20 X 2002 - 21:56 - verba32

Success: my father and I have become indistinguishable over the phone. Now we can wreak havoc on telemarketers.

There is other progress in sight -- today my mother took me out for a walk so she could talk to me. We ended up circling Stow Lake a couple of times (far out to go for a walk, no? but we, shame on us, drove there, and through the Walk for the Cure, too) as she talked to me about tong2 ai4 ren2 -- idiom for gay people. It always sounds so weird when she says it in English. Perhaps it's because she's so fond of saying always 'gay boys and lesbians.' At any rate, the walk ended with her telling me that she'd always love me and that she just wanted me to be happy and careful -- and then she tried to distract me from the Sappy!Moment by pointing out a rock in the water that 'looks just like a duck, I swear!' For the record, it didn't.

So many of the conversations I hold over AIM strike me as wonderful, if only I weren't saying such inane things (not like the inane of Vergil at least). I was looking back at one of them recently -- much of it consists of my saying things like "really?" Terribly fascinating, I'm sure.

Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
And somehow I can't get Catullus out of my head...

All of this has been prelude to another Alchera entry. Also, it's a really good way not to do things that I don't want to do.

OPTION NO. FOUR: How did your love for writing (of any sort) begin? How has it since grown?

I was able to read before I was really able to speak.

When I was reading Dr. Seuss easily, fluently, I still had no voice, couldn't get a sentence out. I could speak rapidly and fluently if I had to transmit others' words. But when it came to my own, words stumbled over each other inoutthrough until I was finally so confused I had to leave off talking. There just wasn't any point if I couldn't be understood.

I don't remember any of this with any sort of detail -- all I get is a delicate fuzz of confusion and frustration. My first memory of the word comes as I sit in bed, watching my sister with the flashlight as she reads sections from Goldman's abridging of "The Princess Bride" to me. Something in my head finally clicked -- this was when we had begun to learn basic penmanship in school -- and I understood that if I couldn't say anything and be understood, perhaps I could write it.

As I grew, I developed more and more complex things to say. I also got better at talking, but it still proved quite easy to confuse both me and others with my love of ellipsis and the embedded clause. My sisters had left for college a few years earlier, but by this point I didn't need them -- I was hungry for the conquests I could by now make myself, holing up in the school library when we were called for recess and lunch. Under the watch of the librarian, I worked my way through first nonfiction, then fiction, then poetry. Cummings, Eliot and I were relatively fast friends; it took a longer while for Dickinson to grow on me, but once she had, I couldn't imagine a time she hadn't been there for me. With each book I took home, new ideas of how to construct a sentence and how to say what I believed needed saying crept into my mind. I was ripening.

Music, too, helped to alert me to the procession of language, to the way not only its meaning but also its flavor and rhythm are to be attended. I reveled in what I could do now, explosions of pen on little scraps of paper marking my new freedom. Sometimes, I even saved them. My experimentation didn't end with music -- as I began to touch Latin and older writers, I returned to a language where clauses, as long as they and meaning both retained their integrity, could really be placed anywhere.

It was around this time that I began to come out -- in halting steps to myself and then more easily with friends -- and also to look farther into myself, to see if there wasn't a sort of reason that could be teased out of the mass of emotion I seemed to grow closer to every day. I discovered quite early that if I shouted, few would hear; with this the case, writing was the natural path to take, and so I wrote furiously -- letters, poems, long narratives, all designed to carry my message to someone else and ultimately to help me think around myself.

Now I've learned to talk, although I still retain confusing ellipses that frustrate almost everyone concerned. But the problem has never been about speech alone -- it's also been about being audible, and I've still got miles to go before I can dream of that. I still write, although not as furiously as before. I feel as if my entire life has been a process of percolation -- as if all of what I have read, all of what I have felt, is only waiting to make its way out my pencil. Sometimes, writing is still my best chance of being heard when it seems the world goes mad around me, but most of the time I write now simply for the pleasure of forming something vaguely well-crafted, something that might begin to answer the books that sustained me when I could not speak.

And some days, writing makes me feel both incredibly human and somehow worthy, and those (as it is when any art inspires such feeling) are the best days of all.