Silence and the Word (30 page)

26.

Nathan ruffled his feathers, looking upset.
“Well, I’m glad you have the pencil. It will be a good pencil for
you.”

And Stephan added, “That paper will last you
forever.”

The poet exclaimed in frustration, “But what
good are they?”

Stephan shook his black crow head back and
forth, sadly. “There are many questions we can answer, but we can’t
answer that one.”

Nathan cawed once, loudly, and then said, “Go
home, young poet.”

She was tempted to pick up a stone and throw
it at them—but what would be the point, after all? The poet closed
her eyes, opened them again, and then turned to the path that led
home. She started walking, leaving the crows behind her.

27.

The path turned sandy beneath her feet, and
she knew she was getting close to home. She could smell the sea,
its salty sweetness. Night had fallen by the time she reached the
little house by the sea, and a long silver path of moonlight lay
across the dark water.

She stood on the beach for a long time,
listening to the crashing waves, feeling the cold water squelch up
around her toes. Her bag hung heavy on her shoulder—all the coins
were long gone, and all that lay within it were a few dragon scales
and a hazel twig. It would be light and easy to throw into the sea.
The sea could easily swallow up such a little bag and never
notice.

The moonlight moved over the water. The poet
turned away from the sea and opened the door to her house.

28.

It was such a little house. She had seen
palaces in her travels, and wide woods. Her house would be lost in
either. But there was her desk, by the window, its rough surface
beloved and familiar. She had spent so many hours studying there as
a girl.

She sat down at the desk, and pulled out a
scale and the twig from her bag. She expected them to look strange
on her poor little desk, but somehow, they looked right.

She picked up the twig in her right hand,
just to see how it felt. It felt good, at home there. She spread
out the dragon scale with her left hand, smoothing it until it felt
like fine paper.

The poet bit her lip, and began to write.

29.

She wrote poetry. It was perhaps not the best
poetry in the world—it was her first, after all. Everything before
that had been just mangled stutterings, clumsy ugly blotches of
words on the page. This was just a start, perhaps, but it was
really poetry.

The poet doesn’t know why she can write now,
when she couldn’t before. Is it the hazel twig pencil? The dragon
scale paper? Her good wood desk and the ribbon of moonlight with
the smell of the sea through her window?

Or maybe it is the long road and the walking,
the silver cities and the dark woods. Maybe it is the almost love
of a handsome young man who sang songs from a crimson bridge, a man
with slim hands that fluttered like birds. Maybe it is crying on
sharp stones with bleeding hands, lying down and wanting to die,
but getting up and going on instead. Maybe it is a dragon and a
unicorn, a hazel tree, and two crows at the crossroads.

30.

The poet doesn’t know the answer to that
question. To be honest, she doesn’t have time to think about it
right now.

She is busy writing poetry.

It started on the worst kind of day, the kind
of day when your boots pinch and your head aches and there’s an
itch on your back just where you can’t reach. I had no one to
scratch it. He was there and I was here and it was my own choice so
I couldn’t exactly complain but I certainly wasn’t happy. He had
done something, I can’t remember what, to make it worse instead of
making it better, and I just hurt. So I asked him to send me
flowers. Please. He sounded startled but agreed and that was a
small victory though bitter too. Nine years together and only
recently had he decided that it would be acceptable to give me
flowers. As long as I didn’t take them the wrong way.

He had given me flowers twice at that point.
Firstly: when I was terribly sick, at the instigation of our old
lover who was visiting town. She chose them, orange mums. Secondly:
when we were buying groceries at the small gourmet store and I
asked him to buy me some flowers. He agreed. I chose them, yellow
daffodils. He did pay both times, so technically they were from
him. More importantly, he agreed they were from him. Baby
steps.

These flowers that I asked to be sent to me
were another baby step. He agreed. Casually, and I wasn’t sure that
he would remember. When days went by with no sign of them I assumed
that he had forgotten. He didn’t often forget things but sometimes
he forgot quite important things. Then a message on my machine said
that they had tried to deliver flowers but I hadn’t been home. Then
three days of missed messages and missed delivery attempts and
after three days of this the flowers, all the flowers, started to
feel like they were maybe more trouble than they were worth. He was
apologetic on the phone, though he really had no control over the
situation.

Finally they arrived, only two days before I
was leaving town, and so there was little time to enjoy them.
Lilies, little red berries, tall elegant dry branches. They were
rather impressive, actually, and he had chosen them himself, or at
least something like them. The web page warned him that they did
not guarantee the same flowers would be delivered. I determined to
enjoy them, despite everything, and for two days I took very
deliberate pleasure in my flowers. Then I left. I thought about
throwing them out before leaving. One of the lilies was already
drooping, and they would be sad and dead by the time I returned
three weeks later. Expecting to be depressed, it didn’t seem wise
to leave them to rot and greet me with foul scent and mold on my
return. But they were still beautiful. I left them in the vase.

One week with him. A few days with an old
lover. A little more than a week with my family. A miserable cold.
When I took the taxi back from the airport I wanted nothing more
than to be home, even though being home meant being alone again. I
unlocked the door, turned on the light, climbed the stairs. and at
the top of the stairs, the dining room, and in that room, the
dining table, and on that table, the vase of flowers. The lilies
had gone dry as dust, and crumbled to the touch; the red berries
were dry and hollow. There was no scent. but the tall thin branches
had put out fresh leaves, pale and green and very much alive. Once
I had cleared away the dust and rubbish, they were lovely.

