Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Page 210

not many years ago I saw a woman in a news clip, nursing her sick
child, and indicating as she spoke her village, a week’s walk away,
turning her head away from that terrible place even as she gestured
towards it: making a slow chopping motion of the hand, the fingers
held together at right angles to the direction, her thumb upwards,
as if lifting up the sensible horizon and planting it further away,
many times, many days’ journey. Her home, her Centre, was no
longer the village; she had chosen to take her Centre with her; but
the important point is that she could command her own horizon,
moving it out at will to encompass her distant village, her old cen-
tre, even while shielding her eyes from the horrors that were per-
petrated there. This physical manipulation of her horizon was bod-
ily, but she was speaking as she gestured, and without doubt an
analysis of her spoken prosody, a trace of her intonation and accen-
tuation such as students perform in my phonetics classes, would
reveal a correlation between the movements of her hand and the
indexical functions of her language. Probably, too, there would be
a muted feature of her intonation which would match the way her
eyes failed to follow her gesture, her refusal to raise her eyes to the
painful horizon. any adequate transcription of her language would
need to use complex indexical codification indeed.
In contrast, the indices in my written text are woefully inade-
quate. and yet this outward-moving gesture is one of the proper
movements of the text, which can always extend itself over
THuMBIng THrOugH THE InDEX
210
Milli mála 2011_Milli mála 1-218 6/28/11 1:39 PM Page 210