genitals. The tame turtle too rubs against the threshold.
Though even touch can be mistaken, and explanations drop into
black holes or other contingencies.
10
So what is hidden in her stillness? No lexical entity nor particular
individual. The third person pronoun is of anything. Impersonal
inflection with distance very near. In species such as sheep or
horses, imprinting occurs right after birth; in humans only as they
develop the capacity to discriminate. Between face and price, cat
and female sex, spilled seed and safari. Not yet between recognizing
a sign and understanding a statement. The echo in her head is not of
the big bang, but of sounds most likely to combine into a phoneme,
the baby’s exercise in the theory of probability. It has opened up a
space that gravity can’t bend in on itself. Where she can take in your
words and carry them to term.
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