Deep within us, we all carry truths so strong and so real they literally shape our lives: truths such as a belief in a caring (or an uncaring) God, or an absolute conviction that someone truly and deeply loves us.
When truths such as these suddenly collapse within us, when they no longer seem real, the very ground beneath us becomes horribly fluid. We can suddenly become lost (as in the case where we realize someone never did love us) or we can suddenly find ourselves in a new world (as in St Paul’s thunderbolt acceptance of Christ).
These moments represent pivotal points in our lives, points at which an entirely new understanding of what is true takes possession of us. That possession may take a very long time to complete itself (as in the case of a mistaken love) or it may take place in an instant (as in the case of St. Paul), but in either case, it eventually replaces the previous truth that ruled our lives.
We are never really sure how this happens. All that we can really say for sure about it is that something outside of our normal way of knowing entered us and cast an entirely new light on our world. In a way, illusion is yesterday’s truth. We can still look back and feel how real that truth was, but there is always something unreal about it, ghost-like. And it becomes more ghostly with time.
In its place, a whole new way of looking at things takes possession of us and looms solidly before us, and within us, like a newly discovered land. Luckily, over time, like all immigrants to a new land, we forget about the ghostly place we left. It is empty for us. A place only of memories. We can only think about the new land we have come to inhabit. How real it feels—and how true.
It is a very frightening and humbling experience to realize our deepest truths can be suddenly snatched away from us by God knows what. Those moments are the reason being human is not a game for the faint of heart. But those moments are also the beginning of wisdom. What we ultimately come to realize is that when it comes to knowing what is true, we are standing on a pile of shifting mirrors. We are standing on quicksand.
Of course it doesn’t feel like that; it feels rock-solid. Or more precisely, like the solid edge of a precipice we are but inches from stepping over (but don’t know it because we are blindfolded or so the story goes.) To see just how precarious our position really is, however, all we have to do is take off our blindfolds. Or have someone else take them off for us, which is usually what happens.
I am going to give you a little taste of that vertigo right now by telling you that a good bit of what I’ve told you about these poems in the FOREWORD isn’t true. This wasn’t an attempt to deceive you for the fun of it. Rather I wanted to establish a certain gravitas for the poems that would counterbalance the very real vertigo you are going to continue to feel as this AFTERWORD unfolds. The primary way I have done this was by dramatically increasing the number of pidgin poems I told you I had received in 1985. Nothing impresses us like big numbers it seems. I also upped the ante a bit by not telling you the truth about the media form they were in. To my mind, nothing is more official sounding than microfiche, so microfiche it was.
The truth of the matter is that I did receive something in the mail in 1985, but it was a floppy disk, not microfiche. The floppy disk, however, contained only the bare digital records of two pidgin poems titled Drimtaim and Mi Tair. You can see them exactly as they looked as I displayed them on my PC in the section called ORIGINAL PIDGIN. There were no other poems, nor any information as to the source of the poems. There was also no information at all about the author, whom I assumed—rightly or wrongly—to be Eldred Van-Ooy, the first-person narrator of Drimtaim. The only thing accompanying the floppy was a brief handwritten note from a long-time, Australian computer associate, Boyd Munro, hoping the poems might be of interest.
And indeed they were. Because no sooner had I displayed the two pidgin poems on my PC than I sensed something utterly mysterious and wonderful had fallen into my possession. Although I had intuitively sensed what the pidgin poems were saying when I first displayed them (pidgin is somewhat like Chaucer’s English in that respect) I was never quite sure if my intuitions were correct. I thus spent a great deal of time trying to locate a pidgin dictionary based on the pidgin Van-Ooy used, which I eventually found out was a New Guinea pidgin called TOK PISIN.
Meantime I began reading up on the characteristics of pidgin languages around the world, which I found out were remarkably similar in grammatical structure although the base language differed depending on the nationality (Portuguese, French, Spanish, English etc.) of those trading with the natives. Fortunately, TOK PISIN was based on the English language which made translating the poems relatively easy.
