Thoughts of the Future
Review of Cynthia Arrieu-King’s Futureless Languages (USA: Radiator Press, 2018)
by Lim Xin Hwee
The linguistic phrase “futureless languages” refers to the fact that certain languages are unable to express the future as distinct from the present. In these languages, the future is conveyed by a time marker, but the sentence is constructed in the present tense (eg. “Tomorrow I am old,” “Tomorrow it rains”). The implications of such a grammar is that the future feels closer to the present than in futured languages. Studies have examined the relation of this linguistic construction to such social issues as the propensity for personal savings. The overall message is clear: that the way we think about time influences our understanding and thoughts regarding the future.
Cynthia Arrieu-King, whose collection Futureless Languages was released in 2018 by Radiator Press, examines the implications of futureless languages through poetry. Her interpretation of the term is arguably more literal. In her poems she asks if we have run out of optimism for the future, and how does one exist in the currents of despair surrounding climate change or the rise of ethno-nationalism in developed countries? Consider her titular poem, which examines the futureless construction of language, and how people behave in light of it:
I do not smoke. Tomorrow
most animals and trees
are dead. In the fall,
I live. I live in this fall.
The speakers of these
supposedly have
more prudence, prepare,
save money, smoke less.
The speaker exhibits an understanding of the impact of this futureless language, and also discusses the “outlier culture” whose futured languages inures them to the worries of the future, and are thus cast as “hedonists.” But Arrieu-King’s speaker does not seem to be as interested in the dichotomy between the future-attentive and the hedonists as much as she is by the possibility of living perpetually “in this fall.” What does it mean to live on the cusp of the future, to feel the future so closely? This is the question that sets the mood for the whole collection, which goes on to contemplate different ways of uncovering and dealing with the future while always living on the cusp of it.
Futureless Languages is split into three sections, with the first and third sections containing more conventional poems consisting of lyric verse and enjambment, and the second featuring a sequence of prose poems where the speaker ruminates on memory and permanence. Of the whole collection my favorite has to be the third poem, also titled “Futureless Languages.” In this second "Futureless Languages" poem, Arrieu-King uses anecdotes to show that the future will be a repetition of the past. Split into six parts, the poem deals with translation and endeavors to decentralise America and English, instead proving that the American experience is derived from the rest of the world. The US government is likened to fascist Germany, even though the language of fascism does not translate well into English. Some failures in translation include “So many jokes about vermin when they Bannon fired. / Or: Too late, it already all the eggs in the draperies has laid.” This points to the idea that once fascist ideas are communicated in English, they become automatically justified by their own existence. This is due to the familiarity of the English language, which leads people to mistake these ideas as universal and give them a pass. Arrieu-King uses German without providing glosses to counteract this (“habe ich mich entschlossen ein scheusal zu sein.”), almost as if to pose the question: what do you associate with the sound/sight of this language, even if you do not know what it means? By doing so, the poem reveals the linguistic and historical biases embedded within language itself.
In the second section of the book, Arrieu-King looks inwards instead of outwards in her exploration of pain. She writes, in “Saga,” “Pain, in fact, is the beginning of something.” The type of pain in this section shifts from one that stems from the trauma of being a public citizen dealing with absurdity to a private person dealing with private acts of violence. The section starts with “Freedom of Speech,” which tackles a certain strain of self-renewing pain that arises from a person’s conflict with a family member about politics (“Your eyes always dip to sleep after a remark/ about how climatologists are overreacting, the march of history, the next civil war,/ all good things come to an end.”) In the next poem, “In 5000 Years None of This Will Really Matter,” Arrieu-King mentions mundane events in life, like “[taking] a thing from my car that wasn’t supposed to be there,” then instantly focuses on the macro, saying a few words, “The cosmos kept blowing up like a snake in a fake peanut brittle box.” By juxtaposing these different failures, the poem provides a way for the reader to experience personal failure as freedom. As the title suggests, our failures are circumscribed by our natural lifespans, and should therefore be felt in the context of the greater scheme of things. This sentiment is summed up in “Two Kinds of Forgetting,” where Arrieu-King writes, “Forgetting settles into surviving. You go outdoors. I go/ indoors where everyone’s watching the game or putting an apple in plastic.”
By reckoning with personal pain, Arrieu-King also reckons with the theme of colonialism. Futureless Languages recognises colonialism as an act of violence, and places it alongside other acts of violence. This can be interpreted as a move to legitimize the idea that the personal is very much affected by the public. Consider “empire,” in which there is no resolution or reversion to an original state of being. Despite the use of negations such as "restore," "undo" and "unshuck," the poem is unable to restore the colonized subject to its original state. In another poem, "El Anatsui," Arrieu-King suggests that the linguistic hegemony of English as the dominant global language has rendered such efforts useless from the outset; the eponymous artist is quoted verbatim in the poem saying, “I mean/ your language, English, he says, is too specific. So unpreventable.” While there are attempts at subverting the hegemony of English by making up English words like “gelen train and brate” in "empire," these gestures are futile in the face of colonialism, and are ineffective in resisting the highly sanitised, one-sided “monologue” that is the empire's voice. Ultimately, what we are left with is yet another sanitized façade standing in place of violent death – that of “pits wet with dark red flesh."
