Meditation

Laura Blake

There is a room where moments knit together, so that a fabric is formed as the

present loops through the past. The window is propped open with a stout, weathered

Ancient Greek-to-English dictionary. You can hear peacocks cawing on the close and

smell the first blossoms unfolding in Dean Kowalski’s garden. In the distance, the

hunched dome and scaffolded spires of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine rise into the

cityscape.

I rise early to come here, the air blue and wet on my tongue as the street vendors

open their carts for the morning. And the close just beginning to stir—the old orphanage,

Synod Hall, the stone school all silent save for the rustlings of the choirboys who had

once called these grounds their home.

I bend over my red Jenny text, long since out of print, curling my tongue around

the syllables of the Latin language. Age twelve in this sunlit classroom where the distant

rumble and whine of traffic meets my halting pronunciation and all the whispered,

scribbled history of a word passes through my breath.

Translation of an ancient language is both a fast-forward of time and a suspension

of time. In translation we leap a word’s millennia-long evolution in a momentary

utterance of syllables. We speed through time, but we also suspend it, folding the present

upon the past. We hunt for the heart beating within the word, its essence, a core that has

survived all along the word’s journey, reincarnated in varied sounds and appearances.

And when we find this core, time can hang in a syllable.

 And maybe in the same way that different letters and pronunciations wrap as a

skin about the heart of a word, layers of time and place and experience encircle a life. As

we live, we peel off past selves, examine them, adopt new ones. Our journeys, our

translations of self, define us, teaching us to listen for the beat of our own blood, the

pulse within our histories.

My favorite bed sheets growing up were printed with the alphabet. Each letter

had a face and personality. M was rather morose, C squinted like a conman, Z was

exotic, E obliging, U a bit sleepy. The alphabet became my companion. It was last to

wish me goodnight as I shut my eyes and first to greet me when I opened them each

morning. Long before I could piece letters into words, I knew their curves and attitudes.

So I learned to speak in the language of my family’s small blue house with its

sour cherry tree and stern arborvitae in the front yard. Before I could read or write or

distinguish yesterday from tomorrow, the names of a world were whispered into my ears.

Names for the of doves who nested each year in the roof, for the hiss and plunk of

summer rain, for my father’s old canvas tent that my sister Hannah and I used to pitch in

the back yard.

A blizzard came unexpectedly one March. Iced tree branches clacked in the wind

and gleamed where the sun hit. The arborvitae curved under the weight of the snow until

its peak touched the ground and the trunk splintered with a moan. Once the spring

thawed, men came to cut down the tree and my mother planted hyacinths around the

stump. Yet every time I saw the stump, I saw the tree too; what had been and what was,

present in the same column of air.

 Literacy, too, splinters the present from the past, the self from memory. On the

train to Philadelphia to visit Ellen and her daughter Abby, who is nearly two, I read an

article titled “Twilight of the Books.” The author examines oral cultures where, he

writes, “Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to

tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently

adjusted.... It is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be

accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from

myth.”

As I sing the alphabet that afternoon with Abby, as she dances, tossing her

beautiful little head back and forth, and cries out an elated “l-m-n-o-p!” I cannot help but

wonder what jangling ring of keys I am handing her with these 26 sounds. What doors

will letters unlock in her? What doors will they shut for good?

It is, I think, no coincidence that the words transfer and translate share a common

Latin root. For as we transfer ourselves, literally bring ourselves across, to a new place,

we must also somehow translate the past self into the present self, stripping off an old

skin, growing a new one, clinging only to our bones and blood.

So as my family sent the furniture by moving truck and packed Deedee’s espresso

cups with the thin gold handles, all our books, and both cats into the car for the two day

drive to New York, we were both transferring our possessions and translating ourselves.

New York spoke in a different tongue. The vibrato of a young woman’s voice

spilling out the window at 2 in the morning. The wail of ambulance sirens on the way to

St. Luke’s. The whoosh of wind and wings as pigeons took flight. Even letters were not
the same. A could be both indefinite article and 8th Avenue express. Have you ever

considered how much confusion, how much paradox lies in the phrase ‘The A’?

It was here that I began to formally study translation, in Dr. Vitale’s classroom on

the third floor of the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine. The Latin language was

difficult at first, with its cases and principal parts, but over time it gave itself to me. I

learned to love the precision of a verb form, the clean units of clauses, the firm pattern of

declension.

