18.12.13

In Medea res

I'm in love with the way I mishear your words: in Medea res I thought you said on that voicemail, and my heart burst. I played it back over and over. There is just enough difference in our voices, just enough sameness in our beings, that these delicious little moments of othering our mutual language happen time and again.

Once I had a professor who was Israeli. We students were all in love with her voice, her inflections. When she said 'desire' something in me burned so brightly, as if the pilot light to my soul were suddenly kindled and would provide enough warmth for days. Others in the class also thrilled at this word, as I discovered once we began confiding in each other our excitement (well beyond the excitement over the content, existential philosophy and phenomenology, already quite exciting in itself to our ears and hearts).

Another, too, at that time spoke to me with a tongue that was like my own responding to me but with a different accent, so perfectly different. It is a seductive and uncanny thing, hearing oneself othered in someone else, feeling oneself spoken in another mouth. The other speaks with cadences that could never be mine, that alienate me from myself in the way finding a home outside oneself can. Such a transformative detour of our language, little tongues of difference to remind us of the difference at the heart of it all.