The theme of the afterlife, or what lies beyond the future in its conventional sense, preoccupies the speaker in the second section. In "In 5000 Years None of This Will Really Matter," Arrieu-King’s speaker finds it difficult to choose a particular memory to “use as a bridge to oblivion.” It appears her answer to oblivion lies in the connection we have with others: towards the end, the speaker impresses her memory on the reader to remember and carry on. This urgency comes in a deluge of information: "Walking in a cold meadow after a swim. Sitting on my dad's chest as an infant [...] A made up game."
Poems in Futureless Languages echo and refer to one another. For example, the image of pizza, which appears in "In 5000 Years None of This Will Really Matter" (“I saw us/ eating pizza sleepily while on the timeline of the cosmos, an infinity of dead/ stretched before us.”) also appears in “Futureless Languages,” in which the speaker says, “Futureless: You still eat pizza/ if you know you’re going to die.” I would argue that this pattern of repetition subverts the reader’s ability to read the collection sequentially, and thereby prevents the effect of a chronological reading through the collection’s arrangement of poems. If so, this is an intelligent move on Arrieu-King’s part, one that suggests that the speaker’s world is essentially recursive, and thus futureless. The reader is forced to experience time in a circular fashion.
The resistance to a linear narrative is conducted not only on the level of the book but also on the level of the individual poem. When the future of a language cannot be predicted, and when the future of morphology is uncertain, Arrieu-King plays with syntax to create a sense of circularity. The tone that results converges on absurd, and events acquire a humorous tinge. The collection's second poem, "Outsider Art," explores dissociation as a result of grappling with an absurd future. Lying between the two poems titled "Futureless Languages," “Outsider Art” suggests that the contemplation of the future is an act so arduous that it is often interspersed with acts of dissociation and episodes of depression. The narrator is on the “outside” of the narrated events, looking in. She writes:
there will reverberate a moment when my lover asked me
why I always go inside my mind
go somewhere instead of looking at him
and saying what I’m thinking.
[...]
and they said there should be a national holiday where
every person goes out into a field or cave alone to think.
The speaker’s trauma creates dissociation, and keeps her from revealing the truth and being honest to her lover in the present. The poem therefore suggests that thinking is a solitary experience, and laments that without governmental intervention, thoughtful reflection will no longer be something we can afford.
In its final section, Futureless Languages contemplates what the world could have been and reconnects with people and ideas that were lost. In the poem “The Idea at Rest,” the narrator experience dissonance and finds herself almost holding the hand of the man she “asked to marry [her] ten years before”:
and I almost took his hand in mine without thinking
so long the fingers write down within themselves their code
sensing sweaters, unwrapping cough drops,
thumbing another story about teen love,
holding objects while the glue sets, knowing about the wind,
feeling an empty space to be full—
This was heart-breaking to read.
Some of Arrieu-King's most beautiful lines emerge in this section, such as “Why do we name monsters and admonishment: they are both warnings” (in “Two Weeks Without a Phone”) and “If someone made our souls, I wonder did they pretend to run out/ here, this combination of cells, bones, dreaming harshly?” (in “Crying at Will”) These lines are questions raised in incredulity towards the events that are going on. In conclusion, instead of just stating that life is absurd, Futureless Languages insists that life is absurd, but we can make it beautiful.
The collection ends with the poem “Eternity,” where the narrator looks for a way to re-purpose everything, to see everything in a new light:
Whoever you are, I decided I would keep large half-shells as plates
and never think of a man-made plate again. The world in which that
would happen. I imagine us eating out of these.
In the image of re-purposing half-shells as plates, Arrieu-King is imagining a reconciliatory interaction with nature and the world we live in through an act of recycling. If so many human relationships depend on the cycle of production, consumption, and destruction, Futureless Languages pleads with us to re-evaluate our relationships with each other and with the world. Arrieu-King prioritizes 'us-ness' in this collection. Though she establishes that the future may be uncertain, she also points out that what can help us negotiate this absurdity is meaningful, thoughtful, and genuine human connection.
Lim Xin Hwee is currently studying English Literature and Linguistics at Nanyang Technological University. Her published works include classical music concert reviews on The Flying Inkpot and an interview with Simon Armitage on Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. She loves reading medieval manuscripts and contemporary poetry.