Broken English - Heather McHugh

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as in a portrait, lived intensely

      in the instant things split off again:

      first there forever, and then not at all.

      In the poem, as in the Capa diptych, the encounter is phenomenally exact, yet turns about an absence: this image of another figure entering the passage (in both pieces, the passage is of space as well as time) in which an orienting consciousness has paused, is touched with the Blendung which in German means at once dazzling vision and blinding vision. The figure of the Other has from afar something of the aspect of a ghost: it enters the passage from the far end, after all, and not the entrance, and boils, as sunlit figures seem to do when viewed from shady tunnels, with the light that seems to constitute its being and annihilate its features. As our vantage stays with the first and forward-going figure, this Other seems to move in time, from the future toward the present, until it approaches so close it too enters the shade of proximity: the deepest shade is nearest the self, and the new face, suddenly seen in detail, passes virtually into the self's own unseeability. (Remember how invisible the very near can be; at its limits it is as unseen as the very far-off is: we cannot see our own eyes). The moment when the object turns to subject—when the other and the self become indistinguishable, that moment which the sorting logics of an analytical language cannot register, when the lyrical recourse is paradox, that moment “as in a portrait,” Rilke tells us, (or, we might add, in the held present of a photograph), that time “lived intensely in the instant,” an instant in which “things split off.” It is a moment of birth, when inner is borne into outer, outer into inner; for self and other are born together, both at once, when as infant organisms we first distinguish ourselves. This moment has its own dark flash of insight, as if two times became simultaneous (the future entered the past), two became beings-at-once, as if (indeed) we could imagine birth at both extremes of existence's passage—all these temporal effects flash through this moment of encounter. The other enters and departs from the self, and the usual sense of life's passage (from nothing to something) is reversed: the other, like the self, is “first there forever, and then not at all.” Something timeless becomes nothing ever.

      Look back at the “passage” Capa provides us, framing the stream of the bicyclists’ going-by, to show us how things looked before and after them. What of this occasion DON'T we see? The instrument of motion? The vehicle itself (which is, in some form, in art always “behind” performance)? It was present here all along—the spectators lining the street turn FROM its sign because they are drawn into its motion.

      For what we didn't see isn't what is outside the frame. Most viewers are sophisticated enough to notice that missingness. We are sophisticated enough even to notice that two kinds of missing can go on—the missing before something's been seen, and the missing after: the bicyclists were at first anticipated, /unappeared; and then the bicyclists were remembered, disappeared. But the missing we do ourselves, when something's right before our eyes, that's the missing we miss (as viewers, not only as thinkers). If we watch the watchers closely, then their turning reveals something behind it all, resisting disappearance even now. Look into the lens of the window behind them: it is still there. It is still there. The storefront contains the stilled image of the missing (it's the store of the idea, not the action; and the idea is persistent). Look again, and you'll see! It delivers a gift, a hidden twist toward us, from the missing subject and the missing artist: its handlebars and gearshifts visible, the store is a bicycle store!

      Tour de France, Pley ben, Brittany, July 1939. Photo by Robert Capa. Permission granted by Magnum Photos, Inc.

      The Still Pool Forgets

      A Reminding from the Yoruba

      The Yoruba people of western Africa, one of the largest ethnic populations south of the Sahara, constitute a powerful urban culture. Yoruba cities fostered rich economic, administrative, and religious systems, and it was precisely this society the western slave trade plundered for human wealth: nearly all slaves brought to the Americas came from west Africa, and of these, Yoruba slaves and their descendants became a most significant influence in the cultures of Cuba, Brazil, and other parts of the Americas, including the United States.

      These Africans brought with them a deep and practical regard for the arts. In Yoruba cities, sophisticated systems of exchange and distribution had made markets for weaving, dyeing, iron-working, brass-casting, woodcarving, beadwork, leatherwork, and pottery; arts networks grew wide and interdependent. Even Yoruba hunters were said to praise the gifts of those who carve wood or compose song; proficiency in these arts was valued as highly as bravery and warrior skills. Among the social features of Yoruba life were powerful polygamous family systems, and a pre-eminence among older women of magicians and spell-binders. Professional distinction was accorded singers or poets, who were responsible for perpetuating and embellishing the stories of gods and notable mortals, figures such as Shango (God of Thunder), Ogun (God of Iron), and Eshu (God of Fate). In New Orleans and New York today you can find shops in which are sold images of Ogun, god of hunters, warriors, professional circumcisers, all who make use of his metal. From the totemic figure dangle tiny knives and hoes and hammers and machinery-parts; in him many ages meet.

      Both gods and men can be appeased. Among the functions of the professional poets is the making of honorific names. Unlike naming in patronymic cultures, Yoruba naming occurs not only at birth or marriage, but throughout one's life. There is the name that comes from circumstances of the birth (the-one-with-the-cord-around-his-neck, let us say); there is the name recording the parents’ (sometimes unsentimental) sentiments about the event (the-straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back). And there is the third kind of name: oriki. These names are a form of pet-naming, praise-naming, poetic name; and though praise names may be assigned at birth, they are earned all through life. A very notable figure may garner many such names, and very great trees, cities, or gods are paid tribute by professional oriki-makers. Ulli Beier (to whose indispensable work I owe my acquaintance with Yoruba poetry) gives, by way of example, the oriki these poets bestowed on the first European explorers in Africa: “a pair of shorts that can worry a large embroidered gown.”6 It is an immediately funny and yet painful reminder of colonial history, in a practically succinct, semiotic garb.

      I mean to celebrate the practical premises of Yoruba poems. To the mind of someone brought up on English and American poetry, it seems refreshingly direct—full of humor, wit, and intricate exemplification. Abstraction operates to bespeak, not to outspeak, physical experience. In poems of considerable structural complexity, poems that operate as pulsing signs for human understanding, this ground of Yoruba metaphysics is moving. Yoruba singers and drummers set up powerful long-distance communications (CNN watch out): songs can actually change fates (some 600 gods, after all, are listening; and they can be tickled, pleased, seduced). All the Yoruba gods but one (the unapproachable Olodumare) are variable, mischievous, and yet amusable; and all can kill—there is a god, for example, of smallpox. All are also respected and honored, and there results a peculiar mix of affection and insult that resembles nothing so much as familial relations. Not unlike human beings in their gifts and foibles, Yoruba gods are responsible for love and trouble both.

      The Yoruba value generosity as wealth. If the poems to the gods don't seem very pious or predictable, perhaps it is because the gods themselves don't: among the originary stories of Yoruba mythology, for example, the occasional tendency of the gods, like human beings, to drink too much and then make compositional mistakes explains how white people came to be.

      Riddles and songs collected from very young Yoruba children suggest how free from prurience are subjects America tends to hold taboo. Beier cites the song told him by a six-year-old girl, used by little girls to drive boys (eight of them, apparendy) away from their play:

      Penis penis plays by himself

      Vagina vagina plays by herself.

      We shall not play with somebody

      Who has sixteen testicles.

      Two

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