A Reading from the Book of Hope
Jojo Donovan
Find the markings, wherever they appear.
Read them as best you can.
Invent a language of translation. There is no teacher but your eyes and the signs. No tools will be supplied. No compass, no key. No alphabet, no list. Search for patterns and imagine what they may mean. Construct a skeleton of understanding from your imaginings. Give it what flesh you can manage.
It won’t work, you know.
A brief flash of meaning, the clouds will take shape, a hint of form to your kaleidoscopic guesswork, maybe, maybe this – then a half-turn too far, and the tunnel of fractal light collapses. All returns to mystery and dust.
You will fail. Daily, moment by moment, your eyes and the signs, asking only to read and be read.
But language is a closed system. Our myths are littered with lands that can be reached only by those who already know the way. This has always been more about linguistics than geography. When the lineage of a language is broken, when none remain to speak it, the body of the language fades. Only the ghosts of meaning remain. Phantom shadows on the wall. Indecipherable, unknowable. Each word a sunken island. A forest shimmering in the myst, gone by the time the skies have cleared.
You are chasing after a phantom land. None are left to show the way.
No miracle stone in the desert. No conquering army, praises be, to find it.
Only your eyes. Only the signs.
A stirring in your deepest belly, a velvet bloom of vertigo, to stare this way across the ledge of character and symbol into the abyss beyond:
In the beginning there was the Word, but the Word was lost, and all creation with it.
Yet everywhere you turn, you find the markings. Like a crack spreading and spidering across the corners of the world. A web of unknown story has caught you.
The Word has surfaced, a sunken island returned, shattering the glass of a distant sea. A gray splinter on the horizon.
Stark cliffs beckon.
New lands promise themselves.
But a language needs a tongue to speak itself alive, awake.
There is an urgency to the signs. This you can tell. They are reaching, they are searching, they are stretching across the void as surely as your hungry eyes.
But the language needs a tongue, and the tongue needs a teacher.
Your eyes, the signs, they have no teacher. They have only each other. Together you must invent a language of translation.
Like strangers from distant lands, fumbling towards conversation, hungry to be known. Clumsy gestures, sounds that collide and crumble in one another’s ears. Earnest, desperate mimicry. Slow and painful failure. That is your path.
Until, maybe, you will fail your way towards something like understanding.
You will test each other’s sounds until, maybe, one will sound less strange.
You will gesture until, maybe, the signs will gesture back.
And in those moments, you will feel it. That sudden spring-water rushing, a stone removed and the channel clears, a surge of energy down the spine – these are the moments, the euphoria of shared meaning, that will sustain you.
Those moments: they will be rare. They will be fleeting.
They will be enough.
Everywhere you look, you find the markings.
Everywhere you look, the markings are finding you.
The Word has gone too long unspoken, a language without a tongue.
River without bridge. Wound without suture.
Reach across.
Reach across.
You will fail; keep failing. Reach across.
The Word can feel you reaching.
The Word is reaching back.