There was a neatness to Latin, so unlike the sprawling noise outside or the

shattered sound inside when I woke at night to hear my mother’s voice crack When was

the last time you said you loved me? Disjointed, fraying, messy syllables. I wanted the

cleanliness of Latin forms. I wanted to wash all the dishes after dinner. I wanted to knit

in even rows, tight stitches so that the holes forming the fabric were almost invisible. I

wanted to sit inside the Cathedral and decline nouns in my head as the chaplain spoke.

One year the Cathedral caught fire. Stained glass saints melted in the heat. Some

exploded into hundreds of jeweled fragments—Saint Francis in shards across the

pavement. The tapestries filled with soot. Have you ever seen a church burn? There

was so much ash. For a year it filled your nose, your mouth, bitter, parching. I carried

the smell of burning home on my navy school sweater, and to me it was good, fierce, an

honor to smell charred.

It was a sharp smell, sharp like the corners of an ablative absolute. It covered the

scent of my skin until I smelled the way Latin smelled. The way, I thought, scholarship

smelled: the blazing, consuming drive to memorize, analyze. I could make this fire, this

language my own. I poured over an Exeter guidebook, in love with the idea of a place
where autumn leaves blew in the sky bright as popping sparks and snow fell like cold

drifts of ash.

Prep year I read Caesar in Latin. He marches. He camps. He kills many Gauls.

Orgetorix is up to his usual shenanigans. The text is factual, historical, numerical. Snow

sticks to the sides of buildings in blank, unrecognizable continents. My mother calls to

ask how I am. Fine. Right before I hang up she tells me she is lonely, without Hannah

and me. It’s quiet here, she says.

Over the telephone, I cannot see how her shoulders hunch like mine or the way

her mouth purses when she is concerned. I cannot even envision where she is standing or

sitting, if the cat is in her lap, whether the apartment is neat or messy. I listen to the

series of pitches that define her voice, flattened by static in their transfer along loping

telephone wires. And I am angry at her, for the break in her voice that I hear as

weakness, for the part of me that she holds in her shoulders and lips, for the guilt that

splits me across the miles between us.

I began, that year, to scratch at my skin until I could peel it away in pieces from

hidden places—my scalp, my feet, my back. My cuticles were a bitten mess, ragged and

bleeding. I did not cut; that seemed too woefully adolescent. I bit and scratched. There

were dreams too, mostly in the winter, that left me exhausted and ashamed in the

mornings. One night I dreamt that I pulled my stomach away in chunks and found

nothing inside but the blackened, cobwebbed insides of a rotten orange.

I read recently that cuttlefish have phenomenal skin. It changes both in color and

texture to camouflage to their surroundings. If you drop black rocks into the sand where
a cuttlefish rests, it will almost instantly display dark blotches upon its skin. A cuttlefish

can even show one pattern on one part of its body and another pattern on a different part.

The summer after prep year, my mother, sister and I leave the apartment leased in

my father’s name. I go to be a CIT at summer camp in Vermont while Mom and Hannah

move seven blocks uptown.

I received two letters from home over those two months of summer. My fifteenth

birthday passed unnoticed, though I received a strangely acrid, fragmented letter from my

mother a few days later. I learned life-guarding and CPR, puffing breath into the plastic

mouths of Annies, thrusting my palms hard into their chests.

Only months later did I learn from Hannah how the days had stretched brittle with

heat. How my mother had hardly slept and refused to eat. On a white wooden bench

outside a bookstore, there is accusation in her voice. You weren’t there. And I say to her

You can always leave. There’s always a choice. And she just looks at me, because we

have both grown more fluent in silence than in speech.

We never unpacked the 123rd Street apartment all the way. I kept meaning to do

my boxes, but it was easier to stack them at the foot of the bed and try to ignore their

hulking posture. Maybe I did not unpack because the space felt so temporary, a

parenthesis in which to learn to live as three instead of four, a parenthesis in which to

acknowledge failure.

Failure. Dr. Vitale could spend an entire class searching for the right translation

of a word. He rifled through stacks of dictionaries hunting down etymologies, salt and
pepper eyebrows leaping over the rims of his glasses. And sometimes, an hour up, he fell

back into his chair defeated by a break somewhere in the lineage of the word, and I knew

then that the word was untranslatable.

