WARNING: The following essay contains a vulgar allusion. Anyone under 21, or emotionally conflicted should ask a parent or their religious advisor before reading. One can, also, press the delete key or, employ a word program that sniffs out gratuitous sex and violence. And, gratuitous it is. I could have easily removed the offending sentences, but I chose to include them, because I am old enough to laugh at my own stupidity and, by extension, everyone else's.
I broke a porcelain plate the other day, and I've spent the last two days reflecting and ruminating on my clumsiness and other things.
How could something, as beautiful to behold as porcelain, have so vulgar a name? Chalk it up to man's basest nature. In this case I mean "man," the specific, not the generic. By extension, why did a cowrie shell, called "Porcellana" in Italian,. and from which porcelain, through its aesthetic resemblance, received the name "little pig," or "vulva"? I guess it's the way some men (present company excluded) have-- and continue -- to associate one with the other.
Of course that sheds a new --if prurient-- light on the children's tale of the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs. "Little pig, little pig, let me come in!" When I start pecking away, I never know where things will go. Forsooth.
I remember teaching a college class on the evolution of writing in the Middle East and I had just made the bridge between pictographs and cuneiform (wedge-shaped) and was pointing out that the Assyrians had a syllabary not an alphabet. When I realized that I had lost the class with the word "syllabary," I stopped to graph an example on the blackboard. I chose the word "tribute" (of which I have received very little-- either in monetary compensation or professional kudos), pronounced "ma-da-tu". I was only interested in the first syllable. "ma" which is written with three parallel cuneiform wedges laid horizontally, and a fourth perpendicular and vertical (orthogonal) to the others. I began to take double takes on the wedges. It was then, while I was drawing the forth character, that I had a minor epiphany, and, with my back to the class, began laughing. I wasn't worried about what the class was thinking. I could sense that they were curious, but I wasn't going to tell them.
You see, when I was a kid, the favorite epithet of the Italian kids on north side of 116th Street, our neighborhood rivals, was a four-letter word beginning with "c" and ending in "t" which I avoided ever using (much) because of the unpleasant sound that the mostly consonantal word made on my ears. For the Italians kids, it was totally different. The route word was the Latin, "cuneus" ( wedge-shaped or delta as in "Delta of Venus." N'est-ce pas?), which evolved separately in Italian than in other Romance languages.
Strange to think of it; stranger to say it, but the main reason I didn't use that word nor, as far as I can remember, did any of my friends, was that it was part of the lexicon of those other guys. That is not to say that I (we) were saints, au contraire, we had our favorite pearls, too, it was just that that word was identified with our cultural enemy. If that sounds ridiculous to you, chew on this. Weren't all American kids culturally conditioned to hate the Russians since the Bolshevik Revolution? We learned to hate all of Russian culture including the sound of the Russian language. Why not Chinese? Well, the Taiwanese were (and continue to be by law, I am constantly reminded) our allies. However, all of that may be changing as we speak.
Strange, for me, when I was a kid, was to hear children of Anglo-Saxon heritage making fun of the guttural sounds of the German language, Anglo-Saxon's mother tongue. Because of the two wars we fought with Germany in the last century, we were socially (all of us) conditioned to be repelled by res Germania. Too bad, really, since we grew up reading a pot pourri of Hobbes, Hume and Bacon and not enough Hegel, Nietzsche and Kant. That, however, brings me to a topic more germane to this essay: Philosophy.
I began by telling you about the broken plate, naturally, that led me to Plato. Soon I was in a swound, wandering (I avoided saying "meandering" to avoid the guffaws and the jeers of the cognoscenti) betwix Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry, avoiding their logical extension, Boethius, who, because he was so conflicted between politics and philosophy, ended up on the sharp end of an Ostrogothic sword. Try as he might, he would find little "Consolation" in that. Just think. If Boethius had chosen Philosophy over Politics as a career move, the Western world would have beaten out the Arabs by 200 years in bringing back Aristotle to the world. Which means that we might have had the atom bomb as early as 1745, and have given Locke, Malthus and Mill whole new material to scribble about.
But I continue to digress.
I wanted to talk about language. By this time, you must know that I am obsessed by the subject. I have had the most difficult, call it agonizing, experience with the English language. It's not mine. It doesn't belong to me. I never know, when I rattle on for hours if anyone has understood a word I have said. Looking back a few years and recalling having to read exam blue books, I am only confirmed in this view, that no one really understands me when I speak or write in the English tongue.
