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I have a bag of fabric scraps that grows larger every year. Trimmings from clothes I made for our children, fraying remnants from curtains I made for our homes and playmats I lovingly stitched for our grandchildren, frocks for my younger self. Velvet and satin. Cotton and linen. Lace and ribbons. Delicate silks and heavy brocades. They will come in useful one day, I say.
And so it is with language too. Those beautiful quotations I copy into notebooks. Unfinished sentences that creep into my soul and might yet become poems. Snippets of wisdom that I file away because they might come in useful one day. Scriptures and spiritual thoughts that might even speak to me of God, if I return to them often enough.
Now, as time stands still and history holds its breath with its fingers on its lips, I take out my ragbag of language and wonder what story there is to tell—for before any history can be written, stories must be told.
Shhhhh. Speak only in whispers. Let the whirlwind carry our words away. Who knows what future worlds we might be birthing in our garbled utterances?
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus)
The world is born gradually out of words. (Mahmoud Darwish, Absent Presence, p. 15)
Dialogue goes on because of a trust that recognition will be possible. (Rowan Williams, Dostoyevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, p. 135)
I assemble a patchwork of language to speak of a world in words whose meanings have frayed and pulled apart at the seams. Shhhh. Silence would be better, but as starlings chatter on the telegraph wires in the setting sun, so we must speak in this darkening hour, for we are beings who long to speak of that for which we have no words. The less we mean, the more we say. The less we have to say, the more words we need to say it. But still we speak, and maybe somewhere there is an HQ that listens, and discerns amidst the electronic chatter a word, a phrase, a whisper of hope that is the birthing cry of worlds to come.
I return to Hélène Cixous, to a passage that irritated me when I first read it because it seemed so pretentious, so contrived. Yet I played with this passage and returned to it often. It taught me a lesson in attentiveness and invited me to reflect on how that which sounds deep is often only verbose, and that which sounds trivial might yet be the wisdom of the holy fool. We must listen to the random words of seekers and speakers after truth, for sooner or later, we might hit on the right word, a word that strikes the anvil of meaning and sends a message out into the noise of the world.

I—I. The I and the I, separated by a bar with an abyss on either side. The wall and the barbed wire fence. The no man’s land. No woman’s land either. A land whose silence is guarded by the bodies of murdered children. This is the silence that consumes meaning, the words of despair curdling into hatred, rattling in empty space, words that drive us ever further apart in a solipsistic hell where there is only ever I and I and I and I—never you, never us.
But the bar can also become the crossing point, the threshold that unites us and changes everything, while holding open a space between us that allows us to share communion without consumption.
I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores. (Cixous)
Two “I”s conjoined to make space for a third—a third that knows how to be silent, a third that knows when silence renders it visible. The H asperé that hides itself in speech and reveals itself in writing. The H that moves close to the consonant to render it sibilant. The H that unleashes the constant signifier and lets it flow into new channels of meaning and communication. The H that allows the ear to hear, if only it knows how to listen to what is not said, to understand how that visible silence changes everything.
H is trinitarian. It is the mysterious meaning that emerges when three become one.
In Hebrew, the letter H has rich symbolic significance:
There are other interpreters who say the Hebrew letter H resembles a ladder. So many meanings. So many possible interpretations. We must climb the ladder of writing towards our yearning, which has many names and no name. There is a time to be silent, and a time to speak. Maybe though, the only silence worth speaking of is that which allows the other to speak, to breathe, to sigh, to reveal. The silence that follows questions such as, “Who art thou?”—“How art thou?”—”Where art thou?”—and listens attentively even if there is no response to speak of.
Breath. Behold. Sigh. Sight.
Shhhh. The hearth. Earth transformed into a gathering place of warmth where fires do not turn bodies into ash and breath into smoke. Breath. The letter that allows us to breathe, that allows language to breathe. A letter that allows the ear to hear.
When letter is combined with letter, that is game with game, the obscurity of the form reveals the clarity of a sound, and this slow clarity opens the way to a meaning which has a form. Three letters turn into a door or a dwelling. Thus obscure letters, which have no value when separated, construct a house when joined together. (Mahmoud Darwish, Absent Presences)
The H teases us. To speak or not to speak, that is the real question, the question of the real, for we have no choice but to be. We cannot not be. But is this an historical moment, a historical moment, or an ahistorical moment? Shhhhh. We don’t yet know how or why, so we can only speak of who. We must tell the stories that will allow history to be written, that will give voice to the silenced, that will give names to the nameless.
