Of Sounds and Languages

Torill Mortensen in a Wednesday, January 25, 2006 entry "Returning Home" on the blog thinking with my fingers writes

I feel homesick for a language that touches me in a different manner, a longing towards harsh consonants, clear vowels and words that bring to mind a wiser range of meanings.

I am reminded how differently animal sounds are represented across languages and I am led to wonder about the Basho haiku devoted to the sound of the encounter between frog and pond.

glonk
Basho's frog
gone

I find it amusing that the syntactic resources of some languages permit a sort of reversal:

gone
Basho's frog
glonk

An interesting discovery I would not have found without a detour nostalgia. Keen, now, to discover the sounds of other versions rendered in other languages.

And so for day 401
18.01.2008

Again After Basho

My earlier glonk noise on Basho's famous frog-pond poem has some twins composed in 2001 and here reproduced for your aural pleasure:

I
pond, old old pond
frog leaping in
in ripple sound

II
rippling sounds
from frog splash
a pond wrinkle

30/11/2001

I find that this moves from a study of the qualities of "o" and "i" vowels and their reduplication to a tiny note of short vowel "a" that tinkles.

And so for day 867
28.04.2009

Getting There

Roo Borson in Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida invites the reader to meditate upon the place and the passage of time and the limits of the recuperative abilities of literature.

Oishida still exists on the map. I would someday like to go there. Whether it would be the same Oishida Basho knew is another question. Nonetheless I would like to walk the streets and see for myself. There are places one cannot go except in literature, but then again there is a version of time which literature, and all ordinary human commerce, keeps us from. In that version, Basho's Oishida no longer exists — but fortunately, poetry keeps intervening, poetry and its obsession with the "qualities" of things, the huts of the fisherman on the beach, the little coloured clams, and so on.

In my reading I keep circling back to the sentence that registers if not a moment of failure then a type of tension: "There are places one cannot go except in literature, but then again there is a version of time which literature, and all ordinary human commerce, keeps us from." Words get in the way as much as they facilitate travel.

And so for day 586
21.07.2008

Viola Tricolor Memento

Browse: The World in Bookshops
Edited by Henry Hitchings


Reading in this collection "Bookshop Time" by Ali Smith, I was struck by this passage about what gets inserted and preserved between the pages of books

We leave ourselves in our books via this seeming detritus: cigarette cards with pictures of trees or wildlife; receipts for the chemist; opera or concert or theatre tickets; rail or tram or bus tickets from all the decades; photographs of places and long-gone dogs and cats and holidays; once even a photo of someone's Cortina. Now when I donate books to the shop I have a flick through to make sure that anything tucked into them isn't something I might mind losing.

A Cortina btw is a type of car.

A few days later I find in a copy of Bashō a delicate book marker fashioned as a mark of affection and love. On the one side is a pressed heart's ease patiently arranged and composed with parts from other plants to form a miniature herbarium specimen. On the other side is an inscription dated Valentine's Day 1987. The card is laminated and so protected. A perfect long lasting gift.

And so for day 2387
26.06.2013

Chiasma

The words for an advertisement for an automobile very large upon the side of a building take on a special glow when the reader recalls the cars-on-ice montage as seen on the big screen in the cinema and the warmth of the freakish winter weather and one impishly imagines the luxury vehicles plunging through on a lake crossing:

Perfect Moments
Imperfect Conditions

Perfect conditions lead to imperfect moments.

But a moment is a condition.

How can one arrive at such readings more regularly? Recall Robert Aitken, a great student of Basho, in "The Search for Mind" collected in The Mind of Clover:

Realizing that greed, hatred, and ignorance aren't there is a deeper way to resolve them than merely seeking to forget them by looking on the bright side.

O the nuances of a deeper way to resolve! "Looking on" as distinguished from "looking at."

And so for day 24
07.01.2007