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The well-worn words to desc when words, a shreds. When board chuckle words” acknow nable. We can Compounded by How can we an

From:

Unanswerable, ragraphs, jux Letters and p tion or lost, “unprecedente There are no coming post-p self. Collect

Special Edition

n and often chosen phrase, “There are no cribe it” might be best chosen for a moment all their weight and affect have been worn to author’s often choose these phrases, we as a e at the irony. The disclaimer “there are no wledges the limit of language, mimesis unattainnot verbalise what is actualised in our life. y the unprecedented, what is there left to say? nticipate what might actualise?

, we still try. Words, often pages or paxtapose the disclaimer of the indescribable. post mail that lie in a liminal zone of transi, remain unanswered. As worn as the phrase, ed” and “new normal” are, I too choose them. better words to describe it; a pandemic and pandemic world as ambiguous as the pronoun ittively, as writers, as readers, as those who use, abuse,and stretch language, we are searching. This special issue will offer no answers. It is a product of the pandemic, a continuation of our past contributor’s insights and perspective, and maybe, a wellspring of questions.

n

There are no words to express our gratitude.

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Kara Worrells-Gutiérrez You are not here Tracking Number: 202103778929

Gerardo Lamadrid Castillo Blame Tracking Number: 202199334821

Kyrie Garlic What if all we have is this?

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Gerardo Lamadrid Blame Tracking Number: 202199334821

Peri Sheinin Dreams Tracking Number: 202188301811

Thomas Nielsen On Words and Deeds Tracking Number:202128385522

John Simone-Vanderpool language is the science of reality Tracking Number: 202113181912

Kory Richardson Immense Power Tracking Number: 202114119124

Evelyn Maguire Q&A Tracking Number: 202193181914

John Shimazaki Language is a chisel Tracking Number: 202143452226

Em Setzer Untitled Tracking Number: 202163422115

Maruice J. Norman No. 1 Tracking Number: 202143438326

Em Setzer Untitled Tracking Number: 202163422115

Dia Brown A list Tracking Number: 202143430026

Kristina Kim Through Dance Tracking Number: 202100318116

Elena Harris-Bauer Legible Tracking Number: 202117718828

Elizabeth B.D. Johnson Wielding Tracking Number: 202116181618

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Elena Kefalogianni Poem Tracking Number: 20210031834

Cameron Markovsky acidnights Tracking Number: 202165675861

Lillian Mottern Skylight Books Tracking Number: 202112312335

Verity Sturm The Newcomer Tracking Number: 202199918062

Chariklia Martalas Sanctuary Tracking Number: 202132154337

Verity Sturm The Newcomer Tracking Number: 202199918062

Chariklia Martalas Sanctuary Tracking Number: 202132154337

Andrin Albrecht Untitled Tracking Number: 202174738168

Bryan Angel Five Poems Tracking Number: 202100040038

Andrin Albrecht Untitled Tracking Number: 202174738168

Ben Papsun How Does Jazz Speak?: An Improvisation Tracking Number: 202164461846

Jack Rodgers Remarks Tracking Number: 202191524670

Emily Cohen Untitled Tracking Number: 202120212056

Matthew Olivas Untitled Tracking Number: 202103182074

Anna Staropoli Spectrum Tracking Number: 202102019858

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[COMPOSED BY] KARA WORRELLS-GUTIÉRREZ

You are not Here

After 2020 I am your imagined tree falling in the forest, now.

Can you not hear?

Maybe not, I guess it makes sense; After all, you are not here.

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What if All We Have is This?

Rhetoric is dialogic, existing in a shared space between self and other. And I think that’s the realm of thought and emotion.

It’s a shared space neither of us can fully interpret or internalize or understand.

Is pain dialogic? Does it exist between people? In a shared space?

Or is it individualized? We can only ever share pieces of our thoughts, representations and manifestations, but the rest is buried deep down inside and the only way to draw it out is with the right words at the right times.

But what if we don’t have the right words at the right times? What if all we have is the moment we exist in and the thoughts that present themselves?

This is how we share what we can’t say.

—Kyrie Garlic

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This past year, I wrote about my life. I wrote about my anxiety. I wrote about my comfort and joy. I wrote in a little corner of the world in the smallest state in a smaller space. I was small.

But my dreams were big and they grew and they grew and they blew my door open and spilled onto the hardwood floor. I chased them down the stairs and into the dining room where I blew out my twenty-first birthday candles under the golden chandelier. I chased my dreams into the living room where they hid behind the couch while I consumed episodes of Parks and Recreation and held my childhood in a bowl of cinnamon oatmeal. My dreams sat next to me on the couch as I molded memories of yesterday into possibilities of tomorrow. I chased my dreams to the front door until they slipped out beneath the crack… and left me alone in the place where I began.

—Peri Sheinin

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language is the science of reality but meaning is to understand that which exists between words the one who speaks the loudest powers perception and perception is the most fallible truth perception is the most powerful truth

—Simone John-Vanderpool

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r/the_foundationalist • Posted by u/bowd_eic on December 31, 2020 5.25 k

What power does language hold?

11.7 k comments

Award

u/evelyn_maguire • tracking no. 202193181914 A: This past October, Mike Davis, a prolific writer, political activist, and receiver of the MacArthur grant, visited my university to deliver a talk entitled, “California Burning: The Apocalyptic Trinity of Climate Change, Alien Plant Invasion and Exurbanization.” It was the first (virtual) event I had attended since starting my MFA in Prose the month prior, and I came to it with expectations.

I wanted to be reassured. I wanted to hear that what I was doing — searching for a way to approach climate catastrophe through literature — was effective, that it meant something. I wanted to hear those words from Davis, someone who had spent his career dedicating words to our dying planet.

The talk opened with the ominous question, “How can you sleep when death is around the corner?” and offered a significant history, both scientific and political, of the invasive species that have found destructive purchase in California, the migration patterns of low-income Californians, the inaction of proper federal land management, and how these forces combine to spark the wildfires that have devastated millions of acres. And, Davis pointed out, the carnage was likely to continue, as little steps had been taken to mitigate the damage. The topic was somber. The prevailing mood was somber.

After Davis finished, the moderator gave a bit of a strained laugh, and commented, sarcastically, how we had certainly ended on a positive note.

u/evelyn_maguire A: But during the Q&A at the end of the lecture, Davis spoke on the subject of hope. Following a question regarding the advocacy and revolutionary-minded Generation Z, Davis smiled — one of the first smiles of the lecture — and talked a bit about his high school-age children, their hopes and dreams. “I think anything short of a utopian imagination is a kind of treason to the future right now,” he said.

So what else can writers do but imagine better worlds? What can we, as people who are bearing witness to a sixth extinction, to rising sea waters, to a growing, ravaging gap between the world’s wealthy and poor, do but craft a better world — and hope that someone reads it?

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the power of language lies in its ability to grant us even the most temporary moments of human connection. while we have the spectrum of sensory experience at our disposal, we are most explicit through language. life often feels like grasping in the darkness but for the occasions on which one understands another through language. some of the most meaningful human connection i found in the past year came at the end of december, during a writing group i was a part of. these were people i had never met before, and had no information about, with the exception of the writing that they shared. we connected through some of the most intrinsic details of the human experience - our ideas of love, hate, grief, our relationships to our parents, to our lovers, how we see the birds outside our house and who they make us think of - without needing to see each other, or touch each other’s skin.

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Through dance, I’ve learned how language can transcend tongue. lips, and mouth. Open palms and arched spines can speak in blasting volumes too. A collarbone can be a sentence. A toe can be a novel. Every body, still or moving, has a kind word to offer. A song to sing. A ‘thank you’ to take and give back. This year, we witnessed a mass symphony of language hurl the streets and speak against a plague of wretched violence. Weaving limbs and pounding chests spoke and spoke and spoke. Some saw their audacious loudness and said: I do not want to listen. Others couldn’t stop breathing in all the urgentness. There were hearts, real bloody muscles, whose beat was instructed toward a different direction. From one step came the whisper: I understand now. You. Me. Us. We are a sacred language, flesh honored by all the beautiful bodies before us. Bodies that were broken, torn, and beaten. Silenced for the simple sweetness of wanting to live through song.

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Wielding

Elizabeth B.D. Johnson Language wields the power to convey meaning, but also to reflect truths about those who wield it. More than that. The power of language, this past year, for the country, for me personally, lies in its ability to rouse. It is a persuasive tool. Therefore, it matters very much who employs it.

