1 April 2022 / Providence
Dear H,
A family of mourning doves is nesting outside my father’s window. Each afternoon, my niece, in her red velvet dress, steps outside and names the birds like pets in her garden, who seem to find no special oddity in their daily reinvention. Yeshua, Joshua, Emmanuel–these mourning doves perpetually weep and still they serve as a sign of peace; they romp and play in fragrant fields like children of a lost century.
H, I’ve been reading through your records, but the work has been difficult. How foolish to think that meaning flows undisturbed through language. Your tongue lands in my mouth through the innumerable failures of translation–your thoughts mediated by metaphor and by my own perceptual inventions. Unmoored in time and context, pronouns slip–from me to her to you to we–a quiet exchange between permeable subjects, themselves nonequivalent and imperfect.
I once heard the poet, Li-Young Lee, speak of the dying breath as the medium of all language–the exhale that carries meaning in opposite ratio to vitality. I listened as he spoke of ideas that unfold as the words that carry them falter; how expired speech and exhausted breath are preconditions for disclosure.
What is a human being, you’ve asked again and again. I will also lose sleep over the unbearable simplicity of this question–one that begins in the belly of its answer.
With love,
AT