Image by Pieter Bruegel the Elder via Wikipedia
I am walking through the city, my ears tingling from the cold, when it occurs to me that six weeks here in San Francisco, I have felt what I did not feel after nearly three years in South Florida – the sense of the ground under my feet. That is, my body in relation to land + space; nothing to do with the landscape itself, buildings nestled on hills, streets that rise and fall like baby mountains. Again/in a simpler way: I feel rooted – as though any moment now I might sprout out leaves and fruit. Yet, I must leave at the end of Summer.
On this side of the bay area, you’d find blonde women with loose locs screaming to the high heavens or chatting with faceless buddies. The streets, many times, carries its own fragrance – part dew, part piss. There are dogs who strut about quite respectably, with phone distracted walkers in tow; the endless string of restaurants from which the sound of laughter and grilled meats escape so that the streets are a chorus of sounds and smells and sights. There is, too, that occasional unexpected fog (which I am quite and strangely fond of) that rolls over the city like smoke from cigarette, blurring the view of surrounding mountains, with drizzles from the crystalized air falling on lashes, lips, and earlobes.
Image via worldstrides
On these streets I am nobody. Not necessarily more unknown than I am elsewhere, but still, there is something anonymizing about being in transit, moving through space in which said space is not boggled by the burden of labels. A walk, sometimes, can be the practice of creating pause in time. Especially when it lacks purpose. Just that meandering interaction of body and place. But there is much else that appears to be stripped of ‘purpose’ and its conventional urgency. Here, I am not grad student. Not writer. Not international-potential immigrant. Not researcher. Not flailing for meaning/purpose. Not freelancer. Not editor. Only this: another body in a place, in a crowd of other bodies in the same said space. Which is to say that the metrics by which I have measured by life in recent history do not seem to fit in or apply here.
I have been thinking a lot about the Tower of Babel, more as a cultural reference than in its Biblical connotations. A mission disrupted by difference where the unifying factor was a previously shared language. What does it mean, how does it feel to lose what is shared, I wonder? And so, I think about language with neither linguistic or etymological context, simply as a person who transacts with words. Language as a unifying force and/or a factor of division. Language, really, is the tool and means by which we see world, by which we enter the world and share it; but it is also how we see ourselves: the ways we have come to name and identify. A cup. A chair. A stone. Without language we are not only babbling to strangers in mindless/incomprehensible gestures. But we are lost, too, to ourselves, the sense by which we mentally weave the narratives of our lives. For sure, by language I do not mean that which is necessarily vocalized because language does not always equate to sound and because even silence carries meaning. So, maybe then to think about language as a kind of instinctive and sometimes shared intelligence through which the world takes on a stable and preservable structure?
Question?
What happens when the (foundational) structures of your life and work and identity become punctured? What is the rhetoric of meaning-making outside familiar walls?
I am thinking now about my time off of social media and having to learn a new language for what is social, and what is media. And then my time here in the bay area, finding new language for myself, for meaning, for transit. How do you define what is mostly in motion? These days, I lead introductions almost instinctively by saying: I am passing through, here visiting: a language that feels like a closed doors or the sound of old fears. However, I like that here I do not have to be a writer all the time. Or even some of the time. That I do not have to be engaged in conversation on culture and literature. That I can be wide eyed and participate in discourse on Afrobeat, and coding and vegetables; I like that I get to share these things with strangers.
This June, I fell in love with a six-month-old baby. You should know, however, at my age, biologically, everything in my body feels like a machine grinding towards motherhood. This is not necessarily self-willed or intelligent. Merely hormones being hormonal. And yet, I am almost convinced that this is not the case with my new friend but, I digress. In my shared time with this baby, I came to devise another language: Baby talk, in popular parlance. Making mindless coos- smiling so hard I am aware now that there are muscles at the back of my head. Again, in this space, word counts do not matter. Nor does existential angst. They might make me partly who I am, but they are irrelevant to my relationship with this baby.
To share a language is to share a hope, a dream, a kind of love. To find people who ‘get’ you. Whom you get. Who you are willing to get? But what does it mean to lose one? To surrender a language. To abide in the loss of an identity - shared or private? To say in this manner that I am no longer tethered to your previous construction of my meaning. Or in the words of the ancient texts, I am a new creature, old things are passed away.
I think that my being here in SF is a kind of loss of language or losing a thing that is known, where that loss itself is an opportunity to learn something new. To be something else. Something various and multiple and hybrid. Something beyond fixed. There is much to get used to here. The early morning cold tight on my lips. The ridiculous tax rate on Uber eats deliveries. Smiles from strangers in church. Lunch with new friends. Distant relatives. Strangers. Night out in a sweat pulsing disco hall. Train rides. Ramen noodles. Card games. Winning the card games(!!) Everything but what I have been in the last couple of years, so that I ask myself: who is this person simmering beneath my known identity? The answer is both a gift and a surprise. We might be split and confused and separated by our endless constructions of meaning. But maybe it is also true: if we are open and curious, a different language will always be an invitation much more than it is a wall.
As always, you amaze me.
You are a skilled writer, Tochi.
Happy new month.
May it bring you endless possibilities.
Thank you for sharing.