Tongues, Thresholds, Trees

There is the familiar, which can stifle you, and the unfamiliar, which can confound you. And between them is this threshold of wavering, charmed recognition. A foreign language brings that up so well.

My own language- as I speak it at home- brings to me all the slimy tentacles of subscribing to a setup. Kannada at home was only for the day-to-day; you knew the names of vegetables and temple-flowers and the word for 'mattress'. I couldn't say 'slimy tentacles', even if I knew the words; it's easier for me to say, "the fan's not working". But in English, not because it's a better language but simply because it's different, one could think differently.

Spanish is all around me here in San Francisco. I murmur Don Pablo:

Oh invádeme con tu boca abrasadora,
Indágame, si quieres, con tus ojos nocturnos

(Oh, invade me with your scalding mouth,
Peer into me, if you wish, with your nocturnal eyes)

It would be awkward to say this in my own language. I'd see my mother's meek and worried face and my father's tongue tasting bile around his canines. I suppose we all think of a scalding mouth, and some of us, like Neruda, can say it as we are- and others must turn to the foreign.

(Aside: This particular sonnet of Neruda's, though, is not so much about the scalding mouth, but that even that, all of desire and red-pepper-lust, even the woman's noctunal eyes, can be kept aside for the music and form of the crafted word, the name of the woman as a little crucible of all of the world's beauty: 'Matilde')

The maples are bare, wearing brown spiked seeds, elegant and mysterious, like quiet gypsies standing by themselves, waiting for April. The oaks too are bare; I see them, great and old and unfamiliar and yet known from the words of dead writers, branching before me like a monster's scream.

But one must return to Banyan trees and Neem, to one's own personal epics.