But were they the real thing? Munro was a notorious practical joker. Could they be frauds? After a good bit of searching, I located a linguist at a large university who specialized in pidgin languages. I sent the two texts to her with a query as to their possible authenticity, i.e., were they frauds, something written by someone with a scholarly knowledge of pidgin or were they authentic: did they have the stamp of someone who was orally fluent in pidgin? The message I got back was quick and to the point: they were indeed authentic and did I have any more? No, I answered, much to the disappointment of the linguist I’m sure. Looking back on it, I should have answered, Not right now, but I have never been that prescient.
Having been assured they were authentic pidgin, I bore down on trying to locate Munro to find out what he knew about the author. In those pre-web days, it required a bit of luck to be sure, as he was one of the first wealthy software developers and he had a bit of Howard Hughes in him. He flew his own plane frequently between America, Bermuda, England and Australia, so there was no telling where he was. In addition, he seldom answered phones and tended to make himself scarce, so it was only by coincidence that someone I was talking to on the phone at Boyd’s subsidiary in Burlingame California offhandedly told me Boyd was in the next room picking up some mail. I asked him to put me through and when he did I asked him about the two pidgin poems.
Munro, by the way, could never decide if he was Australian or British, so there was much huffing followed by something I can only describe as a Foster’s guffaw before he told me what had happened, namely that he had come upon the pidgin poem Drimtaim in a small restaurant in Brisbane, where he had found it scribbled on the back of an old menu. When I asked him about the second poem, Mi Tair, there was a long silence on the other end after which he said something like, What second poem, mate? I was totally confused and recited Mi Tair to him in English (after all I had done the English translation) and it suddenly came back to him. Oh, he said, I wrote that one. As a sort of joke. Couldn’t you tell?
I was waiting for the Foster’s guffaw but it didn’t come. Could he have written it? I doubted it. I could maybe, maybe conceive of him writing Drimtaim, which for all its beauty is a bit “thinky”, but the lush emotional falling of Mi Tair seemed far beyond his sensibility. I told him, as politely as I could (because you can never be sure about these things) that I couldn’t really believe he’d written it. He said he didn’t really believe it either, but he had written it, really, that it sort of came to him.
He went on to tell me, and he seemed very exact in his reconstruction, that he was especially tired that day but the pidgin poem Drimtaim he had seen at lunch kept coming back to him, so he went back to the restaurant and located the menu, which he bought as a souvenir. He said he didn’t know why, but my interest in poetry came to mind, so he decided to key up a floppy and send it to me as a curiosity.
And here’s the part that got my attention. He said that as he was sitting later at his PC staring at the restaurant menu, he started keying in some nonsense about how tired he was and then, suddenly, Mi Tair started to come to him in pidgin. Very quickly he added. He said he had acquired some pidgin in his travels through New Guinea in his school days, but when this pidgin came to him it he said it felt like it was coming from somewhere else in his head. When I said nothing (what could I say?) I heard a little nervous shuffling on the other end of the line before he went on to say that for some reason he liked what he’d done and decided to put it on the floppy without saying anything to me about its origin. So there you are, that was it, he said.
Well, maybe he was telling the truth and maybe he wasn’t, but there was no way to tell. Knowing his penchant for practical jokes, it was also possible that he had written both poems and there was no menu, or (and this is really devilish) maybe he had actually found two poems on the menu (not just one) and had made up the confession about writing Mi Tair just to thicken the porridge. If this was the case, the Munro I spoke to that day must have been a very fast thinker, but them again no one had ever faulted him in that department.
All this went through my head in matter of seconds, but before I could say anything he went on to tell me he was pleased I had thought his pidgin poem Mi Tair as good as Drimtaim, a poem he considered a small masterpiece. This was followed by a long silence on his part, which was his usual signal he wanted to hang up. It was all I could do to keep my composure and thank him for the poems. After I hung up, I looked at myself in the hallway mirror for a very long time. My own best guess is that I was the victim of one of his more elaborate practical jokes. Munro always admired what he termed “the delayed effect” of some practical jokes, a topic he never stopped talking about, and he may have seen in me the perfect potential dupe. After all, poets always believe they lead secret, mysterious lives, but I think Munro, when he came across the poems, being a bit of a little greedy piggy himself when it came to money, must have sensed my own little greedy piggy need for poetry.
When he found the two poems on the back of the menu, I think his head went into overdrive. He knew if he