Table of CONTENTS Tongue
Decadent Cosmos
JILL ROSATI..........................................T3-T4 DAN DELLECHIAIE.............................T5-T10 EVERETT BRYSON.................................T5-T6 ORIGINAL ONE.........................................T11 PROPHET PM............................................T12 DABTARA...........................................T13-T20 ERWIN KAMUENE.............................T21-T22 GREY DEVLIN....................................T23-T24 TASHA Z....................................................T23 ALEX PACOR.............................................T25
Editor-in-Chief | Tasha Z Assistant Editor | TS
Dear Reader, Tongue is the first (and last) quasi-academic journal by Decadent Cosmos. This journal seeks to explore various facets of language through essays, poetry, art, and more. We hope you enjoy it! x
INDIGO KINSELLA...........................T26--T27 NICO..........................................................T28 MICHELLE DEVLIN...........................T29-T31
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Front and back cover art by Sam de Soto. Sam (they/them) is an artist and musician in Boston.
JILL ROSATI YOUR WORDS
Your breath picked up the wind, Which picked up the dirt and debris, Which picked up the bugs and leaves, The birds and trees, The clouds and seas. Your words move the earth.
THE RULE OF THREE Never think in threes If you would like to maintain sanity, A danger for someone such as me. For the first time it sounds crazy, The second time, a no But by thrice you are accustomed, The pest burrows and it will grow Uncertainty to conviction And this is how it must go.
THE BEES KNEES The sky spoke to wet my intentions But I slid off heavy like a bumblebee Silently and still, setting in your disease A comfort that could break your knees. How strange the mud must taste today.
STARVING Sweet days in the grass, I trace your mask again and again. A deceitful song forms a canopy from your lips and I reach to plush the ripest truths. Their flesh so tempting to sink my teeth in while the juiciest leave me starving.
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CONCUSSED A pool of glass marbles, Smokey colors inside, Scrape together. Grinding teeth mirror Remnants of my cognizance, A million images In tight focus as they roll. What is and what once was Keeps me awake at night When my eyes open will I still confuse Vacancy for mystery? Cool and dumb as ever. What is my body doing When my thoughts are elsewhere? We are trained to be self-centered, To fear latency, To make our own distraction. But you shout back When I scream into the abyss. So if kindness is vulnerability, I will let myself be vulnerable. One day we will sit in silence, Looking over a million Reflections of all we abandoned, And everything we chased Will have been so fleeting.
PREVIOUS PAGE Jill Rosati (she/her)| @acidplaydough Flame Acrylic on repurposed canvas 24 x 36 inch 2022
WHAT I FUCKING LOVE ABOUT LANGUAGE
NOTES TOWARD A PHILOLOGY OF PROFANITY
DAN DELLECHIAIE I’m not a linguist or a philologist or a philosopher of language, but I’m a daily user and that gives me some right to take a jab at my gossipy, blabbering, and hiccuping language known to the wider world as English. The sliver of my mother tongue that I use the most is the dark corner: profanity. Often curse words, swear words, profane words—whatever you wanna call them—have a literal definition and many colloquial usages. To help untangle this, I’ve thought long and hard about these special, mostly fourlettered words to figure out how we use them in the twenty-first century. We don’t use slattern or blackguard anymore, but we do still use whore and have created new ones like basic bitch.
FUCK Definition:
verb:
to
intercourse with. Variations: fucking,
have
sexual
butt-fucking,
fucking-a!, fucking hell!, what the fuck?, fuck you!, fuck me!, I’m so fucked, who gives a flying fuck?, motherfucker,
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dumbass motherfucker, badass motherfucker, high as a motherfucker, drunk as fuck, fucked up, fucker, little fucker, goat-fucker, thigh-fuck, tittyfuck, fuckwad, Jesus fucking Christ. Of course, fuck is not as prudish or scientific as its synonyms like copulate and fornicate or as romantic as make love or as silly as make whoopie. It’s more direct. Fuck is both a noun and a verb and when you tag on an -ing,
“Get fucked!” is an odd insult, same with fucker. It’s meant to harm someone, but you’re just telling them to have sex, which is a compliment in my book. You could interpret “Get fucked!” as a synonym of bottoming or “suck a dick.” Both of these activities are seen as arduous for some, but are fun for others. Fuck also works as a general expletive, more a guttural noise than anything else. How many of us have yelled, “Fuck!” without meaning anything about sex? And how many of us have yelled it during sex in all its variations? Motherfucker is the next evolution of fucker. The verb form, motherfuck, isn’t commonly used, but has a lot of potential. “Motherfuck you!” is cooler than “Fuck you!” But when it’s a verb, you can be saying either you wish them to fuck a mother, that you wish their mother to be fucked, or that you wish a mother to be fucked somewhere in their vicinity. In Spanish, “¡chinga tu madre!” i.e. “fuck your mother!” is a tad clearer. As a noun, motherfucker is easier. You’re saying that someone fucks mothers, probably their own. Of
it becomes a qualifier. Someone who’s a fuck is not a good person, but a good fuck is fun to have sex with. A fucking asshole is even worse than an asshole, but fucking assholes can be a pleasurable activity or a character flaw.
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course, this does get complicated with two noun variations. If you’re a badass motherfucker (BAMF), you’re cool. If you’re a dumbass motherfucker, you should watch some documentaries before opening your mouth again. Damn is the fuck of yesteryear. “Goddamnit!” still has a nice ring when yelled after stubbing one’s fucking toe.
SHIT Definition: noun and verb: anal excrement or the process of expelling aforementioned anal excrement. As a verb, it’s the means. As a noun, it’s the ends.
Being pissed off is a ridiculous phrase that implies that you’re mad because someone used you as a platform to urinate off of. I would be mad if someone did this, but I’d be even more annoyed if I was pissed on.
Variations: Piece of shit, little shit, shiteating grin, shit talk, shit in a silk stocking, tossed into the shit heap of history, like a pig in shit, chickenshit, batshit crazy, shithole, shithead, shit for brains, ripped shit pissed, dipshit, lying sack of shit, shitty, shit on, shit sandwich. For
how
obsessed
Martin
Luther,
Mozart, and Chuck Berry were with the stuff, shit, something all of us hopefully do regularly, is still a swear word in Western culture. I don’t enjoy public restrooms with broken locks and infrequent cleaning, but I will still admit I shit. At least I have that advantage over Kim-Jong Un. Our anal excretions are synonymous with stupidity, mischievousness, and stubbornness. Dumb animals like pigs and human babies roll around in the stuff without a care in the world. Many humans have died for talking too much shit or from shitting too much via typhoid and cholera. Piss doesn’t have the same ring. Pisshead will never be shithead. Wicked pisser is a compliment in one American city. Being full of piss and vinegar is meant to be compliment, but it sounds smelly and uncomfortable.
BITCH Definition: noun: female dog. Variations: bitchfit, bitch and complain, son of a bitch, bitch-tastic, don’t be such a bitch, bitch out, bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks, bitch-ass, bitch-ass-motherfucker, pussy-ass-bitch, crazy as a bitch, basic bitch. Every student who sees bitch used in an older piece of writing giggles. “It’s just a female dog!” they reply with a shit-eating grin on their face. Sexist language is always a pain to justify the continued usage of. Luckily, most expletives, even the ones with sexist origins, are straying toward a neutral linguistic future. If someone’s a bitch, they’re weak, annoying, cold.
stubborn,
mean,
and/or
If someone bitches (as in “bitch and complain”), they’re complaining excessively about something minor. All of these attributes apply to all people, irrespective of gender and sex. We all know that person who complains too much, who’s just a pain in the ass, who’s weak-willed, who’s hard-headed beyond words.
