Every time i blow dry my hair, i remember a friend telling me that she would read in the morning while completing this boring, almost embarrassing task. At the time, it was something i never did, and i thought of her confession as an odd, potentially impossible, affectation. Then my hair got so long that drying it became a necessary part of my morning routine, and since i don’t like to look in the mirror while i’m doing it, i started reading, too. The duration is long enough to be tedious but not really long enough for any real narrative engagement, so i try to either read tiny chunks of something very dense (poetry, literary theory) or long, quick bits of something very simply written (newspapers, adolescent fiction). A few days ago, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a blowdryer on my lap, i scanned the closest pile of reading material, and pulled Empire of Signs within reach.

My copy is dog-eared and i started skipping to outlined passages from previous readings. i came back to this one: “Thus, in Japanese, the proliferation of functional suffixes and the complexity of enclitics suppose that the subject advances into utterance through certain precautions, repetitions, delays, and insistances whose final volume (we can no longer speak of a single line of words) turns the subject, precisely, into a great envelope of empty speech, and not that dense kernel which is supposed to direct our sentences, from outside and above, so that what seems to us an excess of subjectivity (Japanese, it is said, articulates impressions, not affidavits) is much more a way of diluting, of hemorrhaging the subject in a fragmented, particled language diffracted to emptiness.”

This is one of the few good jokes in Lost in Translation. Bill Murray growing increasingly frustrated because the translation is so much shorter than the preceding exchange. He thinks he is being cheated, of course. Barthes, on the other hand–also unable to speak or read the language–imagined something else of this crucially extensive…punctuation. In the alternate possibilities of hemorrhaging, leaky, bleeding subjects and something called functional suffixes, he read the elimination of some of the shame of having to singularly assert oneself. With its practice of folding the obtruding “I,” a process that is as focused on the how of saying as it is on what is being said, Barthes imagined a language without the anchoring of Western metanarratives that might actually offer different possibilities of subjectivity. Of exchange. Of association. A careful intimacy bound into its pittering and “unnecessarily” padded entrances and exits. The soft scaffolding of context. Of nostalgia. Of what came before wrapped into every ending.

i know the season is pulling on me, but i keep thinking about New Orleans. Driving. Holding hands and roaming broken sidewalks. i went to the Met and looked at the mummies and their jewelry again. Sleeping on the floor. Waking up in the black light with my Dad when i was too young to remember. What Jonas used to call “blue dark.” The way drying grass smells and cutting down cattails on the side of the road with the Buck Knife he always had tucked into his bag. Goldenrod and those yellow berries that grow under palmetto bushes. Bleached jeans orange pine needles so thick we used them as a blanket. Every night, riding back under the red tunnel of the Williamsburg Bridge, i thought, soft red cold metal costumes cages velvet pretty torii, and wondered which side then was meant to be the sacred ground. i wasn’t planning on bringing you flowers, but something was making sense as i drew one stem, stared at it for a moment, drew another, bound it around the first. i am still learning the names, and i realized later on that i’d been wrong about the name for one of the tiny ones. i was listening to the girls as they prepared for yet another wedding. One held up a yellow sprig and pronounced, “tansy,” and someone said that would be a cute name for a child and then the one holding the flower instructed us that there is a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay about the tansy flower, and we talked about Millay’s habit of gardening naked, and i told myself to remember to look up the poem. Here you go:

“My Heart, Being Hungry”

It may be/When my heart is dull/
Having attained its girth/
I shall not find so beautiful/
The meagre shapes of earth/
Nor linger in the rain to mark/
The smell of tansy through the dark