How. And who listens. Language is many things. In 2020, I saw-language as a weapon language as healing language as a bridge language as a divide but always, language as a reflection.

Words. Sentences. Stories.

They all came out broken, the jagged shards of a shattered mirror. Half the United States was trying to look in at itself and ended up halved and halved again. This country was already a great divide, built on the cracking bones of problems that evolved and people that wouldn’t.

In every broken piece of mirror was a reflection. Of the nation, of its mechanisms, of people and their intentions and their innerworkings, of myself.

This past year, I was trying to look in at myself and I couldn’t see the whole picture. My words reflected in so many different directions. They fell from my mouth and my pen without regard for their place on the page or in the world.

And the spaces between shards were sharp silences of so much darkness.

action and on account of their words.

The year 2020 was a shattered mirror of language.

Language is all at once For the country. For illusionary and revealing, friends and family and reflecting truths about those who no longer rest the speaker no matter the in either category. For me façade or image those same personally. In the consewords work to maintain. quences of language, one In a sense, no one can may come to find meaning hide behind their words. in the shards. In the siThe words will mimic the lent spaces between them. person. A lie from the liar. When language broke Calming reassurances from down this past year for me, the healer. Fragmented I was able to slowly move phrases and fractured ilback through all the pieclustrations from the hurt es. Cuts. Blood. Scars. The and the confused. words and the reflections they reveal are painful and Language is the start, the healing (not always at the spark. Of war, of healing, same time). There is someof understanding, of rething in the act of piecing claiming. The dawn of actogether all the shattered tion. If words are the mirparts. Not to be whole ror, action is the light that again. Rather to find some feeds the reflection. Where understanding, some aclanguage goes, action folceptance or rejection, and lows. Or the inaction, just to create a new reflection. as glaring. A person is seen, then, by light of their

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Things I didn’t dare to say.

Couldn’t say. Didn’t know how to say. All broken and scattered over the floor.

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[COMPOSED BY] GERARDO LAMADRID CASTILLO

Blame Remember February when everyone was blaming China for COVID and attacking their Asian neighbors like they did in 2001, and in 1941, and every other time, too?

Remember how we don’t do that anymore?

How Trump never once called COVID “Kung Flu”?

How we’re best friends with China now? And with Iran?

With each other--all these “fine” people on both sides?

Remember how 2020 was the year we finally solved racism?

Remember?

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On Words and Deeds Thomas Nielsen

“’Tis a kind of good deed to say well: / And yet words are no deeds.” Deeds show the heart behind one’s words, as Shakespeare’s Henry VIII observes.

Absent deeds, words are slippery things, capable of being contorted for self-interested ends. We have borne witness to policemen who pledge to ensure “safety,” leaving unsaid that their concept of safety is murdering innocent citizens they perceive as a threat. We have seen politicians who proudly claim to be “pro-life,” but remain silent when asked to support policies beneficial to kids outside the womb, like education and universal childcare.

And many of us have cut off friends and family members who swear they aren’t racist but support a president who indisputably is. When people say one thing and do another, words lose their power and the society grows all the more fractured and mistrustful. It’s a truth highlighted by Feste, who in Twelfth Night observes that “a sentence is / but a cheveril glove to a good wit: how quickly the / wrong side may be turned outward!” This is the double-edged sword of language. Unbuttressed by deeds, words are pliable; they can be molded to mean contradictory things, fomenting skepticism and division in the process.

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But coupled with deeds, words can strengthen and connect us. I witnessed language at its most powerful when I attended a Black Lives Matter protest this past summer and joined thousands of other marchers shouting for justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and rallying against the systemic racism inextricably engrained in police forces nationwide. I observed language wielding its awesome strength when the Supreme Court, in a decision bringing together both conservative and liberal justices, ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act forbids workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status, instantly changing the lives of millions of people. And I felt language in all its glorious intensity when I found an old letter from my best friend, who passed away three years ago, telling me I should always believe in myself, and broke down crying because even after death, her love for me shined through in her carefully-written cursive script. We are faced with a choice: to speak opportunistically, with no regard for abiding by our words, or to recognize the power of what we say and harness it, together with action, to rebuild our splintered society into something better, closer, and more compassionate.

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Language holds immense power...

Language holds immense power. One reason is because language is much more than words. It is letters, numbers, figures, gestures, and maybe even more than that! When I hear the word language, the first idea that comes to mind is communication. Both language and communication are very powerful. Growing up, my mom would often remind me that how we use language is just as important as what we are using it for. Her exact words are, “It’s not what we say, it’s how we say it,” and the older I get, the more this makes sense. Consider mom’s advice as just one example of the power language holds. The way we frame, convey, and interpret language influences not only our thinking, but also our feeling and emotion. It is almost magical, the way it influences our perceptions of the reality in which we live and how we feel about ourselves.

Another example of the power language bears is in how it can be used for or against one’s well being. Take the phrase, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”-- does this phrase flex the power of language? I think so. When we say those words, we are using affirmative language to protect ourselves from abusive language, are we not? It seems circular to say it that way, and I hope that doing so doesn’t leave your head spinning for too long.

My gramps used to say that language allows us to express how meaningful things really are to us, which in my experience, creates this super-combo effect of making both the language and the things more meaningful at once. That is also very powerful. Power, however, is a double-edged sword. I say this because power can be abused or misrepresented by anyone, and in some ways, so can language. A lot of 2020’s events (at least in the United States) became very stressful in relation to the misrepresentation

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of language. A lot of important messages were lost in translation multiple times when it came to responding to COVID-19, and it was really connected to the fact that no one in power knew what to do, and didn’t want to openly admit it. It might have been worse to tell the masses, “Even doctors don’t know what to do,” anyhow, because fear and panic could have risen to worse conditions from those words alone. The fear and panic were bad enough the way they were.

Do you see the power of language in these uncomfortable, yet honest details and expressions I am making?

We use language as both a tool and a resource to lessen the ubiquitous ambiguities of reality, and the viral nature of the COVID-19 pandemic nearly took that from our collective consciousness. I won’t even go into the United States 2020 Presidential Debates-- it is clear that language has such an immense power that it can either trap us or set us free. My final question and closing remark on this topic is: How can we connect with the power language holds in a way that liberates?

Inez Tan, the professor at University of California Irvine, helped me learn how to liberate myself through the power of asking questions, which I must point out, is different from seeking answers. With that in mind, How can we connect with the power language holds in a way that liberates.

A big shout out and special thank you to Mom, Gramps, Inez, and The Foundationalist!

—Kory Nathaniel Richardson

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Language is a chisel often used by unscrupulous sculptors to form rigid faces through blemished division.

—John Shimazaki

Languag

—Mau

ge endures.

urice Norman D r. An tho ny Fa uc i . S t a c y A b ra ha ms . Dona ld Trum p. AOC. Joe Bi d e n. A l i s t c oul d b e c o n ti nue d f urt he r a nd f urt he r w i t h na m e s o f v o ic e s t ha t ha ve p rove n i nf l ue nt i a l in d i re c t i ng t hi s p a s t ye a r’s p oli t i c s whi c h ha s t ra ns l a t e d t o our he a l t h c a re. Who s e lang ua g e w e, a s i nd i vi d ua l s , c h o s e to li s te n t o, i s a n i nc re d i b l e d e t e rm ine r o f w h a t w e d o a nd w ho w e t rus t .

T hi s t e nd e n c y ha s b e e n w i t h us s i nc e b e f o re w rit t e n w ord . L a ng ua g e i s a s p owe rf ul a s e n tro p y, a nd i t i s up t o us t o p ut i n the e n e rg y f or s ha re d und e rs t a nd i ng.

—Dia Brown

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ATTN: ELENA HARRIS-BAUER interpolate: to insert words into a text, especially in order to give a false impression as to its date; to alter (a book or text) by insertion of new material. interpellate: (of an ideology or discourse) to bring into being or give identity to (an individual or category); precept where a subject is enjoined to respond to the address of a specific ideological system.

To interpolate/interpellate both conceptually support the process of bringing an entity into relation—to call something into being and to give it the structured security of relational definition within a matrix of other like and unlike things. All identities are built in this way—the intercalated nature of our social, political and geo-ecological futures are tied to the living process of our triangulating co-identities. And technology is the solution where these meet.

