![]() But the tava had yet to be cleanedfor there was no more water!and the word was slowed. End slid to join end: in this tread the word made its way along the dirt floor, over the fan mother waved to keep the flies away from the food, past brother's sandals, and finally across the surface of the cooled tava on which grandmother had baked the evening's chipattis. Its steps were not steps, it neither crept nor wriggled. So summoned, the word made careful progress up the interior wall of the jug, over the rim, and out into the odors of fresh coconut and coriander and raita and fish and chai that lingered around the ovens like pounding will in a drunken head. Soon, their sleep was the tolling of a bell grown over with moss. Supper's bowls emptied and the day's jug exhausted, the family, bellies firm and tranquil, readied their beds of silken rope and narrow cushions. The word, unwinding, again assumed the form of a linethough longer than beforeand inched above water's fall. (Although it was possessed of nothing so at odds with itself as the emotional life to which you and I are accustomed, the word can be said to have behaved according to instinct.) As the sun bent lower and lower to help mother set out supper, the jug began to tip more steeply to answer the thirst of men, women, children, iron, rag, rice and fire. Whenever grandmother or grandfather or mother or father or sister or brotherhis hide stingingor cousin came for a drink, the word sank beyond the cupping catch of both hands and ladles. It tucked its head into its tail, making a ball that could cleave to the coarseness of the vessel's clay. Stepping heavily all the way, mother refilled the jug at the broad and laden leaves of the rain-catcher plant. Sorely displeased, mother snatched the jug from the ground before the word could stir itself to escape. That place was an empty water jug in the courtyard of a house on the southernmost outskirts of a village of men, a jug that brother had left to dry in the sun and had neglected to bring in for the evening.Ĭome dawn, and the word was yet undivided from its respite when mother, still pulling snug her sari, discovered that her son had failed in his duties. Indeed, so weary and breathless was the word that it could barely draw its length towards the first cool, dark place it could find. Dew was not refreshing but rather the raging of a flood, the tall grass an unfriendly citadel's wall, lianas the skeleton of some monstrosity cut down in its tracks. The dappled forest light that to you and I is of such delight was to the word a storm of boiling hailstones. And the word grew weary, for its passage had taken it through lands both foreign and, though grey, wild. Following a winding, shadowy path for manyperhaps it was countlessdays, the word came finally to the banks of the River Yamuna. And so, while the word was graced with nothing like what you and I would consider sight, it was not blind, and it could sense shade. The word was not restless, but it was disturbed. However, man soon arrived in the forest, slashing forward with his radiance and smitten with turning over the hidden places in the earth. Being soft and of potential delectation, the word fully inhabited its vulnerabilities and rarely ventured very far from the damp, nocturnal places in which it could live out its long, indolent, and solitary days. Long, long ago, the word was, but only as a snail without its shell is. While the story does not move backwards, it does deliberately lag behind a future that is so elusive the only approach that brings it closer and makes it more observable is a retreat: or a loud, an insistent, reticence. If there is a coherent or unified point-of-view here, it is that of the leavings, the "former" now characterized as waste, the attempted, the matter so ill-defined it can only be called "before", the abandoned abode in which we can discuss the limits of what we do not know. ![]() ![]() It accumulates, then it discards (subjectivities, settings, vocabularies, desires, progressions), and via this process fashions events. Like all narratives, the piece is saturated with the sequential. Joe Milazzo Four Origins of the Articulate, Requiring ProofĤ Origins Of The Articulate (Requiring Proof)", being a set of variations on a single notethe fact of our speaking requires of language an etiology wavers somewhere between a drone and a cycle of glitches. ![]()
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