The Devil is out to stop history; he is the enemy of narrative and so of the freedom of persons to shape their identity over time.
Thus writes Rowan Williams, of Dostoyevsky’s Devils.
“Who now remembers the Armenians?” Hitler is reported to have said, though historians debate whether that is fact or propaganda. Who will be able to write history when artifice rules the world? But we must remember. We must tell the untold stories, find the words, invent them if we must, but redeem the narrative.
History, especially that of people history was designed to exclude, can no longer afford to escape the uncomfortable embraces of all our kin. Critical and reflexive ways of thinking and knowing must become the standard. Queer history must stop being a contradiction and become an imperative. History as we know it must be destroyed.
So writes Ben Miller, reviewing Jennifer Evans’ book, The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism. Have we not destroyed enough in our making of history? Are we not sick to death of imperatives? How can that which is queer, subversive, written and read against the grain, become the standard? Those who queer history can never become the standard, for the standard is determined by the victors who write history. Those of us with no history must be tellers of tall tales, like little children whispering stories to each other in darkness while the adults tell us to hush, be quiet, go back to sleep.
Beyond its solipsistic sexual parodies, the queering of history has an absolute duty to the voiceless, to what Williams calls “the labor of conserving life in small particulars, a commitment to human history not as a grand project but as the continuance of a vulnerable localized care.” (p. 24) Shhhhh. Whisper in the margins. Break apart the silences. Stay awake, and if you cannot stay awake, talk in your sleep and let your nightmares speak, but let your dreams respond. The last word belongs not to futility but to futurity, not to despair but to hope.
I end with some more scribblings drawn from that bag of fraying scraps that might yet make a patchwork quilt large and warm enough to allow us to snuggle beneath it around the earth-hearth of our shared humanity.
One of Kafka’s dreams: He is telling us in a complex way about our inability to desire what we desire—the secret. Our difficulty and our inability. … What makes us flee, what makes us come running down the mountain, what no man, no prophet could ever do, is look straight at God, look him in the eye. This is a metaphor. It’s looking at what must not be looked at, at what would prevent us from existing, from continuing our ordinary, domestic lives, and what I call, for better or worse: “the truth.” (Hélène Cixous)
“Transformation” by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh:
I haven’t written a single poem
in months.
I’ve lived humbly, reading the paper,
pondering the riddle of power
and the reasons for obedience.
I’ve watched sunsets
(crimson, anxious),
I’ve heard the birds grow quiet
and night’s muteness.
I’ve seen sunflowers dangling
their heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman
had gone strolling through the gardens.
September’s sweet dust gathered
on the windowsill and lizards
hid in the bends of walls.
I’ve taken long walks,
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.
You can listen to Pádraig Ó Tuama discussing this poem in one of his Poetry Unbound podcasts at this link.
Adam Zagajewski (1945 - 2021) was a Polish poet born into a Catholic family in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine). The family were expelled from their home and exiled in Poland after the Soviet occupation, in the year of his birth.
Mahmoud Darwish (1941 - 2008) was a Palestinian poet born into a Muslim family, whose family fled from their home and whose village in Western Galilee was destroyed during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war to make way for the State of Israel.
Hélène Cixous (born 1937) is a French Algerian who was born in Algeria to a German Jewish mother who had fled the Nazis, and an Algerian Jewish father whose family had migrated from Spain and Morocco.
I have stitched these three voices into this patchwork of language because they are seers whose writings embody their stories, which constitute the history of our times. In their ambivalent relationship to the traditions of faith they inherited, they represent the persistence of language, the resistance of the personal narrative to all nihilistic tyrannies, to all rationalising debates. This is the resistance that Williams discovers in Dostyevsky:
Faith and fiction are deeply related—not because faith is a variant of fiction in the trivial sense but because both are gratuitous linguistic practices standing over and against a functional scheme of things. The gratuity of faith arises from its character as response to the freedom of the creator as unexpectedly encountered in the fabric of the world. The gratuity of fiction arises from the conviction that no kind of truth can be told if we speak or act as if history is over, as if the description of what contingently is becomes the sole possible account of language.
Shhhh. Speak quietly. Speak gently. Speak kindly. But speak.