The daily diet of 500 words cannot be sustained without questions. That is my realization of the day. To sit with a question in front of me (it does not have to be an intriguing one) is the key to unlocking the torrent of words that is meant to sooth my soul (probably will change this later). In any case, the question for me today is: How can I know myself? This, of course, is a question derived from an injunction, “Know thyself,” which I embrace wholeheartedly as a sound philosophical way to be. I am not saying I know myself (at least not yet), but I accept the prescription, and now take the first step asking myself for the process by which I can achieve the goal. In fact, the goal itself is not important. It may be something that can never be achieved. What matters first is the process. That is what I am committed to. So, how to begin… It seems to me I need to have one of those inerior dialogs with myself to get things rolling. I need to ask myself questions, and try to answer them myself. What am I? Who am I? Am I up to the job of such knowing? As I ask myself these and other questions, however, I am met with silence. Someone is there, but there is no answer. My first encounter in this process is with a Mute. But not an unfamiliar figure. I have lived with the Mute for a long time — probably thirty years ago. Then, I was quite the voluble type. I had been sure of myself growing up and had developed a lyrical writing voice early in my college years. I was beginning to fall in love with the English language just as much for its own gloriousness as for the freedom it allowed me to move back and forth between it and my native Amharic. I wrote in it. I translated in it. I wrote in both languages simultaneously. I even meditated in it feelings that were rooted in my otherness. But doubts began to arise in me first after reading T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent in which he discuss the writer’s ability to “feel” in his own language. I probably misread what he was saying — essays did not inspire me much in those days, ironically. But I started wondering whether I truly could feel in English. What did it mean to feel in a language, anyway? Up till then, my key insight into writing poetry had been “discovery” not “feeling.” I waited for that muse-driven inspiration when the vowels and consonants fell like raindrops and trickled into place. But suddenly, a corner of my mind where sparks of verbal pyrotechnics had once flared, begun to dim. I continued to write, but it was not the same. Just then I also got married. This second transformation in my life brought with it a different sort of evaluation of my words. What had been strong language that made my loved one cry was no longer a source of strength and renewal for me and, as I had assumed, for her. Suddenly, it was not some projection of angst into the universe, but a narrow and personal appropriation of some one else’s life. Who was I to say those things about anyone? What right did I have to fiddle with the balance of relationships. Retreat! Retreat! As English withdrew from me, the Mute began to assert himself, and slowly I turned away from the pen as a harsh musical instrument to seek refuge in the hardware of my own hands. So, when I ask now, “How can I know myself?” I am met with a thirty-year accretion of silence that has rotted my feelings for language. I see an old man sitting on a stump in the woods lost in thought, or maybe no-thought, looking right through me as I approach and sit next to him.
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