Nest
1
My mother tongue, Chinese, has an immemorial history before me.
I was inserted into it, a motive for my language.
I learned it naturally, filling it with intentions, and will leave it without intent for other children.
My mother and I speak local language and sometimes our mother tongue,as in my dream, with its intent.
What to intend in changing the mother tongue of my daughter, compassion, not being ill, sleep in whicha daughter resonates depth, like a bell.
Loving the wind is equivalent to intention as rhetorical surface, like writing my diary on her skin.
Non-comprehension tips ambivalent matter, as if there were two of us, here: one is Kuan Yin, one ismother tongue.
Her matter inserted, a motive, is always somewhere else, exitingone language, another without intent,translated as heart.
2
I want to tell you whats difficult to admit, that I left home.
Change of mother tongue between us activates an immunity, margin where dwelling and travel are not distinct.
Artifacts throw themselves toward light without becoming signification.
Telling you is not an edge of the light.
Theres no margin of a shadow to imply interior.
In my childhood house was a deep porch covered with vines.
Look past our silhouette to silhouettes like shadows of guests arriving in a bright yard.
Light in the next room falls on her, as she bends to kiss you.
Skylight pours down, then covers the mud wall, like cloth.
I observe a lighted field seem to hang in space in front of me.
Speaking, not filling in, surface intent, is a cabinet of artifacts, comparisons, incongruity.
3
My origin is a linguistic surface like a decorated wall, no little houses at dusk, yellow lights coming on, physical, mute.
Its significance is received outside hearing, decorating simply by opening the view.
Wherever I look is prior absence, no figure, ruin escaping an aesthetic: hammock, electric fan, ghost dont qualify as guards.
The comfortable interior my guest inhabits is a moving base, states of dwelling undetermined, walls cross-hatched like mother tongue.
The foreign woman occupies a home thats impersonal, like the nest of a parasite.
Its value is contentless but photographable, in the context of an indigenous population, tipping between physical ease and the freedom of animals accumulating risk.
When the scene is complex, I turn to the audience and comment aloud, then return to room and language at hand, weakened by whoever didnt hear me, as if I dont recognize the room, because my family moved in, while I was away.
Text imbricated with outside, a wall is waves.
So, I decorate in new mother tongue, plasticity of fragment, cool music.
Theres a lock in it, of the surface.
It still lights apricots in bloom, leaves, skins of organisms, horizon, borders that represent places.
4
A margin cant rot, no bloated outline around memories of witnesses, the way origin in the present is riddled with holes.
Pick one and slip through it, like a girl whose body is changing.
Domestic space oozes light through a loophole, mother to mother, so close I cant catch it through myself.
My family is vulnerable at the margin, child, line of a cheek diffusing energy, line of her eye extending an inner look.
Dont let her ooze through loopholes we inhabit like migrants, light drifting across five windows on the river, drifting functioning as imagination so intimate our space seems anonymous.
Furnishings, colors are sumptuous in relation to anonymity, textiles like money.
5
I feel the right to have my invitation accepted, an open house.
Guests appear in other places for other occasions with my invitation, pleading for the secular, the empathic.
Speaking, an artifact, creates a loophole for no rapport, no kinship, no education, on a frontier where wild is a margin of style, and rhetorics outside that.
In this case, shed immigrated long ago, so they tried to stay with her as a family.
Speech opens onto a lost plain, then contracts to a diffuse margin between metaphor for space and concept of drunk, ill, running away.
Her story begins aesthetically, but hysterical acts withdraw it to a floating space of frustration, unself, and a paranoid husband is produced.
Her words are high-handed, awkward, formal.
He hears them as expressions of personal pique and self-indulgence, but wont say she uses power unfairly in the pose of unhappy mother.
Such topics are prohibited except at the kitchen table, in the car, etc.
Its said, illustrious persons lead parallel lives, which join in eternity, but some lives veer off the straight path to community.
So, I speak with care, but prove authority wont take me far, because the areas too large.
In this, daughter, you see more than I did at your age, because you see me.
巢
1
我的母语,汉语,在我出生之前就是一门历史悠久的语言。
我出生在这门语言当中,成为了语言的目的。
我自然地掌握了它,在里边注入了我的思想,不带任何目的地将它留给其他孩子。
我和母亲都讲方言,有时也讲母语,就像在梦中。梦也有它的目的。
想改变女儿的母语、情感和健康,改变女儿深睡时如洪钟声般回响的鼾声,其目的究竟为何?
