Indolencia
At the turn of the year, I was intrigued by Nathaniel Drew's video about principles that guide his life and self-exploration. One of these that has returned to me countless times is his quotation of Charles Bukowski: don’t try.
I'd finished Anahid Nersessian's book Keats' Odes around that time. Nersessian takes six of the odes and writes an essay in response, sometimes locating the poem in Keats' life, sometimes in her own, always grappling with what the poem leans on and invites. The essay that pierced me most – in one of those all-too-rare lay the book down and gaze at the sky moments – was that on indolence. In it, Nersessian remarks on the actions of Keats' lover, and her more modest and less overt expressions of desire and connection, making the case that this quieter love is no less passionate than was his. No less passionate.
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I returned to Spain in May, testing again this old tongue that's learning new tricks. I am in fresh awareness of the importance of resting the tongue, the critical importance of listening. Because I express such a lack of confidence mi profesor jokes whenever there's a listening activity about it being such a treat for me; no matter how many times I say 'de nuevo' we find ourselves laughing by the end. My comprehension face must be a picture.
When I started listening to guided mediations in Spanish, that phrase returned: don't try. In the listening, I understood everything – the in breaths and out breaths, the parts of my body, invitations to open to and inhabit, pacing and placing and being. But if I'd had to repeat back, in English, what I'd heard? I couldn't have.
Translation is an art, a fiendish one at that. When in Alicante, I had a wonderful afternoon with a couple who translate between English and Spanish. On occasion, they work together – he building the bare bones, she making the flesh supple and yielding. Good translation understands feeling, the punctum of a moment. Emotion has no native tongue. Ana Amália Alves, in an essay about the complexities of translating Amarjit Chandan and John Berger’s poetry:
Berger has suggested that translation is a triangular affair, between the poet’s language, the translator’s language and ‘what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written’.
When I think of this triangulation, I think of the specificity of my tongue, the way I employ words and try to convey feelings that seem ungraspable; I think of mis amigos hispanohablantes, also noting their own unique linguistic signatures and experiences. And this third side that closes the triangle, the side of what lay behind... the thought of knowing, never mind expressing, those motives and sources seems intoxicating.
At the end of last week, my teacher Charly set me an exercise to describe the feelings that studying Spanish has awoken in me, which lead to a conversation about the qualities of each language. He asked whether I found Spanish negative, because of the prevalence (and ease) of changing a verb to its opposite by adding no. He also remarked on the English tics of whole other words created to say some form or other of no. A grab bag of euphemisms.
But I like no. A watchword for indolence. A clear declaration of intention, availability or willingness. I said as much to Charly, that I thought we Ingleses, as a nation, would benefit enormously from a much stronger relationship with the word no.
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When I was growing up, I didn’t see my parents say no, except once in a blue moon when there was noisy outrage: they had their limits, in spirit and from a sense of fairness. They are the most generous people I know, the epitome of that very northern phrase ‘they’d do anything for anyone’. Drawing on this sole frame of reference when I was younger, I didn’t know that no could be positive, quiet and not require justification. Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’, would have been alien in my childhood home.
In a recent Snap Forward, Alex Steffen talks about the necessity of a seismic undoing of our current worldview. In relation to the climate crisis, he says:
We’re trying to understand an unprecedented future with the worldviews of an older age, formed on a different planet. We’re working with slightly broken brains.
One of the ways we learn – no doubt the major reason for translation being an integral part of so much formal language learning – is by making associations, assimilating new information by parsing it into our existing frames of reference. But what happens when those frames of reference are limited, or unsuitable for this new paradigm?
Nathaniel Drew explains in his video that he doesn’t interpret don’t try as meaning don’t do anything. More, it is a reminder not to force life to be a certain way. That seems like a paradigm shift to me, to my old patterns of thought that hard work is a sign of integrity, that the worthwhile requires effort, that nothing good comes easy. Unpicking these ideas, with the help of how it feels to learn Spanish, leads me again and again to the how easy it seems to try to do anything when I don’t have a precise goal in mind. As soon as I ditched the idea of reaching a certain level in Spanish, I felt free to revel in all that I learned from imperfection. I stopped holding back because of the fear I’d mess up, stopped trying to avoid mistakes. Deborah Levy, in Real Estate, pulls out an R.D Laing quote (The Divided Self, 1960) speaking – I think – to the same sentiment:
There is a great deal of pain in life, and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
This, too, is a new paradigm for me: all is welcome, because in all there is something to learn. The trick is attending to the lesson.
