My Name is a Constellation: On Unreadability
Perhaps my name is not English, nor Chinese, nor Italian, nor Russian. Perhaps my name is a constellation, and in order to read me, you must run your finger across the night sky. Try, if you must, to capture a star in the perimeter of your mouth. Taste the luminous edge of a vowel, a consonant—you will only succeed in burning your tongue.
—
The body is a loose structure. It carries birthing and dying cells, growing hair, aging joints. It is a relational vessel, collecting elements of those who have come into its orbit before and those who will come after. It is in exchange with an atmospheric world, receiving oxygen and gifting carbon dioxide. It is a generational torch-bearer—of cultures, habits, traumas. It holds to gravity as it does to light. It forgets and it remembers.
In a culture that wraps itself around a capture of knowing, more and more I am seeking ways to be unknown. Language forms not only how we convey meaning to one another, but also how we convey meaning within ourselves. It informs our reality, how we imagine into being. Increasingly, it has become a tool for categorization—a capture through intellectual understanding.
By drawing a target, we end up missing it entirely—creating objects, even out of ourselves, within our imaginations. I am not one name, one pronoun (or perhaps two or three)—yes these, but not only, not just. The rapidly expanding wholeness of one’s being will always outpace the compartmentalizing trap of language—each of us a universe, unfolding and unknowing itself.
There are many ways to understand. Many ways to conjure meaning. Many ways to hear; to touch and be touched; to imagine a being, into being, alongside a being. In a culture preoccupied with identification and definition, I desire less and less to be known. I desire obscurity. To find the holes and tumble my way out.
I seek to transcend language. And if it cannot be transcended, then I will weave a pattern of warp and weft with my feet—an evasive maneuver to escape the colonizing grasp. If I aim for the translingual star in the sky and fall short, then I will land instead into the multilingual bed. Scatter across a sea of languages. And in this way, I will escape through the holes of the fishing net.
This tactic of evasion is a trickster’s dance. The very movement of the trickster, the trail left behind, is a queering of the normative—a “bending” of the straight line that is the status quo. I call upon the trickster’s play to de-center monolingual English. De-stabilize it. With a stomp of the mischievous foot the entire system jolts, wobbling precariously on its global pedestal.
There are hundreds of ways to translate into being, and I am entranced by an unfolding garden of languages. Pictorial language, like traditional Chinese characters. Words captured in physical gesture, like Sign Language. Braille systems of tactility for the visually-impaired. A binary of dot and dash for Morse Code. Shorthand slang concealed in numbers, like the Pager code of the 90’s. The divinatory language of the I Ching (易經). The ritualistic sand drawings of the Vanuatu.
I find myself drained by the bone-dry rigidity of English. Worn by a lingual monoculture. I desire to curve away from the thing and to engage instead in a coy dance with signs and symbols. To be known by gesture and light and touch. I want to refer to the thing in diagonal ways, other-sensory ways, or else not refer to the thing at all. To capture a thing squarely in singularity, and in this way deny it of its any other possibility, is to deaden it—I wish only to refer to myself, and to others, in ways that acknowledge their full aliveness.
I do not wish to be caught. If I must be known, then let me be read in other ways. Let me be seen through the intuitive eyes of a cat. Heard through the sensitive vibrations of a spider’s web. Attracted by the electrical differential between bee and flower. Let me be read as a river that diverges, seeks gravity, carves its words into the land, and intricately finds its way back to sea.