Volume 26 - Part 2/3 - another essay 🌈
Here is another reminder that my newsletter has turned 2! 🎈
Thank you for letting me slide into your inbox with writing once again.
.
It rained all week here in Mumbai. Heavy, thunderous, creating-potholes-on-contact, smash-your-face, fill-up-homes kind of rain. Going out for a walk was out of question. All the birds and animals outside my window hid wherever they could only to be heard when the rain slowed down for a short break. Reading, thinking and writing was all one could do, that is all one did. (Also) A batch of sandesh was made, Loki and Masterchef AU's finales were watched and are already being missed, a new mynah couple was befriended between heavy showers, many books were read and cat cuddles were sorely missed.
☢️Language
Dolphins use sounds, cuttlefish use colour and we use words. Language is a complex organism, living, growing and changing everyday. It became art, it became something truly powerful, it became destructive. How did we even get here? What is language really?
I wonder what Rilke said. I wonder what Dostoyevsky said. I wonder what Orhan Pamuk said. I wonder what Yoko Ogawa said. Cobalt Blue is a stunning Marathi novel written by Sachin Kundalkar and translated by Jerry Pinto. I comprehend Marathi even though I don't claim excellence so I understood what Jerry Pinto meant when he said there was no real substitute for the word re in Marathi. It adds emphasis and character but it doesn't really mean anything. He tried to retain as many Marathi words as he could so the reader could take the onus to find out what they meant. Who can do that when you're all caught up in the plot? Like I did as a child, Pinto too read Enid Blyton growing up. Unlike me he didn't get an early spoiler of tasting a real scone. He writes, "Far better to dream up what a scone is, far better to let it explode in a million flavours on your tongue than to look it up and discover its somewhat quotidian doughiness."
One of my favourite parts of traveling is reveling in new languages. I remember my father's delight when he found similarities between Turkish, Hindi and Konkani. My parents fell in love with the words küçük and büyük which mean small and big in Turkish. There is such pleasure in asking for bir küçük baklava. I enjoyed the struggle of trying to figure out what animal filled the steam bun I was buying on a street in Shanghai. My translation app wasn't of much use. I will never know what was in that steamed bun. It tasted good...My team mates in an exchange program in Bangkok taught me that 555 in Thai slang is hahaha because 5 is ha. There is a way words in English are cobbled together to build a bridge between Asian languages and pure English that I love. A team mate in Shanghai looked at me seriously and said that I must not rush when there is an injury to the heart when he asked and I told him about a very recent breakup. He then bought me dumplings which I happily accepted. I will willingly accept food for all injuries to the heart. I will gladly accept dumplings without injuries to the heart also. I relish explaining quirks of my language to someone who is completely new to it. The rush of explaining your existence to someone else and the thrill about being let into theirs in unparalleled.
And then there's the occasional European who will tell me that my English is good for an Indian. Europeans are oddly the only people who have said that to me. 🤷♀️
Peter Rich had told us during a workshop in college that language is everything, when we lose our language we lose a limb of our culture. We must protect it at all costs.
What are the ways in which we're losing our language? I used to think in Konkani when I was younger. Startling incidents were met with idioms in Konkani in my mind. Now, I think in English. The voice in my head sounds like an amalgamation of characters in TV shows and books I've read in the last decade and a half. I listen to my parents and grandfather as carefully as I can, trying to soak in all the Konkani I seem to have lost. I let those words roll off my tongue. Those familiar, comfortable and warm words. Language is a home and a nest of colourful Konkani words is where I belong.
...
Language can be unbelievably pleasurable if one is willing to roll words over their tongue like candy. I made my own words as a child and stubbornly refused to use correct words because I thought mine were better. Everyone had to play along. There was the friend who fell in love with the word chutzpah for its structure.
I think of the poem How Delicious To Say It by Vievee Francis where she lists words she loves saying out loud. Words that feel juicy and delicious on account of the sounds we make to say them.
"to allow it like hibiscus to wend over the tongue
where it opens at the gate, lending its red, unknowable
taste. What wonder the palate may embrace – in a flick
behind the teeth: loquacious, Liebchen, Schätzchen."
Vievee Francis makes words sound sensual.
Regular descriptors can magically make you aware about the tangibility and materiality of things. Mary Oliver does this when she brings to our attention the textures of flowers, the soft belly of an animal, the glistening scales of a fish or the nature of a bug. Suddenly the world around you isn't full of abstract planetary flatmates but living, breathing beings with beating hearts.
