Saturday 28 June 2014

WRITING WITH LIGHT 2

"But I will arrive, I will arrive at the point where you will no longer read me. Not only by becoming more illegible than ever for you (it’s beginning, it’s beginning), but by doing things such that you no longer even recall that I am writing for you, that you no longer even encounter, as if by chance, the ‘do not read me.’ That you do not read me, this is all, so long, ciao, neither seen nor heard, I am totally elsewhere. I will arrive there, you try too."

Sometimes I find myself thinking about Tarkovsky during the making of his last film: sawing branches off trees and glueing them back on in different places - the ‘right’ places. I’m not trying to work it out, much less justify or condemn it, I’m just trying to ‘think’ it, to spend a little time in its shadow, allowing it room, room enough to affect me.

Your letter arrived today, its instantly recognisable handwriting like a print-out from an echocardiograph machine. And I thought: if only I could speak like that! I’m not talking about the sound of the machine, I mean the same sparse beauty - little peaks and depths of feeling manifesting with pinpoint accuracy from within a neutrality that is gentle, reliable, generous even… I think of the most dear letters that I would like to send you as I’m drifting off to sleep, but I can’t write them down… More and more I believe that for the forseeable future communication is going to depend more on trust than on the stability of signs.  Autism, nomadology, ‘postcard writers’ in a world of collapsing sign-systems and exhausted languages, archaeologists of a sadness without an object, refugees of the paragraph and the page, attempting to say everything with a few remaining fragments: unfinished, open-ended, under-determined sentences, isolated, incomplete or even erased words, fragments of images torn from magazine pages… Perhaps more than ever before we need an extraordinary tolerance for ambiguity, an education in difficulty. To re-establish the relationship between difficulty and kindness, difficulty and love. Difficult objects, texts, spaces have their own kindness: they evoke states of mind characterised by patience, attention, commitment, trust, openness - the same qualities that make love possible.



The kanji for ‘touch’ combines the kanji for ‘insect’ and ‘horn’; the kanji compund eikyo (‘influence’) consists of the kanji for ‘image’ and ‘echo’; ningen (human being) consists of the kanji for ‘person’ and ‘in between’; honyaku (‘translation’) contains feathers or wings turning as they fall; ‘leaf’ consists of three elements: ‘plantlife’, ‘tree’, and an element which is a kanji in its own right and appears in compounds such as ‘world’, ‘century’, ‘decency’, ‘small talk’, ‘to assist’ etc. This is the cinematic, contemplative side of kanji study. This is where I find myself again and again when my concentration starts to wander; in the openness of its interconnections, its written ‘photography’.

Translating some poems by Kawara Machi. In one poem she complains about her lover’s rough way of talking to her on the telephone. In the next, the touch of falling rain on her lips suddenly brings him to mind. There is no way of conveying the fact that the kanji for ‘telephone’ contains the kanji for ‘rain’ except by stepping outside the smoothness of translation and making notes such as this… Watching a word disappear into another language is like watching somebody walk out the door, the feelings and images triggered by the disappearing word are just as real - just as deserving of a response - as the word itself.  Or, if that image is too dramatic, perhaps we could compare it to dropping a pebble into a pool: the translator’s task then revolves around how to handle the noise of the pebble’s disappearance while at the same time allowing the ripples to flow outwards. But in any case the ‘precision’ of language is a totally different precision from that of, say, aeronautical engineering. There are no identical texts, only kindred texts or, to continue the etymnological link further, ‘kindness texts’. Languages refreshing themselves in each other… I imagine a translator, indifferent to the functionality of the times, aware that language, like ‘home’, is holographic and is carried completely in any one of its parts, extending the range of his perceptions and decisions to the point where his translation of two lines of a six line poem extends to hundreds of pages.

"A musician can trust the notes that come out or he can trust the feelings that go into the notes that come out. He cannot trust both at the same time, because they never do equal each other."

Go to sleep, wake up in the middle of the night, wander around the apartment, go back to sleep in a different room…

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