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Unlike “motherfuck”, son of a bitch makes sense. You’re calling their mother a bitch and, by the transitive property, you also suck. It’s always
Douchebag deserves an essay of its own. It’s literally a product women almost exclusively use. As an insult, however, is almost exclusively used for
funny when a mother or a brother calls their son or sibling, a son of a bitch. It’s the insult equivalent of a boomerang.
men. A douchebag is a variation on dick and the only thing they have in common is that you can put them in a vagina, if you so please.
A cunt is literally a vagina, but, like motherfucker, is the next evolution of bitch. British folks and their colonized offshoots use cunt how Americans use dumbass or bitch. The comedian Jim Jeffries refers to himself as “the Rosa Parks of cunt” in his quest to open up the usage of the term. I don’t think it’ll take off since even the most foulmouthed Americans clutch their pearls when they hear it. Because cunt has one curt syllable like fuck, it has a firm power. Pussy has none of that power and that’s inherent in its pronunciation. A pussy is someone who’s weak. Pussy-ass-bitch is a compound word that triples down on this. It also makes me think of cats, which a vagina doesn’t resemble at all, no matter how many Georgia O’Keefe or Courbet paintings you look at. Some Caribbean folks say “pussyhole.” Like cunt, I don’t know if it will join our profane lexicon. It only sounds good with a patois. Whore, hoe, slut are in the same monosyllabic family as bitch and cunt. They all mean you fucked before marriage when a deity and their human hype man in a baggy robe says it’s okay to bump uglies, you have slept around a lot, and/or that you’re a sex worker. Again, none of these attributes are bad and I know many people who proudly refer to themselves as such.
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BASTARD Definition: noun: a kid, usually male, without a father. Variations: rat bastard, bastardize, real bastard. A bastard is a guy who’s a piece of shit, usually rude or pretentious. It’s an insult that fits lawyers, bankers, and elected officials perfectly. As a bastard myself, this insult doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Yes, it meant something before proper contraceptives, sensible inheritance laws, and the French Revolution. Nowadays, it’s ridiculous. There’s no equivalent for not having a mother, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or seconds cousins. Growing up without a father is different, but considering how many people have daddy issues, maybe being a bastard is a boon. Jesus had two fathers and he ended up getting nailed to two planks.
DICK Definition: noun: a penis. Also: someone named Richard, for some reason.
Variations: dickhead, in need of a good dicking, suck a dick, lick a dick, don’t stick your dick in crazy, big dick energy, little dick, small dick, fat dick,
“Suck my ass” and “suck my clit” have been recent much-needed variations on “suck my dick.” Other body parts don’t have the same effect. You can’t
skinny dick, dirty dick, broken dick, limp dick, dicked down, cock, cocksucker.
tell someone to suck your elbow and expect them to feel insulted.
A dick is an obstinate and cruel motherfucker. A dick is worse than an asshole. An asshole makes you sigh. A dick makes you groan. A dickhead either means someone is a tip of a penis or their head is a penis. Considering how ugly penises can be, this insult is effective either way. Penises are odd in function and shape and thus perfect for profanity. They’re a battering ram, conduit, fire hose, shotgun, and plug for the retention of seminal fluid. They look like a blind snake and an ugly tropical fruit spent a weekend in Las Vegas. It’s what we call the boss who yells at us for being two minutes late. Like fishing and surfing, it’s something people spend a lot of time and money on in the hopes of catching a big one. Size does matter when it comes to insults. Having a small dick means you can’t pleasure someone as well. Having big dick energy means you move like a boss through a room, acting like you have Big Ben’s chime in your pants. Suck, blow, jerk (the shortened form of jerkoff) are actions you can do with a dick. Something blowing or sucking means it was horrible. A jerk is a selfish asshole. One fantastic French insult is “That was funny, did you blow a clown?”
A moral code I used to live by was a variation on virtue ethics: “Don’t be a dick.” We all know a dick, don’t be like them.
ASS Definition: noun: gluteus maximus or donkey. Variations: asshole, dirty ass, nasty ass, stupid ass, fatass, dumbass, crazy ass, bitch-ass, broke ass, assfuck, suck my ass, eat my ass, ass man, pussyass-bitch, asswipe, ass cheek, smack that ass, shake that ass, fine ass, gonna get me some ass, tight asshole, loose asshole. Ass is a confusing one, language-wise. In school textbooks, it gets the same amount of giggles as bitch. When you put an adjective in front of ass, the word is completely modified. A dumbass is stupid, but a smartass is clever in an annoying way. A fatass is an overweight person, but a fat ass will take you far in life. A pain in the ass is something that pisses you off. Getting some ass means you’re looking to fuck someone. Shaking your ass is dancing. Smacking that ass applies to both fucking and dancing.
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A donkey is a dumb-looking animal. Our rear-ends are also dumb-looking. Depending on your genetics and workout regimen, you can have anything
Also: no matter how many new slurs incel militias like the Proud Boys shit out and how many they recycle from their beloved Nazis ancestors, these
from two watermelons to two jellyfish hanging out back there. Our asses can’t tell the difference between a bench being cold and wet and just cold. An ass can withstand a lot of pressure, but will turn red and sore after three or more well-aimed smacks.
words aren’t entering the wider lexicon at the rate these douchebags want them to. The Overton window has shifted and will hopefully one day slam shut on their hands.
I’m not sure whether asshole is worse than ass. Yes, it’s closer to shit, that dumb motherfucker of insults, but it’s also where some people have G-spots.
CONCLUSION Profanity is fucking weird, my dear reader. Words that we yell and mutter every day taste different when you think about them. Curse words linguistically embody attributes we hate about each other. We hate it when people lie (“Lying sack of shit”), when people are inconsiderate (“What a fucking dick”), when they complain too much (“Will they ever stop bitching”), when people are cheap (“The rat bastard made me pay for their dinner”), and when people act stupidly (“They’re such a dumbass”). And yes, there’s an unbelievable amount of sexism too. It was a conscious choice not to include racial, homophobic, ableist, and transphobic slurs in this essay. Most of them are variations on the above words, but applied to a specific community.
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We reach into the past for the words to categorize our experiences. Sometimes we discover that the words they used to use to don’t apply to us anymore. We create new insults every day because the conditions we live in change and the ways we intelligently and unintelligently adapt bring out new behaviors to criticize. So as you go about your day decrying the motherfuckers, dicks, and assholes who run the world and the dumbasses, bitches, and shitheads that enable them, I hope you think twice about the curse words you use and invent a new one like motherfucking shit for dick bitch.
Dan Dellechiaie (he/him) is a writer based in Boston. He graduated from Boston University where he received a BS in journalism and earned his MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. His writing has appeared in New Hampshire Magazine, The Cambridge Chronicle, and The Chamber Magazine. His website is dadell.com. Art by Everett Bryson (he/him). Everett is from a small town in rural Alabama. His hobbies include being confused, playing guitar, gardening, and attempting to blend in with Homo sapiens. He is actually an undercover alien sent to do something on earth but has forgotten what it was. He can often be found banging his head against a wall in protest of Microsoft forcing him to switch to Windows 11.
By Original one (he/him). From a young age I always enjoyed expressing myself creatively and I always had a big imagination which helped me to view the world in ways others may miss or overlook. I spent 6 years writing poetry and perfecting my writing technique. More so I get my inspiration from my life experiences and spending time in nature.