Words cobbled together can capture the universe in a paragraph. In From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee writes about peaches but through peaches he's talking about everything. That is how much meaning a few words can hold. I love this poem so much. If words were vessels then Li-Young Lee allows them to contain oceans.
They make magic using language.
...
There is nothing universal when it comes to language and symbols. In an episode of Star Trek, Data the android crashes into a planet and through some damage to his circuitry loses his memory. He is carrying a briefcase with radioactive material. The briefcase is plastered with red circles with the radioactivity symbol. Data has forgotten what it means. He takes it to a nearby settlement which is a primitive version of civilization on Earth. Naturally, people get sick and drama follows. Data eventually finds an antidote but gets killed by those people anyway. His crew revives him, don't worry, you can't stab a super complex android to death.
Red is assumed to stand for danger. Animals are wary of red berries and red bugs. But there is no universality. What is dangerous to one culture or creature is acceptable to the rest.
You can make things explicit and as clear as possible and still be misunderstood. You can't take anything for granted. You and I are islands, we see things differently. One now has to read between the lines of texts and emails. We have words, gifs, emojis, sound clips and stickers but we still struggle to say what we mean. Why don't I hide how I feel in a joke or in an intense empirical argument so you won't ever find it? The more complex and expressive these things get, the harder it is to truly understand anything.
I started speaking as soon as I turned one, language was mine to conquer. I think about language a lot. I write thousands of words every month. I have been told I play with words well. I wrote an entire essay on language for crying out loud but I have failed. I have failed because despite everything I had to tell you and all the ways I could have told them to you, I couldn't tell you much at all.
🥟 You can support my writing by sharing this with a friend, saying nice things to me, buying me dumplings, giving me a hug (if you are cat or a feline-human hybrid) or support me with a book. 📖
Find the Volumes archive here. 🥟
Thank you for letting me slide into your inbox with writing once again.
.
It rained all week here in Mumbai. Heavy, thunderous, creating-potholes-on-contact, smash-your-face, fill-up-homes kind of rain. Going out for a walk was out of question. All the birds and animals outside my window hid wherever they could only to be heard when the rain slowed down for a short break. Reading, thinking and writing was all one could do, that is all one did. (Also) A batch of sandesh was made, Loki and Masterchef AU's finales were watched and are already being missed, a new mynah couple was befriended between heavy showers, many books were read and cat cuddles were sorely missed.
☢️Language
Dolphins use sounds, cuttlefish use colour and we use words. Language is a complex organism, living, growing and changing everyday. It became art, it became something truly powerful, it became destructive. How did we even get here? What is language really?
I was thinking about language and its intricacies after I listened to Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows interview with Krista Tippett on On Being. They published a new translation on Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to A Young Poet, a book I have read, re-read and always enjoyed. Like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, this is one of those books that will give you a new takeaway every time you read it. The reward is in the repetition. At the same time, I'm never reading the real letters. The real letters are written in German. A translator can be neutral but will always leave their fingerprints of language and flourishes behind.
I wonder what Rilke said. I wonder what Dostoyevsky said. I wonder what Orhan Pamuk said. I wonder what Yoko Ogawa said. Cobalt Blue is a stunning Marathi novel written by Sachin Kundalkar and translated by Jerry Pinto. I comprehend Marathi even though I don't claim excellence so I understood what Jerry Pinto meant when he said there was no real substitute for the word re in Marathi. It adds emphasis and character but it doesn't really mean anything. He tried to retain as many Marathi words as he could so the reader could take the onus to find out what they meant. Who can do that when you're all caught up in the plot? Like I did as a child, Pinto too read Enid Blyton growing up. Unlike me he didn't get an early spoiler of tasting a real scone. He writes, "Far better to dream up what a scone is, far better to let it explode in a million flavours on your tongue than to look it up and discover its somewhat quotidian doughiness."
One of my favourite parts of traveling is reveling in new languages. I remember my father's delight when he found similarities between Turkish, Hindi and Konkani. My parents fell in love with the words küçük and büyük which mean small and big in Turkish. There is such pleasure in asking for bir küçük baklava. I enjoyed the struggle of trying to figure out what animal filled the steam bun I was buying on a street in Shanghai. My translation app wasn't of much use. I will never know what was in that steamed bun. It tasted good...My team mates in an exchange program in Bangkok taught me that 555 in Thai slang is hahaha because 5 is ha. There is a way words in English are cobbled together to build a bridge between Asian languages and pure English that I love. A team mate in Shanghai looked at me seriously and said that I must not rush when there is an injury to the heart when he asked and I told him about a very recent breakup. He then bought me dumplings which I happily accepted. I will willingly accept food for all injuries to the heart. I will gladly accept dumplings without injuries to the heart also. I relish explaining quirks of my language to someone who is completely new to it. The rush of explaining your existence to someone else and the thrill about being let into theirs in unparalleled.
