Silence and the Word

by MaryAnne Mohanraj

  30.

  The poet doesn’t know the answer to that question. To be honest, she doesn’t have time to think about it right now.

  She is busy writing poetry.

  Flowers and Branches

  It started on the worst kind of day, the kind of day when your boots pinch and your head aches and there’s an itch on your back just where you can’t reach. I had no one to scratch it. He was there and I was here and it was my own choice so I couldn’t exactly complain but I certainly wasn’t happy. He had done something, I can’t remember what, to make it worse instead of making it better, and I just hurt. So I asked him to send me flowers. Please. He sounded startled but agreed and that was a small victory though bitter too. Nine years together and only recently had he decided that it would be acceptable to give me flowers. As long as I didn’t take them the wrong way.

  He had given me flowers twice at that point. Firstly: when I was terribly sick, at the instigation of our old lover who was visiting town. She chose them, orange mums. Secondly: when we were buying groceries at the small gourmet store and I asked him to buy me some flowers. He agreed. I chose them, yellow daffodils. He did pay both times, so technically they were from him. More importantly, he agreed they were from him. Baby steps.

  These flowers that I asked to be sent to me were another baby step. He agreed. Casually, and I wasn’t sure that he would remember. When days went by with no sign of them I assumed that he had forgotten. He didn’t often forget things but sometimes he forgot quite important things. Then a message on my machine said that they had tried to deliver flowers but I hadn’t been home. Then three days of missed messages and missed delivery attempts and after three days of this the flowers, all the flowers, started to feel like they were maybe more trouble than they were worth. He was apologetic on the phone, though he really had no control over the situation.

  Finally they arrived, only two days before I was leaving town, and so there was little time to enjoy them. Lilies, little red berries, tall elegant dry branches. They were rather impressive, actually, and he had chosen them himself, or at least something like them. The web page warned him that they did not guarantee the same flowers would be delivered. I determined to enjoy them, despite everything, and for two days I took very deliberate pleasure in my flowers. Then I left. I thought about throwing them out before leaving. One of the lilies was already drooping, and they would be sad and dead by the time I returned three weeks later. Expecting to be depressed, it didn’t seem wise to leave them to rot and greet me with foul scent and mold on my return. But they were still beautiful. I left them in the vase.

  One week with him. A few days with an old lover. A little more than a week with my family. A miserable cold. When I took the taxi back from the airport I wanted nothing more than to be home, even though being home meant being alone again. I unlocked the door, turned on the light, climbed the stairs. and at the top of the stairs, the dining room, and in that room, the dining table, and on that table, the vase of flowers. The lilies had gone dry as dust, and crumbled to the touch; the red berries were dry and hollow. There was no scent. but the tall thin branches had put out fresh leaves, pale and green and very much alive. Once I had cleared away the dust and rubbish, they were lovely.

  My first thought was that I should make a poem about these branches, that they were just too good a metaphor to waste. Something about not giving up, about how you think something’s dead, but if you just hang in there and clear away the old rubbish, you may find something beautiful, you know the routine—squeezed into a few lines, some good clean words, maybe some rhymes. But that was no good, really.

  It was simpler than that in the end (though longer, too). Those branches, those leaves—that is how I am, when I think of him. He is green leaves within me. I live in the heart of winter, and despite everything, he is the spring.

  one of the ways in which

  you amaze me

  even though it has been so long

  that one might think that I

  would have gotten used to everything by now

  what amazes me

  is that

  you know

  when I am not

  being true

  to myself

  even though

  it is not

  evident

  to me

  and even better

  that you wait

  for me

  to figure it out

  for myself

  and even better

  that you simply

  wait

  for me

  Letter to Kevin

  January 15, 2001

  Kev,

  You’ve noticed, of course, that there’s a title on this, something you don’t usually see on the letters I send you. That’s because this isn’t really a letter to you—or not just a letter to you. I’ll send it to you when I’m done, but it’s really (or also) an assignment for narrative theory, the one I was so anxious about when we talked on Friday. It’s an exploration/explication of some semiotics: Saussure, Pierce, Barthes, Derrida, Benveniste. I am not certain I understand all or any of them, so this will not pretend to be comprehensive. I’ll just talk a little, and we’ll see where we end up.

  You suggested Friday that I pretend I was teaching this to undergraduates, and try to figure out what I would say. I’m not sure that will work very well—there’s so much to cover, and little space to cover it in. Instead, I am thinking about semiotics as it applies to my life, as it applies to you, as it applies to us.

