My Mask

Author Mercedes Yardley is running an interesting author-series in her blog "Broken Laptop", induced by a conversation: "We were talking about online personas and how we want our authors and artists to be informative, approachable, and yet mysterious. Natalie commented that writers should all wear masks. And that sparked my muse: We all wear masks.

How many people know who we truly are? Doesn’t “who we truly are” change with each person that we’re with? But that is a different discussion for a different day. I would like all of us as writers and artists to take a picture of ourselves in some sort of mask. I would just like a picture of you in a mask, a blurb about your work, and permission to run it. I’ll run a picture a week and spotlight you."

The spotlight series is named: "Writers in Masks”. It got me thinking. And writing. Here's my mask:

-------------------------

My Mask

My mask is invisible.

I wear it almost every day, usually without thinking of it. It is: English.

I started to learn English in school, in the fifth grade, as most German pupils do. About the same time, my father bought a computer. He didn’t use it much, and so I adopted it. That was long before Windows, when you needed to learn a computer language to communicate with the processor. So I learned Basic. Learned it faster than I learned English in school. Started to write some simple programs, then moved to the next level. And at some point, asked my father to buy computer magazines. Some of the computer magazines were in English. I can’t remember the exact timeline, but I guess it was a two-way process: the English in school helped to get me into Basic, and the computer zines were like extra lessons in English.

In seventh grade, the French lessons started, but I never really got the hang of this language of accents and apostrophes: “Qu’est-ce que c’est ?”- “Cest ça, la vie.”

Altogether, I didn’t think much about the nature of language itself back then. Words, as I understood it, were strings of meanings, and could be changed from one language to the other with the help of a dictionary. I knew there were programmers who were busy programming language modules for computers. Not long, experts said, and the computers would start to talk, and would be able to translate texts.

In school, the English lessons continued, and we started to read books. That’s when I ventured into the “foreign” rooms of the library. Sometimes I was lucky, and they had a book in both editions, German and English. Then I would borrow both, and have the German as back-up for difficult passages. Reading a book in the original version and in the translation also opened my eyes for the fact that a translated texts is a transformed texts. I still have vivid memories of reading Toni Morrison’s book "Sula" in German, and then in English. It was a different book.

Back then, I only wrote in German. Then I started to travel. And English became part of my everyday life. While abroad, I talked in English, and back home, I mailed in English, browsed English webpages. At one point, I started to write in English. Every now and then, I take one of my own texts, and translate it. It always reminds me of the pitfalls of translations.

Here’s an example, a nano story I wrote this year:

“He sat to watch the world go by. He waited for insights. Instead he found himself, thinking more and more about less and less.”

It took several approaches to turn it into German, starting from a literal translation and then moving to one that had a smooth flow of sentence and thoughts.

„Er saß da, beobachtete den Lauf der Zeit. Er hoffte auf große Eingebungen. Stattdessen dachte er immer weiter über immer weniger nach.”

Looking at both lines now make me think again that every language has its own tune and melody. The question is: to which degree does this melody also influence the writer and the speaker? I sound different when I talk English. I put things different when I write German. Both stems from the language itself – which, like the computer language Basic, is an interface of communication. Only that this interface isn’t passive. Every language has a specific structure, vocabulary and tone. Maybe it’s no coincidence that there is “face” in interface. The languages we speak, to some degrees, are masks we wear:

Ich bin.

I am.

Je suis.

Someone slightly different.

---------------------------
Dorothee Lang, August 2010

notes:
- For some of my bilingual blog moments, try the label German
- And for more writers in masks, try this Writers in Masks link list
- This essay was first published in the Writers in Masks series, and now became part of the blog carnival >language >place

qarrtsiluni: Lung Ta (wind words)

"This time we’re looking for words of power: curses, spells, charms, prayers, incantations, mantras, sacred scriptures, explicit performative utterances, oaths, or legal instruments. Submissions may consist entirely of such super-charged language, or may riff upon or explore such language. Submissions of visual art may of course take a more figurative approach to the topic."

said the qarrtsiluni call for submissions. right after reading it, i started to browse photo files, hoping to come across a clue how to approach the theme. then a memory of a photo popped up: prayer flags. yes! i thought, and located the photo. and had to realize: this won't really work.