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Prophet PM (he/him) is a Boston based muti-disciplinary artist and mentor. Known for his silky, smooth voice and photography, you can find him bopping around all over town.
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The Origin of Writing in its Philosophical Context BY
DABTARA
T
he spoken word has always been with us, a constant companion for the last 200 millennia of human history. And while debates around the linguistic capabilities of archaic hominid species continue without any decisive evidence on either side, one thing remains clear: writing, the written word, is a startling newcomer in the course of human history. The uniqueness of human language has perplexed as much as it has horrified (Oscar Kiss Maerth, The Beginning Was the End. London: Sphere (1974))—Oscar Kiss Maerth, for example, theorized that language emerged as a result of the neurodegenerative consequences of prolonged cannibalism among early populations—but written language has often been treated with relatively less skepticism, being seen simply as the natural outgrowth of the human desire to preserve the information encoded in the spoken word. And perhaps this conventional view is, in a qualified sense, true. After all, writing is a technology that emerges uniquely within settled, agricultural societies. Various forms of proto-writing may incline us to revise this assumption—Aboriginal Australian message sticks, Anishinaabe wiigwaasabakoon and the Rongorongo script of Rapa Nui—but, given the function of these, it remains safe to say that writing (as we know it) is a relative fluke in the history of language. It is, at the very least, a result of the social changes in Neolithic and Chalcolithic society; as such, it “carries the birthmarks” of the ideological climate of that time. To understand writing, therefore, we must try to grasp—as best as we can—the Neolithic mind. Writing is a form of time travel: through writing, we are able to access the earliest annals of human history. But writing never truly explains itself; when it does, the explanations rarely, if ever, make sense to us. So we must begin before history, before the written word, in order to understand what writing meant in its earliest forms. The most common features of the earliest written records are that they usually do one of a handful of things, usually “mundane” in nature. This includes things like king-lists, records of commercial transactions, property-marking, and so on. A common thread in all of these seems, at least to most people at first glance, that these are quintessentially utilitarian tasks—writing is a technology that exists to facilitate ruling, buying and selling. However, there may be something more subterranean underlying all of these. It is particularly worth noting that certain features of proto-writing may be rooted in mathematics, specifically in the need for celestial timekeeping. As Peter Lamborn Wilson points out,
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Alexander Marshack…traces notation, at least, if not writing, way back into the Stone Age, even back into the Palaeolithic, on a number of objects which he has studied which had never been studied before, because they were so embarrassing and impossible to understand. They are objects which have scratches on them. They’re obviously not decorative, they’re not at all interesting to look at. Some of them are very worn, as if they’d been carried around in somebody’s pocket, or used over a long period of time. And they have little nicks, or scratches, or little marks in them. And no-one had ever asked what these things meant, until Marshack came along and suddenly saw them as a form of notation…he started counting the scratch-marks, and adding them up, and seeing where they were divided. And over and over and over again he began finding numbers which related to the lunar cycle: thirties, twenty-eights, sevens, numbers like that…And for reasons unknown, but perhaps understandable or recoverable through ethnography, that these Paleolithic hunters were already interested in the calendar, which was previously thought to be a Neolithic invention, dependent upon agriculture, or perhaps giving rise to agriculture, and having nothing to do with the hunting societies. (Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Ploughing the Clouds,” https://dreamflesh.com/essay/ploughing-clouds/) The mundane often gives way to the magical, especially when we look to our earliest pictures of the world. Origins are complicated things, messy things. As a result, there’s a natural tendency to focus less on singular moments of innovation— something that certainly will never be uncovered as it concerns the origin of writing—and instead continuity. Even the earliest forms of writing in Mesopotamia post-date the Vinča symbols by hundreds of years and the Dispilio Tablet by potentially thousands. The mystery of these cases endures precisely because we have yet to translate these scripts—assuming they even are meant as a form of written language in the first place—or even arrive at a consensus view on what exactly these markings are. What this ultimately goes to show, at least in my estimation, is that there is a fairly consistent—and perhaps even universal—human desire to develop various technologies that serve as mnemonic aids and designators of someone’s possessions. Of course, many societies did (and continue to do) this without any need for written or inscribed symbols at all. And all this underscores the fact that highly complex societies by no means are expected or required to develop writing; the Inca, for example, managed a continent-spanning empire solely through the quipu and yupana (though the “readers” of these devices, the quipucamayoc, functioned very much akin to Egyptian or Mesopotamian scribes). Similarly complicated societies in the Americas, Africa, Polynesia and beyond all attest to this. Given that these many other examples abound, we are forced back to the original question. If writing is not necessary—even for significant cultural and technological development—why, then, did it develop at all? The answer I want to sketch out here is rather speculative in nature. To this end, I want to try and weave together a number of disparate threads, all of which attempt to place writing within a cosmological context and, from this, uncover the philosophical significance that can be derived from this. We cannot know what sparked the origin of writing which, at least as far as the archeological consensus goes, has four autochthonous beginnings: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. But we can make an educated guess.
F
irst and foremost, we must re-orient ourselves. In modernity, language has lost the “bite” it once had; language is ephemeral, intransient, immaterial, etc. To understand the origin of writing, we must understand the language within a cosmological perspective. That is to say, understand language as something deeply entwined with the causal order of things. Words have power. Words create; God speaks in order to create light (Gen. 1:3). And with creation comes naming; God names “day” and “night” (Gen. 1:5) and Adam, gifted with the divine power of naming, names all the animals on the earth (Gen. 2:20). Jesus casts demons out of possessed men with the power of the word (Matt. 8:16) and, in many cases, inflicts muteness upon demons when casting them out (Luke 11:14, Luke 4:41, Mark 1:34, etc.). Language also sets people apart from others. For the Pirahã and the Yąnomamö it is only the speakers of their specific language that are truly human—all others are “crooked” (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001387.html). The Greeks, from whom we owe the term “barbarian,” coined the word βάρβαρος as an onomatopoetic mockery of the seemingly incoherent babbling of non-Greek language. Sanskrit बर्बर (“barbara”) likewise indicates the foreign, non-Aryan speaker, though this term would fall out of favor and be replaced with म्लेच्छ (“mleccha”) which, ironically, is likely a borrowing from a Dravidian (i.e., non-Indo-European) substrate language. Language can only do this if speech itself has the power to shape and influence reality. Many cultures have linguistic taboos— such as the prohibition of speaking the names of the recently deceased—that only are understandable if words have the power to summon that which they name. This is especially common among hunters; East Slavs, for example, avoid using the protoIndo European words for “bear” (*h₂ŕ̥ tḱos, which is preserved in Classical Greek as ἄρκτος), instead speaking elliptically—the bear is медведь, “honey-eater.”
