wordly wise

It is Saturday morning. There is no sun filtering gently through the gap in the curtain. It is a grey day, June gloom, of which I was so kindly instructed is the norm, but which this year began in March, and has yet to relent.

It isn't so much a depression, but an emptiness, an absence of feeling. That worries me more. Not just for me. Is it the sun that so brazenly affects my mood? My eternities of allayed self-love, in lieu of bartered responsibilities. If I do this, then I don't have to do that. If I wait, one more day, it will all make sense.

The universe is no more or less meaningful. The self-denial seems, at once, foolish and wise. Indulge in one place, and deny in the other. Find comfort in your own skin, make that your home, forget the rest, forget the sun, that doesn't poke its head out, except for when we climb, up, up, up above the clouds, the nebulous layer of fog that rests on the mountains.

Soon I will be walking along Revolución, División del Norte, Miguel Ángel de Quevedo. I will peruse Ghandi, and FCE, and haggle over the price of textiles and clay crafts. I can smell the city, feel its pulsing hum. My feet, my poor blistery feet, want to carry me through the swirling crowds. I can smell the sizzling adobo-slathered pork, with pineapple dripping down, on a spit, on every corner of La Roma. I wander around the Alameda, with my mind's eye, I rest, on the marble steps of Bellas Artes to watch, and watch, and watch.

The words themselves take me, carry me away from here, from myself. I suppose I always knew this, it is a way of looking, seeing, but not inside oneself. One can eternally peer within, and never see a thing, losing the forest for the trees. I don't know why I don't remember this, that I think I can make other people happy, but I forget about myself, because, because, because... it is the manipulation, the deformation, and rearranging of the words that brings me pleasure.

A simple pleasure, to say the least, a facile puerile pleasure of the flesh, the tongue, at rest. The words are always there, unfurling, unending, they are the companions that I never have enough of.

So Travis and I agree to disagree in politics, and we keep each other company, with nothing but our pithy commentary, and a fat tome... The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española... I out myself, once again, for the incorrigible word whore that I am, what can I do against such potency? We play a game, with this book, like other books, Italian, sometimes. We flip through at random and grill. What does it mean? How do you use it? There are so many words I will never know, never use, never own. And still, they soothe me.

That is where I am, when I can't sleep, I remember that there are always words to be transformed, molting, mutating into something else. Ignacio sends his poems and I translate them before even closing out my mail. Cats descending into a self-made hell, Orpheus, and Poe. I like his poetry, I like melting over the flames of vulcan my own language to meld, into a liquid, pour over the mold that has been laid before me.

These concrete tasks, not the difficulty of what literature makes us feel. The pure, brazen, sheer combativity of language itself, to be conquered, to be known, like a lover that awaits, whose every corner, and erogenous zone is yet an enigma, whose limits are unimagined. I realize, as I struggle to read and write in a language of my foremothers, that in this hot pursuit, in the conjugational bliss of letters forming words forming sentences, and questions! Yes questions! Why does she not sing? Because she is sick! Where does she rest? She lies in bed.

In that time my mind is whole, completely occupied in the maneuvering, I feel no pain, have no sense of the word, or the world, just the universe, self-contained and buoyant, of the trailing tongue. So I look for my happiness again, my own, my sheer need, enveloped in the transition, translation, transposition. A play, a word, a page a day. An escape that leaves no trace, no marks to mar my contemplative serene surface, my face.