Drunk With Language
by Carol Stanley
I can become drunk with language, besotted by the poetic sentence. Kate Braverman’s Palm Latitudes was a look through the bottom of a drained tequila glass, a vision infused with light, shadow and magic. I drank in every word, and read an hallucination of a sundrenched Los Angeles.
Her book, which was published in 1988, opens thusly…
“In this city of the Angels, you can trust nothing, not even the dense and erratic air. There is La Migra, la policia. Fire in the hills. Ash that falls from the skies. In this City of the Angels, en Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles, it is best to be silent, invisible. You who are brown in this white realm, be as your stained courtyard walls, hidden, camouflaged. Become part of the grain of the landscape. Vanish into the indigenous and cast no shadow. You who have no visa, no passport, no identification.
La Puta de la Luna is a flagrant exception. She leans against the enormous stalk of a palm tree planted beside a bus bench near an intersection, in daylight, exposed, without fear. She searches for American businessmen exiting the emptying downtown spires with their twin arrogances of dimension and light.”
The book was a fever dream. I was infected. And like an addict, I could not get enough of it.
Then, there is this, from the novel Fugitive Pieces by Canadian poet Anne Michaels…
“The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the past like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, a photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.”
One cannot read such things without feeling lightheaded.
The Australian novelist David Malouf opens his exquisite book Ransom, a breathtaking retelling of a passage of the Iliad with this paragraph…
“The sea has many voices. The voice this man is listening for is his mother. He lifts his head, turns his face to the chill air that moves across the gulf, and tastes its sharp salt on his lip. The sea surface bellies and glistens, a lustrous silver-blue – a membrane stretched to fine transparency where once, for nine changes of the moon, he had hung curled in a dream of pre-existence and was rocked and comforted. He hunkers down now on the shelving pebbles at its edge, bunches his cloak between his thighs. Chin down, shoulders hunched, attentive.” This is how we first meet Achilles who mourns the death of Patroclus.
I am a sucker for such writing. The intoxication I feel in reading the words of authors who spin the straw of a, b, c, into the gold of this luscious language is my opium, my drug, my wine, my ether. And when I discover this in a writer I’ve not read before, I am inebriated by the discovery.
And lastly, here is a passage from Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd…
“To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are dreamwrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.”
May I always find such spirits.
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