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 (as in St Paul’s thunderbolt acceptance of Christianity), but we can never predict which.
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 blind to it. But to see just how precarious our position really is, all we have to do is take off our blindfolds. Or have someone else take them off for us, which is usually what takes place.
I am going to give you a little taste of that vertigo right now by telling you that almost everything I’ve told you about these poems is a fabrication. What I mean by that is although I have assured you (and linguists have assured me) that the pidgin texts are real, I am compelled to tell you that Eldred’s history and a good portion of the original pidgin texts are a fabrication. I made them up. Just as I made up the translations and the commentary. And this confession.
Let me clarify that. I didn’t really make them up. They sort of made themselves up. And with some substantial help from others, I might add. For example, my statement in the foreword that I had received microfiche of The Worker containing the twelve pidgin poems along with an editorial isn’t quite true. I did receive something in the mail in 1985, but very little. What I received was a floppy disk containing two pidgin poems, titled Drimtaim and Mi Tair, but no other poems and no information at all about the author, whom I assumed to be Eldred Van-Ooy, the first-person narrator of Drimtaim. But nothing else except for a 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 looked at them than I sensed something utterly mysterious and wonderful had fallen into my possession. My sense of wonderment only increased after I had displayed the two pidgin poems on my PC. In fact, I was stunned. Even with my then very limited sense of pidgin. I decided I simply had to find out more about them. First, I acquired some pidgin dictionaries. After translating the two poems in their entirety, I realized they were indeed extraordinary poems, the real thing as they say.
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 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. I finally located him. In those pre-web days, it was a bit of luck to be sure. 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 a 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 at his desk 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 could feel 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 throw 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, 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 sent them to me I wouldn’t be able to put them down, and that when our paths would eventually cross (as they did) I’d have to bring up the poems. Like a trout to bait. And then he’d have some fun with me in his own odd way. Which I can assure you he did.
Then again, if you think about it, and I can also assure you that I have, and on many occasions, there’s nothing more confusing than being told something you thought true is only half true. Before my conversation with Munro, I had always assumed that the two poems had been written by a poet, and in this case, by an aborigine poet by the name of Eldred Van-Ooy. The poems seemed, beyond a doubt, to be the real thing. But when Munro “confessed” to having written Mi Tair, it really set me spinning. No matter how much I tried to dismiss his confession as a clever ploy, I was never really able to look at the two poems in quite the same way again.
All this, of course, was a lot of work to go through for a practical joke, but there were a few reasons why Munro may have done so, one of them being his nature and the other being mine. Unfortunately for me, beneath my genial surface I do have an assumed air of superiority that some men instantly dislike and will go to no end to put down. Munro may have been one of them, if for no other reason than he’s a bit like that himself. Of course another reason for his wanting to have a go at me may have been that I had bolted from his company some years earlier to start up a competing firm that was successful enough to put a small dent in his pocketbook. A dent I’m sure he remembered beneath all the chatty geniality of his phone conversations.
So he had a lot of motivation, if you know what I mean. But I must say he was very discreet and persevering about it. He never let on. In the end, though, your call is as good as mine as to where the two original pidgin poems really came from. I have no way of really knowing. All I have is the word of Munro, which is a hall of mirrors all by itself. But as for the poems themselves, all I can say is they have an undeniable authority.
Despite that felt authority, his confession still left me in somewhat of a quandary vis a vis their publication. How could I publish them knowing what I did: that (at best) they were two pidgin poems of questionable authorship found (reportedly) on the back of a restaurant menu in Brisbane? Of course, they could very well have been the poems of an aborigine by the name of Eldred Van-Ooy, but just as equally they could have been written by some day-tripping hippy returned from a sojourn in the outback, or by some spinster inspired by the latest library slide-show travelogue on Ayres Rock. After all, when it comes to poetry, there’s no telling.
At any rate, it was precisely at this point of confusion that I decided it was best to let the poems go. There was simply no way to publish them without knowing if they were real. Yet I adored these poems: sometimes they seemed so real I wanted to cry. My Beautiful little monsters, was what I kept thinking as they began to recede into the backrooms of my memory, where they lay like dusty, misarranged treasures.
For the most part they stayed there, undisturbed, except when some real or imagined personal slight would trigger the memory of Munro playing with me and cause me to endlessly skate and re-skate over the oily, slick surface of my conversation with him, looking for some kind of indication as to what the real truth was. But I never found one.