now what?

the answer arrived a week later, with a bbq invitation that included the line: "when you see the prayer flags in front of the house, you know you are in the right place."

the day before the invitation, it rained. then the skies cleared, and there was this light breeze in the air. i took my camera, still not knowing if this might work out. it did. the story of that place is up here, in the blueprint photo pages: prayer flags. i took about a dozen pictures, and back home, tried various crops. two worked out really well. but they were missing something, i felt. so i started to visit pages about prayer flags. and then put the essence of it in 2 lines, to accompany the photos.

here the link to the wind words: Lung Ta

tiny detail: the title - "lung ta" is the tibetan term for the horizontal prayer flags, it means: "wind horse". if you look closely, you can actually see the shape of a horse ("ta") on the red flag in the upper image, it's one of the traditional symbols printed on prayer flags, representing the transformation from bad fortune to good fortune.

and while there, check out the podcast (speaker/arrow symbol beneath the title) - it offers a brief and compelling introduction to the "words of power" issue, and also refers to the 'Lung Ta' piece.

~

Wheelhouse: underwater / oranges / smiling land

in March, i worked on some collaborate visuals with Jeff Crouch.
3 of them are now up in Wheelhouse Issue 8:

- Smiling Land
- Underwater
- Confiture d'Oranges (the one above)

some notes on the process:

"the 'Oranges' and 'Smiling' images are morphs, extreme morphs at that, which means I find an image (or make one) and morph it into something as completely abstract as I like." - Jeff

"i now returned to "underwater", and tried a new version, including german terms: "wasser" is german for "water", and "farbe" is german for "colour". i hadn't noticed before that "farbe" cuts into 2 english words nicely: "far" - "be". - Dorothee

---

and here, some notes on Wheelhouse:

What is The Wheelhouse Arts Collective, anyway?
The Wheelhouse Arts Collective is what it sounds like: a collection of wayward artists, many of whom are progressive activists, labor unionists, and dilettantes, stuck inside the cramped confines of a seafaring vessel's main cabin. Luckily, we have a steering wheel, some windows, and a compass. We know where we're going: towards land, specifically a land where art is defetishized (not appreciated but wrestled with) and politics is a civic duty, where the New Yorker is not the arbiter of literary history (and no, it's not necessarily Canada).

Wheelhouse also just published a press anthology: "Activism & The Avant-Garde"

~

LITnIMAGE: from "tides" to "transcend"

"LITnIMAGE features art in the here and now. We like art that's edgy, that has yet to be labeled or attributed to a movement. We embrace thought-provoking work that causes viewers to broaden the way they see and feel. We enjoy work that guides and challenges our ideals. Content is significant; aesthetics follows its lead. LITnIMAGE recognizes not only the skill and creativity of artists, but the time and hardships they undertake to wake their audience. We're proud to spotlight the results of their efforts."

some submissions are easy. you see, you send, you get accepted, the work goes online. some are more complex. like LITnIMAGE. i had the link noted since a while, and came back to it after a collage-session with Steve Wing. we had 3 collages, each of them following 1 theme: "tides", "growth" and "microstructures". we thought they would make a real good series, and submitted them.

some days later, i wasn't so sure about the series anymore - the images felt a bit too diverse. plus, i was working on the shortcuts/detours issue of bluerprintreview, and had just received an invasive life question poem - and felt, "growth" would be the perfect match for it.

then litnimage wrote back, with an acceptance for "tides", a pass for "growth" and "microstructures", and the invitation to send some more images.

that's how things started to fall in place.

"growth" became part of the shortcuts issue, it's up here: "Invasion".

"tides" turned into the base for a series of black-white collages in which Steve and i experimented with different approaches of combining 2-3 photos. the full series we came up with consists of 6 images, which are all online now in the summer issue of LITnIMAGE, here the direct link:
tides / latitude / constructures / drift / transcend / merge

looking at it now, i am really glad that litnimage didn't accept the first collage series, and instead asked for something different - which let this series come together. my personal favourite is: "Transcend".
~