The paradox of existence

These days, I am more and more at a loss for words. I can safely say that I hate language. But, very frustrating (!!!), words always find me… 

When I was doing my Masters, we were asked to construct, reflect, and document some kind of experiment. Mine was to parse together elements of Shintoism, Buddhism, Islam, and whatever else, to create my very own Frankenstein, DIY, nano-cultural ritual. By all accounts, these worlds should not have met and yet, they did/do in me – or did/do they…? 

For this ritual, I would carry out ablutions, chant, bow, clap, praise God, praise Tara, then light a candle on a table of offerings, before offering up my presence to any ancestors that fancied talking to me. The people who met me were very obvious – my little brother, my father – but I was often surprised. The image of my great grandma, who begged me not to go the last time I saw her, who had clung to my arm with the strength of a woman who had hand-washed clothes for decades, came to me once, full of scolding. How could I forget her?

I would fumble my way through extremely sparse Indonesian and Japanese, before switching to English, hoping that anyone I spoke to would somehow understand me. I can’t claim anything above the language level of a four-year-old for Indonesian, and my Japanese is basically non-existent, but there’s something to be said about how speaking a language at any level can be a form of embodiment. In these moments, even though I struggled, I embodied my ghosts, our dialogue an active construction of connection. 

Timeskip to this year, just a couple weeks ago, when I was in Japan and confronted, on the daily, with my tongueless existence. I knew even less Japanese than I did before and, with fresh cuts to my last blood ties, I had absolutely nothing tethering me to the place other than the broken syllables that quickly revealed me to be Not From There. 

{…I am under no illusion. Even if I could speak “perfect” Japanese, I would never belong. Sometimes, it takes a trip to the ancestral lands to remind you of what the corny diaspora mango poets have been trying to rectify: home for some can never be material, or a place that makes sense; it can only ever be a slippery, intangible thing sewn-up from embellished and misremembered patches, living and always mutating entirely within the realm of imagination…}

In any case, to not have language is to be without a shape. To be without a shape is to be animal, plant, mineral – without identity (at least in the world where Whiteness decrees only certain humans as having identity, and thus as worthy of kindness and dignity). And so, in this world, language is violent. We are all born through the fiction of language and the way that it constructs, in the minds of others, who we are, what we want, where we’re from or going. Language is communication and explanation set to rules. You must fit within the parameters of syntax and grammar to make sense. Your thoughts must be drawn-up, quartered, and contained, honing in like the arc of a missile to a truth you want to express. 

But it can never really get there, can it? 

A tiny sample of things language can’t contain:

• the smell of an orange 

• the gold-bright of seeing your loved ones autonomous and happy – nothing like it

• the restaurant; mirin, shoyu, moist face towels; the warmth of the evening with its wet air and the palm trees and pavements where lizards scuttle away from tiny fingers; the drive home that seemed long but was actually very short; the cool marble beneath warm feet padding to the kitchen for water at midnight

• the heavy, immaterial weightlessness of another year of being without; of witnessing online the continued murder of millions, new and old “conflicts,” desecration of the earth and all of its inhabitants; speechless frustration; raw, cracking beneath the numb that freezes; anger calcified into weariness

• (this one I saw on the bus yesterday) the napes of the necks of two very elderly men, like precious, soft, newborn fawns; the balding patches between their white, coiled curls and thin, silver strands revealing ancient lines and liverspots; the hands that have caressed their heads over the years; the panic and love and persistence that carry them onwards

• someone, human or canine, etcetera, deeply inhaling the air of your ear; you inhaling the air of someone else’s ear; this air that has swirled out from the deepest, most internal parts; the wanting to know each other’s most internal parts

To its credit, language can be freedom. I would be dead if it were not for words. I truly feel that. How many people have grabbed on to the skin of language, to stories, in a place that did not give them safety, dignity, or belonging? Countless, I’m sure. That’s why Rumi is still found in abundance, today, centuries on from his time. It’s why we have tales of Ananse, and fierce dragons, and clever peasants, and pure-hearted ducklings.

To write, speak, listen, is to shoot an arrow at something and hope that it will land. This is why language has the potential to be emancipatory. Hope is the most powerful thing any living being can have. Text, speech, film — anything that uses language — can only ever be, at best, the grazing of that arrow upon the cheek of its target. 

Like identity, language is always imperfect and is entirely made-up.

Over the past year, I’ve spoken with friends about how I don’t really see myself as a writer anymore, and I’m not really “Indonesian,” “Japanese,” or any of these identities that I have “fought to claim.” The response is often the same well-meaning insistence that nothing and no-one can take these identities away from me. I belong no matter what. Capitalism can’t take away my creative spirit! Asians “from” Asia don’t get to dictate who I am!

But it’s not that I feel defeated. It’s that I no longer want to cling to the formation of new words on the page. I want to stop trying to connect the dots between myself and all these fabricated collective memories. I want to be free from the act of articulation so that I can live between, and before, and after language – in the moments that are just about breathing, not building. 

The irony of me talking to you right now through words on a screen is not lost on me. Can I ever escape language? Can anyone? What is this for? Who the fuck knows! I will blame this on this week’s full moon, partly because it’s funny, and partly because it does and doesn’t make sense. We live in a world that is absurd and oppressive, awful and beautiful beyond words. But the moon, in all of its inexplicable, unknowable beauty, has been the subject of God-only-knows-how-many poems.

Outside of poetry, the moon literally controls the tides. It’s done this since the beginning of time. Does the moon do this for a reason? 

Does there need to be a reason?