Diasporic

Saturday, June 21, 2003 - 7:15 am
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

I found this on a small piece of paper slipped into a book (Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving*) I picked up at a used book sale:

if suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for i shall already have forgotten you.

Pablo Neruda

~

A few days ago, while writing a letter, I looked at my name on my letterhead and did not recognize it as my own. For an instant, I saw it as a stranger must see it, a name unrelated to myself. A flickering moment of displacement. Almost immediately I recovered my reason, if not my senses. My reason, my intellect, the part of my brain with pretensions to logic, told me that, yes, this is my name, my first name after an ancestral Welsh uncle, my surname from my father's Russian forbears. (My middle name, after a saintly Polish prince, was the mater's capricious fancy, regardless of the dearth of Poles in our family's genealogy.)

My senses do not agree with my reason. My senses, my intuitive discernment, the part of my brain that leaps to conclusions without resorting to any kind of ratiocination, continues to feel alien to my name.

It's like a teensy-tiny spate of amnesia.

I'm kinda enjoying it.

~

* I bought it for the pictures. It's a quaint little darling of a book covered in red leatherette, with gilt accents. The illustrations are colored engravings, elaborately detailed, of architectural subjects, panoplies of colonnaded Spanish arches and calligraphic Moorish tiles. Did I mention that I love books with lots of pictures?

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

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