There is a simultaneous sense of awe and a halting, white-knuckled trepidation in my father’s attitude towards the apps on his phone. When he holds one for too long, provoking that jittery shiver-in place effect, he is visibly unsettled. The inevitability of technological mediation is banal to me in a way it isn’t to him; I, along with my generation, have accepted this certainty, because we grew up with it and because we have to. My father’s respect for the huge power of technology sustains an undercurrent of intimidation, mark of the emotional resistance and practical clumsiness of a user assimilating the virtual in mid-life. But it might be plainer said that the virtual is assimilating him.

Congenital to my Boomer father’s experience with technology is an alienation that we who grew up already submerged in the medium don’t experience. We have assimilated; we recognize technology as an ineluctable piece of human culture, and have accepted its compulsory management in almost all aspects of our collective experience. Its various interfaces are the surfaces upon which we live out our lives. My father, in his hesitancy, is resisting a shift that has already happened, and finds himself suddenly surrounded: our world is already determined by technology.

Even though his business is in videography, involving the complex equipment needed to capture video in 3-D, my dad sees the digital as separate from “life.”

He describes the world of human experience as divided

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into three categories: the mental, the physical or embodied, and the virtual. Watching me swipe, shark-like, through a stream of Tinder users engendered this meditation, in which I heard the reaction of a discomfited user-subject, uneasily adapted to the uncertain demands of techno-culture. But the virtual is not separate from “life”; the digital is a multidimensional solution within which we are all invisibly suspended. It is both a methodology and an infrastructure, a mycelial network of human information and intelligence, the system of autonomous logic that undergirds and supports our culture. The virtual is very much present in “life.”

Co-piloting my Tinder session, my dad remarked on the disposability of the profiles, which he considered a degradation. This is a compulsive criticism often leveled at Tinder. But I see something else in the feed, which is the endless flow of interpellation the Tinder stream represents. Each user my profile encounters represents an offer, a posture, a provocation: each, a possibility for a specific form of address, promising a particular union of separates. Tinder replicates and makes surface-level the bombardment of interpellations sociopolitical life is constituted by; each profile proffers a particular form of regard, sourced from the human user somewhere behind the profile.

Tinder swipes are expedient in a way worldly engagements so often aren’t: there are two answers, Left or Right, Yes or No. Tinder offers a possibility to rise to

meet the gaze of a desiring Other, and a uniquely decisive chance to engage or to decline engagement. The neatness and supposed sterility of this virtual “contact” is grounds for my father’s critique; but it is also a ripping of the veil, a demystification of what, in “life,” is tangled and obtuse. All things in our environment demand our attention and seek to engage us. As organisms in a poly-purpose ecosystem working in the various dimensions my father mentions—digital, physical, psychological—we are constantly being addressed by the other entities in our environment. Tinder is peculiar in that it offers transparency: entreatment-as-such.

In navigating the immersive flow of other users, it presents a clear question: Do you accept the terms of this regard? Do you submit to being brought into relation, at this moment, through this medium? Do you recognize yourself in the call, and do you answer?

Tinder successfully makes “flat” a multidimensionally complex plane of engagement and interaction.

It is fluent in the language of human need (Connection!

Recognition!) and translates this into an interface legible by its users (representing the side of the mental and physical) and its strains of constitutive code (the virtual) alike. It makes startlingly bare, though no less complex, the technological topologies that run like tracks under the surface of our lives, translating our intimate humanity into the slick language of data slots.

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I like Tinder because it acts like text: it is a transcript of what is ineffable about human existence, which it puts into language anyway. Tinder transacts less in words than in a subtle—but straightforwardly legible—cultural script, encrypted as a flow of data. It foregrounds the question of representation, baldly reminding that representation is no different, ultimately, from language, from detached code, from the moments of ontological stillness in forever shifting and reconstituting self-concepts. In a world so thoroughly made of coded signals, and in lives lived out across multidimensional digital planes, our virtual self-representations are inseparable from non-virtual “life.” The thickness of our world, in all its material and immaterial instances, is in the poly-representations we produce, in the data shed by convulsive self-definition and the material constantly thrown off by relational consolidations and combustions.

I understand very little about technology; I only know that my life is immersed in it, and that I am native to it, made subject by it, fluent in its particular tropes and dialects. I like technology as a metaphor—the digital is a convenient, if conventional, analogy for the unscripted and spontaneous, but somehow predetermined, range of possibility for engagements of various kinds. It is the amniotic fluid incubating the contacts that birth, format and recreate human social topographies. Technology is not unlike language, really. It is

both visible and not; it has material dimensions which emerge, iceberg-like, from an ocean of submerged information, which conceals its deeper and much larger proportions.

I am part of a large and growing corps of people willingly made data. As Tinder users fluent in the slang of our techno-capitalist environment, we are ready to answer its subtle prods and provocations. We’re primed for it. Our language is one of symbols and signs, encoded by the digital realm we inhabit. The translation of human affairs into data, into stored and sorted sets, is the inevitable consequence of lives given over to the huge power and self-renewing appeal of the digital environment. My data touches your data…we are of a type.

As Donna Haraway predicted, and warned, “The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines, they do not dominate us or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.” The massive intelligence loop that we call artificial and that brought me to you gives us a common, if abstracted, language of address.

We are all its transcript, and through the medium we become legible to one another.

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In times of trouble, language helps us breath… Writing poetry was my avenue to escape the harsh reality of 2020 and rediscovering the little things that still matter. Those “things” were… nature. 2020, the year that took so much from me (my pet died, I got covid…), yet it brought me something too; it reminded me to slow down and… breathe, giving birth to the poem breath. Ironically it’s meant to be read in one breath, teaching us exactly the opposite…

Breath Deserted streets.

Empty seats.

Lonely people.

Sick season.

No food.

Bad mood.

Blossom trees.

Light breeze.

Clear skies.

Hopefully eyes.

Helping hand.

Fertile land.

Take a breath.

Just one more breath.

There is life even in death.

—Elena Kefalogianni

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“We are all goldfish,” is what the local poet said when I asked her to sign my book at the bookstore in Los Feliz. That and, “can I make this out to anyone special?” I told her no, just me, it’s just me, but I’m happy alone because I’m in this bookstore and it’s going to rain tonight and wash all the smog away.

I didn’t say the last part but, being a poet, she probably implied it.

She had a ring on each finger and she smelled like apricots and and even though I couldn’t see myself because they do not have mirrors in the bookstore in Los Feliz, I knew my cheeks were pink and my eyes were glassy grey in the way that they are when it is late and the city is seeping into my brain.

There were people and people and people in the bookstore; it was filled to the brim and spilling out the edges and the light was warm and there was a tree in the middle of the room which you could sit beside it if you wanted to, or hug.

I didn’t press her on the goldfish but I think she meant that we’re all kind of living in a fishbowl.

Living in a fishbowl and trying not to sink.

I wish I’d asked her to write me a poem. I didn't know I’d be gone so long.

—Lillian Mottern

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[COMPOSED BY] CHARIKLIA MARTALAS

Sanctuary Language is the power of reality. Sometimes it feels like stepping into the world of language is to step into a room made of an impossible number of windows. Depending on how the language is used different parts of reality open up their view to you. Some of the windows were the windows of the news,looking out to a world of fear, heartbreak, death, anger and injustice. I was looking at a world that was not working. Some of the windows were how my family spoke to me, a view of all the complications and glories of being loved. Last year with the windows of language pulling me in so many different directions of emotions and thoughts, I decided I would build my own window and started my journal again. Word upon word, a scrawl of blue ink to create a window into myself. Sometimes I was scared to look out of the window I built; sometimes it filled me with gratitude at the beauty of the view. But no matter the feeling that came from peering out that window, what I found was that the process of holding language in my hands to create my own view out of words, became a sanctuary. In the midst of a world of turbulence the power of language for me was the power to create a sanctuary of my own. Language is a sanctuary I can turn to every day, every month, every year and for that I am grateful.

