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Keeping a private language

Matthew Jakubowski

May 30 3

Quantum entanglement is perhaps the loveliest phrase in English. That’s my humble opinion. I heard that at one time a survey revealed that among English speakers and non-English speakers researchers were somehow able to determine among the respondents the phrase “cellar door” was the most beautiful in all of English. How they decided, among every syllable and permutation possible, is a mystery, but I do recall some teacher in my past discussing this anecdote and its disappointing result — “cellar door,” this image that brings to mind the entryway to dimly lit dirty spaces.

If this kind of survey ever goes out to the world again, “cellar door” is going to have some newfangled competition in the form of “quantum entanglement,” this technical phrase that unlocks its beauty like a lotus, seeming to speak its exact meaning hinged with mysteries within mysteries from one clear syllable to the next. I’m sure it doesn’t speak the same kind of thing to other people. Everyone has their own pet phrases and secret languages from the past that evoke memories we’re happy to keep inside these personal worlds within words, and of course there are deep horrors locked in everyday language that we wish we could filter out completely.

I’m happy to stand up for the beauty I hear and feel in the possibilities inspired by the words quantum entanglement. But there are others I’ll never discuss. Like the secret tree language characters use in Christina Rivera Garza’s novel, “The Iliac Crest,” and as Yoko Tawada wrote in her novel, “Portrait of a Tongue,” as translated by Chantal Wright, “You don’t always want to share a language with the anonymous masses.”

Sparrows, when you were six

Matthew Jakubowski
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Credit: M. Jakubowski

I saw them up ahead of us beside the road, eight or nine moving in the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb, sure they would flee as soon as I stopped at the light at the corner, but they had city-bird courage, a sturdy flock; browns, grays, ivories, tans made over in the morning light diffused by the fog. Stubby beaks neat and trim, black eyes round as obsidian pearl, heads clicking at angles at every sound and potential danger, as I watched them with love so near the car in the grass alive with green lividity from the week-long rain. They nibbled at the flowering blades, snipping the seeds so neatly, as I waited for the light to change, my human form hidden behind the curved metal and glass shapes they were used to seeing flash by like fleeing buildings.

Sparrows out for their morning hunt. For seeds and soggy moths. Battered beetles and breadcrumbs. I turned the car to take my son the last few blocks to school, and did not point out the birds. We’d been there for a few seconds and he was listening to the song on the radio looking out his own window at the fog in silence, a six-year-old person with a father who stares at sparrows. The cost of an education changes families. Mothers and father disappear into duty. Who will they vote for? Is another mistake unavoidable? Who will care for their parents and their parents before them? What is it to tell someone about the beauty that lies in the grass between the road and the sidewalk, someone trying to prove between stoplights, weekends, birthdays, and funerals that the world is made vast by small brave beings alive in the grass here with us, alive in eternal feathery abundance. The song on the radio went on for years. The boy left the car and there was no school. You turn and see your father. He’s doing something you don’t understand and when you see this you understand a few words of something he said before that made no sense at the time. You swallow some kind of hatred you’re afraid of.

Cleanse

Matthew Jakubowski
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Credit: M. Jakubowski

He would have hands large enough to go to the edge of that green ground, jab his fingerspades into the sod and grip the turf woven with roots and rhizomes to lift the life-giving blanket of the earth, shaking it high in waves through the sky to reveal the giggling children of old and dead and forgotten beneath it, all the bumps and skeletal humps and vertebrae valleys, the shapes of history that are softened and hidden beneath sedimentary layers of the planet’s bedsheets, the holy collective decay of animal and vegetable life like leaf litter under which all the past sleeps until tectonic turmoil strikes at an invisible hour, the dead awaking the living above the blanket, as his hands shake the wavy coverlets free of the day’s greed and corruption.

Gripping the continental edge, standing in the Atlantic off the coast of Maryland, with one shake he sends the concentration camps flying, hurls aside the anti-immigrant shock troops, tumbles the white-power militias, upsets McConnell’s and Miller’s and Kavanaugh’s and Gorsuch’s beers, giving Trump the thump of fate beneath his feet and deep within his temples.

With this generation’s horrors flung beneath the moss, he’d throw his arms out and with his head back shout, “Tsunami!!!!” crashing backwards into the sea, letting his words and energy breach the shore, sloshing back beneath the waves, disappearing into the green black depths, having given, gone, some dreamed echo of justice.

The Night Air

Matthew Jakubowski

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I was middle-aged and didn’t know what was happening to my mind. I wasn’t ill. I was tired, but everyone is tired at that age. I had my aches and pains. More sleep would have always been welcome, any day of the week, even if I’d already slept two days straight. More sleep, yes please, my body would say, and slurp up the hours like a dog by an open hydrant on a hot day, if anyone with the power to offer me gushes of time to sleep had done so.

My friend’s child smiles when she sees me and reaches out her arms. My friend says she likes me. But when her mother extends her arms to hand the little girl to me the girl cries and clings to her. Her mother and I smile as the girl puts her head on her Mom’s shoulder and looks at me. Her Mom tries to laugh at this but anyone can see that the effort to extend the child, who is now over twenty pounds, and suddenly return the child to her chest has caused her some pain she’s trying to ignore. She was hoping for a few minutes of having the child away from her, to not feel her weight, and to imagine days ahead where she can stand on her own, go run and play.

