Bimyou – Eve Sneider
If you look up bimyou in a Japanese-to-English dictionary, you might read that it means subtle, delicate, complicated. But none of those really capture it at all. Bimyou is a fuzzy word. It refers to the gray space in between places, the neither-here-nor-theres. It is as amorphous as it is ubiquitous. How do you feel about the upcoming presidential election? Bimyou. How was that test? Bimyou. What is the weather like today? Bimyou. How are you feeling? Pretty bimyou.
We are sitting thirty stories above Tokyo, surrounded by panoramic views of the bruise-purple, light-polluted sky. This is our last night–together, that is–and our plan was to do something Big. We wanted to sit at a rooftop bar in a fancy hotel, surrounded by sleek furniture and brooding, sophisticated people. But the bar is expensive and we are young and cheap so instead we drink convenience store booze and sneak into the indoor swimming pool. This is a good substitute.
We don’t really talk. We are tired and the fancy reclining poolside chairs are very comfortable and none of the three of us has anything else to say (a rarity). Instead, I let myself get carried away. I think of the mean things we said and the nice things we did, the books we did not read and the boys we did not kiss. The evening last September when we made dinner, fucking up a very easy cake recipe and speaking in a different accent during each course of our meal. The countless hours we spent waiting for things to start, and then not.
These are my closest friends and this is my life but already it isn’t, too. Because being on the threshold of newnesses has a way of altering the old stuff quite a lot. The cake we baked in September was truly a disaster, and not the endearingly funny kind (we used salt instead of sugar and forgot to turn the oven off; it was just a mess). I would probably be better off had I read a few of those books. I definitely should’ve done more nice things, nicer things. Getting nostalgic about the real moments only makes them surreal-er. And that’s weird.
How are you feeling?
Pretty bimyou.
The pool is the color of a crayon. It is pretty in the jarring way that fluorescence often is. Soon we will be discovered by a hotel employee who will be much too kind when he asks us to leave. We will get on a crowded subway that will pull into each of our stations and then out. Tomorrow I will be in a new city where there are fewer people who talk much, much more. The buildings will be shorter, squatter, with more room in between them. The air will bite a little more at night. When the sun next sets on the land of the rising sun we will all be busy elsewhere.
There will come a time when I am not between places, not in this bimyou space. I wonder what that will feel like.
***
Duende – Caroline Way
Duende, Spanish, n. (def): 1. a goblin; demon; spirit. 2. charm; magnetism.
The writer’s challenge is to translate the third dimension into the second. A scene, a moment, occurs before his eyes, or in his mind’s eye, and he tries to write it: the curves of shadow, depths of palette, all of the intention behind the twitch of a pinky finger. So much depth of the image will be lost, and painfully so, in words.
So it is a rarity and a delicacy for language-lovers when the role is reversed–when an image fails to give all that a word does. Such is the case with the Spanish duende. A Google Image search produces all of the following: a troll-like thing with a bulbous nose, several red sharp-toothed demons, their grey cousins, a devil smoking a pipe, a few imps wearing caps over straggly hair, some with no hair, some grinning, some crying, and a pervasive thread of Santa-Claus-style children’s elves. There is no exact “duende: the image.”
But “duende: the word” doesn’t need an image; it stands alone, folds upon itself. Double-d: the tongue-tip teases the back of the teeth, first springing off into a cooing ue, then pressing more gently against them for the nd. That last e lets your breath run out. It trickles out into the air. Say it again and again, out loud: duende, duende, duende, du-en-de. Listen afterwards—it lingers. If there is anything I can tell you about duende, it is that it haunts.
My ninth grade Spanish teacher explained to us the folkloric origins of duende. He showed us the strange stock images of demonic fairies and repulsive goblins, and also people crying and cheering in response to a particularly gifted flamenco dancer. I gathered that duende had some aspects of a televangelist. Wrapped in millennia-old mythology, casting a spell that could bring vulnerable audiences to screams and sobs, duende was seductive and mysterious and yet, at its core, performative, even false.
“Alma, / ponte color de naranja. / Alma, / ponte color de amor.”
I had read plenty of poetry in English. I had appreciated meter and rhyme and syntax, but when I read it in Spanish—even when I didn’t fully grasp the vocabulary—I felt like dancing. Sometimes fast, clapping, laughing rr; other times, slow and sad, tearful, cooing o-sounds. And when I read Federico García Lorca in love, I felt like a glutton. I overate. I knew I was too full of his too-rich language, but I couldn’t stop chewing. It tasted too good. As I scratched lines underneath Lorca’s rhymes and marked off the meter with dashes, I felt in turns confused and exhilarated and queasy. My response was unapprised, visceral. It was duende.
And, oddly enough, it was Lorca who introduced duende into modern art in a 1933 lecture, “Play and Theory of the Duende.”
“The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought,” he said. “I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.”
