Longing for Language

I have never felt at home in English. No, I'm not going to go on about previous lives or anything like that!

I just don't like English. I'm very, very glad I learned it as my first language, for I never would have learned it as a second language. People laugh when I say that I don't do well with English. They blame my lysdexia. But what can I say?

Actually, quite a bit.

I've studied over eleven languages now. German, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Irish, Welsh, Breton, Manx and Italian. I guess that's twelve. I became fluent in German and Spanish; got to reading level (with dictionary to help) in Latin and Anglo-Saxon, enough to know bad translation when I read it. I had French in school, but don't even try to speak it although I do understand quite a bit. I have a linguistic knowledge of Greek and Italian and Icelandic, some reading ability, about a year's equivalent in schooling. I have a strange linguistic/vocabulary knowledge of the Celtic tongues, but not much in the way of grammar or common usage--enough to know about noun forms and to recognize words out of passages and to pronounce much of what I read. The only languages I'm continuing to learn are the Celtic languages.

I don't consider myself good with languages. Mostly because I have a poor memory and do not use the languages I know. When I lived in LA, I spoke Spanish every day and that is the only way to become fluent for me. But I could read newpapers in German and had about 6 years equivalent of schooling. I read Icelandic, AS, Latin and Greek because I'm a historian and love the sagas and poetry.

Okay, enough background. I know enough to know that it is easier to express things in some languages than in others. Most of this is what I call a connotation tree, or a long pattern of association that makes the language "heavy" in a certain head space. The Latinate languages tend to be "heavy" in a space where sex, death, and god overlap; the Germanic languages are "heavy" in a space were war and god overlap, for instance.

Anglo-Saxon is one of the most earthy, sensible, prosaic and unimaginative languages on the planet. It is excellent for speaking the simple facts and the truth of the world without embellishment or metaphor. In AS a person has a soul because he is alive. AS is wonderful for talking about war and death and sex and fighting monsters and killing and fighting more monsters and sex and eating and being wounded. It's a hands-on language. To say that English is descended from AS is like saying the British culture is Greek. Well, there are lines tracing back, but English is a lingua franca, almost a pidgin, a tongue that evolved out of many tongues. This is why it has a vocabulary that is four times the size of most languages and why it has an incredibly stupid grammar and why the spelling is horrid.

But English is a language that was meant for commerce. It is not a language of the spirit or a language of science. Oh, you can talk about those things, but almost all the words are borrowed and you always sound, well, spiritual or scientific, like a religious fanatic or a geek.

I've decided that my native tongue, or my "right" language is Gaelic that is spoken in the Islands or in Donegal. This is my heritage so it is not any leap to understand that the way that I learned to talk and think was Gaelic in English. What do I mean by this? Gaelic is a language in which it is almost impossible to be straightforward and simple. It is a language of metaphor. It is not a "good morning" but a "top of the morning." British English, but much more so, American English is so metaphor heavy that it baffles most foreigners. Simple English is easy. "Letting the cat out of the bag", "tongue-tied", "tempest in a teapot," is not. It takes years to learn all of the metaphors in English. Gaelic is worse. Gaelic is a poet's language, or a language were one is always doing something that sounds like something else entirely. There are fifty ways to say "good night," and none of them are literally, "good night." You cannot say yes or no; you cannot own something, you cannot just talk about something directly. Inference and allusion are everything to the Celt.

That is why I like it. A friend of mine once complained that language should have one word for one thing to make it impossible to be unclear. I just laughed. My own nature is to load down meanings upon meanings so that our entire conversations consist of interwoven elements, connotations that stun and astound, a language that wakes up the spirit and sets the mind racing in a hundred different directions.

The next problem that I have with English is that it's ugly. Writers talk about music in language; English is like clanking pots to me. It's offensively ugly. Music abounds in language. Spanish always sounds passionate because the language allows one to speak faster and faster with a rising tone of urgency and emotion. French has a rising and falling to it like breathing. Even German, in all its supposed harshness, has a breath to it that is like rain, a hesitant, earnest quality to it that makes it a language for debate and speeches and thoughtful, intense conversation. And Gaelic is the murmuring tongue, the tongue that is like the style, half-hidden, have sounded, disappearing in and out of the flicker of light and music of the other world.

Like German, English gutterals and glottal stops should make it a thoughtful tongue, but it becomes merely clumsy. Like French, it has a rhythm to it, but it is not a rising and falling, but a hesitant, racing, headlong then stuttering, as if one does not know what to do or how to feel. Like AS, the greatest English poetry is alliterative, but the poetry most popular is that that rhymes. So it sounds dorky, forced and contrived, unlike the Latinate poetry where almost every word ends in a similar ending and so there is not fishing for a rhyme.

And so I long for a mother tongue. I hobble along in this one, hoping for beauty in meaning, hoping for music in interesting juxtaposition, sounding religious, sounding like a geek, unable to speak in loaded meanings without sounding like a mad poet.

That I should be so cut off. Mad indeed.

Trying to Reach the Heart

When I was young I was extremely shy. I was also very private. My mother, who was not only a performer, but a teacher, wanted to draw us out into the world, to nurture our talents, and to have us be fulfilled as creative people. This rather backfired in some ways in that, while I loved being creative, I was way too shy to show off. I got to the point that I wanted to hide what I loved from my mother so that she would not want me to turn it into a performance. Competition made it worse. My mother enjoyed and thrived on competition and I found it shameful and somehow sick, as if my work became sullied by the act of comparison. I was too young to understand this.