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In Spanish, the imperative to pay attention is presta atencion. Prestar, the verb, means to lend. This, too, seems inherently more positive and generous to me than the transactional ‘payment’ of attention in English. To lend suggests a return, something coming home. My experience of ‘paying attention’ is much closer to the Spanish sense – when I attend closely to something, I am often rewarded with insight, enrichment, a smile, greater ease (mine and others) – transcendence, even. Lending attention is an act of grace.
This is why reading is so life-giving to me. The attention I willingly endow in experiencing a text can transform, fractal-like, into a thousand new avenues of thought, feeling, creation.
My recently concluded dalliance with Ulysses make many demands that I responded to indolently. I don’t know if it was a transactional (but it will take so long) or indolent (it would take such an effort) mindset that stayed my hand for so long on reading it, but I waited long enough that at the centenary anniversary of its publication, Friends of Shakespeare & Co created a podcast dedicated to reading Ulysses. It came straight to my eardrums on the tongues of a host of writers I adore.
I think the book is an act of attending closely. What else would we expect from a tome so long covering so short a period of time? It looks with intent at obituaries, streets, paraphernalia, desires, the network of a community. It lays out observations in sections that seem to have their very own lens, a unifying perspective or mode. And it is defiant, too: I defy you to pay as close attention as I have, it said to me. I was glad to live with it these last five months, accepting that only in experiencing the Ulysses that danced with light feet on my existing frames of reference could I hope to learn some new steps; only by allowing this book to permeate me, rather than trying to handle it, would I be able to grasp any meaning; only in surrendering to voices who could speak but not quite ‘read’ for me, would I know the difference.
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Back to indolence. Keats’ Ode dates to the early 1800s. Indolence – ‘the state of showing no real interest or effort’ or ‘habitual laziness, sloth’ – has plenty of positive connotations in writing from that time, as a bed of roses (a situation or state of ease, comfort or pleasure) or dolce far niente (delightful idleness, carefree indolence). Some decades later (1851), Schopenhauer’s take on the public attitude is altogether different: ‘As things are, we take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something.’ Between the two, segun Selby Wynn Schwartz^, we have the publication of A treatise on the nervous disorders of women, 1840. In it:
The eminent Doctor Laycock of York, writing on the nervous disorders of women, could not help but notice that the more young women consorted with each other, the more excitable and indolent they became. This condition might strike seamstresses, factory girls, or any woman who associated with any number of other women.
In particular, he cautioned, young females cannot associate together in public schools without serious risk of exciting the passions, and being led to indulge in practices injurious to both body and mind. Novels, whispers, unsigned poems, general education, shared sleeping compartments: no sooner were girls reading in bed than they were reading in bed together. What might look like sisterly affection or a schoolgirl’s fancy ought to be diagnosed as the pernicious antecedent of hysteric paroxysms. In the throes of it they were highly contagious and might throw whole households into disorder.
What truth, these many decades after Keats? Have I consorted with any number of other women? Yes, and it has been my unbridled pleasure to co-create relationships of depth, challenge, inquisition, attention and care. Have these women excited the passions? Yes, undoubtedly yes, setting fires ablaze that cannot be put out even those I’ve only encountered through text. Have I become more indolent? Yes, embracing Ockham’s razor that insists on the simplest solution; embodying the idea of the gift of silence; inhabiting ease as my true north. Has Spanish become my mistress? Yes, triumphantly yes, she brings me closer to the repeated reclamation of the self from the obscurity of a tongue that skirts rather than slices.
As for novels, whispers, unsigned poems, general education and shared sleeping compartments – I want them all. And if disorder is not trying to make things be a certain way (don’t try), then let’s be contagious in our indolence and bring households to their knees.
^This from the so far absolutely enthralling and vital After Sappho. But more on that particular world-rocking book another time.