Fifty Sounds, page 9
If I’d learned anything from Wittgenstein, it was that context was everything: the way that words were used in particular settings, the particular games played with language. You couldn’t see a tool that looked roughly the same as one in your box and assume it functioned the exact same way, or was used to perform all the same tasks when the makeup of the rest of the toolbox was so wildly different. But it was one thing to know this and another to live it fully. It transpired that it required a considerable largeness of spirit to accept the way that these imported words were wielded with little consideration for their original usage and belonged to an utterly different web of associations to those they had in English. It was not the commandeering of the words that was painful, but rather the lack of knowledge around it; as my friend had pointed out, it seemed to signal very clearly that subtleties which had made up your world were lost, and you now had to abide by a different set. Nobody understood you, or had any interest in understanding you.
As time went on, I began to have flashes of understanding that felt nearly spiritual. I would be walking down a street, wondering for the umpteenth time how it could be that so many people could create a signboard for their shop or restaurant using an English word written in English script without thinking to check the spelling, when it would suddenly strike me that I was quite possibly the first person to ever notice this particular mistake—at the very most, only the tenth or twentieth. And with this came the understanding that the standards of correctness I had been brought up with literally did not apply here—to all intents and purposes, these weren’t mistakes anymore, even when they were written in the Roman alphabet. What I was looking at and pointing out and obsessing over was not English in the way that I had previously understood the word; English itself had to be given a different definition here, to be governed by a different set of rules. And as I had that thought, I would feel an expansive sense of grace descending over me, and with it a feeling of immense relief. I had been manning a watchtower for a crumbling empire, I realized, desperately trying to do the duty that had been subconsciously instilled in me. Now came the news that the empire had fallen, and all I felt was peace. But I could only keep this understanding in focus for a short while before it would slip from view.
¶ chira-chira: the sound of the mighty loner and the caress of ten thousand ownerless looks
TO BE STARED AT, ALL the time, everywhere. Except to describe it as staring is already to misrepresent it, to conjure up an image of a long, fixed, open-eyed sort of look with a discernible owner, and while there are some of those, like the man who waits in the road outside your flat and stands still and solid as a rock as you pass, glaring at you with hatred in his eyes, it mostly does not feel that way. Rather, it is the glance thrown furtively, a move performed less with the whites of the eyes and more the dark of the eyelashes, so that en masse, the sensation is that of being caressed by a hundred feathered wings, or cut by a hundred tiny blades. Chira-chira is the word for it, this scattered, stolen look, the same word used for the soft twinkling of the stars, a light fall of snow, the fluttering of candlelight. Also broken down and used in the making of the word “pan-chira,” the love of glancing up girls’ skirts to catch a glimpse of their pants, a word which to me always sounds like some kind of superhero: the Mighty Panchira! And indeed, this perpetual snowfall of glances can make you feel like a superhero, caressed and carried aloft, and also irredeemably alone.
¶ jin-jin: the sound of being touched for the very first time
A MUSICAL INTERLUDE. IT STARTS with a voice, a sole raspy voice emerging from the silence, intimate and slightly unnerving:
Jin jin jin jin, the voice goes—chi ga jin jin
Hearing this song as someone who doesn’t understand Japanese, it might occur to you to doubt whether or not this is, in fact, language. You may think it feels too sonically evocative to be real language: too creepy, too insectual. As it happens, it is both: it is language, and it is perfect sound. Jin-jin, reads the dictionary; the state of feeling pain in part of your body each time your blood pulses there. So let’s hazard a translation for these lyrics, although it will be a bad one, for there is no word in English that can work like jin, can carry this meaning and yet buzz like an instrument when sung. Nonetheless:
Throb throb throb throb my blood is throbbing
Now the verse continues, a cappella and sinister as holy hell, as the singer describes her sense of seclusion from a world that is moving on without her. Both the plum and the cherry blossom have perished, the sheltered princess cannot get a wink of sleep. What, she wonders, will her first taste of dawn coffee be like? Now the singer reveals that despite her pressing sense of solitude, she understands that, factually speaking, she is not alone in her sensory deprivation: you’re a virgin, I’m a virgin too, she sings. And then the brass band handsprings in, billowing with sardonic jubilation. We’re all yearning to be touched! the trumpets seem to scream ecstatically.
Entitled “Virgin Blues,” the track is a cover performed by a beloved singer named Jun Togawa. In the video, Togawa is walking alone down a train track, wearing a heavy overcoat and surgical mask and carrying a briefcase, when she encounters a high-school couple apparently in the throes of a budding romance coming the other way. These themes of isolation and difference, which the video brings out with almost comical clarity, are very much of a piece with the rest of her oeuvre; indeed, I think it is the way she deals with these themes so intelligently, and with such humor, strangeness, and self-awareness, that gave me such a strong reaction to her music when I discovered it five or so years ago. It was a reaction that I almost want to call a homecoming. Her work felt profoundly relevant to my life as it was then, and it continues to resonate now. And yet there is something about this particular song that, from the moment I first heard it, has made me cast my mind back to a past me: it puts me immediately back to being back on the island. Specifically, it puts me back to being on my black swivel chair in the staffroom, learning Japanese and planning lessons, surrounded by a school’s worth of hustle and bustle, feeling like I’m going out of my mind with a kind of longing that seems too all-encompassing, too holistic to tolerate any succinct description.