T O O t

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Heart Cut

e you ever even ther Once it leaves s a w it et rg fo g to do is the best thin in with rhythm to beg es

d a h never - color chang ed with salt ir a p ff o etter something b against it/ liva press up sa

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es Can I Leave yer li w ra o et H b t a re

g t wha answered estion finally u q st la & t rs though the fi esiege me? which I came? is heart ever b n th a n th ca e d w u o n H more ifts the asks - the chest & g Fridas Kahlo to o rs w T ce e h in p T l g a n of surgic in the painti of herself/

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fo to in ed ve a mouth le nger drives the hu it t ee sw n o dam into music to

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tched a Vide a W I g in n r This Mo n. hest & Eate C is H f o t u O

etting His o of a Man G

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If I Ruled the World

-After Nas’ It Was Written featuring Lauren Hill Miss Hill

I think you sang the world into completion Before you uttered an identifiable word

That sounded like sex working its way Back into genitals

Sounded like the sugar coat of Brooklyn with more bridges than roads

What if the world was already ruled by Those who possess wings?

Every young black male/female jumping off A bridge to get a better look at the sun?

We’d walk right up to the sun hand in hand We’d walk right up to the sun we won’t land So many lyrics mean love than they do weapon

I have yet to witness street performers stand in a

Circle & vomit up bullet casings Teeth pull back the hammer in a steel chamber

measured In a figure 8 outlining the shape of infinity I know I understand your affinity for gemstones

The youngest diamond can kill a man a Million times over & still have 200 million years to go

& for that Miss Hill I don’t blame you For wanting to free all your sons

The news is stuck on every channel Going back before the year I was born

Perhaps it’s best not much rhymes with murder

The ear will follow anything that Sounds like notes falling out of a tuning fork

There’s nothing like the harmony of music before

It is sung Like verses of oceans washing up at our feet daring us to

Jump in Before our father’s or someone dressed like our father’s

Dropped us in a pool & said swim.

5/11/2020

I love the sound

Of gasps turning into fields

Inside the throat I’ll show you a woman

Who can transcribe them all

Before sunrise plants a Seed there The scene outside my bedroom is

Also a garden: My Grandmother

Balancing spoons on her face &

Arms for us to drink from Drink she says & we’d get

Stupidly drunk I love that sense

Of balance My mother’s

Walking rope rooftop To- rooftop, The rest of their body

Jealous of how well their

Feet have aged I love how the rope

Ascending, channels through

each room leading back To the rooms my father’s

Were locked out of; my ear against

The door is their weeping

On the other side I would sit there & listen,

Their tears hitting the floor

Boards a genre of music Until the music

Of my mother’s crying

Out for supper, The harmony They could easily let into a room

Home is where you set the table And eat, they say

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A Poem for My Mother’s

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We would sit at the table

& get beautifully fat Anyone could love

Their mastery of water

They perfected the book Of Matthew & tip

Toed ‘cross the oceans

That drowned my father’s, I love their disobedience

Of clocks. My mother would

Interpret time like how the Rose moves through

A line in a cutting factory; beautiful

When uprooted, en routed or petals lying on the floor When asked, my mother’s

Would tell me the true nature Of flowers, When placed in the pockets

Of the freshly buried, the dead

Just become beautiful Roots -

& to myself I thought,

Now I cannot wait to die

I love their whispers & wails,

their voice falling out a window

In the willow morning

What is more pure than music?

What weighs less than wind?

Every story worth retelling ends

With my Mother’s arms as

Branches, reaching up Towards the highest boughs,

Practically eye-level

to the crucifixion

Anything can bleed

When pressed together

For so long, the

Unanswered morning peeking in

Unclasp your hands I’d tell them, they’d unclasp their Hands & lift gracefully from

Their toes.

My Grandmother & Mother Get Up From The Table To Dance

-With Smokey Robinson & The Miracles

& their hands are first to touch, cupping a voice inside creation - ‘Ooo Baby Baby Ooo Baby Baby…’

My Grandmother leads, my mothers shadow follows - Feet move in a semi-circle cross dark spots in nighttimes circumference.

‘Mistakes, I know I’ve made a few But I’m only human, you’ve made mistakes too...’ & my mother is still crying tears from Lincoln Ave. Chicago, Illinois 1979 My grandmother mouths the words my mother sings, childhood photos fall at their moving feet.

‘I’m just about at the end of my rope but I can’t stop trying… Can’t give up hope…’ & their voices rise to meet the final chorus, strong enough to escape the semi-circle that Holds them. I can see their mouths forming new words, stretching out lyrics -

I can see harmony in mid-air.

‘Ooo Baby Baby Ooo Baby Baby,’

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Though their hands

Were always clasped

In prayer formation

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The Cocoon

(Of silk - of the body that moves it sight unseen) (Of times friendship with liquid what i was before will be broken down by what i am now) (Of dark dementia on the tip of a wing undone) (Proof of ancestors before me tell me i still have time to be beautiful More beautiful in the waiting room of the sun) (Of twilight tucked in the teeth of its predator Reverie & reverence throw paint against canvas in their invisible ink) (Only if you could see me now) (Of swollen figures lost translation

of silk & Bombyx Mori)

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(Those who refuse home are afraid of the dark) (Of skin’s ravel & unravel - vellum veining & vainglorious My birthmarks second draft will resemble paint Drying in the confines of a fresco or expressionist contour study) (O’ plighted pigment threading needles inside the eggs most envious shape Let us again hive a creation under the sun The same way i hang inside this noose to live)

—Bryan Angel

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How Does Jazz Speak?: An Improvisation ATTN: BEN PAPSUN

Jazz musicians will often talk about how they are working on

their “language,” usually referring to a particular form of harmonic vocabulary that entered into American culture with the advent of bebop in the 1940s. “Language” can be a tool to measure the development of a young jazz musician; it is often a brook of fire through which a jazz musician passes in order to earn a speaking role in the improvisational dialogue of competent jazzers. What is curious about language in jazz is that its role is fundamentally different from language as we typically think of it. Language, when it works, is a system of reference; it connects up words to objects or ideas for the purpose of communication. But jazz language, like most musical grammars, is not referential. To play a successful jazz lick is not necessarily to mean something literal by it. And yet, the metaphor of language seems evasively appropriate for jazz music.

Countless jazz greats, including drummer Roy Haynes and tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, have explicitly called jazz a language— bassist, composer, and bandleader Charles Mingus called jazz “the language of the emotions.” Jazz critics almost invariably write about

the effectiveness of an instrumentalist as a function of their ability to communicate through their instrument, to convey a particular message. There is something unavoidable about comparing jazz, whether we are thinking of its internal harmonic or rhythmic logic, or of its affective spectrum, to language. Where, then, does the power of this language come from, if it does not operate in the same way as written or spoken language? How does it communicate to us?

This is a question that has troubled me for some time. I am,

at heart, a skeptic, and the seemingly metaphysical capability of jazz to elude explanation is as tantalizing to me as it is vexing. As much as jazz invites analytical appreciation, it does not seem as though jazz can be completely abstracted down to its analyzable parts. It invites a reverent mysticism, an almost primeval escape from the often formulaic structures of Western classical music. Amiri Baraka once wrote that “A printed musical example of an Armstrong solo, or of a Thelonious Monk solo, tells us almost nothing except the futility of formal musicology when dealing with jazz. [...][E]ach note means something quite in adjunct to musical notation.”1 This observation lands us dangerously close to an age-old dispute in literary criticism: if the text (of jazz, in this case)—the literal transcription of the melodic and rhythmic content of a piece of music—does not yield a work’s meaning, then where exactly can its meaning be found?

I think the best way to answer this question is, to begin with,

1 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), Black Music (William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1967), 19

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a sidestepping of the question. Locating the point of origin of meaning in a text, musical, visual, literary, or otherwise, has been a central debate for as long as we have created art to have debates over, and it is still a topic of contention. But this philosophical impasse overlooks a much richer territory with respect to locating meaning in jazz language, namely the historical tradition jazz owes itself to. This is a tradition born against its will, risen up from the dark underbelly of American modernity, forged out of the barest musical tools of voice and rhythm among the stark and bloodied cotton fields of plantations. If jazz can be said to be a language, its speakers have often been the otherwise voiceless. In lieu of words of protest which would have incited lynch mobs, vocabularies of sound were often substituted, and so literal meaning was sublimated into connotative meaning.

For instance, in the Stono Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina, one of the largest slave revolts in American history, rebels used the West African practice of “drum telegraphy,” beating on drums to broadcast coded rhythmic messages to other slaves.2 This event precipitated the banning of drums among enslaved peoples (to what extent is not exactly known), but the importance of percussive expression continued to manifest itself on plantations in the forms of body percussion, the clapping of jawbones and castanets, and early varieties of tap dancing. In conjunction with the call-and-response and polyphony of work songs, these rhythmic activities laid the foun2

Sullivan, John Jeremiah, “Talking Drums” (Oxford American, Iss. 107, Winter 2019)

dations for the blues as we know it, which in turn formed the basis of jazz as it developed in the early 1900s.