Duende was my 14-year-old reaction to his poetry, longing and swollen. Duende was how I felt a year later, when I first saw the Andes. Duende was the desperation to climb a peak whose name I did not know. Duende is you, turning up the volume when the chorus starts building to the bridge. Duende is, plainly, the call: to write or paint or climb or make love or really just to participate. It is the clawing, any clawing, underneath the skin of our fingers.
***
Tsundoku – Frances Lindemann
Tsundoku, Japanese, n. (1): The act of buying books but not reading them, piling up a stack of unread books.
(2): Her mother used to say that reading could take you anywhere you wanted to go, and at the time it had felt not like a cliché but like a promise. She remembers the nights when she was very little. She would wear a matching set of cotton pajamas printed with pink elephants, smelling of soap and her mother’s silky hands. Her mother lay in bed, propped up against the pillows, earrings glinting like fairies. The little girl curled against her, and her freshly showered hair left marks on her mother’s shirt like the shadows cast by long grass in meadows. They were reading Little Women, or maybe it was Charlotte’s Web. She was falling asleep, even though she didn’t want to, lulled by the warmth of her mother’s body and the vibration of her voice.
Her mother adorned their apartment with books like they were flowers, and to the little girl they were a source of comfort, a way of seeing the world from the confines of her warm bed, like looking out the window down at the people on the street and knowing that they cannot look back. Sometimes at night she would sit against the cool glass of the windowpane and read under a milky moon—or at least, looking back, that is how she sees herself, a very small person with deep, curious eyes and furrowed brows and a paralyzing fear of the dark.
(3): An awkward adolescent with too much skin in all the wrong places, her glasses framing red spots across her nose, she compared herself to the great writers before her (Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at 23; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights at 28) and committed herself to studying them until she, too, was called “great.”
She read with vigor and anger and black pens that stained white pages. Her mother still read, too—though they read separately now—but more slowly and leisurely than her daughter. She allowed the books to pile around her room in tall quivering stacks like very old trees. They began to give off the musty scent of knitted stockings and slightly burnt pancakes. Untouched, they sat with eyes closed and faces up, breathing gentle promises into the stuffy air.
(4): Piles of books in an empty room emit the sensation of a foggy day, the kind where you can feel the wet of the air on your skin. Perhaps a whistle will hoot softly in the distance, calling all aboard, and you will be left on the shore to wave farewell. The books lie in disarray, mocking in their deafening silence, nameless and unseeing. Their pages, yellow, disintegrating, dust to dust.
***
Mokita – Meg Pritchard
Mokita, Kilivila, n. (def): The truth everyone knows but nobody speaks.You are walking down Elm Street when it hits you: you are not a god. It takes a minute for you to recognize the significance of these words. You stop walking and come to rest beside a trash can. You like recycling better. A flier shaped like a paper crane lies by your feet. You remember that you are not a god.
These words surprise you. If holiness is something you swallow with your morn-ing coffee, then why don’t your fingers bend steel? You touch the trash can to check but no, you’ve got nothing. You have always been immortal because you knew you were. The consequences of your actions have never threatened the idea. You are holy because you are alive and nothing you have done has changed this.
A squirrel rustles barren branches above you, but you have no control over him. He scratches up and down dry bark. Nothing else moves, except the cosmos, of course, and you’re pretty sure that’s not you anyway.
You are not a god, and this is something you know from the scars on your knees and the question marks at the end of your sentences. Gods don’t use punctuation because they never need to stop or start. You read your paragraphs in your head. Period. Comma. Period. The same shapes pattern your legs; they are the typical pitfalls of common mortality.
You are not a god, and you have never been one. If you were to write it out, the story of your past would be just like the paper crane trying feebly to fly out from under your sneaker: entirely two-dimensional. You printed it out last Thursday. It does not cast a shadow and perhaps that’s a blessing. If you are not a god, maybe one is looking out for you. You can think of worse things than a two-dimensional story. Zoos. Bad haircuts. Forgetting to eat lunch.
There is a rustling above you. Squirrels make you think of steel again and you wonder what gods drink in the morning. It can’t be coffee so it’s probably some-thing you’ve never seen before. It’s watery and bitter and looks like chocolate milk and smells like chamomile and it’s always lukewarm. You are glad you drink coffee. You like skim milk and two sugars and you only ever stir it with a spoon. You appreciate the reliability of the inevitable. Tomorrow morning you know you will not be a god. You will use a steel spoon.
And you are not a god and you are still not walking down Elm Street. You glance at the sky: still moving. You blink three times, slowly. Your knees are browned with healed commas. You are still surprised, but now at your own ready acceptance. You are not a god and this does not bother you. You are the steel. Your fingers move only themselves, and do they really? A question mark. Exactly.
You pick up the paper crane. It weighs the same as air. You let it fall through your fingers into the trash can.
You think, perhaps I am a god.