If someone were to approach the chair of this person and ask her if she was happy or miserable, she wouldn’t have an answer. If asked what exactly she desired she wouldn’t know that either, although she might try and get away with a response like “everything, everyone.” What she does know is that she feels like this song feels: shivery and half-deranged with longing. She feels as though she’s perched on the edge of a world, and what she wants more than anything is for that world to take her into itself. This perpetually renewed lack is like being suspended, acrobatic, mid-air, in the act of reaching towards something which lies just beyond the grasp.
It’s only reading Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, years later, that I can truly understand this feeling for the first time, and give it its rightful name: eros. It’s through Carson, also, that I understand for the first time that the geometry of eros is, by necessity, triangular:
its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros.
In this geometric sketch of eros, the distance that prevails between us and the object of our affection is not a bug but a defining feature of what it means to desire—and so, too, is our permanent awareness of that distance, which takes the form of a moment-by-moment re-measuring of it. The separation needed to create the hole of longing has its ultimate root in the brute fact of “the boundary of flesh and self between you and me,” but to the language learner, this third element in the triangle can assume a concrete form, a specific costume: distance takes to the stage dressed as language.
Your language is what is missing in me, that tantalizing body of knowledge which I do not have, which keeps me from what it is that I want. Namely, you. Namely, intimacy. Namely, the other, and the impossible merging of my self with theirs. That which prevents whole, unadulterated attachment is no more than language—or so we tell ourselves. Ultimately, it is this lack in us upon which we fixate. “Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.”
To be clear, I am not (only) talking about falling in love with a person who speaks a different language. What I want to suggest is something more controversial, more wide reaching: that things can also work the other way round. That learning a language, particularly when done in an immoderate, drowning, gulping sort of a way, sets us up very well indeed to become sensitized to the boundaries between people, where eros resides. Immersion begets desire, then continues to fuel it. “It is nothing new to say that all utterance is erotic in some sense, that all language shows the structure of desire at some level.” Equally, I think, it is nothing new to say that we do not really notice this, until we fall in love—or until we start learning a language. Or both, at the same time.
Seen through this lens, making the commitment to learn a language is not solely a practical, rational, commendable choice, a way of improving communication, although it can evidently be all of those. It is also a doomed response to the desperation and the urgency and the thrill of adrenaline that the continued perception of this distance instills in us: it is an almost wilful misunderstanding of the distance, an attempt to grasp hold of it by identifying it—the language barrier—and in the same breath, resolving to do away with it—I will surmount it.
Which is not to imply the irreality of the language barrier, or to propose that learning language does not bring us closer to understanding one another. I suggest not that the distance which language poses is untraversable but that, as Carson notes, once it is sealed, we either rub up against a different kind of boundary—“the boundary of flesh and self”—or else, the triangle collapses and we are no longer in eros. Without its third component, the triangle cannot hold. To speak specifically of language, we are now in a place of familiarity. Perhaps one of comfort, of boredom, of frustration, joy, self-expression, oppression, resentment, maybe even a blend of all of these, but not of desire.
Never mind that, though, for the moment. I am still irredeemably there, held aloft in the world of eros. Surfaces hum, edges are blades, and everything is crying out at the fundamental tragedy of being separated in space. I know this because I too am throbbing, in a way that feels both regressive and also like a return to a fundamental truth: “Infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? By passionately not wanting it to be.”
Every interaction is a brush-up against these edges, an improvisational performance around the fundamental crevice that separates us, which stirs up the hope of our union as it spotlights our great distance. Yes, every conversation is a dance: if this isn’t eros, I do not know what is. It is not that this dance is only available to the learner; the problem is rather that the seasoned dancer has forgotten what it is they are doing. “Language is a skin,” says Barthes. “I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
One day I am on my swivel chair in the staffroom, playing a game to teach me the Japanese scripts. The game is called Slime Forest Adventure, and features a spiky ginger-headed boy with a bandanna who navigates his way around a neon-green island, sporadically venturing into the wooded areas. To help him fight off the slimeballs that leap out in his path, the player has to type out the phonetic reading of the characters splashed across the slimes’ stomachs. The game is more absorbing than I imagined a language-learning game could be, and I am thoroughly engrossed in slime battle when I feel someone pause behind me. This is not a rarity: often kids entering the staffroom slow their pace when passing my desk as their eyes are sucked to the screen, less, I think, out of conscious curiosity and more through some sort of electronic bloodlust. Mostly they scuttle away as soon as they notice me noticing, but there are a couple of kids who come in regularly, and who have begun to interact with me, standing behind me and helping me with the answers. Today, I look around and see that the lingering shape is S, who is already well acquainted with Slime Forest.