The usage of music as a Trojan horse for inciting resistance did not end with the end of slavery, and took on a different form in the post-Reconstruction era. Nowhere is the substitution of words with sound more visible in jazz than in Charles Mingus’s protest anthem “Fables of Faubus.” The composition was written as a caustic response to Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’s decision in 1957 to send in the National Guard to enforce segregation by physically blocking nine Black teenagers from entering Little Rock Central High School (despite the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of the Supreme Court three years earlier, which declared segregated public schooling unconstitutional). Mingus had initially written mocking lyrics to the tune for his band to shout out: Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em shoot us!

Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em stab us!

Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em tar and feather us!

Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!

Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie.

Governor Faubus!

Why is he so sick and ridiculous?

He won’t permit integrated schools.3 Mingus’s record label, Columbia, found this diatribe unpalatable for commercial release, and due to their demands “Fables of Faubus” 3

Mingus, Charles, Charles Mingus, More than a Fake Book (New York, NY: Jazz Workshop; Distributed by H. Leonard Pub. Corp., 1991), 47

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was released as an instrumental on the album Mingus Ah Um (1959).

Although Mingus would record a version of the tune as he originally envisioned it with a different record label the following year, the creative limitations on the initial recording of “Fables” are illuminating.

During the A section, the glissandos of the tenor sax take on a taunting tone, and the playful articulation of the alto creates a mimetic “Ha! Ha!”; during the menacingly minor B section, the trombone and tenor utter moans of grief beneath a darkly romantic alto lead. The tragic and the comic, which are never more than a hair’s width away from one another in Mingus’s music, are both wrestling for control of the tune.4 The aural effect of the piece is unmistakably one of accusation, of disgust, of condescension. It is a remarkably powerful testament to the poetry one can compose using jazz language.

Encapsulated in jazz is an oral history of the Black American, and as Richard Wright famously stated, “the Negro is America’s metaphor”5—a synecdoche of America’s brutal racist and colonial foundations, as well as the often tragically repressed democratic yearnings bubbling just below the nation’s institutional surface.

Similarly, Martin Luther King, Jr., in his opening address to the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, declared that “in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of 4

As Cornel West observes: “With Mingus, within the black musical tradition, you already have a wrestling with the most sophisticated forms of the comic, and of course I want to stress that the comic is in no way reducible to the humorous or even the satirical. It cuts much deeper, though it often embraces that” (The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 557).

5

Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! Lectures in Europe 1950–56 (Harper Perennial, New York, NY, 1995), 74

modern man.”6 Although jazz is descended from a particular history, its practitioners have almost unanimously insisted on the ability of the music to speak to people of every stripe. If language is the single most recurrent metaphor for jazz, democracy is surely the second most persistent. There is not a person on the planet, after all, who has never had a case of the blues. The musical form of the blues is a particular expression of a universal phenomenon, and this universality imbues the jazz tradition with its communicative power.

So we might find meaning, then, in jazz as it relates to tradi-

tion, a reservoir of cultural memory which overflows into our artistic forms. The notion of tradition is complicated, and is often coupled with a kind of reactionary or conservative politics quite opposite to the liberatory and transgressive drive of jazz. Probably the most influential account of tradition ever formulated comes from American-turned-British poet T.S. Eliot, in his famed 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” He proposes that the artist, in the act of creating something new, must immerse himself (“him” was Eliot’s default) in the whole history of his artform and essentially allow the tradition to speak through him, sacrificing his personality in the process. The introduction of his new work then alters the relationship every pre-existing work of art in the tradition has to the whole tradition itself, and so ensures a continuous dialogue between the past and the present. We have reason to accept the idea, Eliot writes, that 6

Quoted in Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful (Picador, 1996), 194

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“the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”7

On the one hand, Eliot’s concept of tradition powerfully

stresses the responsibility of the artist to do his homework, to familiarize himself with the qualities which have allowed his forebears to succeed artistically before him. This almost filial connection, a genuine kinship felt by the young toward the experienced, is essential to jazz. Many successful jazz musicians go through the rite of passage of apprenticeship—Duke Ellington took on Billy Strayhorn as an apprentice, Charlie Parker took on Miles Davis—and much of the story of success in jazz can be told via musical family tree. There is also a more diffuse kind of apprenticeship present in the general expectation that practitioners of jazz will familiarize themselves with a loose canon of jazz “standards.” On the other hand, Eliot’s tradition emphasizes impersonality, an “escape from emotion” in the service of an objective, timeless tradition.8 This will not do for jazz. An escape from emotion and personality is inimical to jazz, one of the most vitally emotional, intimate, volatile, and above all personal traditions ever to exist. This is where we might consider the criticism of Eliot’s tradition offered by Cornel West, one of the greatest contemporary exponents of the jazz gospel: 7

Eliot, T.S., “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, ed. Frank Kermode and John Hollander (Oxford University Press, 1973), 2015 8

Ibid., 19

We talk about faith and hope and service, so that I am nothing but an extension of a very long prophetic tradition. That is another reason I have a certain concern for tradition, why T.S. Eliot and others mean much to me, even though the tradition he is talking about is very different from the tradition I am talking about. [...] I am deeply concerned about the dynamic character of tradition, except that for me the tradition that I am talking about comes from below and sometimes from beneath modernity. It is a tradition of struggling and resisting, black people’s democratic tradition, whereas the tradition they are talking about tends to be from above.9 West’s critique reminds us of the importance of tradition as a democratic force rather than an authoritarian one. Being connected to the past does not necessitate that we are reverential towards it, or that we empty ourselves of personality to make room for canonical voices.

But as the jazz tradition shows us, canons can function democratically (however imperfectly), especially when they are built from the ground up by working-class artists, and not imposed on the public by an out-of-touch elite.

The movement from “language” to “tradition” in the course of this meditation is telling. Insofar as jazz can tell us something in the way that language does, it is able to convey this message through the prism of cultural norms (i.e. tradition). The communicative power of jazz language does not come from any kind of hermetic essence which links a musical statement up to an idea. For that matter, it is doubtful that written or spoken language functions quite that 9

West, Cornel, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 221

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way either. The various kinds of communication we engage in, from automatic small talk with coworkers, to ambiguous flirtations, to somber confessions of guilt, are experienced through the mediums of their social contexts. These contexts are made up of lifetimes’ worth of accumulated associations, whether deliberately constructed or cobbled together by happenstance. Eliot reminds us that “no artist of any art has his meaning completely alone.”10 Our received traditions of speech, writing, facial expressions, hand gestures, musical cues, dance moves, handshakes, etc., are all a part of this continuum.

Any way in which we receive a communication of any kind is already mediated by the conditions that make it possible for us to interpret the communication at all. Perhaps, then, jazz and language are not as fundamentally different as they first appeared.

Nevertheless, there are areas of expression umapped by language which jazz can help us to navigate; as Hans Christian Andersen once aphorized, “Where words fail, melody may often speak.”11 The key difference between jazz and most other kinds of music, however, is that the speech of jazz is not a recitation; it is a live forum. The essence of jazz lies in improvisation, in the spontaneous creation of new material which nevertheless owes its heritage to a primary source. Jazz has a much more directly conversational nature than any kind of music which is played the same way more than once (after all, 10 11

Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 2014

Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales from Hans Christian Andersen, ed. Ernest Rhys (Edinburgh: Turnbull and Spears, 1907), 258. Often styled as “Where words fail, music speaks.”

the same discussion will almost never take place more than once).

The conversation of jazz is open to hypothesizing, disagreement, miscommunication, and compromise; it allows for rambling, pithiness, and everything in between. Perhaps this is one reason the metaphor for language is so pervasive when describing jazz, and why jazzers always speak of developing your own “voice” and “speaking” through your horn. The language of jazz reaches out beyond conventional language, which explains in part why it is so challenging to describe in words, and why the opinions people have about jazz are commonly fuzzy or underdeveloped. Sometimes it is difficult to tell how a jazz recording makes us feel, even when no one has more direct access to their reaction to the music we do as listeners, and more difficult still to put these feelings into words. And when communication is laid bare beyond the arbitrary systems of signs we wrangle it into, we find at its core the perhaps the most singularly touching and intuitive expressions of humanity.

