On “In Altre Patrole,” by Jhumpa Lahiri, and Letting Myself Make Art
The summer after my freshman year, when I was eighteen and exhilarated to be broke and living by myself in New York City, I would sneak into the dark and empty dance studio of my college’s campus to practice on the grand piano. I was always terrified that someone would walk in and tell me I couldn’t be there, so I wouldn’t dare to turn on the lights, instead I would squint at the sheet music in the moonlight. It was on one of those summer nights that I finished reading In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri–or In Altre Parole in its original language, Italian.
After leaving the dance studio and returning to the book in my dorm room, I sensed a barely perceptible, melodic shift in the way I read Lahiri’s prose. In the rhythm of her sentences was a new yet familiar lightness, a feeling much like when I had been playing the piano earlier that night. Her reverence for each word seemed to echo the notes spilling into the empty studio, with the resounding clarity of music in a cathedral. Likewise in reverse, the memory of playing the piano mirrored the forms of her minimalistic prose, the notes emerging sharp and concise like a knife. Her deliberate diction, with the slicing precision of biting into an apple, reflecting the crisp definitive note of each key. The measures of the songs flowing into each other, streamlined transitions, paralleling juxtaposed words that overlapped with similar definitions. There was a joy and confidence in her writing that I hadn’t noticed before.
It used to be that when I would finish reading a poem or story, I would stay still and take a moment to hold the words inside of me, nestle them in my ribs and let them take root. It used to bring me a feeling of serenity, like letting my hands dip into still waters. And yet over the years, the process of reading a book had stopped giving me peace. Because I had wanted to convince myself that I was a writer that summer, reading often instead sent me into a crushing panic of incompetence. It became a trial of comparison. The more I read, the more it seemed that everything I wrote couldn’t help but be a cliché.
When I first came to New York City, the determination to be a writer had been simple. It came from an uncomplicated love for language, for the heady rush after encountering a sentence that marked before and after points in my world. It came from the desire to be able to create something true and unbearable like that too. Over the years, under the crush and competition of high school and college when everything became a comparison game, I had lost faith in my ability to write. Suddenly, I felt as if my writing could only be validated in the world of literary awards and counts of published pieces. I felt unqualified to even attempt anymore, and I would review my work with the viciousness of a caustic perfection that tended to outside standards.
Reading In Altre Parole that night reminded me of the simple reason why I should permit myself to write, without guilt or disappointment in myself. To allow myself to stumble through an unclear idea, to write just for the sheer act of creating, of seeing words stream onto the page like quicksilver where before there was nothing. After the years of self-criticism, I finally learned to recover that feeling again.
Jhumpa Lahiri wrote that we seek art to be transformed, and I only really understood her after seating myself at the piano. In the transition from sheet music to the written word that June night, a certain receptivity carried over. The act of switching codes from instrument to book made words come alive for me again, made me feel them in the heartbeats in my chest in the way that I only allowed music to make me feel before. In commanding myself to devote a religious attention to the shifting colors of each key, something in me opened wide, into a state that allowed the light to slip in.
To pay attention is an act of prayer, because to hear and feel the response necessitates vulnerability. To create something out of nothing asks you to pour the shape of you from your hands and into sound. And then, still trembling, to walk naked into the next piece of art you encounter, to be reshaped much more forcefully, with the world bared open to you like the inside of the moon scraped clean. To play the piano, to really play and give yourself over to it, is an act of faith, like wading chin-deep into the ocean without hesitation and into a fluid way of existing. In all those times I had desperately immersed myself in novels, I had sought to be altered. To exit and return to a world that is three nocturnes and an aubade richer in texture. And yet, clinging to a fear sharpened from the habit of comparison had kept me from letting myself be transformed and from fully encountering the art.
In Lahiri’s careful meditation on her love for learning Italian, she seemed to say that language, whether learning or creating it, could be as simple as an act of translation. Nothing more, in the way that playing music for myself came from an act of joy, and with no need to please anyone but myself. She wrote about her own struggle in comparing herself to the great writers, but understood that despite the fear of daring to call herself one, she didn’t have to be great to be a writer. Writing was not meant to be an arrival, but an infinite relationship of wonder with the world.
In the dim shadows of that moonlit dance studio, my fear of language began to fall away. I began to understand that writing was a gate swinging open to let the light in. That maybe I could find solace in it again. That writing didn’t need to be a test of myself, but simply a gesture of trust. That sometimes all I needed to ask from it was respite from the world, a momentary place to catch my breath. Writing not as a request for validation, but a venture into a gentle kind of discomfort, the kind that comes with pushing yourself to feel, to notice, to be alert. That it all came down to permitting myself to break silence, like my single-minded impulse to play the piano, the urge to sink into a soft luminosity of mediated sound–sound as the barest kind of language.
In Altre Parole reminded me of what the act of reading and writing could be again. Like seating myself at the piano, fingertips dancing on keys. Returning to language as a way of being, without searching for perfection, but being content with the notes singing in the empty room. As a way of forgiving myself. That is what I am trying to recover.
Noelle Penas is a rising junior at Barnard College in New York City, currently studying Visual Arts and Human Rights, and is passionate about mangoes and light art. You can find more of her writing and other work at noellepenas.com.
In Other Words
by Jhumpa Lahiri
256 pp.