liquid language
It is just like diving into a pond – then you start frantically to swim. So far as I am concerned, it is like swimming in a baffling current and being rather frightened and very thrilled, gasping and striking out for all you are worth.
– D. H. Lawrence1
“Juan thought that the crack was saving him from total immersion in something [algo] that was now beginning to take the shape [tomar forma] of a cramp in his stomach.”2 Is that “something” inside or outside Juan?
See the fluidity that Julio’s sentences lend our world of hard boundaries? See the softness and porousness, the smooth sliding movement? It doesn’t really matter for the moment what that something might be – maybe some kind of anxious tension or just plain fear. It’s also not important here that the narrator registers Juan’s emotional response to a situation – he’s sneaking into someone’s else hotel room in the middle of the night – as a physical sensation.
What matters is what happens to “something.” What strikes me about the passage, and about the many, many like it throughout Julio’s work (go to Hopscotch: read it looking especially for “black shout” or “tickle”), is the way he deploys the elements of language to construct a mobile fluid relationship between external stimulus, emotional response and internal physical sensation. That “something,” whatever it is, first figures as a fluid medium of some kind. Even as I learn that the crack in the door of the room he’s just slipped into saves him from “total immersion” I learn also that the “something” is the sort of stuff into which one can be immersed. There’s no simile here. Julio’s narrator just boldly drives forward and evokes the nature of that “something” by describing Juan’s possible relationship to it: total immersion.
But watch that “something” changing now, morphing, protean: the fluid medium that the crack in the door keeps Juan on the brink of transforms into an internal physical phenomenon of his own body: the cramp in his stomach. Of course, it’s important also that each of these processes (total immersion and cramp in stomach) are just tendential and never really completed in this passage. That’s typical Julio, too, stay in the middle of a process, where things are most dynamic and chaotic and ambiguous [Ù95].
Isn’t this a kind of magic: scary and exhilarating like all mysteries? When a pool of something outside me can slide, somehow, into my body and make of itself a stomach cramp. Transformation, movement, and transubstantiation: “something” could be a fluid medium outside of Juan and then two lines later “something” could be his stomach knotted in a cramp. This kind of thing, strictly speaking, can only happen in a universe brought forth with the kind of language, or with the kind of use of language, the style Julio here uses.
But Julio is not the only one who can “language” in this style.3 For one thing, I do it when I read him, twisting my tongue and mind and feelings around these very words. Then, also, the practice I get while reading tends to leak into my language when I’m not reading so that such performances feel less like disagreeable yoga postures and more like what they are: my own way of bringing forth a world of possible relationships in language and of situating my self in it. And then I begin to model it for others, and to infect them.
How to respond to my student who doesn’t want to live in such a world? Who doesn’t want to with such deep intensity that he will – as I often do – simply deny that the world is, or could be, this way? There’s no use telling him that it is this way. Or describing it as such.
The only method is to draw him into that universe by an act of language, to bring him first into the shallow lapping tickling waves, maybe give him a little splash so that he reaches down and cups the water and splashes back, escalating, until we are both up to our shoulders in a cloud of splashing spray that becomes him leaping up to dunk me and then darting away with a few powerful strokes where he waits, treading water, at home. He’s now been there, felt it moving around and through him and also felt the rush of strength and mastery that comes from first accepting and yielding to its strange properties and unfamiliar propensities.
Take it from Michel Serres, who begins – as I discover by chance – his beautiful, poetic book on education with a very similar image: “No one really knows how to swim until he has crossed a large impetuous river or a rough strait, an arm of the sea, alone. . . Depart. Go out. Allow yourself to be seduced one day. Become many, brave the outside world, split off somewhere else. These are the first three foreign things, the three varieties of alterity, the three initial means of being exposed. For there is no learning without exposure, often dangerous, to the other.”4
Maha prajna paramita. This is “the great wisdom perfection” of Zen Buddhism. But, in Sanskrit, Haju told me, it literally means the “the great wisdom crossing over to the other shore.”
1 D. H. Lawrence, “Making Pictures,” The Creative Process,Ed. Brewster Ghiselin (New York: Mentor, 1952), p. 69.
2 Julio Cortázar, 62: A Model Kit, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1973), p. 174. In Spanish: 62: Modelo para armar [1968] (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996), p. 179.
3 Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), p. 210.
4 Michel Serres, The Troubador of Knowledge, Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser with William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 4-7.