Editors’ Notes -- Departures & Encounters
Blood Orange Review 2.2

A few days ago at breakfast, when I announced the news that Kurt Vonnegut had died, my housemate, a scientist, said quite seriously, “That’s it: I can’t go to work today.” All day long, I spoke with people that simply wanted to ditch everything, go home, open a Vonnegut book, and read.

His passing exemplifies something very simple: writing is important. As we hear or read another’s thoughts, our own thoughts change. Why else would so many people feel moved by the death of an elderly stranger? The writing/reading transaction is not a removed activity: we are affected, often permanently.

Consider for a moment, two lines from Sarah J. Sloat’s poem “Vestment,” which appears in the latest issue of Blood Orange Review: “On the morning of my ruin/I will dress in a vest of bees.”

Sloat succeeds at nailing a kinesthetic feeling of intensity and discomfiting power, even in the most perilously distressing moments of our lives. The first time I read these lines, and each time since, I have been thankful that this feeling was expressed just so; inexplicably, it makes perfect sense to me.

Similarly, Kris Sanford’s stark and honest photographs that are showcased in this issue exhume and communicate layers of submersed, undeniable sentiment that feels like utter relief for the audience to observe. I am grateful when I see artists, again and again, stepping up to express the complex human condition.

For days now, at my house, we’ve been clinking our wine glasses to Vonnegut. We should be dancing the foxtrot or playing our favorite music as homage. For now, here’s a new issue of Blood Orange Review: to Vonnegut.

Heather K. Hummel, Co-editor
Blood Orange Review

***

The language of the Pirahã tribe of northwestern Brazil has been baffling linguists since their first encounters with it in the early part of the 20th century. On the surface, the language appears extremely simple, with only eight consonants and three vowels. According to Dan Everett, one of the few linguists able to work directly with the tribe, their language has no words for colors, numbers, or quantification. They have no directives for “left” or “right.” The language is completely absent of abstraction, with no myths of origin, no lasting art, and no cultural concepts for an ancestral past or an afterlife. As hunters and gatherers, they live in an eternal present and have no interest in the outside world, its words or its ways, which they do have a word for. They call it “crooked head.”

The tribe communicates through songs, hummed or whispered, shifting tones, stresses, and varying syllable lengths, which linguists call "prosody." What confounds linguists, especially Noam Chomsky, godfather of Universal Grammar, is that the language apparently lacks the one element that is understood to separate human speech from animal vocalization. The ability to form complex thoughts using recursive structures, setting one phrase inside another inside another like Russian dolls, is the key to Chomsky’s theory that we are all born with language encoded into our brains. The existence of this tribe’s language, on the other hand, suggests that language might be more cultural than biological, that the words we use and how we put them together is a result of a distinct set of values and desires. In his remote office at MIT, Chomsky denies that that this tribe’s language challenges his theory, and that they must be, in essence, "crooked head."

Reading over the latest issue of Blood Orange Review I couldn’t help but think of this debate and of the many linguistic encounters that this volume puts forth. In the poetry of Emily Tallman and the photography of Kris Sanford, there is the intersection of past and present. In Nathan Graziano’s “Semper Fi at Lunch” and Lynn Patmalnee’s “Strip Mall Serenade,” individuals come in contact with others who make them re-evaluate their situation. Poets and writers, that’s what we do. We cross the river in our rickety boats and give away our trinkets in exchange for food or shelter. In this exchange of history and the present, others and self, self and the lyrical moment, we sing to each other in order to connect and survive. I guess that makes us a tribe of crooked heads. Stay with us a while, then. There’s plenty of room around the fire.

Stephanie Lenox , Co-editor
Blood Orange Review

 

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