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Language, therefore, performs many roles. It designates—by setting apart natural kinds and defining the joints around which reality bends. It summons—by drawing the attention of the one who is named, who is called out by the voice that reaches them. And, most importantly, in nearly every culture—both ancient and modern—language is deeply tied to the healing arts. Even today doctors are expected to recite an oath of allegiance to Apollo the Healer (Ἀπόλλωνα ἰητρὸν) such that if they fail to adequately perform their medical duties, they will suffer divine retribution. This “magical” tendency inherent in language is well-attested, both anthropologically and within the vast corpus of curses and incantations preserved on tablets, papyrus, bones, sculptures, etc. Even the relatively benign “property-marking” function of language—the most commonly accepted explanation for the Harappan script and the vast majority of the earliest Runic inscriptions in Northern Europe—is itself a kind of magical ward. By placing one’s name on an item, nothing has truly “changed” in the thing itself; it remains what it is and there is nothing preventing a potential thief from taking it. Or is there? The name, the “this is mine,” is the presence of the owner, the owner’s voice, within the object itself. It is no longer free for the taking because, now, the object “speaks” on its owner’s behalf: “this man is a thief, for I belong to someone else.” The power of speech, therefore, lies in its ability to twist and transform the world. This was recognized by all cultures as an incredibly powerful tool, though one that is deeply morally ambiguous. Gorgias described the spoken word as “a mighty lord, and for all that it is insubstantial and imperceptible it has superhuman effects. It can put an end to fear, do away with distress, generate happiness, and increase pity” (Gorgias, Encomium of Helen II.8). Persuasion and rhetoric, poetics and storytelling, are all uses of language that are, especially in pre-modern societies, the basic means through which all cultural knowledge and religious practice is communicated. As such, language must be highly regulated—the improper use of language runs the risk of damaging the cosmic order itself: The rabbis taught: It happened once that a certain child, who was reading in his teacher's house in the Book of Ezekiel, was pondering over 'Hashmal, and there came out fire from 'Hashmal and burnt him, and they sought in consequence to conceal the Book of Ezekiel. Said Hananiah b. Hezkyah to them: If he was wise, are then all wise? (Tractate Haggia: Chapter 2) It should come as no surprise, then, that the divine name (יהוה) is always replaced with Adonai, Elohim or HaShem in vulgar speech. In many illiterate societies, language is said to be given to humanity from animals—birds are common, such as in the OkoJuwoi creation myth—and our language is, in that sense, a reverberation of an underlying cosmic speech. From this perspective, written language is an aberration—or, at the very least, a deeply suspect yoking of this primordial power to distinctly human aims. This can be seen particularly prominently among the Greeks, particularly the sophists, as they were deeply skeptical of the written word. Take, for example, the 5th–4th c. rhetor Alcidamas, who noted “writing, [which renders] processes in the mind slow and exercising the practice of speaking in an opposite set of habits, puts the soul too in a state of perplexity and bondage and gets in the way of all that easy flow to be found in extempore speeches” (Alcidamas, On Sophists 17). Writing, for Alcidamas, lacks the spontaneity that is characteristic of the spoken word; as a result, it traps the soul in bondage, constricting it and preventing it from working in accord with its natural function. Humans are, by nature, speaking things, but writing is a trap and language in its most base and degraded form. Of course, this begs the question, how did we fall into this trap in the first place? Did we trap ourselves? Or is something far more mysterious working through us?
F
or many today, as well as some in the ancient world, our ability to speak comes from an imitation of nature. Language, as a form of mimicry, naturally lends itself to artistic and poetic performance; these, after all, are attempts to replicate the beauty of natural sounds, the “language of the birds.” Whistle-languages—such as El Silbo of La Gomera and the “transcendental whistling” (Chángxiào) of the Daoists, though there are many others—can be seen as the clearest attempts of humans to replicate and imitate the language of the birds. In many cultures, especially those for whom the written word is a very recent introduction, the connection between language and nature is made explicit in the stories of its origin. For example, “the Swampy Cree of Manitoba hold that they were given spoken language by the animals. For the Inuit (Eskimo), as for numerous other peoples, humans and animals all originally spoke the same language” (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York, Vintage (2017); 87.) In this worldview, language exists in continuity with (rather than a break from) the natural world. All things speak; humans, insofar as we are unique, is due to our inability to understand the language of nature that is shared by the rest of the animal world. A moderate version of this view is held by Aristotle. He writes in the Poetics, It is reasonable to think that the art of poetry in general was brought into being by two kinds of causes, both of them natural; for imitating is innate in men from childhood, and in this respect men differ from the other animals by being the most imitative of animals and learning first by imitating, and all men enjoy works of imitation. (Aristotle, Poetics 1448b4-9, emphasis added)
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Nature, therefore, still maintains priority over the artificial, but there is not a strong ontological divide. The former is prior to the latter, and the latter cannot exist without the former, as it takes its basic material (in this case, phonemes and perhaps even the idea of an ordered grammar) from nature itself. Aristotle, however, distinguishes between speech proper and mere “voice.” Humans are the sole possessors of speech—the gods do not need it and animals, as irrational, can never attain it—and, as such, it forms the basis of the organic human community. It is clear, then, why man is more of a political animal than a bee or any other gregarious animal; for nature, as we say, does nothing in vain, and man alone of all animals has the power of reason. Voice, of course, serves as a sign of the painful and the pleasurable, and for this reason it belongs to other animals also; for the nature of these advances only up to the point of sensing the painful and the pleasurable and communicating these to one another. But speech serves to make known what is beneficial or harmful, and so what is just or unjust; for what is proper to man compared to the other animals is this: he alone has the sense of what is good or evil, just or unjust, and the like, and it is an association of beings with this sense which makes possible a household and a state. (Aristotle, Politics 1253a8-19) Animals may be “gregarious” and even talkative, capable of communicating their inner states (of pain and pleasure). But this is insufficient, argues Aristotle, as they can solely communicate the what (i.e., what they feel to be good or bad) and are unable to express the why (i.e., why such and such thing is just or unjust in the first place). The animal voice is “reactive” while human speech is “constructive,” being the bedrock upon which all human civilization rests. This account, perhaps unsurprisingly, has gone on to influence much of the thinking around language in the West. As such, it provides an interesting insight into the concerns of a people that, we should not forget, was only recently being (re)introduced to the written word. Mycenaean Greek, which was written with the Linear B script only for about 200 years in the Bronze Age, gave way to the “Greek Dark Ages” that lacked a written script entirely. It was only with the adoption of the Phoenecian alphabet that the Greeks “rediscovered” the written word and, as such, approached it with quite a high degree of intellectual reservation and even skepticism. From Aristotle’s perspective, this should make perfect sense. The spoken word, which is the defining feature of our humanity and the means by which we make our reason known to the world, exists in a diminished form in the written word. Writing lacks nuance and context—naturally lending itself to imprecision, slipperiness and sophism—and should be seen as a mere imitation of the fullness of the spoken word. This view continued through the Hellenistic period in many different forms and schools. Take, for example, the Epicurean theory of the origin of language: Names were not assigned in the beginning by arbitrary decree, but rather [from] the natures of humankind, as they felt their own peculiar feelings according to their different nationalities and received their own peculiar sense perceptions, each in their own way [uttered a sound] given form by their particular feelings and impressions, according to the difference in nations owing to their various locations. Later, specific vocal sounds were agreed upon by mutual consent in the individual nations in order that the meanings of what was said might be less ambiguous and clarified more concisely. (Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 75-76) Language once again is seen as the natural outflow of human nature. Here, the emphasis is placed on providing an account of the plurality of languages which, even by modern standards, avoids invoking anything particularly “mystical” or “magical.” Differences in speech are mere accidents—primarily of geography and individual human constitution—but these historical contingencies are reified as nations constitute themselves. Civilization (and by extension, writing) is a form of regulation and standardization of language, a taming of the primal chaos of natural human speech. To Epicurus’ credit, at least, this is not a violent imposition, but stems from the “mutual consent” of all those speaking the language. History, however, does not paint such a rosy picture of linguistic evolution. By the time of Late Antiquity, the philosophical innovations of Stoic cosmopolitanism and the social climate resulting from prolonged Roman cultural intermingling refined this particular account of language into a genuine universalism. For everywhere the species of man or horse or lion is the same, and similarly the thought concerned with man or stone or any other thing is the same, while vocal sounds and letters are not the same among all peoples; for Greeks use different vocal sounds from Phoenicians, as do Egyptians: ‘different is the tongue of different peoples’ says the poet. (Ammonius, Commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation, 19.10)