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r/the_foundationalist • Posted by u/bowd_eic on January 23, 2021 5.25 k

What power does language hold?

11.7 k comments

Award

u/emily_cohen • tracking no. 202120212056 A: Working as a teaching assistant to high school English teachers in Austria this year, I have become well-acquainted with the power of language to connect with others. This is surely not a novel take, but clichés often contain some grain of truth, and this year in particular I have been grateful for the power of shared language to help me explain such baffling concepts as the electoral college to my students. Vice versa, I could see my country from their point of view. In this way, language clarifies and encourages understanding.

I have also, however, observed the power of language to, paradoxically, obscure true meaning.

This was most obvious to me when I discussed the insurrection that took place at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I could have spent the whole class period pontificating about the intricacies and nuances of misinformation and social media algorithms to explain what happened, using all sorts of phrases to hedge my statements and avoid directly blaming any one person or group or thing. When we came to the police’s reaction to the rioters—or lack thereof, when contrasted with their repeated militarized response to peaceful protesters marching for the sake of Black lives this past summer—my students did not hesitate to identify the culprit: “It’s racism,” they said, that simply. I nodded yet still found myself using the same uncertain language to respond: “Yeah, it’s hard to find any other explanation…”

u/emily_cohen A: My familiarity with the language allowed me to circumvent the full truth, the necessity to clearly identify the recurring antagonist in America’s history that has also proved foundational to the country’s development. It allowed me to hide behind language of uncertainty, of politesse, that has permitted the American empire’s survival on a life raft of white supremacy under the guise of ‘civilization.’ Instead of being detrimental to their expression, my students’ less-than-fluent English is in this case a boon. allowing them to cut through the bullshit—it’s hard to beat around the bush when you don’t have the vocabulary to do so—and say it like it is: Racism is at the root of America’s troubles, and it always has been. I would do well to take a page out of their books.

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The little boy with hair the color of changing leaves — dulled grows older and the years meld like the debris of emptied trees the other, he pinches his fingertips together, over and over aga emotions he cannot convey through words. He is a boy who doe nalize everything going on in that muddled, beautiful brain no his happiness through his body, his hands, his face, as he runs open in ecstasy as though he can swallow the air and let it bec burst of wind. We don’t need so many words as we do fingers th our surroundings. Subtle movements — happy flicks of fingert from a thousand mouths in a climate of people struggling to b hands on playgrounds meant for little boys who live in their im

Without forming sentences, this child conveys the joy of harne leaves that fall apart, the wonder of change when the world is much and evolve not at all and listen too little and evolve not almost sounds like clapping.

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d red with flecks of orange and blonde that will turn to brown as he s meeting the grass — picks up a discarded leaf with one hand. With ain. His doctors refer to these claps as “happy”: “happy claps” for all the esn’t speak, he may never speak at all, but for now his fingertips exterobody but him can understand. Without verbal language, he expresses into the wind and collects the leaves that billow toward him, his mouth ome his being. His laughter makes me think the world is as simple as a hat clap, silence in place of speaking just to speak, an ability to listen to tips — are as concise as it gets, more articulate than a thousand words e heard. Too many voices speaking over one another, not enough happy maginations.

essing all that is dying, the natural whimsy of branches that fall off and simultaneously evolving too much and evolving not at all. We speak too at all to hear the fallen leaves pinch the grass. When the wind blows, it

—Anna Staropoli

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you wasted away your body while i drank away mine and we both never knew how to brighten up that god-awful british grey that soaked deep into our clothes and our thoughts, did we i begged you to find a way to stay while you begged yourself to find a way to live and i never knew who was more selfish so now that you’re gone i continue to wish you well despite praying that you’ve lost your way and that your soul eventually creeps back to me

—Cameron Markovsky

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the two of us shared a small flat uptown that was filled with our lives and our laments and still it never felt full, did it

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The Newcomer Verity Sturm

I haven’t produced writing since August. This doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. This means I haven’t conceived or pitched or composed or shipped anything for publication since the uneasy end of a remote job in big media.

I left this job with the sense that my vocabulary had shrunk.

You don’t use words like fatuity or chiaroscuro in a news brief, 9-5 Mo-Fri. A whole color spectrum shriveled up and sifted out of my fast-twitch lexicon. Throughout the coldening months, I’ve found myself tap tap googling these words again and again as they pop up in this or that novel/story/ poem. Words I remembered once, recently, knowing. Strangely enough, the “p” adjectives in particular: propitious, prodigious, punctilious. I read, googled, re-remembered, re-forgot, read, googled again. And reader, I still cannot retain them.

At the same time, my body began to experience every sort of LCD-keyboard combination as work. Emailing felt like grading felt like transcribing felt like “writing” felt like going on Zoom making comments on Zoom making comments on Docs making comments on Canvas, making comments that were neither extemporaneous nor insightful. Quantifiable commentary. Texting began to feel like making comments. So I stopped texting people.

The lead block of my NA group reading gestated in the library for nearly eight months before a librarian friend kindly let me back into the building and birth it into print. Between November and January, I produced twelve copies of the last two paragraphs of “What Is the Narcotics Anonymous Program?” in Pantone Warm Red. As these pages came off the press, as I leafed through the rubbery-smelling dozen of their ever-sonot identical series, a certain line started to peel off the page and pierce the space between my eyeballs, a line that had

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*** I wasn’t precise when I said I haven’t produced writing since August. I have produced exactly one writing, in the very literal sense, on the Chandler & Price printing press at my University library. The writing was a group reading from the Narcotics Anonymous (NA) Program titled “What Is the Narcotics Anonymous Program?” This is a sort of writing that belongs to no one in particular, but also to everyone who utters it in church basements and community centers from Oakland to Ypsilanti.

A speaking, really, lowered to writing for the sole purpose of keeping it spoken. And I set this speaking in writing, letter by letter, in Bernhard Gothic Medium 14-point typeface. It took three hours on a March afternoon, and my hands smelled like quarters for two days afterwards. A week later, all of campus shut down.

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never quite struck me in the soundscape of the meetings I was attending, at the time I set the forme:

*** My grandmother died the day after Thanksgiving and I spent the next week writing her obituary. Reader, this is my second imprecision: I produced an obituary in early December. This is a sort of writing, though, that’s more like a compiling. Her many children — my aunts and uncles — sent me lines of memory and pieces of writings. They authored and I organized: youth, marriage, farm, family, community, faith, death. But there was one extant phrase I couldn’t quite place, one so smooth and abstract that affixing it to any sort of category felt like a sullying. I rolled it around in my mouth like a stone:

Since I wasn’t writing or texting people or maintaining a robust vocabulary, there were only a few words in my head that I could use to interpret this. Five, to be exact.

She valued authenticity and humility. *** In a last-ditch effort to hold onto certain friends and family, I have begun sending voice messages in lieu of texts. Reader, this has been revolutionary. There’s a spontaneity in the rhythm of speaking, a flair of improv, that I forgot language

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In the other room, my partner was watching the finale of Survivor season 20 Heroes and Villains. It was down to three finalists: an alpha-male meathead who picked others off one by one til the bitter end, a svelte siren who repeatedly won immunity by winning physical challenges left and right, and a disgruntled mother who spent most of her time maligning the meathead and exerting next-to-zero effort in challenges because, well, she wasn’t an athlete and didn’t particularly care.

Nobody knew how she made it to the final. But I watched the jury, one by one, cast their votes for the disgruntled mother.

The woman who didn’t win one challenge, who was always on the weak end of the alliance. One of the jury members stood up and said, plainly, that he wished he had talked to her more.

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could do. When writing becomes work, spontaneity becomes inefficient. Writing responds by speaking.

A speaking is a stretching of the vocabulary. Words stumble out that I forgot I knew, that my glazed eyes and QWERTY fingers have forgotten in their months under the thick rubble of context collapse. When I push a new word into a sentence on its way out, I more often remember what it means. My body remembers. Pull your teeth and lips around a word. Fit it into your anecdote — a daily challenge. Produce its new music with your familiar tenor. Can you imagine the intimacy?

Remember the sound, feeling of yourself speaking it. I could shiver. How could you forget?

And something else: speaking doesn’t belong to you. It disappears. We can only keep what we have by giving it away. I cannot look at a voice memo, let alone edit or criticize it. When I send a recording, I give away my language. It is more often flawed than not. Sometimes this is the first, maybe only time I speak all day. Humility and authenticity. I thank it, I give it away.