And then there's the occasional European who will tell me that my English is good for an Indian. Europeans are oddly the only people who have said that to me. 🤷♀️
Peter Rich had told us during a workshop in college that language is everything, when we lose our language we lose a limb of our culture. We must protect it at all costs.
What are the ways in which we're losing our language? I used to think in Konkani when I was younger. Startling incidents were met with idioms in Konkani in my mind. Now, I think in English. The voice in my head sounds like an amalgamation of characters in TV shows and books I've read in the last decade and a half. I listen to my parents and grandfather as carefully as I can, trying to soak in all the Konkani I seem to have lost. I let those words roll off my tongue. Those familiar, comfortable and warm words. Language is a home and a nest of colourful Konkani words is where I belong.
...
Language can be unbelievably pleasurable if one is willing to roll words over their tongue like candy. I made my own words as a child and stubbornly refused to use correct words because I thought mine were better. Everyone had to play along. There was the friend who fell in love with the word chutzpah for its structure.
I think of the poem How Delicious To Say It by Vievee Francis where she lists words she loves saying out loud. Words that feel juicy and delicious on account of the sounds we make to say them.
"to allow it like hibiscus to wend over the tongue
where it opens at the gate, lending its red, unknowable
taste. What wonder the palate may embrace – in a flick
behind the teeth: loquacious, Liebchen, Schätzchen."
Vievee Francis makes words sound sensual.
Regular descriptors can magically make you aware about the tangibility and materiality of things. Mary Oliver does this when she brings to our attention the textures of flowers, the soft belly of an animal, the glistening scales of a fish or the nature of a bug. Suddenly the world around you isn't full of abstract planetary flatmates but living, breathing beings with beating hearts.
Words cobbled together can capture the universe in a paragraph. In From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee writes about peaches but through peaches he's talking about everything. That is how much meaning a few words can hold. I love this poem so much. If words were vessels then Li-Young Lee allows them to contain oceans.
They make magic using language.
...
There is nothing universal when it comes to language and symbols. In an episode of Star Trek, Data the android crashes into a planet and through some damage to his circuitry loses his memory. He is carrying a briefcase with radioactive material. The briefcase is plastered with red circles with the radioactivity symbol. Data has forgotten what it means. He takes it to a nearby settlement which is a primitive version of civilization on Earth. Naturally, people get sick and drama follows. Data eventually finds an antidote but gets killed by those people anyway. His crew revives him, don't worry, you can't stab a super complex android to death.
Red is assumed to stand for danger. Animals are wary of red berries and red bugs. But there is no universality. What is dangerous to one culture or creature is acceptable to the rest.
You can make things explicit and as clear as possible and still be misunderstood. You can't take anything for granted. You and I are islands, we see things differently. One now has to read between the lines of texts and emails. We have words, gifs, emojis, sound clips and stickers but we still struggle to say what we mean. Why don't I hide how I feel in a joke or in an intense empirical argument so you won't ever find it? The more complex and expressive these things get, the harder it is to truly understand anything.
Somebody once decided to make words up when they tired of hand signs, sounds and enactment. It started with wanting to name things, to classify things.
This is what I see. This is what is in the world around me.
What started as this is a tree became watch out for that raging bull, which became
I will give you these apples for those potatoes became don’t eat that, it’s gone bad, which became
How can I help you, which somehow became are you okay?
I feel so ecstatic, I have never felt this way before morphed into this is how much I adore you, here is this painting I made which became I love you ardently.
This feels exhausting became you are exhausting became
It's your fault and I hate you. This should ideally become help me but I suppose we can make it a gif?
I started speaking as soon as I turned one, language was mine to conquer. I think about language a lot. I write thousands of words every month. I have been told I play with words well. I wrote an entire essay on language for crying out loud but I have failed. I have failed because despite everything I had to tell you and all the ways I could have told them to you, I couldn't tell you much at all.
🥟 You can support my writing by sharing this with a friend, saying nice things to me, buying me dumplings, giving me a hug (if you are cat or a feline-human hybrid) or support me with a book. 📖
Find the Volumes archive here. 🥟
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to Currents: