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Diane Glancy
A FIELDBOOK OF TEXTUAL MIGRATIONS
Ta pollai teileafoin
ag bagairt orm.
Telephone poles threaten me.
—Nuala ni Dhomhnaill,
Maidin sa Domhan Toir Oriental Morning
1. In a Field Where Meanings Quantitate
I do not speak Cherokee, but
when I read the language, I see the spaciness of words to make meaning. To
stretch across the possibilities of what could be said. Not limiting it.
The telephone, for instance: di-tla-no-he?-di-(i)
They (words) made of (or placed on) the wind (or air) have been brought to one place
to be used.
That descriptive noun, which contains verbs and other
parts of speech, makes the telephone familiar. It uses the natural elements of wind
(or air). The old ways are embedded in technology. The same principles of trust and
reciprocity hold. The conduits still connect.
In another instance of the roominess in the Cherokee
language, I read a sentence which assures that artificial lights work as well as
natural light: di-gi’-ga-ge a-le di-tse-yu:-s-d(i) da:-gi-(ha) di-tsv’-s-di
I have some red and green lights. Or, plural non living red and plural non living
green them I of indefinite shape have non living to be turned on with. (Taking
several lines in English to say what can be said in Cherokee in one.)
In general (though Indian languages are different)
Indian languages (in general) are often an abstraction of the pragmatic. An
arrangement of words which makes them heard in different directions. A migration
of making it said. Of it being heard.
tsu’-tla ni-ga-we:-s-gv ga-tv’-gi?-(a) Fox just spoke it I am hearing.
The fox just spoke it. It I am hearing. The one it
ties the two participants together. You see the language does what it also is doing.
It is spoken for grouping. A reciprocal reciprocity.
ha’-l(i)-s-du-tlv’-ga Bend yourself on something.
i-da-nv’-ni-da Let’s be sitting around.
That’s what it is to make an easement. To share a place
where talking can happen. For the purpose of refielding. For understanding. For making
the adjustments which survival adjusts.
2. A Field Where a Heritage Is Split
What do you do with a mixed-blood
heritage other than being a sitting duck in the water for those who want to expel
your voice from what they consider their boat?
I grew up in my mother’s white family. I felt my difference everyday.
If I say I am an Indian part, what do I do with the
white? And what do I do with the hollowness where the Cherokee language should have been?
I can say I remember the sound of something like wind
coming out from both sides of the tongue (thlu). I remember the way my
father said double ll’s (such as million). The way the word flapped in his mouth.
I remember something like, go whay la or doe dah gah ho.
But the sound of language in my ear is English. What I have
from the Cherokee is the possibilities of meaning. The arrangements of thought.
I know instead of separate words, there are clumps of
words that connect in different ways. I know Cherokee words are spoken differently
on different occasions. And the spelling of words is up to the one who is spelling.
3. Locations
As if Columbus arriving to America.
There were inhabitants on the land
but they could be unthorned.
The pilgrims could establish
their own centeredness they could claim
as theirs what is already inhabited
as though it hadn’t.
They came with their cavalry maneuvers
of language. They dislodged the lodgepoles of Indian languages. They dismantled
meanings from a continent.
It was their disruption of languages.
It is to be Indian. To be dewinged. As if deplaned.
Just when you think you’re going somewhere.
To be Indian is to know the loss of language. It is
a longing for that moveability. For the words stranded from their strandedness.
(Stranded as in yarn. Not standed by itself until someone comes.)
To lose words that serve as a functional. To be
delanguaged is a recitrocity. It has ramifications.
If English itself is a stretchy language, as I have
heard, imagine what it would have been with the otherness of the languages it
met. Without the interfuss of them. Which is their absence.
Without them, the doors of connections to other
possibilities are tightly shut. s-da-ya da-s-du-ha di-s-du?-di, which is said
by saying, closely closed closers.
The placement of English on the continent was a
four-pronged caltrop. No matter how it was placed on the ground, one prong always
stuck up. To prevent the walking of cattle or horses.
Those who came brought their pronged instruments to
stick in the hoof or in the mouth.
Putting the languages into the English
Melting Pot. I was through school before they took out of the pot. What
clumped that wasn’t stirred because it was the continent’s bedrock.
To know there would not be an idea that would
hold tow rope. And I am now in a field-pond with an insect of voices.
Language is the consciousness of the one who speaks it.
As though America were the place Columbus came. The
pilgrims and emigrants and settlers following. With their refermations and terminates.
I could put English into the Indian melting pot.
