I Was Made of Language
I n my first year of university, I had the sense that my future was assembling itself into semi-solid form and all I had to do was point myself in its direction as it continued to harden into reality. That future dissolved on the day I stepped into an introductory linguistics course.
Before that day, it had seemed inevitable to me that I would be a writer. This meant writing novels or possibly poetry; I had not yet read other kinds of books that smoldered with aesthetic intensity or set my synapses alight. I chose a class in linguistics not because it sounded interesting (it did not: Its course description made reference to notions such as syntax and grammar, which I had encountered only in desiccated and prescriptive forms) but because it seemed that knowing about such things might be useful for a writer.
I thought I knew a great deal about language already. I had by then wandered in and out of five languages and was adept at comparing and contrasting them. But more than that, I felt I was made of language—that my soul was the product of all the language fragments that had blown my way and accumulated into a semblance of a whole, all of them held together by my ardor for their alchemies of sound and meaning. Nothing else in the world drew the same bodily response from me (I was just beginning to have an inkling that sex might have similar possibilities). I could imagine no version of my self that was not about language. I thought I knew language intimately, in a way that made me possessive of it.
