Acts of Translation
“She begins by looking and she begins by listening.”
This morning, I spent some time looking at the sour cherry tree outside my home. I found a bee floating about, just when I heard Kristen Bell remember a time in Norway when "It felt like [she] had better access to [her] own soul." Watching him there, then, I felt a bit like Mary Oliver. Like my whole purpose was to stand in awe, point, and say, "Holy."
There, that is holy.
You, you are holy.
The paint is holy.
The message is holy.
No doubt, I'm feeling exceptionally mystical this week. Blame it on Hilma af Klint, who—as it turns out—not only saw deep connections between art, physics, ecology, and the scientific, in general, but used to hold seances with four other women in varying locales of Sweden and believed her works were not her own but were, in fact, direct messages from the Divine.
You can also blame it on Selah Saterstrom, a writer-diviner-card-reader I am now hearing conjure magic through my ears each week and who wrote a book called Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, where you can find this beautiful exhortation: "Choose the reader with the forked tongue, a reader able to straddle the border between inside and outside, who is able to move, unburdened, through the ouroboros, dissolving the stitches, holding in tension the binary, and who can, instead, give way to the realms of uncertainty, simultaneity, contradiction, paradox, and parable."
Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, Selah's Ideal Suggestions is a work that regards both writing and divining as acts of making the invisible, visible. And, in one of af Klint's journals—narrated in this gorgeous documentary—she pulls on a similar thread: "Thought crystalizes the universe into geometrical figures." This, then, is a lineage of creative as mystic, an act of moving the ethereal into the material.
Or maybe a type of translation, a border crossing, or alchemy, as Gloria Anzaldúa might call it. "La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities...", and, later, "I sit here before my computer...My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body." She also calls writers shape-changers and shamans.
Maybe this feels a little too woo for your tastes. Or, maybe I'm writing it too academically. All I really want to say is that I'm spending my time these days trying to become a better translator and I get the sense that being a better translator means being a better listener, a better observer—of seeing all things as holy, and then transmuting the holy onto the page.