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Here, we see something of a precursor to what many in modernity take for granted as the nature of language. Concepts and thoughts, because of their “representational” nature, are universal and the same across all people; language, by contrast, is particular and culturally contingent. But, ultimately, the language is merely grasping at the same ideas which, once we are able to get beyond language, we have a “clearer” understanding of reality. In these Hellenistic thinkers we see a move to downplay language, either written or spoken. Language becomes at best a sort of ethnic residue that attaches itself to the soul which, even though it can express itself through language, is, in one sense or another, better off without it. Writing, then, with all its cultural eccentricities is at best a prerequisite hurdle that needs to be overcome; differences in orthography being the most obvious, but the way in which phonemes are encoded can vary wildly, even among identical scripts (think of the average English speaker trying to pronounce French words, for example). So what does all this tell us? For one, the Greek skepticism toward writing never fully goes away—it evolves and diversifies along with the broader philosophical climate it finds itself in, even when it comes into direct contact with peoples that take a diametrically opposed view. As Derrida famously noted, this produced a culture—the “West”—that treats writing as a derivative, even degraded form of the spoken word. Writing is a fall from grace that entraps the living, vivified word in a static, prison-like condition. But I argue there is more to this story. Even as a variety of philosophers railed against the written word, they nonetheless chose to write. If speaking is born out of imitation, so is writing, but writing gains a certain autonomy. A basic principle of Roman law, first coined by Cicero, was the res ipsa loquitur: the thing speaks for itself. A text, separate from and independent of its author, can promulgate ideas and information different from (and even diametrically opposed to) those held by the author. For the Greeks, this was a source of worry and anxiety. If writing imitates the author, whatever is gleaned in writing that diverges from the author’s oral teaching is automatically suspect—this is where writing splits off from reality and must be discarded. Imitation, on this view, is only useful insofar as it is a faithful imitation and the mimetic arts have no place for organic spontaneity. But this is not a worry for everyone. Even within the “imitation paradigm” there is still plenty of room for the autonomous text to negotiate a tenuous coexistence with the spoken word. And, most of all, when imitation runs amok, collapsing into an infinity of spiraling iterations, what gives us the possibility of reorienting ourselves is no longer an external world of pure ideas, but rather the grammatical (and even orthographic) particularities of whatever linguistic universe we find ourselves in.
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anguage, in virtue of its ability to both manipulate and reveal the causal order of things, is deeply intertwined with our relations to what is above and below; language is what mediates between the gods and humanity, kings and subjects, humanity and the non-human world. When the gods speak, it is often to command. As Walter Burkert notes, “one of the basic functions of language communication is to give orders,” a feature of our language that is very much a feature of primate communication as well (Walter Burkert, The Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1996)). But divine language is often strange, manifesting either in the form of riddles and cryptic messages (e.g., Judg. 14:5–20) or, more significantly for our present purposes, liturgical language. Ritual language—such as the Kromanti language of Jamaican Maroons or more familiar examples like Ge’ez or Vedic Sanskrit—functions as a distinct register by which communication is opened up between the human and divine realms. Often, the image invoked in these cases is a sort of “soul-replacement,” with ancestors, divinities or other spiritual entities taking up residence in the body of the person speaking. For example, among the Carib of Guyana, [I]n trance, which is induced by chewing tobacco, the shaman’s spirit (or soul) becomes very small and light and is able to detach itself from his body and fly with the aid of ‘ladder spirits’ into the skies…At the same time, his body, which is left behind as an empty receptacle, is filled by various forest spirits. It is these which now possess his body and speak through it. (I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. New York, Penguin (1989); 41.) In more familiar territory, the 18th century Jewish mystic, Israel ben Eliezer—known better by the title of “Baal Shem Tov,” which translates as Master of the Good Name—claimed to have attained a sort of mystical ascension to the heavenly realm which allowed him to communicate directly with the Messiah and, as such, was able to convey hidden truths about the nature of reality: including, but not limited to, miraculous healings, the expulsion of evil spirits, and the creation of protective amulets. All of which, he argued, were only possible due to a direct, mystical acquaintance with the secrets of divine language, both as it existed in the heavens and on earth (in the Hebrew alphabet).
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Commands issued in divine language, therefore, have the power to compel completely independently of the speaker—as R. Hasdai Crescas noted, “it is a source of great puzzlement that prophecy [can] devolve upon such a wicked [person]” (Hashem II.4.3). Humans, by virtue of our innate ability to acquire language, have the promethean power to steal divine language from the gods themselves. This means, therefore, that the language itself cannot simply be a product of the speaker—the speaker does not have the power to bring about the changes in reality wrought by the power of divine speech. Rather, the speech itself has that power, with the (mortal) serving as intermediary being little more than a passageway through which divine language can be made intelligible in the mundane realm. When we speak “from the hidden god within us” (GTh. 83), it is probably more appropriate to think of the words as speaking us. As such, human language is both a gift and a burden. As a gift it lifts us up, letting us access something that flows in and through us; but it is also a burden, as it is a sign of our incompleteness and the limits of our knowledge. Late Greek thinkers recognized this duality of language, noting that language is a mark of a certain kind of forgetting; by forgetting our origins, we are forced to speak: When, however, the soul has fallen into the realm of becoming, it is filled with forgetfulness, and requires sight and hearing in order to be able to recollect. For the soul needs someone who has already beheld the truth, who, by means of language, uttered forth from the concept, also moves the concept within [the soul of the student] which had until then grown cold. This, then, is how the need for language came about: on the one hand, it strives immediately to assimilate itself to notions, while, on the other, by means of them it adjusts to realities and becomes of one nature with them… (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories 12.26-30)
Language and memory are closely intertwined precisely because of this double-motion inherent in the act of speaking. There is the need to know, to learn, and to uncover, and it is in and through language that this is made possible. Language traffics in secrets—and not just divine secrets. One should think of the story of King Midas who, upon whispering secrets into the ground, the earth grows up reeds that cannot help themselves but to whisper and repeat what has been said. This story, well known from Greek myth, may date as far back as the Sumerian bronze age (See The instructions of Shuruppag, 92–93. https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr561.htm); the earth itself keeps score and can whisper back to us when we are willing to listen. As such, this tie between language and forgetting speaks to the way in which humanity, as the “middle rung” in this cosmic ladder, needs to be reminded of things. Certain humans, like Odysseus, are able to trick supernatural beings and even gods, not in virtue of possessing incredible strength or magical abilities, but by virtue of their ability to interpret—bending the rules of language, as it were, to achieve their own ends. By means of words, inspired incantations serve as bringers-on of pleasure and takers-off of pain. For the incantation's power, communicating with the soul's opinion, enchants and persuades and changes it, by trickery. Two distinct methods of trickery and magic are to be found: errors of soul, and deceptions of opinion. Those who have persuaded and do persuade anyone about anything are shapers of lying discourse. For if all people possessed memory concerning all things past, and awareness of all things present, and foreknowledge of all things to come, discourse would not be similarly similar; hence it is not now easy to remember the past or consider the present or foretell the future; so that most people on most subjects furnish themselves with opinion as advisor to the soul. But opinion, being slippery and unsteady, surrounds those who rely on it with slippery and unsteady successes. (Gorgias, Encomium of Helen III.10-11) Enki, the provider of the gifts of civilization known as Me for the Sumerians, is the teacher of the scribal arts, much like Thoth for the Egyptians. Writing—and its close ties to magic—is the art given to humanity by the gods. For the Maya, scribes themselves were seen as cosmic laborers working under the patronage of deities such as the Tonsured Maize God and the Howler Monkey Gods. It should come as no surprise to us that the surviving Maya codices are all almanacs and horoscopes used for distinctly ritual purposes. Writing, especially for the Maya, is intrinsically aimed at controlling the flow and nature of time by placing it within a cosmic order that humanity is capable of understanding (Alexus McLeod. Philosophy of the ancient Maya: Lords of time. Lexington Books (2017)). If writing is to remain situated as part of the broader cosmic order, the autonomy of the text needs to be accounted for in a different way; something must seep in from the outside. Writing is channeling. The divine has long played a role in this, guiding the pen with a silent but watchful hand. This is essentially the Orthodox Christian view of scripture: divinely inspired, but not divinely authored, as it is in Islam and Judaism. In a more mundane context, the long history of spirit communication— planchette writing and other forms of psychography—features equally prominently in the histories of occultism and mystical thought, and in Surrealism and Dada.
