Solar Flares

 

Linda Hogan is an award-winning author, the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and currently the Chickasaw Nation's author in residence. When I look for first sentences, following the tracks of others' respect often leads to interesting choices. I haven't yet read any of her books, so I am coming to this sentence as someone first opening the book might. 

That's not to say I am coming to the sentence with no preconceptions! In September of 2019, I marched, and "I hear the voice of my great-grandmother" was a line in one of our chants. Even though Hogan's sentence dates from 1995, I'm meeting it now, so I hear it flavored with the joint action and care for the world I associated with the march. 

This is the fate of anyone who speaks a language. Every sentence carries echoes of similar sentences, of how the words have been used before, and who has used them. If it were not so, the words wouldn't carry meaning from one person to another. 

Within the sentence itself, we have two characters: "I" and "my great-grandmother, Agnes." There's no particular conflict. The only verb, "hear" is neutral, nor are voices or great-grandmothers particularly threatening. Perhaps we'd feel a shiver if this seemed to be a ghost story, but there are no words to suggest a worrying or uncanny situation. "Hear" may simply refer to remembering. 

The most precise word is the name "Agnes." Agnes is a name once more popular than it is now. It seems a match to a great-grandmother. 

The most unusual part of the sentence is its location in time. "Hear" is in present tense. "Sometimes now" is complex. "Now" means currently, and often implies a very short period. "Sometimes" means only off and on, which requires a longer period so that the hearing has time to both happen and not happen. Together, "sometimes now" seems to mean in the current period but not before ("now") I intermittently ("sometimes") hear my great-grandmother's voice. The narrator uses two words to define the time, yet each of them has loose boundaries. The result is a slippery sense of when the sentence is happening – "now" but extending some amount into the past, "now" but maybe not this precise moment, only "sometimes."

"Great-grandmother" extends the timeline into the past. A great-grandmother must have existed well before her great-grandchild. The voice of the great-grandmother comes from the past, into the present, blurring the time mark even more. Although "hear" is simple and present, the words "sometimes" and "great-grandmother" stretch the current "now" farther and farther into the past, suspending "now" over a long period, like a vision of eternity. 

Hogan's sentence doesn't describe a danger. Instead, it shows memory and heritage. It promises that the narrator will grapple with the influence of the great-grandmother's voice – an appealing offer to readers who have their own family history to understand.