Look: I went to the orthopedics’ earlier this month with a pain, deep in my ankle joint, that I openly struggled to describe. How difficult to articulate an original pain! I started

My language grew absurdly poetic as I worked closer and closer to the felt experience of this thing, my doctor’s expression growing increasingly puzzled. And then, a hunch: maybe, she said, it’s this very specific sort of cartilage damage. At first the MRI came back clean, but she told them to go back, check the bone this time. And there: the jagged edges of damaged cartilage at the bottom of my tibia. She said she only thought of it because of my meandering, bizarre description of the depth of it. She thanked me.

She put me in a boot and now I’m healing.

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somewhere that proved arbitrary, backtracked and added to it, sprinkled some more adjectives on top. I imprecisely described it as a deep thin flare, an internal ache more responsive to pressure than palpation, a bothersome hotness nested in not the X nor the Y but the Z plane of my joint.

They ask me ab silent.

Sure, there ar we already kno and discourse words.

I could elabor French, even L might just as

From:

Over the past proposals, fic peare studies ple I couldn’t

I read some of

What power doe

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6 8

bout the power of language, and I go

re all the clichés, and the things ow: communication and performance and memory and the violence of

rate on them in English, German, Latin if I tried a little, and I well say nothing.

year, I wrote some 800 pages of ction, poems, petitions, of Shakesand song lyrics and letters to peot see because of Covid-19.

f them out loud.

es language have?

I keep writing like a climber keeps climbing when there’s no other way down, frantic that, one of these days, I could find out.

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F

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January 31, 2021

ATTN: JACK RODGERS “Because now I am speaking to you seriously: I am not playing with words. I incarnate myself in the voluptuous and unintelligible phrases that tangle up beyond the words. And a silence rises subtly from the knock of the phrases.

So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this nonword—between the lines—takes the bait, something has been written. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief. But that’s where the analogy ends: the non-word, taking the bait, incorporates it. So what saves you is writing absentmindedly.”1

As 2020 turns, like clockwork, into 2021,

much is made of broken promises. I am struck by a peculiar sort of double history—an amalgamation of counterfactual realities which seems just as tangible as the chronology which will end up in a history book. Its months seem doubly filled—inhabited once by the struggles of isolation and a pandemic, then twice with the specter of memories missed, justice deferred, and events,

imagined then mourned. This parallel past is fueled by an architecture of anticipation which subtly transforms socio-cultural markers into inevitable touchstones by which the passage of a life is measured. In a socio-political register, this same architecture is the scaffolding of our political platforms, parties, and institutions, which comfortably rest their philosophical baggage on centuries worth of aggregated promises—abandoned, forgotten, partially fulfilled. Lately, the potency of these words seems somewhat lessened, as years and seasons come and go. Anticipated moments are scratched out and rewritten later in the calendar—or vanish altogether.

The silence that rises from the knock of phrases seems particularly hollow, like the sound of an empty vessel or a carved-out shell.

We might be tempted to think that we’re

better off without promised futures altogether.

The whole business of promises seems awfully archaic at times, as if a confident forecaster on the news were a modern-day Delphi or a particularly encouraging alert something close to Noah’s rainbow sign. Maybe we are like fish, lured and baited by the inner life of the word, which is also the non-word (like a shadow too long for

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FOUNDATIONALIST PRIORITY MAIL

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FOUNDATIONALIST PRIORITY MAIL

its source). Here, the classic opposition of words and actions rears its head, painting every moment of speech as a moment when things are un-done. Plato’s old diatribe against the poets suggests that promises, like all pronouncements, are listless and desiccated, insufficient representations of things which are just too real to be captured by any combination of phrases, no matter how promising.

But broken and empty words do add up

to something after all. Put poetically, the fragile skeleton of the future is only held together by the quivering membrane of promises. Like a skin, it binds all of those mysterious organs which constitute the process of living, and, if left exposed to the world would cease to pulse.

This is to say that the veracity of a prophecy is always an insufficient metric by which to judge it. This is because, generally speaking, the most sacred function of prophecy is not to predict the future, but rather to open it; not to fix time, but to crack it apart—like the primeval egg of Orphic cosmology. Expressed differently, the completion of a promise is, ultimately, only the afterimage (whether triumphant or frustrated) of a process which begins with a rupture in the field of the

possible. Broken promises are the recalcitrant waste in Adorno’s negative dialectics, which reveals in wreckage a mirror-image view towards redemption. And the heartbreak and betrayal that comes along with a broken promise (a vanished future) is the same pain which inevitably occurs when the present, like a reluctant snail looking for a new shell, ventures along its solitary way into the great landscape of all the times which it is not. There is something fragile and wonderful about the un-done, which can never be accomplished and is wholly alien to the act but is intimately familiar to the word. And as for that which is un-done and ought to be done, we need not see its unfulfilled promise as the failure of the word, but instead as testament to language’s ability to venture into that temporal realm which no presentness can touch—and return a glimpse of a different world which fills us with longing.

When all is said and much is left to be done, we should consider that the heavy horizon of the future is nothing more than the aggregate of promises kept, promises broken, and promises forgotten.

Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva, 15.

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Language – like the one mother sp Too busy learning, writing, recitin habitual Spanish sounds to shape that kind I’d grow up to speak.

It’s a language I’ve sponged the back of food service jobs with by typing in Google translate beca words that have shaped me. I’ll se my characters speak, and they’re be. Spanish 1 – 4 passed by the sk power in “te amo, te quiero, ching

They mean We’re here, still survi

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peaks but never taught me how. ng, twisting her tongue against e proper English words like

up with nuance and swears, in the rest of the Latino staff, or ause I cannot myself spell the earch up translations for what all more fluent than I’ll ever kin of my teeth, but still I wield gara, y no te olvidaré”

iving, and I see you.

—Kory Nathaniel Richardson

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The Foundationalist is a literary journal that welcomes undergraduate submissions of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and literary analyses twice a year. It is edited by undergraduate students at Bowdoin College, University of Iowa, and Yale University and publishes regularly semi-annually in the Spring and Fall.

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For full submission guidelines and deadlines, please refer to our website: thefoundationalist.com.

For further correspondence and inquiries, please contact us at: thefoundationalist@gmail.com.

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ANDRIN ALBRECHT (he/him)

Aldrin Albrecht was born in 1995 in Wattwil, Switzerland, and wrote incessantly from an early age on. He studied English language and literature, and history, in Zurich, Grand Junction (CO) and Singapore, and he’s currently in the process of applying for postgraduate studies in comparative literature. His short fiction and poetry in both English and German has been published, among others, in the CMU Literary Review, Down in the Dirt Magazine, and Literaturhaus Zürich, and he won the Targa Centro UNESCO di Trieste in the Castello di Duino international poetry competition 2019. In addition to his writing and research, Andrin Albrecht has composed a variety of music pieces for bands, orchestras and short films, and hopes to combine these different media in his future work for both artistic and educational purposes.

ANNA STAROPOLI (she/her)

Anna Staropoli has written for The New York Observer, Italy’s La Repubblica, and Magenta Florence. After graduating from Dartmouth in 2019, she moved to Palermo, Sicily, where she tracked down her ancestors and wrote all about it.

BEN PAPSUN (he/his)

Ben Papsun is a recent graduate of Vassar College. His work has been published in the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, the Vassar Critical Journal, and Rainy Day Magazine. His interests include building houses of cards, analyzing voice-leading in pop songs, and—most recently—playing chess very poorly.

BRYAN ANGEL (he/his)

Bryan Angel resides in Southern California with interests spanning across the arts: music, writing, film and sport. Studies film & media with an emphasis on writing for the screen & analysis. Award winning poet whose poetry has been included in journals from UCI, Cornell University, The Foundationalist (Spring 2020) & more.

CHARIKLIA MARTALAS (she/her)

CAMERON MARKOVSKY (he/his)

Chariklia Martalas is a graduate of Philosophy, Politics, English and History with an Honours in Philosophy from the University of the Witswatersrand. She is currently reading for a Masters in Philosophy. She has been published in numerous literary magazines including a collection of four essays in La Piccioletta Barca and has won the Deon Hofmeyr Creative Writing Prize, her University’s writing prize. She has also been published in the undergraduate literary journal The Foundationalist.

Cameron Markovsky is a student at Bowdoin College.

