'To Dance on a Luminous Page'

“At times a word escapes this tangled text / to build its nest in our comprehension.” 

It’s easy to take literacy for granted. It’s every modern person’s right, like getting a driver’s license. And like one’s legal certification to operate a motor vehicle, it can be quickly abused. Consider your life as you live it today, minus the ability to effortlessly decipher signs on a page. Some lives would, of course, remain virtually untouched. Traffic signs can be memorized by their color and shape. You can buy pork chops or shoes by pointing at them. In his essay “On Reading,” Guy Davenport describes meeting a man in his twenties who is illiterate:

 

“The horror of his predicament struck me first of all because it prevents his getting a job, and secondly because of the blindness it imposes on his imagination. . . . I  had never before felt how lucky and privileged I am. Not so much for being literate, a state of grace that might in different circumstances be squandered on tax forms or law books, but for being able, regularly, to get out of myself completely, to be somewhere else, among other minds, and return (by laying my book aside) renewed and refreshed.”   

 

To a literate person, illiteracy, though difficult to imagine, sounds frustratingly claustrophobic, like looking at the world from inside a box, through a hole the size of a pinprick. Imagine the provinciality of one’s understanding. There’s something offensively ungrateful about aliteracy; that is, being able to read but choosing not to.

 

The lines quoted at the top are written by a poet about whom I knew nothing, E.T. Jeremiah. “Reading the Classics” was published in the Spring/Summer 2011 edition of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. It concludes:

 

“So it marvels, how the skin of tree

has become the mouth of man,

how life is transposed in the glyph,

the etching,  the marking of breath,

 how letters assemble to the syntax of life--

 

“How the classics, resting on their shelves

in the graveyard of thought,

or webbed, traced and gleaming,

are brought flowers of remembrance by the living

and open once again

to dance on a luminous page.”

[“On Reading” is collected in Davenport’s The Hunter Gracchus (Counterpoint, 1997).]

 

[Here is the potted biography of the poet printed in Arion: “Edward Jeremiah recently completed his doctorate on the emergence of reflexivity in Greek language and thought at the University of Melbourne. He currently lectures and tutors in classics at Melbourne and Monash Universities . . . He wishes to thank all writers, both dead and living, for their undying inspiration.”]