  I do not know if you’ve had a chance yet to look at the copy of Mythologies I gave you for Christmas. I suspect not, given the job hunt anxiety and start of semester craziness, though I do think you’ll like it. To review very briefly, in case you haven’t, Saussure, in his Course in General Linguistics, describes language as a “system of signs that express ideas”—more importantly, he drew the distinction that the linguistic sign (the word) was essentially arbitrary, “unmotivated”. It was composed of parts—the “signifier”, or sound-image, and the “signified”, the meaning which that sound image generates. Those two together are the “sign”—the word. There are many and various systems of signs, of course—music, clothing, architecture, etc. Saussure saw language as the master-pattern for all branches of semiotics, because language is composed of signs that are wholly arbitrary.1

  So to take a more personal example—what of “love”, that word that has given us so much grief? If we acknowledge Saussure, it’s of course obvious why you have such trouble with the word. You, being a rational mathematician who thinks logically and rigorously about the world, would of course be very aware of the exceedingly arbitrary choice of the word “love” for—for what?

  No wonder you spent years resisting saying “I love you.” You were obviously aware of how that empty sign had been packed with a vast amount of signified concepts over the centuries; you knew that when you said ‘love’, I was probably hearing something entirely different. Although it’s interesting that you had no trouble with it in the first year. I don’t remember quite when the arguments started, but it was at least three or four years in; long after we’d moved in together, after I’d moved to Philadelphia with you. So why didn’t you protest the arbitrariness of the sign previously? Were you young and unaware? Or did you have a sense at the time that we were both investing that sign with reasonably similar signified meanings—and did you get scared when you realized that I was investing it with more and more signification?

  Years. We fought about it for years. And you couldn’t understand why it was so important to me that you acknowledge that particular sign, you couldn’t understand why we had to use language signs at all, for surely I could see from your actions all I needed to? Those actions, though perhaps somewhat arbitrary as well, and often rather difficult to read, were surely, as Saussure pointed out, less arbitrary than the linguistic sign “love”.

  I should perhaps let this topic go. After all, you eventually conceded the battle
, when I actually broke up with you because you had stopped saying “I love you,” because you refused to say it at all. Broke things off in the morning, and by nightfall you had conceded, and were saying it—but I suspect that I lost the war on that one, because you are still often hesitant, and I think that you may be saying it with no confidence that I am investing the sign with the same meaning that you (or even one that is close). I forced you into my semiotic system, but do we actually understand each other’s signs, or are we just pretending to communicate?

  Too depressing a thought, and probably unfair, since it is only language that is really at fault here. We communicate well enough in other ways. And yet I rely on language—it is tremendously important to me to use language in order to be precise, to convey exact shades of meaning that I cannot communicate in any other way. A hug is great and sex is better, but they do not convey my abstract thoughts. Since we spent nine hours on the telephone Friday, trying to communicate, I must assume that you also see some small value in language as well. Which makes me wonder how we can at once believe Saussure that language is essentially an arbitrary and illusory system (as proven by “love”, itself perhaps illusory and certainly cruelly arbitary at times)—and yet invest so strongly in that system. Language has become a dream that we are all dreaming together; a mutual deception. Like love?

  Maybe we should give it all up and go swing through the trees.

  I wonder if there is room for math in the trees.

  I don’t know enough about math—not your kind of math, at any rate—to be able to speak intelligently about its semiotic function. It is tempting to believe that there is a reality to math that exists independent of how you use words and other signs to communicate about it; but I’m not sure. What do you think?

  I do know that “math” has become something entirely other for me since I have known you. It has gone from simply a word to a personal myth. Barthes talks about mythologies we construct, how once we have the linguistic signs, those words become the new signifiers; we go on to invest them with signified meanings, and the word + meanings become myths.

  When I was younger, “math” didn’t have much mythical resonance for me. As a kid, it was something I did, moderately well and without much effort or interest. In high school, it was pleasant to be in honors math. But mostly, it was just a school subject, and a word invested with little personal meaning, and not much more cultural meaning.

  Then I flunked calculus in college, and suddenly “math” became invested with all sorts of personal myths. The first time I’d clearly and unmistakably failed, and even though I got an A in probability theory the next semester, fulfilling the requirement, “math” and “calculus” were painful, loaded words. They still carry a little of that connotation, a little of the myth of failure.

  And then my junior year I met you, a grad student mathematician. And before long, when I heard the word “math”, I also heard the word “love”.2 As the years went by, more and more signified meanings were added to the sign of “math”. Failure had to make room for sexy, and for brilliant, and for socially inept. And those were perhaps already part of the broader cultural myth of “math”, as witnessed by Good Will Hunting, but they became inextricably part of my own private signification. Society may reinvent the mathematician’s image ten times in the next ten years, adding layers of meaning to the myth, but my own “math” will never again be the same as theirs.

