Hour of lead

I’m blogging from LAX because I know I won’t have wi-fi. Let’s say this is an experiment in prosaic nudity. I can’t go sifting through the internet for adornments, fact-checking and rifling through thesauri and verifying against Bartleby’s the punctuation of a quote. There’s so much nervous artifice every time I write.

I’m typing this out in Microsoft Word, a document formatted like a term paper, with regimented margins and staid font. I miss the internet. It’s not just its content I want to plunder, but also the little superficial tricks and graces— the stylistic authority of CSS. In twelve-point Times New Roman, my words look bashfully unclothed. And there it is, the usual silly high seriousness to everything I write.

Instead of haunting this terminal like a bedraggled ghost, I found myself pacing LAX in frenetic circles. The novelty of checking in with multiple carriers, stationed wide apart in the chaotic ring that is the airport, gave me an excuse with ask questions, ride shuttles, adopt a self-importantly purposeful stride. Arriving from Austin, I went through security twice, with tepid gratitude— it helped pass the time. I’ve made the requisite trips to the newsstands for chewing gum and popular fiction. I’ve changed my hairdo twice.

Maybe I should be doing something more productive than chewing on my words, as if they’re another wad of the sugar-free spearmint I bought from a Starbucks kiosk. After finishing The Origins of Totalitarianism at a McDonald’s bar— that copy I've been slogging sleepily since the flight home from Bradley— I weighed on the libra of my laziness the respective merits of napping and Nietzsche. There’s a copy of Ecce Homo jammed inside my carry-on, between my Lonely Planet guide and a thin wadding of summer clothes.

That sounds pretentious. I guess I am the kind of student who reads iconic texts off-syllabus, just not the kind who reads them well. I do it out of guilt, over my own ignorance, or maybe respect for this idolatrous image of myself as some kind of intellectual— trying to resolve the contradiction between that airy fiction and the truth. It’s just this showy habit of chugging theory at an indecorous pace— I wipe my mouth after each bright gulp and the words are gone, the ideas don’t absorb. So now I’ve got this silly picture of myself as a sloppy barstool drunk, Hannah Arendt glistening down the front of her blouse. I can say only that the words happened to me; my eyes passed over each page. I should talk to my friends about the texts I downed these last few weeks, but I don’t want to reveal for sure these shames I I like to kowtow over— the shallowness of my mind, the fragility of my patience.

I’ve got this idea that expertise and passion make up a currency for social exchange. My friends do math, write poetry, read Heidegger so I don’t have to. And I can pay them back with admiration, or with something else— my own petty competencies. But I feel bad when I can’t talk about the things that matter most to them, get tired of just asking naïve and reasonable questions, being the rational person test. That’s when I end up making these empty promises to myself, to learn Latin and read Kant.

Not that these are the axes on which my friendships turn. But what sweeter gesture of fellowship can I make, than to address each person in his native tongue? I think of Ruth and Naomi, how your people shall be my people, your God my God.

It’s all a little self-indulgent. Because really I just like the aesthetic of erudition. It's a polish that I crave, the way I'm drawn to brightness, like the slick surfaces of nail lacquer and rhetorical bombast.

To streamline my guttering reading speed, I’ve been reading the Bible in Chinese— just the Solomonic Wisdom texts and the book of Lamentations, because I’ve seen them each in Gideon’s once before. The online translation I’ve been using puts each verse alongside the KJV, and I’m distracted from the overall sense of it by these little discrepancies. In Ecclesiastes, for instance, the Chinese gives bu feng for “vexation of spirit”— all is vanity and grasping for the wind. I remember that from another iteration, maybe the NRSV, and I guess that must be the language of the original. In any case, it’s obvious this translator didn't follow the KJV, and I anyway like the image of Chinese academics poring over Hebraic texts in the original— never think about them reading anything but English, Russian, and German.

I’m not sure how much this’ll help when I take my placement test. Just a term without modern Chinese, and the forgetfulness eats at me like a silkworm— a figure I remember, at least, from classical. Combined with my forays into Eileen Chang, my scriptural readings render me uniquely positioned to recognize rather elderly words dealing with whoring, concubinage, lamentation, and sin. My test will, I assume, remain stonily unmoved by a show of this specialized knowledge.

What's nice, though, is that the modifier turning “wife” into “concubine” is the radical for “woman” plus the word for “barbarian”. And it’s nice that “barbarian” is a “man” with a “bow”.

I always suspect that the non-heritage students at my level read better than me, have seen them breeze through museum placards and monographs while I look on in drowsy envy. I can dance through Yale classes secure in my easy, native-sounding pronunciation. The confidence of my speech lends it an artificial sophistication— this is the language I used to wheedle to my grandmother, after all, to wail over the dust-mote tragedies that specked my childhood. So even if I learn to quote from Liezi, in times of stress I’ll revert back to that puerile dialect, that sandbox diction with its Manchurian swagger.

I speak quickly, making mistakes the way I would in English; because of happy circumstance, there’s no translation process instead my head. But then I sit in class and catalog the idioms I don’t know, match them to blond heads and faces that would draw stares outside the Forbidden City.

Not that my speaking couldn’t stand improvement. In Chinese, I sound sweet and docile, a little dull in both senses of the word— my language bleached of the Prufrockian playfulness it takes on in English. I pitch my voice higher, smile more.

My Chinese self is, I think, both more likeable and less interesting than the pompous old man I can be in English, that inverted Tiresias with the lipsticked mouthful of idle talk. Not that this soft persona feels like a mere artifact of linguistic barrenness— there’s an authenticity to her slim, meek sentences, and I think she feels more deeply behind that film of discursive milk.