It’s lunchtime, she apparently has nowhere pressing to go, and there are few people around in the staffroom, so she leans in to look at the screen, helping me. And then, after a little while, she places her hands on my shoulders. It’s hard to explain how unexpected this is. Human contact. For reasons I struggle to articulate, what springs to mind in this moment, fully formed as if it were the result of a neurological malfunction, is the phrase, no man is an island. I can only guess that my struggling brain is attempting to reassure itself that this is in fact normal, for people to touch one another; to acknowledge that I had, in fact, been feeling myself like an island, for months, something like a mute teenager tapping away at computer games at the epicenter of a functioning institution, and that it made sense that the unexpected lifting of this isolation would feel somehow right.
Because it does feel right, but also overwhelming, a burst of sensation that hurricanes through my body with an intensity I find hard to account for. Is this what happens when nobody has laid a hand on you for months? I don’t know, but it feels utterly new, as if I have understood for the first time what human touch is, experienced it for the first time without the barrier of desensitization, and tears prick the back of my eyes with the sheer miracle of it.
“You’re getting better,” S says, still watching my character thwacking the slimeballs with his hoe, her hands still resting unmentioned on my shoulders. And though what I’m feeling is so all-consuming that it’s hard to focus on anything else, I manage to engage in a way that is superficially normal, although it takes me everything that I have:
“What’s this one, though? Is it ‘nu’ or ‘me’?”
“ ‘Me,’ ‘me.’ It’s ‘me.’ ”
And maybe, as we are talking, as I am doing my best to pretend I am feeling nothing, she senses in the way my shoulders relax how much my body is singing out to be touched, because she starts then to massage me with her thumbs, as we talk on, talking through even the ones I feel confident enough to answer alone: “This means eye, right?”
“Yes, eye.”
And when she finally says she has to go and takes her hands away, I can feel their absence there like an ache, like a hole, like I was the first person ever to be touched, and now the tears come to my eyes uncontrollably and I try and blink them away until she’s left the room.
¶ pota-pota: the sound of red dripping onto asphalt
IT WAS A MORNING IN early November. Like most school mornings, I’d woken at dawn and before setting out to work, had made my way down the assortment of tiny alleys, peppered with sunakku bars where men went to drink, to find the sea a plate of gray glass, broken up only by the bank of concrete tetrapods that lay at a little distance from the shore as if they’d been aiming for the beach but collapsed in neatly coordinated exhaustion before they reached it. There was the yellow wooden fishing boat lying in its usual place and the smell of bonfires in the air. I didn’t always do this, but that particular day, I’d gone down onto the strand and walked along the stones, watching the sea fizz and foam in generous loops not far from my feet.
These walks brought me a kind of magical solace, which that day I found myself particularly in need of: it had been an unprecedentedly strange couple of weeks. The weekend before last, I’d been out for a party with the teachers from school, which had moved on to karaoke. I had been very drunk, as I would usually get at these all-you-can-drink parties, which would start at five in the evening and where none of the food contained any carbohydrates, and where the person next to you would continually top up your glass, and where the school janitor would be collected by his wife ninety minutes into the two-hour slot because if he stayed any longer then he “made mistakes,” but in the limited period he was there he liked to sit next to me and drink sake continuously and talk—and so I had ended up falling asleep in the karaoke box, as was my tendency at those times. I didn’t remember many of the particulars, but I remembered with some almost unearthly clarity being woken up by Y.
“Moshi-moshi?” he’d said as he gently shook my shoulder, his body leant over my supine one so that our faces were just a couple of inches apart, “Moshi-moshi?”
And that was how I learned that moshi-moshi wasn’t just something that you said on the phone, but also when reviving the unconscious.
The following morning, I had woken again to a vision of his face, exceptionally close, where closeness didn’t just signify physical proximity. He felt to me known in some way I found hard to account for, like a person who lived in my dream world as well as the world outside. It was nice, it was alarming, and I had a sick suspicion that I had in fact kissed him, and that the way in which that kissing had happened had been a bad thing in the eyes of the world. But the suspicion had no memory associated with it, was just a looming sense of certainty that could also have been the aftermath of a dream. Throughout the weekend, I imagined over and over arriving into school the following week, being called to the headmaster’s office and summarily dismissed. I could cope with that, I thought; but what if he was summarily dismissed also—what if I had brought him down? I had no concrete examples to provide myself of how I might have done that, only a clenching in my guts. After a couple of days during which my adrenaline levels had reached new heights, I had gone into that school the following week to discover everything as normal. The first day, Y barely spoke to me. I was redeemed, maybe—there were times when it felt that every statement in Japan was tempered with “maybe,” and after a while this began to leach into the way that I perceived reality, that I formulated thoughts to myself. Yet this maybe-redemption brought its own discovery, its own loneliness: I didn’t want to be redeemed. I wanted to kiss him, I wanted to have kissed him. I wanted something to tie us together.