But the young learn to protect themselves. I ended up hiding my heart, or the heart of my work. I found that she was baffled by intellect, so I found safety in engaging my mind and trying to get more and more obscure in order to turn her off of what I was doing. This had several unfortunate consequences, but the worst was that I got to the point where I could not longer enjoy doing my own work, inspired from within, without feeling guilty. Creative work was for money, competition, and admiration, all of which I despised. But one had to do it in order to do what was expected. I never questioned that I had to perform, only that it was shameful and bad to do things in secret that might not appeal to other people.

I buried my heart and did some of my work on my worlds in secret. I was also an avid journal writer, in secret. Artwork could not be secret, but writing could. However, because I was talented as an artist, that was the pressure point. I might have wanted to be a doctor or a writer, but the expectation was that I would be an artist. I never felt I had a choice. I'm sure now that I did, but I never had to courage to face down enthusiastic people. I was a child who wanted to please others and to make them proud of me.

I found later that all of this agony over the arts messed up my ability to contact the heart through art. For art to be art, it must be from the heart as well as the body and the head. You can see art that is head art: protest art, style art, art that is interesting but not spiritually appealing. Luckily, I loved music. In music I found all the heart that I could not find in the graphic arts, or even in writing. Although I do not have the ability to believe in god, I found that, though music, singing in particular, I was able to access a spiritual dimension in myself that is essentially worship, or rapture. After being criticized, singing for me became an intensely private affair.

A little while ago, I found an interview with Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, who expresses exactly what I feel about music. I have never seen or heard anyone else who came close to expressing what I feel about god, if I can feel that way without belief. This interview is profoundly moving, so much so, that I have to share it with you. She sings in the same range as I do and I feel very close to her pitch and tone.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRsptfVAwmw&feature=related

Although I cannot bear to sing around other people, I sing when I walk places by myself, or sing in acoustically interesting places like garages and underpasses and stairwells. I love the way the tone vibrates all through the head, almost as if you were becoming tone. I always feel an immediate connection to the godspace, if you want to call it that, and an immediate rapture, that I know takes people years to achieve in meditation. For me, it is a necessary part of my emotional life to express myself though singing. It has remained private, and it would take an enormous effort for me to perform. But watching Lisa Gerrard, I know that it is possible to achieve the space without doing the competition/performance/"look at me" thing. She is singing as a dedication, as a service to the spiritual, which is what art is, or can be.

A few months ago, I gave myself permission to abandon all attempts to make money doing writing or art. At first I was lost. I still am a bit. I had been driven for thirty years to publish and make money through publication. So much so that I was torn between what the market wanted and what I wanted, always. I could force myself to do things that would sell; the artwork I liked the least was always the most popular; and I hated myself through the whole process. I hated the process of drawing and painting when I knew that it was what other people wanted. I loved giving art away; it was a justification of it all if someone liked the art and I could be rid of it. I could not even see if the art was good or bad because the market does not care that much. Styles come and go and good and bad becomes popular or unpopular.

What a snarl! I realized when I went back to bookkeeping for money and freed myself from the quest for publication that I had little idea of what I wanted to do. I kind of knew, but I had no confidence, no compass. I was faced with the fear of exposing my soul only to find out that no one liked it. So what? I asked. So what. So what.

When one has done art since one was a pre-schooler to appease people and do what they want, that so what? is a powerful phrase. I realized that I had no ability to defend myself and my art from criticism. Rarely do artists have this ability. If they did, we would see better art out there. I had seen, over and over, art that was on the right track get messed up by well-meaning publishers, editors and teachers that feared that it would not be popular enough to justify publication. This happens even more in writing and music. I knew that it was wrong to judge any art by the one criterion of "will it sell?" but knowing that and feeling it are two very different things.

I started looking at art to see what I liked, not what I thought was good. You may wonder at this, but it is one thing to judge art by how many hours you know went into it and how skilled the artist is. I had to see what appealed to me on a deeper level--what art appealed to me as art I would want to do.

I wanted to do art that would cross boundaries. I have never felt that I was separate from reality. I felt that when I touched a tree, I was that tree. Outside, I feel that I am outside. There is no "me" to speak of, but only the action of living. In my mind there is no way to separate out things and say, "that goes over here and is called this, and that goes over there and is called that." When Lisa Gerrard stands under a highway and listens to the cars and starts singing with them, she IS those sounds. You can tell immediately by the way she can harmonize into them. I wanted that feeling in the visual art that I did, the feeling of overlapping.

The music that I find appealing is this same sort of overlapping, music like rounds. I love the Celtic knot art where they see the world as interwoven and overlapping. Things float to the surface of awareness but are quickly buried again and overlapped by something else. But I also wanted to animate this feeling, not to abstract it, but to show it with living images.

This is the result.



This is a photo of a painting (did not photo well) from my world of Anieth. It shows the Raven Dance done at midsummer for the Alder people. The man in the picture is a shapeshifter. I have tried to interweave the ravens, the alder tree, the raven skulls and the alder cones with the dancer. The picture also is very symbolic with my layers of meaning that I like to do in writing. The number thirteen is balanced with the number three, the colors are that of the Alder people, and so on. But mostly I wanted to show that Bleid here is not separate from the ravens or his world.

I'm hoping that I can continue to find the heart. I'm writing a new novel in the Anieth series struggling toward that goal. I can achieve it in poetry, which I will write about, and maybe in painting/drawing, but to achieve heart in fiction is also a challenge after years and years of writing groups and publishers and trying to market writing.

Wish me luck!