My first thought was that I should make a
poem about these branches, that they were just too good a metaphor
to waste. Something about not giving up, about how you think
something’s dead, but if you just hang in there and clear away the
old rubbish, you may find something beautiful, you know the
routine—squeezed into a few lines, some good clean words, maybe
some rhymes. But that was no good, really.

It was simpler than that in the end (though
longer, too). Those branches, those leaves—that is how I am, when I
think of him. He is green leaves within me. I live in the heart of
winter, and despite everything, he is the spring.

you amaze me

even though it has been so long

that one might think that I

would have gotten used to everything by
now

what amazes me

is that

you know

when I am not

being true

to myself

even though

it is not

evident

to me

and even better

that you wait

for me

to figure it out

for myself

and even better

that you simply

wait

for me

January 15, 2001

Kev,

You’ve noticed, of course, that there’s a
title on this, something you don’t usually see on the letters I
send you. That’s because this isn’t really a letter to you—or not
just a letter to you. I’ll send it to you when I’m done, but it’s
really (or also) an assignment for narrative theory, the one I was
so anxious about when we talked on Friday. It’s an
exploration/explication of some semiotics: Saussure, Pierce,
Barthes, Derrida, Benveniste. I am not certain I understand all or
any of them, so this will not pretend to be comprehensive. I’ll
just talk a little, and we’ll see where we end up.

You suggested Friday that I pretend I was
teaching this to undergraduates, and try to figure out what I would
say. I’m not sure that will work very well—there’s so much to
cover, and little space to cover it in. Instead, I am thinking
about semiotics as it applies to my life, as it applies to you, as
it applies to us.

I do not know if you’ve had a chance yet to
look at the copy of
Mythologies
I gave you for Christmas. I
suspect not, given the job hunt anxiety and start of semester
craziness, though I do think you’ll like it. To review very
briefly, in case you haven’t, Saussure, in his
Course in General
Linguistics
, describes language as a “system of signs that
express ideas”—more importantly, he drew the distinction that the
linguistic sign (the word) was essentially arbitrary,
“unmotivated”. It was composed of parts—the “signifier”, or
sound-image, and the “signified”, the meaning which that sound
image generates. Those two together are the “sign”—the word. There
are many and various systems of signs, of course—music, clothing,
architecture, etc. Saussure saw language as the master-pattern for
all branches of semiotics, because language is composed of signs
that are wholly arbitrary.
¹

So to take a more personal example—what of
“love”, that word that has given us so much grief? If we
acknowledge Saussure, it’s of course obvious why you have such
trouble with the word. You, being a rational mathematician who
thinks logically and rigorously about the world, would of course be
very aware of the exceedingly arbitrary choice of the word “love”
for—for what?

No wonder you spent years resisting saying “I
love you.” You were obviously aware of how that empty sign had been
packed with a vast amount of signified concepts over the centuries;
you knew that when you said ‘love’, I was probably hearing
something entirely different. Although it’s interesting that you
had no trouble with it in the first year. I don’t remember quite
when the arguments started, but it was at least three or four years
in; long after we’d moved in together, after I’d moved to
Philadelphia with you. So why didn’t you protest the arbitrariness
of the sign previously? Were you young and unaware? Or did you have
a sense at the time that we were both investing that sign with
reasonably similar signified meanings—and did you get scared when
you realized that I was investing it with more and more
signification?

Years. We fought about it for years. And you
couldn’t understand why it was so important to me that you
acknowledge that particular sign, you couldn’t understand why we
had to use language signs at all, for surely I could see from your
actions all I needed to? Those actions, though perhaps somewhat
arbitrary as well, and often rather difficult to read, were surely,
as Saussure pointed out,
less
arbitrary than the linguistic
sign “love”.

I should perhaps let this topic go. After
all, you eventually conceded the battle, when I actually broke up
with you because you had stopped saying “I love you,” because you
refused to say it at all. Broke things off in the morning, and by
nightfall you had conceded, and were saying it—but I suspect that I
lost the war on that one, because you are still often hesitant, and
I think that you may be saying it with no confidence that I am
investing the sign with the same meaning that you (or even one that
is close). I forced you into my semiotic system, but do we actually
understand each other’s signs, or are we just pretending to
communicate?

Too depressing a thought, and probably
unfair, since it is only language that is really at fault here. We
communicate well enough in other ways. And yet I rely on
language—it is tremendously important to me to use language in
order to be precise, to convey exact shades of meaning that I
cannot communicate in any other way. A hug is great and sex is
better, but they do not convey my abstract thoughts. Since we spent
nine hours on the telephone Friday, trying to communicate, I must
assume that you also see some small value in language as well.
Which makes me wonder how we can at once believe Saussure that
language is essentially an arbitrary and illusory system (as proven
by “love”, itself perhaps illusory and certainly cruelly arbitary
at times)—and yet invest so strongly in that system. Language has
become a dream that we are all dreaming together; a mutual
deception. Like love?

Maybe we should give it all up and go swing
through the trees.

I wonder if there is room for math in the
trees.

I don’t know enough about math—not your kind
of math, at any rate—to be able to speak intelligently about its
semiotic function. It is tempting to believe that there is a
reality to math that exists independent of how you use words and
other signs to communicate about it; but I’m not sure. What do you
think?

I do know that “math” has become something
entirely other for me since I have known you. It has gone from
simply a word to a personal myth. Barthes talks about mythologies
we construct, how once we have the linguistic signs, those words
become the new signifiers; we go on to invest them with signified
meanings, and the word + meanings become myths.