I had been each of these parents and children. Life with and without sleep had taken me closer and further away. The age of time within me was settling, with the denser material settling mostly, but occasionally launched upwards and sent clanging around by the power of deep jets of memory bursting forth. It’s a little hard to explain, of course. If all was well I could see it quite clearly and tell the story with the snap of my fingers, the click of my tongue, a sharp clap of my hands and you’d know instantly what I mean. But exhaustion contorts the path. Maybe no one wants to hear about tiredness. But the story of individual tiredness is interesting. People act crazy while tired. Worlds turn on the decisions of tired people. Wars have been fought, loves have been lost. To sleep like the dead and have the chance to awake again feels like a miraculous thing. Tiredness is so boring, everyone says, everyone’s tired. But tell them you had a sexy dream or a dream you’ll never forget and they’ll listen for a few seconds at least. Dreams feed the living imagination with fruits from the furrows of tiredness. Collective exhaustion is fertile ground.

When my child was still little, only able to walk a few steps at a time, friends would say at times when I looked tired that it wouldn’t be long before he could do more for himself. I would nod and smile and they would try to keep a stiff upper lip as I openly doubted their effort to be sympathetic. To say “it won’t be long” was to try and compress the next year or two between my resolve and my hope that the child would crave independence. The magic spell involves several ingredients to transform time. Every minute will still have to be lived, though, slowly, often in pain, and tired, of course, with fresh despair carefully washed of any pesticides, until it’s ready to be grated over the bowl, and mixed into the next couple of years of parenting thoroughly. Once prepared, the spell takes several months to gain full effectiveness. By that time the friend who gave you the recipe may have moved on to another town or spouse. They wanted to escape seeing you so tired but it has found them or someone they love and now they laugh together with the same song of tiredness. They’ve given in and can’t remember ever resisting. It’s the same with politics and revolutionaries, of course.

Instead of sleep or sex I take walks in the dark in the woods behind our house. Except when I step out the back door I see again that I don’t live anywhere near the woods. I have to make do instead. I stand still and let the night air shape me.

All the jealous fathers

Matthew Jakubowski

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All the jealous fathers are eating tacos shoulder-to-shoulder at the bar down the street. Each of their hands is feverishly but nonchalantly swiping at strange banal things on their phones while the other helps sips Bloody Marys or cervezas, their ears tuning out the thrash metal on the jukebox, internalizing their ability to both ingest the badassery of thwanging temptation on their own lips and at the fingertips of the row of men extending left and right.

It’s Father’s Day on a day when the sky has lightened and darkened several times. The cycle of hormones is absolutely paramount within their bodies but will never be discussed. It should be worn on t-shirts though, it’s so apparent. Their very beards, or the thin, well-trimmed hint of beards, speak to exactly how little or how much sex they crave or pretend not to crave. Crunch is popped into mouths and crunched with gusto. Skulls inadvertently bop as they dribble one of several fine salsas onto their burritos. Peter ponders his plantains. Herve heaps huevos onto his gluten-free toast.

On the TV it’s sports, which is supposed to represent the opposite of death. (I am miles away helping a young man up who has just been thrown down the stairs by his drunk father. I am in costume looking up from a table at the morgue helping a young man prepare for the day when death will be as this before him, prepared, cold to the touch.) Life life life the colors of the athletes’ bodies scream. We have defeated death. You fathers will live forever.

Eternal life is there on the tip of your tongues. How much of all this behavior is funded by the dead or living fathers? All of it. None of it. Each body is into his own. They would storm the streets together at any sign of injustice. They are as chill as each radish sliced into a pile in the corner of their plastic baskets of food. All is well. ATMs blink awaiting their touch. Somewhere the land of naps is ready to accept their bellied skeletons. That roaring sound is the laughter of young angels cracking up at the entire scene. The workers’ bodies at the cemeteries glisten in the sun.

I avoid the answer

Matthew Jakubowski
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Credit: M. Jakubowski

I avoid the answer to the question I asked of tomorrow. Avoiding myself, too, as my half-life struggles, revealing itself to others, one hand dipped in the past, the other paddling along in the future.

I don’t know what time is, and I won’t know until it’s over. Having never begun. I can’t capture exactly what I mean, not yet at least. In theory I have it all figured out though. And ideally I don’t rely on puns.

But I am coming to understand in a very simple way that most of the anger and fear we have of others and ourselves, the crushing hatred grinding like the compounded gravity of distant entities light years away, with the weight of a mountain compressed into the size of a grain of sand, all that destructive power tends from hiccups in how we each experience time. Continue reading →

A specific disintegration

Matthew Jakubowski
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Credit: M. Jakubowski

This focus on Else, I am thinking while walking, everything everywhere, cities and towns the world over, what we’ve achieved at the office or the church or the classroom is beautiful of course and nothing to sneeze at. But in the end of the self, whether God’s involved a little or a lot, it’s to something else entirely apart from our memories and accomplishments that we first return.

The flora we call weeds thick and green against the steel poles holding up a fence around a pad of oily concrete. Sparrows abounding in the gutters in cracked building corners, every thorny bush between home an office. Beware resistance to this palace of small places we are headed towards, the bodily noises of the weeds and small birds seem to say. So on days when I am aware in my way feeling what prayerful people call at peace, days without sleep over several nights, the office and the family plans and the past fade into their moment, etched with modest gratitude. Not places of nothingness. The urge isn’t to throw it once and for all away into some other place beyond with the angry force of regret. There’s no regret. Regret is for egoists.

But these things here and now beneath my feet and at eye level that will be here and were here long ago are the next stage we will step onto. This fact will never age, even as sparrows evolve and blades of grass hybridize. It’s enough to make the walk from the bus to the front door something a different kind of person might call miraculous, before they disintegrate into sleep, or the hope of another year that in many cases will not come.