  I don’t know that it was you who put all that meaning into “math”. I dated four different mathematicians that year, and it was probably the cumulative effect—you don’t get all the credit. You can take most of the blame, I’m afraid; since you were the one who stuck around, you became inextricably enmeshed in my myth-making; it was you who really added silence and distance and what seemed like emotional brick walls to “math”. It’s okay, though—that was a long time ago, and the word seems big enough to take it. If you ever leave me, I imagine it will be big enough to absorb all the meanings that come with that as well.

  Are some words bigger than other words? Is there any limit to how much signification you put into a sign, a myth? Does it just get deeper and richer and stronger—or does it get muddled and diffused and eventually destroyed?

  What does “love” mean again? I’ve forgotten.

  Love means Kevin (some? lots? all?), at this point, which is more than a little scary. What’s even scarier is how very many words mean Kevin now.

  Flowers mean Kevin.

  Tea.

  Chicago.

  Philadelphia.

  California. (You are swallowing up entire states as well as cities).

  Utah.

  Coffeeshops.

  Sex.

  Math, obviously, means Kevin.

  Even writing about love means Kevin. Writing about pain. About family. About work. You’ve permeated some of my fiction, and most of my poetry. I am getting lost in signs and significations. Is it that the word “Kevin” is invested with the signifier of love, or that the word “love” is invested with Kevin? Does the distinction matter? Can two signs grow so intertwined over time in one’s personal mythology that it becomes impossible, or dangerous, to tear them apart? Painful, at the very least.

  I am not sure that I can write about love now, without writing about you. What does that mean for my fiction?

  (Deeper, stronger, richer? Weaker, diffused, destroyed?)

  Children mean Kevin. I cannot think of children without thinking of you; I cannot see a young human on the street without thinking the word “child” and I cannot think that word without thinking of you. Ironic. A word can apparently be invested with what it is not, as well as what it is.

  Children and parents are already huge cultural myths, of course. Mine were invested with some private signification from my own experiences as a child, and with my parents. When we vow not to be the type of parents we had, that’s yet another type of myth-making, taking that old signified and inverting it—making it into what it was not. Or trying to. Cultural myths, and the fierce yet perhaps insubstantial added signified meanings of one’s own childhood. I had little more than that before you, before a few years ago, to be honest. And then, I somehow transmuted a massive weight of cultural myth, stirred it in with my personal myths of Kevin, and created a brand-new myth, custom tailored to fit. Fit me, that is.

  It fit pretty well, for a while. And your refusal to participate in that myth-making just became part of the myth. The myth of “Kevin-the-father”, perhaps. It changed from a myth of what-would-be to a myth of what-could-have-been, but stayed essentially the same in its composition.

  That myth has been showing at the seams, lately. In part because of our conversations, those arbitrary yet significant words slowly convincing me that there was really very little supporting that fatherly myth. But far more surprising—I have been noticing that I am not nearly as certain as I was in my belief in my own motherly myth. Which was, of course, necessary to sustain the fatherly one.

  That is partly the intrusion of my cousin’s harsh realities; as she swelled up, took a break from med school, gave birth, breastfed, and complained like crazy, all of her specific signs were added to my motherhood myth. They didn’t fit so well; apparently

  there are some significations that contradict each other so strongly that it is difficult if not impossible for them to coexist. The myth starts to break down. And my own slow-growing pleasure in my work, my burgeoning schedule, my ambition and understanding of what will be needed in order to fulfill it—those also have trouble fitting inside the myth. Oh, they can be shoehorned in, if we use the sign of the quietly competent nanny—but I suspect that sign to also be a myth.

  The motherhood myth is still hanging in there, but it’s looking a little more fragile than it used to. And yet—I have to wonder, if it’s more than my cousin and schedules and nannies. Because as we established earlier, love is Kevin and Kevin is love and the two are inextricable and becoming more and more pervasive. Over the past nine years, their mean
ings have been seeping into every corner of my life. And wouldn’t it be understandable if motherly love struggled to accomodate being filled with Kevin love, which is so vast and overwhelming, after all? There might not be room within motherhood to fit it. There might be limits on the size of that myth.

  An uncomfortable thought—which in itself appears to be pushing at the Kevin love myth, perhaps showing a few of its own seams and patches.

  Well. We could continue, but this is, after all, only an assignment, and it is now long enough. What will you think of this letter, knowing that it is an assignment, knowing that my classmates will be reading it, wondering how much of it is an actual letter, and how much of it is the myth of a letter to Kevin? Perhaps it’s a myth of an assignment, but if you convince yourself that it’s the myth of a letter, then you may deny signification entirely to anything I have written here. That would be your choice, of course. And for all I know, you may be doing it with every letter I send you, because even if they’re not assignments, they’re each one made up of words, which are merely arbitrary, signifying nothing.

  love,

  M

  Sitting Under a Tree, in the Rain

  reading a book of poetry

  or maybe short stories, or

  both—it’s hard to tell

  with this author; rich wet air,