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DIA BROWN (she/her)

ELENA HARRIS-BAUER (she/her)

ELENA KEFALOGIANNI (she/her)

ELIZABETH B.D. JOHNSON (she/her)

EM SETZER (they/them)

Dia Brown is a 5’8”, pretty tubby, freckle havin’, Black civil engineering student at the University of Vermont sifting through the intersections of society. Working to decolonize the housing industry and make more compostable structures, physically and ideologically. Her writings are a way of organizing my cacophony of thoughts into something more harmonic— she hopes you take a listen!

Elena Harris-Bauer is a translator, reader, and occasional author of criticism and creative nonfiction. She writes on ecology and landscape, mythology, pop-politics, and the growing strain of suspicion in digital culture. She is committed to the idea that language is a potent medium incubating revelations for these areas, and that the process of translating between media opens spaces where words surface their culturally- and historically-specific dimensions. Language absorbs and reflects its origins, and in creating a taxonomy of contemporary culture, it is therefore a useful tool and a good place to start.

Elena Kefalogianni is a graduate of Emory University, where she majored in creative writing and political science. She is currently completing my master’s degree in journalism at Georgetown University as an Onassis Foundation scholar. In the summer of 2020, she interned for CNN Greece, where she wrote and published 13 original articles. She is currently the digital outreach intern for the Minotaur Group, a geopolitics consultancy group.

Elizabeth B.D. Johnson is a fourth-year undergraduate student studying English & Creative Writing, French, and Spanish at the University of Iowa. She primarily enjoys writing fiction, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Travel is essential to her experience of writing, as well as for providing new perspectives through which to see the world and in which to immerse readers. After she graduates, she hopes to move to France for a while to teach English, have new experiences, and see where her writing can take her.

Em Setzer is a student-poet studying Classics and Poetry at Bard College.

Their primary focus of study is Ancient Greek poetry and drama, and in their own writing tries to explore the intersections between archaic and modern conceptions of queerness and gender. They draw a lot of inspiration, as well, from the beautiful landscape of the Hudson Valley, where they are located during the school year.

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EMILY COHEN (she/her) EVELYN MAGUIRE (she/her)

GERARDO LAMADRID CASTILLO (they/them) JACK RODGERS (he/him)

JOHN SHIMAZAKI (he/him)

KARA WORRELLSGUTIÉRREZ (she/her)

Emily Cohen is a writer from Kansas City, Missouri, currently based in Austria. She is an alumna of Bowdoin College.

Evelyn Maguire is pursing an MFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The Foundationalist was her first publication, and since then she has been published by North American Review, Cypress, and Sink Hollow among others. She was a Fiction finalist in the 49th New Millennium Writing Awards, and is the co-founder of the literary magazine Overheard. You can find her on Twitter @evelyntweeting.

Gerardo Lamadrid Castillo is a writer from Caguas, Puerto Rico. They have a bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar College, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing--with an emphasis in fiction--at the University of California, Davis.

Jack Rodgers is an English teacher at the Forman School in Litchfield, Connecticut. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 2020 with majors in English and Philosophy. At Forman, he lives in a dorm, coaches soccer, and teaches upper-level courses to juniors and seniors on Romantic, Modernist, and contemporary literature. His academic interests include temporality, ethics, feminism, queer theory, and philosophical approaches to literature. He is originally from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

John Shimazaki is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in both English and African-American and African Studies. He will be continuing my education next year as a Master’s student in English at the University of Virginia, with the hope of attending law school thereafter. After his first year of undergraduate studies, he served a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in France and Switzerland.

Since then, he has been interested in and dedicated to understanding and investigating whether or not current racial dynamics are accounted for by United States Supreme Court justices in their legal reasoning.

Kara Worrells-Gutiérrez is a first gen latin@ native of North America. As a dual citizen studying in Southern California, her current work investigates the intricacies of identity, consciousness, and emotion using critical theory, intersectional feminist texts, and stem research, hoping to conduct formal research and publish a variety of literary modes and languages in the near future. One important fact to know about Kara: she is a veteran DJ and manager of KUCI 88.9FM, and she asks that you help the non-profit push into its 51st year by visiting kuci.org. Keep college radio alive!”

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KORY NATHANIEL RICHARDSON (he/him)

Kory Nathaniel Richardson is a 5th year School of Social Ecology Student at the University of California in Irvine. His major is in Psychological Science because he is much interested in connecting with others. He enjoys Creative Writing even more than he does his major, though. This is because he believes that through reading and writing poetry and creative nonfiction, he is able to connect with others, the world, and himself on deeper levels that he never thought possible. Instead of finding meaning in the thought that the everyday experiences of everyday people are measurable and testable, like he has in psychology, he finds much more meaning in the actual stories of everyday people. This is why he loves reading and writing: because it helps him understand the world and understand others (including himself) on deeper levels. Even though Kory is just a few months away from graduation, he tells himself he will never stop reading or writing (not for too long at least). One of his dreams is becoming a creative writing teacher who’s classes will also help students heal or find a sense of safety and security in this wonderful yet perplexing world we live in. Never stop writing. Not for too long at least.

KRISTINA KIM (she/her)

Kristina Kim is a Korean-Uzbek-American raised in Brooklyn and currently living in Chicago. She is a 3rd-year student at the University of Chicago studying Public Policy, Human Rights, and Creative Writing. She enjoys poetry and spoken word, and loves experimenting with interdisciplinary forms of expression (i.e. dance, documentary, film stills, erasure, recycling existing language) through her writing.

KYRIE GARLIC (she/her)

Kyrie Garlic is a math teacher in training from Weslaco, Texas with eight cats and a penchant for collecting antique books she might not ever read.

She is a Pablo Neruda enthusiast and has published poetry in The Hungry Chimera and The Foundationalist literary journal, along with several poems that will be published in the Fall 2021 edition of UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity. Aside from writing poetry, she is also an aspiring novelist and the recipient of Texas A&M’s 2019-2020 Outstanding Thesis Award in the Creative Works category for a 65,000word novel she wrote dealing with the ways we process grief and create meaning for ourselves. In her free time, she enjoys talking about existentialism, discovering new coffee shops, and spending time with her friends and family.

LILLIAN MOTTERN (she/her)

Lillian Mottern is a fourth-year UCLA student and playwright from Los Feliz. Her short fiction has been published in Waif Magazine and The Foundationalist and she serves as managing editor of UCLA’s literary journal, Westwind. She writes about the end of western civilization and trains.

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MATTHEW OLIVAS (he/his)

Matthew Olivas is a Latinx, Speculative fiction writer whose work often focuses on generational trauma, diaspora, and found families. He has always been drawn to the creatures in horror films, more sympathetic to them than the white men who gun them down before the credits role. He graduated form the University of California, Riverside with a bachelors in creative writing, and will be attending the 2021 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ workshop.

MAURICE J. NORMAN (he/his)

Maurice J. Norman, born and raised in Mineral Springs, NC recently graduated from Davidson College with a B.A. with Honors in English Studies and a B.A. in Africana Studies.

PERI SHEININ (she/her)

Peri Sheinin is an aspiring writer, poet and children’s book author based in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. She is an English major and a senior on the Women’s Tennis Team at Brown University.

SIMONE JOHNVANDERPOOL (she/her)

Simone John-Vanderpool is currently a Master’s in Psychology candidate at Wesleyan University. She first submitted her short collection of poems called Genisys to The Foundationalist’s debut issue in 2018. Currently, she continues to write general fiction and poetry, drawing on themes from psychology, judeo-christian mythology, and history. She also loves to run, play solitaire, and watch really bad television.

THOMAS NIELSEN (he/him)

Thomas Nielsen graduated from Columbia University in the City of New York in 2018, majoring in music and English. For the last eighteen months, he has worked as a legal fellow at a small civil litigation firm in Baltimore, where he researched and co-wrote a book on bankruptcy law in Maryland alongside two local attorneys. A lifelong lover of reading, Thomas has also published articles on an array of literary topics, including the dramatic purpose of song in The Winter’s Tale and Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptions of Shakespeare’s plays. Thomas will be starting at Harvard Law School in 2021 with the goal of becoming a public interest attorney focused on impact litigation and criminal justice reform. Between now and next fall, he is serving as an AmeriCorps fellow at the Alaska Public Defender Agency in Anchorage, where he will be working to lower recidivism rates in the state by pairing agency clients with critical social services.

VERITY STURM (she/they)

Verity Sturm is a writer of sorts based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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