Once I became so crazy to know I left a message on his answering machine demanding to know the whereabouts of the menu and then a few months later I simply lost it and left another one to the effect that I knew enough about poetry to know he had written both poems, hoping to flush him out, and although I had to wait several weeks for an answer to the former and over six months for an answer to the latter, his replies were always affable. I’ll have to quote them from memory, but they went something like this: (Listen mate, that was years ago, who knows where the menu is now? and Justin, I have no idea how you deduced I was some kind of Earl of Southhampton, but it happened like I said it did, really. By the way have you been drinking or something?)
A little too affable, and a little too smooth is what I’d thought at the time, especially considering the frenzied nature of my inquiries, but he liked exercising that British upper class part of his personality, and what better person to use it on than that oddball, snobby little poet who had cost him several hundred thousand dollars in revenue when he bolted the mother ship. Then again, he may have been telling the truth. There was simply no way to tell. Like I say, he never let on. At any rate it was after that last frenzied (and somewhat embarrassing) inquiry that I simply let the whole thing go and said goodbye to the poems. It had gone far enough.
But not far enough it seems, because some 15 years later, as I was wandering through a didgeridoo shop in Los Angeles (where else?), the haunting, pulsating music playing in the background brought up my little monsters once again. That remembrance was so beautifully bittersweet it made me finally realize the poems would never really go away. Like the memories of a love affair that had never quite worked out, they would be with me until the day I died.
A few weeks later, before returning to Florida, I drove down to Sonora Mexico, to visit a friend in a little town called Alamos. Frozen in time is hardly an apt enough description. There was nothing to do except read and sleep, and the bright, hot days and cold, star-filled nights invited both. It also invited the most vivid dreams I have ever had, but one in particular refused to let go of me.
In the dream, two small children suddenly appeared in front to me in the desert. For some reason, they seemed to be full of mischief. I don’t know why I thought this, perhaps it was because of their large, dark bright eyes, which were so large as to almost mesmerize me, so much so that it took me some time to realize the two children were not only naked, but were glowing with a white, almost numinous light.
I was trying to decide what they really were: children, or aliens, or angels, when the one to my right spoke to me. He was very matter of fact, and said they wanted me to build a house for them, that they were tired of wandering the desert like a traveling sideshow. “What kind of house?” I asked, and no sooner had I said that than the other one started to slowly lift off the ground and with no apparent effort turn completely upside down, so that his feet were sticking up in the air and his arms hanging down, at which time his fingers started to grow downwards like long, thin shiny roots that burrowed into the earth until the roots were so many and so glittery and widespread it seemed as if they were branches and he were a tree growing downwards into the earth.
I remember thinking it was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen, but I also remember feeling very uneasy, because his eyes hadn’t turned upside down with the rest of his body, but had remained right side up, and they were burning right through me like an insistent, unspoken command. When I woke up, I realized the two children were my beautiful little monsters. Right then, I knew something was going to happen, I could feel it in my bones. I just didn’t know what would happen, or where or when.
And then, a few months after my return to Florida, it happened. Although it smacks of a Frank Capra movie (and me a bewildered Gary Cooper), two new poems (Naming Things and Homecoming), and all of Eldred's history came to me in a rush one day while I was driving to pick up some potting soil at the Green Fountain Garden shop in Sarasota. Although the poems came to me mainly in English, pieces of pidgin also came to me at the same time. It was a mess, but a gorgeous one.
But it wasn’t really that much of a mess. I have a bit of psychic ability that comes and goes, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the little nuggets of biographical “facts” that I found in my little pudding. (Those “facts”, by the way, were roughly as follows: Eldred Van-Ooy, the author of the poems, was an aborigine born in 1891 in the outback near Brisbane and then raised from birth by white, middle-class parents, Mildred and Cinque Van-Ooy, who educated him to the point where he went on to become an instructor in hydraulic engineering at a technical college as well as the inventor of a unique waste pumping system. In January 1960, at the age of 69, he published twelve pidgin poems he had written in January 1939. They were published as advertisements in a local radical paper, The Worker. He died in 1984, at age 93, of natural causes.)