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But it is by this same gift that humanity often subverts or challenges the divine order, living “the letter of the law” while avoiding the core thrust of its obligations. Trickery, cleverness and outright manipulation of the law are as ancient features of humanity as writing itself: “it is safe to conclude that at the beginnings of civilization, lying and language were there together.” (Burkert 1996, 170). Just as writing allows the writer to set all sorts of falsehoods down and speak as if they are true, writing also encourages the development of a new art of interpretation, the tool by which the reader is able to discern the truth underlying the text itself. The art of legal interpretation—and this is seen especially prominently in Islamic jurisprudence— originates in divinatory practice. To understand the Law is to understand the will of God, but what truly satisfies the Law is usually left unresolved. It should come as no surprise that the meat given up to the gods in sacrifice is usually eaten by someone, but this could be anyone from a priest to a commoner. Early legal codes attest to this point. Sumerian legal tablets attribute the power by which the ensi (lit. “lord of the plowland“) or lugal (lit. “big man) rules as the first gift given by the gods to humanity, and later Mesopotamian texts unsurprisingly continue to place extreme emphasis on the god-given nature of human, terrestrial law. The cosmic hierarchy takes on many forms: the gods rule over humanity, the king rules over the kingdom, the householder over his wife and slaves, and even the slave rules over the livestock under his or her supervision. As such, language is needed to mediate between all these; the ruling party issues commands, the subordinate party obeys. This, in a very peculiar way, returns us to one of our original questions. Why is it that writing only really takes off during the Neolithic? To propose a somewhat unorthodox and speculative answer, it may be closely intertwined with animal domestication, another relative newcomer to the long march of human history. Dogs, the first domesticated animal, have only been companion animals to us for about 15,000 years and goats, pigs, sheep, and taurine cattle suddenly show signs of domestication four or five thousand years later, around the same time as crop domestication begins in plants. With the advent of domestication comes a new distinction in nature between the wild, that which is untamed by human hands and is forced to the outskirts of the town or city, and the tame, the plants and animals that live among us as companions and livestock and beasts of burden. In many hunter-gatherer societies—this is still true for many hunters today—animal-human relations are much more horizontal, with animals being referred to affectionately as being like extended family members or, at the very least, highly autonomous entities. But now, humans are rulers, humans give commands, humans are managers—first over animals, then each other. As such, language evolves. Written language is the language of law—a distinctly post-Neolithic concept—which exists to mediate between all members of the cosmos that exist within the ruler-ruled pairing. Writing, especially the legal code and kingship list, serves as a form of intervention within the cosmic moral order, defining the terrain of acceptable conduct by concretizing the punishments and rewards to be accordingly doled out. The transition from speech to writing, therefore, is the switch to a law-governed universe. The universe of laws is a universe of domination and subordination—it should come as no surprise why writing has remained with us to this day.
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want to conclude with a brief section on signs. Nothing in language is more “magical” than a sign, as it is through the sign that something that is precisely not immediately visible or present is conveyed. The Greek τέρας, meaning a marvel or wonder, and σῆμα, meaning a sign from the gods or an omen, both speak to the intrinsically divine nature of the sign. And it was the God of Moses that, in Exodus 4:17 commands him to “take this staff in your hand so you can perform the signs with it.” Gods speak through signs. In Latin, the art of interpreting signs was simply called “divine activity,” divinatio; in Greek the word for god (theos), and hence the concept of god, are closely tied to the work of seers. Divine signs were observed in Mesopotamia and duly reported to the king; whole libraries of relevant books are extant. Jahweh too spoke to Israel through signs. In the Western Mediterranean, it was the Etruscans who acquired special fame for developing the interpretation of divine signs into a veritable science (disciplina), taught and passed on within families, even if some charismatic power remained indispensable. (Burkert 1996, 158) Signs of the gods abound in the ancient world. Plotinus, for example, spoke of the way in which the stars, planets and even the entrails of birds serve as signs of the goings-on of the cosmic whole, connected to these distant parts of the universe via a sympathetic relationship (Enn. II.3 [52]). Philodemus, an Epicurean from the first century BCE, dedicated an entire treatise to defending his school’s view that one can learn about distant parts of the cosmos from signs that are immediately present (a position ironically termed “empiricism” by many modern commentators).
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Signs are mysterious, but their mystery is often something that can be unraveled. Signs operate according to their own internal logic, a “code” of sorts. And this code often functions akin to a language. For the Babylonians, “the omen series [of tablets] display a generative paradigm akin to languages’ ability to create an infinite set of sentences with a finite list of words. The sequences of omens in the list show simple and complex patterns of gradation, from binary oppositions to lengthy repetitions of the same sequences of variants” (Marc Van de Mieroop, Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia. Princeton, Princeton University Press (2017); 124.) The language of signs is the divine language, yes, but on an even more profound level, it is the language of reality itself. In the Jewish mystical text the Sefer Yetzirah (the “Book of Formation”), the universe itself is built by God out of the basic building-blocks of the Hewbrew alphabet: By thirty-two mysterious paths of wisdom Yah has engraved [all things], [who is] the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, the living God, the Almighty God, He that is uplifted and exalted, He that Dwells forever, and whose Name is holy; having created His world by three [derivatives] of [the Hebrew root-word] s-f-r: namely, sefer (a book), sefor (a count) and sippur (a story), along with ten calibrations of empty space, twenty-two letters [of the Hebrew alphabet], [of which] three are principal [letters] (i.e. א מ ש), seven are double-sounding [consonants] (i.e. בג"ד כפר"ת) and twelve are ordinary [letters] (i.e. ה ו ז ח ט י ל נ ס ע צ ק). Reality itself is text, all understanding is interpretation. And, conversely, by interpreting the Torah, one peers into the foundations of reality. This, precisely, is the inversion of the “imitation paradigm” spelled out by Aristotle and other Greeks. Writing is not derivative of speech; speech is derivative of writing. By speaking, we are turning the text of reality into a fleeting auditory proclamation whose reverberations ultimately gain their power by virtue of imitating the cosmic text itself. The same view seems to have been held by the Babylonians: “the ability to create omens was limitless, as multiple similitudes permitted the elaboration of lengthy paradigms irrespective of whether they had a connection to the actual fact. Reality did not precede the text; the text preceded reality” (Van De Mieroop, 132). Rather than splitting hairs over who was the “first” to adopt this distinctly ontological view of language or, alternatively, treat it is a linguistic quirk of Semitic abjads, I introduce this as a concluding note in order to point to an alternative path, an alternative way in which our thinking around writing could have developed. Particular forms of writing, as well as the conceptual apparatuses that exist to make sense of them, always emerge within a distinct cosmological worldview. Writing is both the cause and the cure. It emerges as a result of separation—the separation of humanity from the rest of nature—which allows the word to be separated once again into its written and spoken forms. Different ways of thinking establish different sorts of priority to one or the other, stirred on by the autonomy of the written word that never ceased to puzzle and amaze our ancestors. And, perhaps, it is only through the act of writing itself that this can be truly understood.