爱上风与任何一种目的相同的修辞表面一样,就像在她的皮肤上写我的日记。
不理解带来的是含混,就像人人都有两个自我,一个是观音,一个是母语。
她的事情,或者说是被插入的意图,总在别处,一个脱离了语言,另一个没有意图,被译成了心。
2
告诉你一件我难以承认的事情:我离开了家。
我们之间的母语改变激活了一种免疫系统、一个边缘地带。在那儿,定居与漂泊没有什么差别。
手工艺品放到光下没有产生意义。
告诉你本身并不是光的边缘。
影子没有边缘,无法告诉你哪里是它的地盘。
童年时代,房子就是一个深深的门廊,上面爬满了葡萄藤。
越过我们的侧影,能看到走进明亮院子里的客人们的侧影(就像阴影一般)。
她弯下腰来亲吻你时,隔壁房间的光洒在了她的身上。
天光倾泻下来,像布一样包裹了泥墙。
我看到自己眼前有一块被照亮的地方悬在空中。
言说,不是填入的表层意图,是一柜子的手工艺品。是相互比较,是互不协调。
3
我来自一面被装饰了的语言之墙,黄昏时分,见不到这处亮起黄色灯光的小房子。身处其中,一片寂静。
它的意义远在声音之外,装饰的作用在于打开了一个视野。
目及之处原本一无所有,没有人,是毫无审美可言的废墟:吊床和电扇,鬼都不配做看门人。
我的客人住的舒适内室是一个活动房屋,房屋的根基已被损坏,墙与墙之间相互交错,一如我的母语。
那外国女人住的是非私产,如寄生虫巢穴一般。
它没有实质价值,但可以随意拍照,就像土著人一样,在身体的舒适和充满危险的动物自由之间左右摇摆。
场面变得过于复杂时,我转向观众,大声评价,然后回到屋内,转向熟悉的语言,被无法听到自己声音的人消耗得筋疲力尽,就像我认不出这个屋子一样:家人是在我不在的时候搬进去的。
文本被装饰上了瓦片,层层叠覆,看似一片海浪。
于是,我用新的母语装扮了自己,一堆柔软的碎片、一些好听的音乐。
表层上挂着一把锁。
它依然照亮盛开的杏树、叶子、生物的表皮、地平线,还有标志着方位的边界。
4
边缘不会溃烂,见证记忆的轮廓不会肿胀,就像起源在今天看来是谜一般的漏洞。
捡起一片,穿越过去,感觉就像女孩子的身体,不断地变化。
家中的灯光透过墙洞渗出来,母亲对着母语,她们之间如此相近,我却无法抓住。
家,已处在悬崖的边缘,摇摇欲坠;孩子,脸上洋溢着青春的气息,眼神中透露出其内心的想法。
不要让她从我们移民住所的漏洞中向外流淌,像河面上掠过五个窗口的光那样流淌。掠过的光犹如想象力,它和我们如此亲密,让我们的空间变得隐秘。
于隐蔽者而言,任何装饰和颜色都显得多余,质感犹如金钱。
5
我有权要求被邀请者接受邀请,一座开放的房子。
客人们用我的邀请函在别的地方、别的场合,向人索要世俗、让人看重的礼物。
和手工艺品一样,言语在没有和睦、没有亲友、没有教育的边界制造着漏洞。在那里,狂野几乎不是什么风格,修辞也被排除在外。
如此,她很久之前就移民至此,他们尽量待她犹如亲人。
言语将自己开放,驰骋到一片荒原,收缩成一片弥漫的边界,变成一个空间的隐喻和迷醉、疾病、逃逸概念间的边界。
她的故事开始很美,但歇斯底里的行为将它逼至一片沮丧、没有自我的漂浮空间。丈夫也变成了一个偏执狂。
她的言语专横、笨拙、装腔作势。
在他听来,她的话是愠怒、自我欣赏的表达,但他不想明说她是在滥用一个不快乐的母亲的权力。
这样的话题一般是禁忌,除非在餐桌上或车里等这样的地方。
据说,名人一般都过着两种平行的生活,两种生活在永恒处交汇,但有些人会偏离它直行的轨道,走向别处。
于是,我小心翼翼地说话,但要保证权威们不会过度理解,因为这个领域太大。
在这一点上,女儿,你比我像你这么大时看到的多,因为你看到了我。