My grandfather grew up speaking a different language, German, until his native

country betrayed him. When he came to America, his English vaguely accented from

years in a British boarding school, he enlisted in the army and changed his name from

Blach to Blake in order to erase its Germanness. And so the name that has been passed

down to me is an invented one, cut loose from the roots of it ancestors.

What was lost in the changing of a name? What story slipped away in the

lengthening of a vowel, the softening of the harsh –ch into the mild –k?

A month after Pa's death, my family went to visit the house he built where Cathy,

Ish, Christina, Granny, Pa and Dad used to spend the summers. We were, I suppose,

trespassing on private property, but the owners of the house had long since left Long

Island for the winter. The house was shaped like a picture frame, and looking through it I

felt as though the lapping December waves were made up of a series of stilled images,

blended so perfectly together as to give the illusion of motion.

The walls of the house were made of glass, and I could see the life inside, frozen

like a museum diorama: seashells, book shelves, blue and orange tin cups hanging over

the sink. Light shone off the glass bright as off a glossy photograph. And I felt no

ownership of the wooden porch or the twin bunk beds; all I could claim was the light off

the glass.

Can we ever inherit more than reflection? I remember Pa's books and the way he

gave them away, slowly at first, then in great spurts. He had thousands, and I do not
exaggerate. Books on Cubism and Ancient Egypt, yellowing stacks of Life and Vogue.

Some were inscribed in a particular sort of script—a mix of artistic mess and analytical

neatness, always in black ink—that you do not see anymore. For Peter then some

witticism or quiet joke, a burst of affection, and a looping, scribbled signature.

Here, take this one, he would say, shoving a stack into my hands. No, Pa, we

can't really. No take it, I insist. And as he stacked the pile higher, my father quietly

looked through them, separating the ones he knew once mattered from the rest.

Maybe we should have taken them all, accepted the gifts of words he pressed on

us. Because one snowy night the roof collapsed in his assisted living apartment, not

above his bedroom, thank God, but above his bookcase. He woke from the crash to find

the volumes buried under crumbled plaster, shattered wood, and still-falling snow.

My mother, the rare books librarian, did her best with them, freezing the drenched

pages then carefully drying them out, but in many places the ink had bled, inscriptions

dissolved, letters collapsed into black rivers, the past running off the page.

In the car with my mother on the Mass Turnpike, another September. She is a

good driver, and I watch her hands grip the wheel, steady and confident. I remember

how her skin grew itchy, red and puffy one summer. When her doctor learned of her

profession, she almost laughed; what do you expect when you work with moldy old

books? The rash was some ancient fungus, the spores preserved between the pages of an

old manuscript. No modern ointment could help. She just had to wait it out.

But now her skin is smooth again and the veins branch over it like the highways

crisscrossing the road map in my lap. Her blood flows blue with all her stories: dreams
of becoming an archeologist, a summer spent teaching herself violin, and so much more

than I can ever know.

I realize then that there is no such thing as a true synonym, either within the

English language or between languages. Each word has been breathed full of life by its

own set of lungs, filled with more breaths than we could ever count. And as we speak, as

we choose one word over another, we cause two histories to diverge. In writing, in

speech, we must breathe our thoughts into one word, leaving another to its own

trajectory.

At school it hurt to shower, though I did so every day, worried that the skin might

become infected. But I could still smell it on me everywhere I went, the smell of blood

and scabs, of flesh trying to heal. One day in the shower the water stung so badly that I

began to cry, and I knew that I could not continue to exist scabbed, mottled, trying to

inhabit both the skin of a student and that of a daughter, a sister, while in reality

possessing neither truly.

In the spring I cut my hair short, amazed to watch the strands fall into my lap in

commas and apostrophes. And I think, I am paring away the unnecessary, trimming

pauses, clipping hesitations.

I have kept almost every letter I have ever received. Postcards, birthday cards,

pen pal letters—I saved them all in shoeboxes and folders stacked under the bed. But last

June, as we packed up again, this time to move to Washington Heights, I threw them all
away. Perhaps it was the abandonment of Morningside Heights, that neighborhood

cradled between Riverside Church and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Perhaps it

was that senior year was beginning, that the inside of the Cathedral was blocked off for

cleaning, that the last time I had seen Dr. Vitale he had asked me what I planned to do

with myself and I came up blank.