Perhaps, that's why the NY Times turned me down when I applied for work there after graduation. It is obvious to me that someone there knew. I can still hear it in my imaginings of the editorial perusal of my application cum CV: "This guy just doesn't have it. He doesn't understand the English tongue." To which, I reply, "You must be right. After all you are the ruling gods of the English language in America." In short order, I began to believe that no national daily or weekly of any repute would hire me because they would all learn, very quickly, that I could never master their tongue: so, I quit trying. Which brings me right back to my subject.
In those depressing days of the early 1980's, I was walking to the Eastside through Central Park, you know, in the kicking-a-can-before-me mode, when I came across a homeless man who, in those days was still called a bum. What's in a word? Take the word " Jungle," no one was willing to help it until someone thought of changing its name to Rain Forest.: then, the world came tumbling to its door. Okay, back to the man: he was holding a copy of I.K.'s "Transcendental Meditations" in German and upside down, pretending to read it. (You see how neatly I can tie things up?) Well, feeling absolutely superior to no one at the moment, and feeling that I had stumbled upon one of the most preposterous situations I had ever encountered, I jumped in feet first. My ego, so recently deflated beyond any measurable proportion, suddenly exploded, and I said to the man, "You can't read philosophy upside down, avoiding, for the moment, that it looked to be in German..
He took note of me, and let the book slide down in his hands a little, smiled and said, "No?" I wanted to write him off as schizoid or a hopeless drunk. My comment was really meant for me: to make Me feel superior to someone. A voice (speaking of voices) inside of me was telling me to get the hell out of there, but, it was already too late, I had been snared: I had jumped into a very carefully laid trap. I knew it by the way he talked and smiled, but especially by the glint in his eyes which immediately sent a shower of arrows, bursting my over inflated balloon.
"Would it matter to you," he said in an inflected voice, that graduate students are used to hearing from their mentors, "if I read Kant backwards?" The way he said Kant told me that I should have been on Fifth Avenue by then. I was transfixed by what I suspected was coming and by the self-loathing I felt for allowing myself to fall into such a snare. I knew that I richly deserved it. "Would it matter to you if I read Him in German?" he asked, now more cynically than he had spoken before. And, without waiting for a further queue, began reading the tome backwards and in perfect German.
I gave him a dollar and spiraled downward into the Hell for Idiots until I came to Fifth Avenue.
My German was quite strong once. Even now, I can understand it and speak a little, but because of the combination of speaking Hungarian and not practicing German, it's fallen, shamefully, into disuse. I tell myself, that a month or so of living in Germany would bring it back. However, I don't think that there is any practical chance of that happening any time soon. That's how some things become lost.
To avoid losing my tenuous hold on English, I tutor private students ("I pity the Fools"). I've learned by teaching, I not only re-enforce my language, but I also end up learning more than the students. I may always lack the self-confidence and insouciance of say, a NYTimes writer/essayist, but I have no trouble, on a day-to-day basis, correcting the English or their misuse of the English language on their on-line rantings. Then, there are those poor souls from the British Isles that have been thrown up on the shores and hills of Eastern Europe. They still ride haughtily on worn out imperial steeds and think that, since English is their mother tongue, they know it- through osmosis- better than anyone else. I have a lot of fun with them. And, when I detect that I have come across an individual that actually knows an adverb from an adjective, I pounce.
"Which poems have you memorized," I ask playfully, wiggling the worm on the hook. I don't take away too many points if they can't recall any from Shakespeare to Shelly, where most of my repertoire is stashed, but when they can't come up with any modern poets, i.e., John Cooper Clarke, the Manchester poet, and likely the greatest English poet of our time, I can't help but slice them up into small pieces fit for curry -- now the main staple and fast food of England, having pushed newspaper-wrapped fish 'n chips right off the table.
Ah, I'm beginning to feel better. This writing thing can be so therapeutic that they ought to reintroduce it into the curriculum of high schools in America. While they are at it, maybe they should close down all the elementary and intermediate schools and reinvent Grammar Schools.
Learning how to read wouldn't be a bad idea, either. However, before you can get little Johnny or Jane to read, you have to get rid of the TV (at least the cable), open a book and read in front of them yourself. I know it sounds painful, especially on Sunday afternoons. But, think of it this way: there are all these newspapers and reporters who, presumably, know how to turn a phrase or two, and are employed specifically to bring you today's sports and other news, tomorrow. However, Homer (not the classic long-running Fox cartoon), needs your children's immediate attention. If they don't like all that Greek stuff, then try Virgil, he didn't like Greeks, either: "Timeo Danaos et donas gerentis!"
Szia,
From Budapest
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