Dabtara (he/him) is the pseudonym of an academic anarchist and free spirit living in Boston. He was one of the founders of the now-defunct zine "Lewaniaan" (https://lewaniaan. wordpress.com/blog /), where other writings under this name can be found.
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TRANSCRIBING
SUPPRESSED VOICES
BY Erwin Kamuene
Think of how you hum D’Angelo more than you annunciate his lyrics, Al Green conveying his pathos through the straining of his lungs, and if you were reared in a home where soukous was always on rotation, and if those lyrics grow evermore elusive, how you can still depend on tone to approximate meaning.
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THESE IDEAS IN GIL SCOTT-HERON’S SMALL TALK AT 125TH AND LENOX, A POETRY ALBUM WHERE THE LAWS OF CADENCE SUPPLANT ALL ELSE. Here Heron’s voice is one so uncompromising that it settles over you like a second skin. Before the static gives way to his polemic, Heron lets his voice assume a stern but soft tenor, the character to follow displaying an inertia so indiscriminate, though ignorant of its own complicity – see: “The Subject was Faggots”, a poem where revolutionary discourse takes a moment to reinforce its masculinity. Though Small Talk functioned as a sort of seed, I felt Heron remained on the cusp of revelations obscured and withheld, not fully realized until I discovered the voice of Ntozake Shange many years later. Shange’s works, like those of BritishGuyanese author Eric Walrond, seem anathema to the page. The reader scanning either’s oeuvre will quite literally have to vocalize what’s written in order to grasp what’s being conveyed, so much so that I marvel at those who don’t emerge with pockmarked experiences.
This act of getting a feel for the words and the topology they elicit like stones upturned by your tongue, was a process I found instinctive, harkening to the breath of Al Green and the timbre of Congolese vocalists. Furthermore, the recollection of their work was not constrained by plot or narrative convention, but submitted itself to a faintly palindromic sense of reconstruction.
LIKE THE STORIES TOLD TO ME IN MY CHILDHOOD, THE DETAILS WEREN’T AS SIGNIFICANT AS THE ESSENCE WAS, IDEALS WHICH PROVED IMMUNE TO VARIOUS CONTORTIONS OF SPEECH.
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I saw the impetus behind their distinctly phonetic styles as attempts to catch the nuances of the traditions that sustained them. Shange’s seminal choreopoem, For Colored Girls, conflates this tradition with hearsay, where stories spontaneously erupt from the texture of life. In Walrond’s Tropic Death, this tradition is one where displacement ensued by imperialism forces cultures and languages to converge. Both inherently oral traditions, and both requiring that language be approached as something malleable attuned to their precarious existences. The gleam I initially caught within Heron’s voice, which I felt spoke to something atavistic, was further contextualized by the negritude which was to ensconce me as the markings of resilience; significance encoded in texture just as much as speech. In “Letter from a Region in My Mind” James Baldwin details the nuance behind this practice when he describes the ”tart…ironic, authoritative and double-edged way” that blues is sung, and that “Only people who have been ‘down the line’… know what this music is about.” Though Baldwin may have meant something more specific when he wrote “down the line”, it’s easy to see how this descriptor applies to other marginalized cultures, for whom many modes of communication having been atrophied, are forced to incorporate transience as a means towards salvaging permanence.
Erwin Kamuene (he/him) is a writer living in Boston, fascinated by all facets of culture and in profiling this messy world we call home. t22
CW: Death, Grief
DEAR AUNTIE MANANG, When I’m near a shore, my breath synchronizes with the very ocean breeze that is your namesake (Brisa). I know that language doesn’t entail communication. Yet, I try to read words, hear musical notes, see painstrokes… anything to receive a message from you, from the water. I know that language doesn’t entail understanding. My grief since your passing swells with the tides, reverberates off the ground in moonlight, and pumps stars through my very veins. The sometimes unbearable heat and pressure of the cosmos consumes the very heart that loved you, loves you, and will always love you. There are times I convince myself that I can speak in a tongue of Christianity that will afford me a throughline to heaven, to you. I feel guilty of thinking about religion as a means to an end, but at least my intentions are genuine. Grief in and of itself has been the only language through which I still feel connected to you. It’s been nearly a decade since we last spoke, and even before then, we didn’t talk much at the end. In grief, I’ve found the courage to think of you thoughtfully, deeply, wholeheartedly. Ways you deserved before your passing.
Grief, charcoal on paper, 2021 by Tasha Z
In language, we convey ideas to one another, or at least that’s the hope. In grief, these feelings of love, loss, regret, and beyond are the result of screaming these ideas to the sky. The hope is that someone is listening, hopefully you, but my faith sometimes wavers. I’m not sure if you’re on the other side of the horizon. Maybe feelings were never meant to be ideas? You often painted watercolor scenes of palm trees against the skyline. I have one of your unfinished paintings hanging above the keyboard in my room.
Every night as I lie down in bed, I glance at it, at least for a second, with the hope that you’ll one day finish it. Finish the shading to give the trees dimension. Fill in the tree trunks with the new layers that each year brings. Add a few ocean waves to make it dynamic. I know your language was visual art. I can hear you sing “Que Sera, Sera” in the fluidity of your pencil lines. In grief, we learn to communicate with ourselves based on seemingly unfinished, unformulated, sometimes insular thoughts.
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Often, my brain rightfully avoids structuralist tendencies and all I think of are amorphous vignettes of memories. In grief, I’ve hung on to memories as a way to communicate with you. I can feel what it’s like to talk to you, sometimes I become omniscient in these vignettes and pretend that the person writing this letter is talking to you. I suppose I am. Grief contains these partial truths. Tonight, the night I’m writing this to you (06/02/2023), rain pitter patters on my window and I know it’s you knocking. You enter the threshold and we ascend the flight of stairs leading to my apartment. The light bulb is still out, of course it is, but you lean your body weight onto me because I can finally support you. Even though Dad is a chef, I find myself cooking the two recipes that you taught me when I was young. Arroz caldo and beef picadillo. Whenever I visit Mom, Dad, and Michelle in New York, my mom asks me to cook one of these dishes. It’s Mom’s way of saying to us what has gone unsaid all these years. She says to me: “It tastes just like Auntie Manang’s.” What I hear: “I miss her. Do you miss her too?” As we spoon mouthfuls of porridge or stew, I know that language often involves absence, silence. Those moments that
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we quietly eat speak volumes. Language must also consider interpretation. The ideas we attempt to convey must also think of audience, positionality, and context. In the language grief, we can never truly understand something that changes with the tides. That changes with every star that glimmers in and out of sight. When I breathe, I breathe in the ocean breeze. I breathe in you. I breathe in and out. I breathe with my hand over my heart. I breathe sitting next to people that remember you. People that don’t. People you’ve never met. Yet, I breathe with the hope that one day, I will no longer need this language of grief. For once, I’ll cook you a meal.