As I sorted everything into piles—recycle, give away, throw away—I felt a

satisfied efficiency. I admired my ability to shed possessions. I watched Hannah

carefully pack her notebooks, photographs and sketchpads. You’re taking all that? I

asked. Don’t throw that away! she cried. Why? It isn’t necessary.

Fall term I forced myself to meet the necessities from one day to the next. Burnt

cups of coffee, days when I did not stop to eat anything until four o’clock, not calling my

parents and, if I did, solving math problems while I listened with half an ear.

And I was proud. Proud that I did not need sleep and food the way other people

seemed to. Proud of the constant burn in my chest, the ache in my back. Proud that my

light was on long after those in Hoyt and Abbot had shut off. Proud that I did not cry

once all term.

And I believed that this was living truly.

It happens in the library of all places, the last day before December break. Hey

Laura, he calls out. What do you think of the Manhattanville Project? And as I listen to

a boy I hardly know extol the benefits of Columbia’s expansion into Harlem, I find

myself more lost than I have been in a long time. As he speaks of ‘Progress’, I see pink

fliers from the block association taped onto the door. I smell the cigarette smoke drifting
through the windows as Pina unraveled the day in conversation on the stoop. I hear the

breath sputtering in my mother’s throat as she slid her finger through the top of the

envelope containing the lease renewal. Among the texts that have so empowered me in

reasoned discussion and debate, I see the frailty of my elegant proofs and analytical

essays, even of my careful poems and stories, against the tide that has swept over my

family again and again, washing us up on new shores. The library windows seem to look

out not onto the neat corners of Exeter, but onto my view of 181st Street where the

windows across the street frame an old man rubbing his bald head and a crescent of a

woman leaning in her window frame, a second moon. In the collision of where I am and

where I come from I find myself inarticulate, unable to translate the grating in my chest

into clean reason, argument.

I know then that words are not clean. They are dirty and cracked and beautiful as

the roads they travel.

The bus ride home that night stretches for ten hours; we are driving into a

blizzard. I think of how the tracks we leave on the highway are filling with snow, our

footsteps erased from sight, remembered only by the road. And I wonder how much time

I spend in transport. If I added up the hours, minutes, seconds I spend on subway

platforms, buses, car rides, planes, how long would it be? A week? A month? A month

of my life spent in transition, translation.

At the summer camp where I work in Pittsford, Vermont, one of the main ethics

among the staff is the idea of the life of the open road. I have been thinking about what it
means to live this way. Because it is on the road, in the act of translation, in the shallow,

grey light between night and dawn, the moments of deliberation between Latin and

English, the raw period between one skin and another, that I most often find myself

balanced within both past and present, folding time in two.

It can happen as I drive past an unimaginable town or an abandoned military base.

It can happen as I wind a warp for a loom, or peel an apple into the sink, or walk along a

sidewalk and feel, in a tugging instant, how many feet have beaten the path before me.

And then I can feel the pulse of the road echoing in the rhythm of my steps.

But an echo is not enough. This is the open road, but not the life of the open

road.

When I graduated from middle school, Dr. Vitale gave me a Roget’s Sixth Edition

Thesaurus. The word thesaurus comes from the Greek θησαυρόs meaning treasure or

treasury. It is a treasury of words, of meanings, of bridges that almost span the distance

between Latin and English, the past and the present, who I am and what I say.

On a bookplate pasted to the inside cover, Dr. Vitale carefully typed a line from

The Aeneid Book IX: Macte nova virtute, puer: sic itur ad astra. Or, loosely, Well done,

with new courage, boy; thus is the path to the stars.

Late nights, as I rifle the pages, searching for the right syllables to translate a

poem or craft a story, those words are a charge. They demand the courage to seek the

synonym that can never fully exist, to trace an etymology that breaks, reemerges, trails

off into a dead end, and to breathe my own voice into the words I have inherited.
 The language I speak is English, not Latin or Greek, as proficient as I may be in

their respective grammars. I will always be bound to these words, these sounds, these

twenty-six companions. Yet I am bound, too, to all the languages that flow into English

like veins—Latin, Greek, Old English—converging, diverging, circulating with a single

pulse.

As the bus rolls through snowy hours, I watch dusk shadow the highway, now

blue and branching. In the window, my reflection layers upon the road unfolding ahead.