Category: Process

The future is female because the women physically present in libraries outnumber the men by, like, 10:1.

I mean, female plus me, obviously.

Tant pis pour vous, suckers!

In the last couple months, I’ve moved to Montreal, where I’ve been hitting the French lessons hard. A few observations about language:

• Learning a new language really returns you back to infancy, and this is an astounding pleasure. I am laughing constantly at things in French that would never amuse me in English. To the extent that humor is based on some surprising ambiguity or confusion, nearly everything is newly ambiguous and confusing. What a treat!
• Because of this, a lot of language learning mirrors early childhood education. You may be a highly accredited legal expert used to requiring a slide deck wherever you go, but you still have to know the cow goes moo before they can let you out on the street. This feels remarkably natural. In fact, the creepiest language instruction material is the stuff that deals with normal, adult subject matter in only an eight-year old’s vocabulary. Discovery Channel, e.g., has a whole series of language education sitcoms that put together some rough facsimile of the cast of Friends plus one foreigner and lets them make vaguely sexual remarks at each other in slow, precise diction and using 500 word vocabularies. You feel vaguely dirty watching this, like you’ve discovered some tragic, debilitated society, where everything developed normally, except the language centers of the brain.
• Spoken words are not discrete things in the brain. They exist contextually. I can hear a sentence in which I know every word, and not understand the sentence be causethe wordsblee dintoea chotherim possibly. It takes a lot of practice to hear the phonemes and unconsciously recognize how they are segregated. 
• Every language has its share of utter illogic, and you learn a lot about your own language’s illogic just by trying to understand another’s. For example, English speakers are well-advised not to confuse “I love you the most” with “I love you mostly.” French has this one solved, but a whole slew of replacement problems to keep you busy.

My grandfather served in WWII, in the Air Force. He was stationed for a while in India. He came back with a few scandalous stories involving cows and some broken Hindi. Nobody spoke real Hindi near us in Buffalo, so these phrases were really allowed to marinate independently in the sauce of his memory for many years before they were passed down to me and allowed to marinate in the sauce of mine. When I went to India myself, a few years ago, I heard nothing approaching them.

One of them goes something like, “eedy al jaldy say jaldy waldy.” It means, roughly, “that thing, it is the way that it is going to be, and so, it’s pretty okay.” This is a maxim of great comfort and spiritual acceptance, I gathered.

I believe someone in India may have once thought a thought related to this, but that’s as far as I’d put it.

The things that make us who we are probably aren’t particularly objective out there in the world. They’re awfully bound up in the work of remembering them – in what we, individually or collectively, choose to preserve, corrupt, glorify or suppress.

I suspect that decent satire requires you to really embrace your own subjectivity. Dive deep enough into another person’s experience, and nobody is absurd to themselves. Everybody’s living their life like it’s the one serious life they’ve got.

​It’s the miscommunication that works for comedy. It’s cutting off your insight at least one dimension short of empathy. And if there’s some higher-minded social value in that, it’s laying bare what we are wont to see in each other from the other side of a divide.

The earth once shared its orbit with another planet, about the size of Mars. These two circled each other for billions of years, maintaining a delicately braided, orbital path. For one to come closer to the sun, the other would wait through the period of its shadow. One could never slip too far ahead without feeling its momentum drain and lurch back into the coupled corkscrew of that long symbiosis, year after year, until one day their equilibrium slipped. And the two planets collided, with a violent shudder, and what remained of the second planet was smaller then. Cold, and barren. And that was, so they theorize, the formation of the moon.

Where you go, I will be unable to stay far ahead or behind. When you move into the sun, I will wait in the patient dark behind you. Drawn around the sun by ourselves and each other. And if ever that delicate symbiosis decouples, know that I could not slip away cleanly into space. The collision would come first. And if it broke me in two, at least half of me would stay behind, still orbiting, silently, colder, drawing on your tides.