Salam from Mugla, in the southwest of Turkiye, where I have been working on being away from words. Counterintuitive to a writer’s habits, possibly the easiest failure to set oneself up for. For here I am, the same words flying out of me that I promised to stay away from.
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I have been reading Amit Chaudhuri, a thinker/writer I love. He says of the aalap that is not a mimetic form, nor is the raga, unlike how we think of western music, raag and ragini have nothing to do with representation, and concern themselves only with evoking moods, exploration, seasons. He says: the narratives he likes best are never-ending aalaps, meandering streams of thought that go nowhere even when they tease some kind of an introduction … narratives that are not concerned with destination, but only with texture.
He writes:
The aalap corresponds with my need for narrative not to be a story, but a series of opening paragraphs, where life hasn’t already ‘happened’, ready for recounting, but is about to happen, or is happening, and, as a result, can’t be domesticated into a perfect retelling.
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My hours of late are spent with a circle of friends whose language I do not speak. Some speak partial English, so mistranslations - and the ensuing laughter - are common. Yesterday at a party, I asked my friend how is she doing. She said, “I am fun!” meaning, of course, that she was having fun. Yes, I laughed. Yes, you are fun.
What does this have to do with the questions I have been posing myself of existing beyond language? Stay with me, I am trying to figure it out, too. And as I figure it out, I suspect some of the answer lies at this border, at the crossroad of translation, where meaning is sometimes lost and always transformed.
*
I must tell you about my relationship with swimming. There are photographs of me at a year old, at the sea, my father holding me above the waves, my face scrunched in fear. Why was I born afraid of water? I don’t know. I love the sea. I love it too much. It is sexual, what I feel when I let the water play with me. And yet, I was born afraid. And this fear trailed me as fears do, for most of my life, and even though I learned to swim, I stayed away from deep water. In deep water, I panic. This panic shows up in my dreams. I have recurring dreams where I am standing before the sea and longing to enter it, but unable to. Desirous and charged my body, but a small, embarrassed failure.
Some friends tried to teach me, how to stay in deep water. In the Arabian sea, her voice a gentle contrast to the waves’ noise… and yet, I couldn’t. Each time, I’d swim myself back to safer shores, where my feet touched the ground.
*
Last month, I sat in a one-week vipassana, a one-week silent retreat where, among other promises I made to myself, this one seemed most urgent: I will learn to swim in deep water.
For ten days I have been in Kabak, sea held by forest, forest tucked into mountain, and I have been swimming in deep water.
How? How did my body suddenly rid itself of its deepest fears?
I suspect it has something to do with language. With rejecting it. With refusing it. With staying with the refusals and letting myself, in the process, be translated into a new possibility.
And I suspect translation has everything to do with the body.
*
My first day here, I saw women with their shirt off. I thought: Can I do that?
It took me three days. It took me three days because only on the third day, when I knew people I could call friends, and was sitting with them, and saw them thoughtlessly take their tops off, that I thought: yes, I can do this. Took my top off. The sun on my nipples. The salt tasting me before I will taste it. Not a touch of freedom, but of skin. All day we sat like that. All day I sit like that, even as I am writing.
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Let me go for a swim, before I return to this essay.
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The Bridge of Not Knowing
Let us tell you about the bridge of not knowing. What is the bridge of not knowing? It is not a bridge in space or time, but in light. It has no frame, no structure, no ground. When you tread upon it, you tread not with feet, but with purity. We define purity as the medium where nothing is certain and therefore everything possible. We define purity as a moment such as this: a song playing in another language, and a nameless friend translating for you: It means, God’s playing mad. God’s a fiddler.
On the bridge of not knowing, you fiddle. With what it means to be you, what it means to be anything.
*
I am learning, then, that while wordlessness is every bit of my concern at the moment, words are borne of a God, too. There is a way to channel language, not intending meaning, but simply, intending God. Two kinds of people in the world. Those who pass through the world, and those who witness the world pass through them. If you behave like the later, then words passing through you are not meaning-making, but simply, simpler, the world passing through you.
*
My friend reading my copy of Sohrab Sepehri looks up every once in a while to ask me the meaning of a word.
What is ‘pelt’?
What is ‘epiphany’?
What is ‘crystantheneums’?
*
I head for the deep water. Immediately, I plunge into the blue sea and head for the deep water, and emerge a blue bluer than I ever knew.
*
This is an absurd proposition but trust me it is true: I learned to swim in the deep, not because I overcame the fear of the sea, but because I overcame the fear of skin.
The answers are always found elsewhere. The answer will always find you in some place other than the one you sought. To find any translation of yourself, you must look, look at the place other than the one that deals the question. To translate ourselves, we allow a new word. A new road. A path different from the one uttered in the original language.
So: I learn to trust the sea because I took my shirt off.
How wild. How true. God’s a fiddler, after all.
Translation has EVERYTHING to do with the body 🤲🏽
Love it, Sadi! The bridge of not knowing is terrifying, but only till you can't trust that fiddling is all there is. Thanks for this beautiful essay!