Grey (they/them) is a queer, non-binary music teacher and musician currently based in Boston. They were born and raised on Guam and also lived in New York before moving to Massachusetts for college. Since graduating, they've enjoyed rediscovering what community and creativity can mean outside of academic institutions.
In 2017, Alex Pacor (they/them) shifted their focus from portrait and landscape painting to experimental illustration. They combine the vibrant color palettes they honed through painting with cartoon-inspired lines, shapes, and compositions. Their experience as an art educator informs their artistic exploration of empathy, belonging, and self-love. They are based in Somerville, MA.
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WATSON, AND THE SHARK, AND THE GRRRL SCOUTS BY INDIGO KINSELLA
I went to the MFA once with the Grrrl Scouts. I can't remember how old I was but remember my Brownie vest. With patches hand sewn showcasing my accomplishments of picking apples, hiking trails, and winning third place in a science fair. Foreshadowing trans-solidarity to come; my hair-do mirrored Demi Lovato’s image from the blockbuster of the summer: Camp Rock. Which helps date the era if anything. Honey-brown hair, straight and shiny, finished with blunt bangs tickling my eyebrows. We saw Watson and the Shark then, all the Grrrls huddled around John Singleton Copley’s most devastating journalism turned masterpiece. Whenever I sit in front of this painting I am Demi Lovato in Camp Rock but really just a boy in a skirt. A boy in a skirt who then fades into an androfag with gusto! Freak with fears, same person in tears, at the museum again. Many years later yet still anguished from the impression put on me by young Watson. He lived, mind you, post shark attack. A preface, so no need to sulk forever. But tragedy is compounded by exhaustion over a subject. Watson was only pulled to relief from the attack after the third attempt to save his life. By the time the lad was pulled out of Havana Harbor he had suffered massive blood loss from his right leg, which had been bit clean off at the knee. In the painting he is still naked and submerged. Not yet returned to the boat's stability, he flails in the water, reaching out towards the crew members hard at rescue, working to pull him from catastrophe. Eyes in shock. Jaw in jeopardy of the shark's own mouth agape and thrusting forward. Still two legged though! The threat he is about to endure has only just begun. His fight to live uncertain in outcome. I sat there as a child and processed little of the horror at hand. I could see practically that there was pain. That fear was present.
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Yet what registered more purely was wishful, a divinity I had not been taught about. A flat chest. Long flowing hair. A zest for life, or so it seemed. Now maybe I would describe that notice as a tenacity dead set on living. The light blonde hair of Watson melts into the oceans hazy green waves. He is floating on his back and stretching his limbs in a way that elongates his physique as he reaches; yearning for safety. He seems powerful in a way I felt pride in relating to. Despite, of course, being so close to danger. The painting does not depict the results of the shark attack and only represents a snippet of the cruel scene. Potentially, it is through this raw unfolding of events and the way in which Watson stands out in the painting, that suggests his future survival. Along the painting's bottom half of canvas the imagery is split between depicting both the shark to the right and Watson to the left. On his side of the canvas, Watson pulses out from the scene due to his pale skin nearing a fluorescent quality. Compared to the camouflaged shark and sea setting opposite, Watson appears illuminated. Although the shark is for narratives sake, the predator, the conception of force and attack; the creature is painted in a way where its darkness as a monster is equal to and no greater fearbearing than the blackness and uncertainty of the sea. Could this further show that the shark will not succeed in the total destruction of Watson who will instead overcome the violence memorialized? I go to the MFA sometimes and I am not a Grrrl, I do not search, scout, or scandal. I can’t remember every time I’ve sat and wondered about solar systems worth of spectrums while parked on an MFA bench. Leathered and light from people sitting up and down,
up and down. I do know however that expression is a boundless thing that the more I allow to reign freely, the deeper I love. When I was young Watson suggested to me a path forward in dissolving one's own fawning to conform. Within a depiction honoring an unnamed formality I saw a glimpse ahead of my future where I would later try to communicate similar concepts as if by proxy. When I was a little girl looking at Watson, I saw in him a beautiful boy to become. When I was a young boy, alone in Boston, I saw in Watson a survival I had not yet reached but was eager to claim. As I age and rearrange my memories by pronouns and house addresses, I learn to let go of trender terror and allow myself to snowflake near modes of gender that surprise me. Like how with Copley’s depiction of Watson’s struggle; it was really the perfect plot to come across. Without it he’d mainly be remembered for portraits, although that is an assumption and probable understatement. Still, closer to actuality than not, Watson and the Shark did for John Singleton Copley what the Mona Lisa did for Leonardo da Vinci; creating a God-Tier Remembrance. A reputation re-elaborated eternally. Mind you, Copley died a stressed man. With debt and regret a plenty. In life though he rethought his brush strokes to narrate art into breeding a new feeling. By attacking the expectations of eighteenth century narrative paintings, he fiction-ed Watson’s trauma into an American legend. This genre of paintings was growing in popularity in the London circles Copley was studying amongst. As an American abroad he wanted to prove something of both himself and his nation. Watson and the Shark became one of the first American narrative paintings that studied storytelling beyond the bible or war. This daring move towards documenting the people's history proved to be a well weighed risk turned success as both the British and American populaces would coo over Watson and the Shark indefinitely. The story of a young ship hand’s triumph propelled Copley to become an American classic.
Which is hard to do. America has always been cruel to her sweethearts. This week the Pride gossip headlines read that Demi Lovato is “exhausted” from explaining to folks how to use they/them pronouns. The articles all appear to miss the obvious. What you tell people to call you does not always reflect how you download. What you admit to the distance ahead is faint from what the heart tunes to in private. If asked about my deadname people expect a brownie point for using terminology relevant to my transness. But really it strikes in me a picket line where I don’t want to feel forced to talk in code correlating to the culture's predictions of my problems. I want to loudspeaker back “which one?” What was first or what lasted longest? What was called of me at birth or edited onto me by law? No one ever even talks about the boy. There were so many starts… and the circle of evolution keeps looping me back to reiterate my biological trauma into stars. I count them carefully to fall asleep, fall victim, fall out of touch with what tongues me softest. Aha! See, if you slinky, terror will creep into our language. They want our bodies historical yet we remain steady into tomorrow's adlibs.
Indigo Kinsella (xey/xem) is a Boston based poet, baker, and beach combing fanatic. Xey explore the incredulous nature of indoctrination through intersecting identities. Xey love public transit, tattoos, and making playlists emotively. You can follow xeir writing updates on IG at @uglyclogswrites
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I am having a time of my life And add a space here for effect There isnt much to say about you ( less to say of me) But I won't dance unless you hold your tongue Between your index and your thumb And make it, the muscles, move Back and forward please I have an itch Right in that awkward spot Look at that, an eagle! It's flying in the sun! There I got it They didn't see We can go back to dancing nico (he/him) t28
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This is an excerpt from Michelle Devlin’s graduate thesis, Noto, Source Han & Plex: the language of America’s Korean fonts. Michelle (she/they) is a Design Researcher and Font Freak living in New York. Background in (no particular order), graphic design, communication research, and painting. Reads about technology, language, and social sciences in their free time.
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