I can only say that when I checked all this out later with the Chamber of Commerce in Brisbane, many of the “facts” turned out to be correct. I wasn’t able to find out a great deal of detail, especially when it came to Van-Ooy himself, but I did manage to ascertain that there are people with the name of Van-Ooy in Brisbane, and there is a technical college (Queensland Institute of Technology) and they do teach hydraulic engineering. These last two correspondences can perhaps be explained as coincidences, but not the name Van-Ooy. I can’t think of a more peculiar name. Take a look in your local phone book if you don’t believe me.
But that was just the beginning. No sooner had all this come to me, than other “facts” began to make themselves up. Suffice it to say that the initial rush of words and images and facts eventually turned into a torrent. The result was an extraordinary house of mirrors that constructed itself with very little help from me. And I must say that its glittery architecture continues to impress me. Not only did I get a chance to write some poems in both pidgin and English, but I was also awarded the job of translator (both ways) and commentator. And critic. And trickster: for along with the raisins of prime numbers and numerology that began to dot this loaf, a whole host of other goodies began adding themselves as well.
For one thing, that old chestnut about what constitutes a good translation was given a nice nose twist. Not only does pidgin absolutely require that the translator add his two cents, but in this case the oft-heard complaint that the "English translations don't live up to the originals" goes to pieces as soon as the reader realizes that English translations are often the originals and the pidgin originals are often the translations. All I can say is, the way they came is the way I caught them.
Of course, the whole "arts fraud" issue is also given a good going over. The legendary art critic Bernard Berenson, who never seemed to hesitate in grabbing a magnifying glass to examine a suspicious canvas, probably had an answer for all this, but like the Borges character that accidentally rewrote Don Quixote word for word, I don’t care to hear it. Who cares whether Van Gogh painted the “The Flowering Orchard” or some clever Armenian forger. If you get the same rush when you look at either version, who’s to say one is art and the other not?
To my mind the only issue worth talking about with regard to so called art “frauds” is whether the thing made up moves you. Besides, this whole thing about authorship is a herring. No poet worth his salt would ever claim he was responsible for his best poems. He just brought them into the world, was merely midwife to the Muse. Let me put it to you this way: someone else is making these things up for us. We just don’t know how or why or who. Or when they’re coming.
Finally, let me say that sections of both the pidgin "originals" and their English translations continue to move me. They are urgent, simple, mysterious utterances. And funny. And sad. The reader who is willing to take the time to read the "original pidgin" will be well rewarded. What could be funnier or more eloquent than young Eldred's impatient lament in DRIMTAIM about the white man's world, the world we call real:
YAR KAM NA GO
OLSEM SAN. OLSEM MUN.
DRIMTAIM I-KAM. DRIMTAIM I-GO.
NA OL WAITMAN I-NO TOKIM MI
EM I-SAEVI DRIMTAIM.
EM I-TOKIM NEM BILONG OLKAIN SAMTING.
EM I-TOKIM: WAN, TU, TRI,
WAN, TU, TRI, TASOL.
Or this tired, expectant letting go into sleep, into dreaming in MI TAIR:
MI LAIK GO PLES BILONG HAID,
PLES BILONG MI.
MI LAIK GO SLIP.
MI LAIK GO DRIM.
MI LAIKIM REN BILONG DRIM EM I-KAM.
MI LAIKIM LUKIM ALA DOR DAI.
MI LAIKIM LUKIM ALA WOL I-SWELAP KWIK
OLSEM SID BILONG FLAWER
I-KAMAP, I-BROK NABAUT.
Finally let me say there was never any desire to trick the reader. If anyone was tricked, it was me. I have no idea what it was that caused MI Tair and Drimtaim to appear on my doorstep some twenty six years ago, but I can tell you this: whatever spirit it was, it refused to let go of me until I had built my beautiful little monsters the house they so ardently desired. A house in which they could be safe, have guests, receive mail, where they could put down their roots, become a part of the world. Some may argue with its shape, but all I can say is, it is the house I was instructed to build.
Who can say what it is that brings these messengers from the other world into our lives? Spirit wants a body, it wants roots in this world, it wants to walk the walk and talk the talk. It’s as simple as that. Every soul, every spirit, that arrives in this world ripples the very real water and disturbs the very real earth in a way we can only bend to. They create a truth that will not be denied. Next to that truth, most of our speculations about what is true and what is real and what is illusory seem somewhat beside the point. Truth is what spirit wants it to be. And it can change in a moment. Just like that. Get used to it.
Justin Spring
2011
Merida Yucatan Mexico