Make my attack on syntax. Spell in my own way. Use misappropriate words. Invent
the theory of fluxativity.
4.
In a Field of Indian Languages:
Doors inside a Corridor
the Corridor inside an Entry Way
the Entry Way inside a Room
the Room inside a Museum
At the Weisman Art Museum,
University of Minnesota, I saw a Mixed Media Construction called, Pedicord
Apartments, by Edward and Nancy Kienholz, 1985.
It was an actual apartment entry hall which
had been taken out of its place and displaced in the museum. Inside the entry
hall, there was an adjacent corridor with six doors, three on each side.
As you walked into the hallway and stood at the doors, you could hear the
sounds behind them. A television. A barking dog. A woman crying. A
conversation. Silence. No one home?
As I stood at the last door, I thought I
heard something barely brush the door on the other side. I couldn’t be
sure, but I was momentarily alarmed. What if the door suddenly opened?
Was this mixed media construction a confrontation with some revelation
of the self? I questioned what I was doing. I wanted to leave. What if
I were caught listening? I was aware I was eavesdropping, even though
the rooms weren’t actually on the other side of the doors. Even though
I had to eavesdrop before I could hear, which was part of the construction.
It threw the real upon me. I had
consciousness of myself and the act I was committing. Even though
it was only a construct of mostly what was imagined. The hearer
filled in the missing part, made a connection to what wasn’t.
An entrapment? As tenement living is? A
partial of the actual? Untenable? A told-to-stay-there: ka-no-hu-yu-hi
which is a reservation.
Sometimes I am doing something in my house
and some-place else comes to mind and superimposes itself over what I’m
doing though it seems to have no apparent relationship. As though it were
the reality going on and what I was actually doing was trapped in the
memory of a place I had been years ago.
Something like that is what an Indian (Cherokee) language is.
5. to-tsu’-hwa the Cardinal
As though I stand at the old language and listen.
Tsi’-s-qua u-ga’-no-wv da-yu’-ni-lo:-sv a-ni-no-hi-lo:-ga
Birds south from coming on their way are flying.
You think the bits of paper she brings
from the bakery would hold water,
the nest like a half globe in the branch.
Is she building a bowl in which her eggs will float?
Does she think the earth will open?
And a flood will carry off her language unless she teaches them?
6. Over Who Will Reign Chief of Words
Indian languages (in general) speak in another.
A poetrix of language.
They are gathered, beloved.
The pilgrim fathers. The reservests. They came to worship.
They didn’t know how close.
I-tse Ka-no-ge:-dv Da-tlo-hi-s-tv New Pronouncements as
He Went About. That’s the way to say the New Testament in Cherokee. The spaciness.
The adaptability ongoing. More than making it up as you go.
There is a written language that was invented on this
continent. A little burst of something unnoticed. An alphabet which is a syllabary,
which is a letter for each syllable, because Cherokee syllables end in vowels.
di-tla-no-he?-di-(i) (the telephone). But it is a whole language written here
and now, rather than over centuries and continents, like English.
I have a visage of that burst. That blast. That
vent. I’m going to town now. I can separate one letter from another. Or parts
of words from the others. So that in con(found)ing there is a found separate
from the cun and the ing at the start and finish of the word. It is the Cherokee
influence of knowing how many things can mean. When one is confused, there is
always an understanding of something imbedded within it. Even if it is not
always the understanding of what you wanted to understand.
It’s what it’s like to write words I can’t speak.
I have to say them in something other than they are. Because directly is not a route.
As if I said there is a God because there is language.
But that language was crucified.
After the cavalry of calvary, the Cherokee
language was put on the cross and nailed and tombed away and the next day,
rehold. The tone was moved away. The whole grass mowed and the new day
rumbled, it is risen.
It is gone for me, as far away as if in heaven, but
its life is in the thoughts behind my words.
Acknowledgment to Beginning Cherokee,
Second Edition, by Ruth Bradley Holmes and Betty Sharp Smith, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1977
I wrote “A Fieldbook of Textual Migrations” because I’m
always fiddling with language. Trying to decipher it as a confluence. Trying
to make a bridge from the English I speak now to the Cherokee language my
ancestors spoke. The old language is a ghost. It is always in my peripheral
vision. Though I don’t know it, I hear it in places where it isn’t—for
instance, when it reverberates off an installation at the Weisman Art Museum
which became a section in the essay. I never know when it is going to
show up. I also wanted a fieldbook or explanation for the experimental
components of my writing. This is what resulted—a treatise that walks
between the ways of two languages.
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