Bravo-Alpha-Bravo-Echo-Lima

July 21, 2010

On Language 

And the LORD said; Behold, the people is one, and they haue all one language: and this they begin to doe . . . . Goe to, let vs go downe, and there cōfound their language, that they may not vnderstand one anothers speech. – Genesis 11:6-7 (1611 KJV)

Sergei Bulgakov

Nous sommes si accoutumés à nous déguiser aux autres, qu’enfin nous nous déguisons à nous-mêmes. - We become so used to disguising ourselves from others, that we end up disguising ourselves from ourselves. – La Rochefoucauld (v:119) 

I mentioned Venitia Pettice two posts ago. There I noted that she was a friend of Tom Nashe’s and that she’d read Bulgakov — the theologian father not the novelist son. (See here.) The name, hers, got me thinking, remembering, and scratching back through a middle drawer of one laptop ago.  There I found an email from Tom I’d saved.  He’d gone with her to visit her parents in South Dakota.

        Tom Nashe   traveler@xyz.net   Tues Jul 20 2010   11:46 pm
        To: Ted Riich   crabbiolio@gmail.com

I’m the stranger and fool in a household whose wisdom is always sure, whose opinions are (therefore) invariably correct, and who never shut up.  No silence.  None.  The noise is everywhere always as if every word spoken is absorbed by the walls, which whisper it back.  Every room moans, croaks, gabbles endlessly.

The people are like walls.  What is the saying: “If the walls had ears”? – yes, subjunctive, condition contrary to fact, because they don’t; there are no ears, only mouths.

So the deaf mumble, grumble, mutter, murmur, whisper, shout without knowing there are echoes.

All are speaking a foreign tongue.  It sounds like English, I tell myself it’s English; but it is such “dialectical” English that every word means something different from what it means in the English I speak.  Sometimes it seems as if the differences are slight but how to be sure as there are words that have become unrecognizable? – a word I’m sure I know is a disguise for a meaning I would never associate with it.  It’s like playing tag as dusk turns night with cousins so distant you see them only every three years or so.  “There,” you think, “is Margaret”; but when you run closer, you realize it was only the shape you thought Margaret had; as the shadow darts around the corner of the house, you aren’t sure if it is Melanie or Michael.

Ven seems to understand the conversations.  Of course, she was born into the dialect; she spoke it at home from the time she could speak until she left at sixteen.

     Milan Musil opined once, as we watched our mutual friend Anna Stein, who wanted to leave Nebraska behind and assimilate in Prague, to become Czech, as we watched her struggling to find the right word in English (his third language, her first), that it was pretense: “No one forgets her mother-tongue,” he argued.  I don’t know that I agree.  Fru Bjørnsen, an Englishwoman married to a Norwegian, whom I knew as a child when we were living near Oslo, and whose English then, as I remember, was crisp and correct, if it had already acquired a hint of a song, seemed at sea in her “mother-tongue”when I visited there in my late twenties, even looking to her husband for words.  And she was a woman of no pretense whatever.

If Ven understands her parents’ stream of speech, she doesn’t try to translate.  Perhaps she doesn’t realize how confused I am.  Perhaps she’s being kind; she thinks it would make me look even more odd, foolish, stupid, if she stopped every other minute to explain.  But perhaps she cannot translate.  If the same word means different things from one English to another, how would you translate except with synonyms that would also mean different things?  Confusion would only reach another dimension, the one behind the walls(?).

I am spending more and more of each day on long walks through the fields.  It’s less stressful among the completely foreign tongues of birds and insects than trying to follow a conversation that seems sensible but cannot be, if I am understanding it correctly.