don't ask how i know // if you know you know
I was born knowing how to read.
I don't mean I knew how to read when I was extracted from my mother's womb -- Caesarian section, I mean, when I came into this world, as fragments of memories, sensations, faces, environments, events... by the time I started accumulating those like the first motes of dust on a new appliance, I had already learned how to read.
I was born knowing how to read, in the way that people with sight are born knowing how to look at pictures and paintings. In the way any such person can look at a thing and see a thing and the things that make it up and the things that are next to it. Colors and shapes and textures and text and position and juxtaposition and perspective and the use and misuse of every such thing on the list, and other things I still don't know the name of, or do and have forgotten, or remember and have simply forgotten how to remember.
So I would look at a newspaper and see a headline like US, Canada, Mexico Sign Free Trade Agreement and I could shape the lines into letters, assemble the letters into words, sequence the words into a sentence. And, as I was told, I could presumably do the same for the rest of the lines in the body of the article as well. Whether or not I could derive any meaning or any use from this series of processes is anyone's guess.
My guess is no. But I was born knowing how to read.
I read -- in the past or present tense? -- newspapers, encyclopediae, picture books, almanacs, boxes of food and food products, novellas, TV screens. I suspect I read them out loud until that got too annoying for whoever was around, and then I suspect I read them silently.
It was very useful, knowing how to read. For others, I mean. A book was a hamster's wheel to a child like me, a child who might need attention or care or affection or simply some time. A book could be a parent, for a little while, until it had been used up. And perhaps by then the parent would have recovered from being used up and participate in the child's life for once.
It was very useful knowing how to read, or remember a phone number, or interpret a map. Someone had to, after all.
I like people's voices. One at a time, however, please, and thank you very much. I never really thought to interrogate why. A tangle of questions spills onto my lap.
Do I like the sounds? People make all sorts of sounds. Low pitches, high pitches, the frequences in between. The wavering in between. The varying thereof. How they grow quiet or loud, to indicate secrecy or shame or excitement or anger, or for another function -- to be heard or unheard or misheard. The sound of another is a reminder that I am not alone.
Do I like the words? I guess people don't always say words. But usually they do. Words are funny items. We share them with one another but often for different uses. Your knife is not my knife is not her knife. But we all engrave symbols and cut pills and slice bread and pierce one another with them. Or do we? We do, right?
I do like how words sound and I am happy to have finally disabused myself of the idea that a word can only sound one way. It was never true even when I thought it was true. It can sound hushed or dragged out or songlike or as a fishhook or hammer or stop sign. Can't can sound like can't or cain't or cunt. Can't that be allowed? The words of another are reminders that I am not the only way to speak.
I like how sound and word combine to form something more. And medium -- how could I forget the use of medium here? -- we mix up our sounds into words and dump them onto a plate or countertop or floor or right into the garbage.
A voice can tell you a lot about the kind of space the listener or speaker is in. My second grade classroom is not sixth grade social studies is not senior year "homeroom" is not physical geology in the auditorium is not the kitchen of my minimum-wage delicatessen. Is the speaker near, afar, recorded, overheard? Is the listener attentive, distracted, deaf, expecting something else, hopeful, despondent?
And along that line of thought, what I really like, however, is the voice itself. The combination of sound and word and medium and perhaps function and perhaps other things I am unintentionally eliding... the combination of these things that a person produces that says to me,
"Here is how I am a person."
I despair for everyone who lacks the right or ability or opportunity to tell the world that. And I make peace with the idea that our voices are quiet and ephemeral and vulnerable to entropy as all things are. The catharsis is in the call and response, not in the permanence.
This is all to say: I love blogs. And journals, essays, articles, novels, et cetera. But I think I have experienced some of my most profound moments of human connection reading someone's blog.
The blog is weird. I guess it can be a lot of things. Sometimes a blog is popular and the writer knows it. Sometimes it becomes popular before the writer really picks up on that. Sometimes the writer expects everyone to read it and nobody does.
Or the case that sticks out to me, which I feel sounds like "I am writing this just for myself, you know, and nobody will read it, and I don't necessarily want anyone to read it, but thank you for reading it."
I don't hate when a blog entry is simple and directed and clean. Those are easy to read, and I learn something I didn't, and I thank the writer for putting it so succinctly.
But I love when it's messy, fragmentary, disconnected, unfinished, even seemingly meaningless. I feel like I struggle to explain myself, to share my feelings, to untangle my experiences (as if they are knotted yarn and not fog and mist and smoke and miasma and haze and a different kind of smoke and a different kind of smoke and a different kind of smoke). I feel like my writing is undercooked, and amateurish, and repetitive, and lacking in formal beauty or clean-cut slickness or even unconventionally rogueish charm (as if breaking the rules is easier than following them).
But I like to remind myself when writing that my writing is simply an expression of all of the weird shit that got crammed into a person, who was never properly cared for or properly cared for itself, and whatever spills out is me and mine, or at least filtered through me, and I guess that will just have to be good enough.
And I like the messy blog because it gives me the opportunity to see others have that experience: the need to give form and life to an idea, an experience, a memory; the difficulty in shaping, coloring, structuring; the feelings of struggle, frenzy, mania, confusion, exasperation, regret; the "you know what I mean", the "why bother?", the "I don't even know", the "no one is even going to read this", the "what am I even saying?".
I love all that because I love people engaging in self-articulation. I love people trying to be themselves, or understand themselves, or others, or events, or the world. I love the processing of nonsense to sense to nonsense to sense to maybe nonsense again.
That we tried is that we succeeded. That we shared it is proof that we care enough to try to speak to one another. That we spoke is proof that we love one another, or at least someone, or at least ourselves.