#120 Another language
Hej hej!
One summer, decades ago, I was reading through whatever the English-language section of the Fnac off Gran Vía in Madrid had to offer. Ulysses, by James Joyce, this time. I sat down in the Retiro park expecting a day in Dublin, but instead was pulled into a rabbit hole and into a lifelong fascination with language. Joyce once mused, “I’d like a language which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.”
His musing resonated with me deeply. While I taught English, my students were teaching me Spanish. And when we were lucky, we met in the middle, in perfect Spanglish, to discuss concepts that neither language fully captured. Hence, Ulysses to me, above anything else, became a book about language.
Then and there, I committed to learning a fourth natural human language. Ideally a difficult one, far from the Latin script that I’m comfortable with. I worked on Russian but stopped for obvious reasons. I dreamed about learning Arabic. Now, I would simply love to be able to read Le Monde. Learning another language is #1 on the list of 50 things I want to learn before I’m 50.
I say “human language” specifically, as life and learning are about many more languages and dialects than our mother tongue. Programming languages such as Python and HTML are an obvious example, but as I learned this summer, almost all of the 50 things I want to learn come down to learning another language.
Such as #3: to fix a Rubik’s Cube. The Rubik’s Cube is the ubiquitous puzzle that has been sold over 500 million times since its invention half a century ago. People can solve them in seconds, which made it all the more annoying to me that I had no idea how to fix a scrambled cube. I spent a good day on a Swedish campsite making sense of conflicting YouTube videos to figure out my own failproof approach. To do so (and write it down), I had to learn a simple language: R U R' U', L' U' L U.
Fixing a Rubik’s Cube is an exercise in recognizing patterns, applying an associated algorithm, and accepting that no matter how hard you try, even the world’s dullest computer can do this a gazillion times faster. “R U R' U'” is one such algorithm, shorthand for right turn clockwise, up turn clockwise, right turn counterclockwise, up turn counterclockwise. Each face and line of the cube has a letter and two directions: the syntax of this language.
Once I had recognized the Rubik’s Cube as a linguistic obstacle, I started seeing languages everywhere. The harmonica (#40) has its own language. For instance, 56 -56 56 -45 45 -45 45 34 -34 45 -34 45 -45 is part of the intro to Billy Joel’s Piano Man.
Music, of course, has its score and tabs as language. But as I become more proficient on guitar and play with others more, I’m learning these are too cumbersome to write down fully. Instead, much like someone from Andalusia merely mumbling suggestions of Spanish words that the C2-speaker intends to understand, songs are written in a language of single letters. (Example below of Snow Globes by Black Country, New Road, as we played it at this year’s Buitenkunst.)
My list of 50 things is full of languages. The Latin of the Dies Irae, the mystical connotations in Tarot, birdsong, yoga. Others are less straightforward, such as being able to read and respond to the physical sensations that allow an arrow to hit its target (#6: learning archery). Or the subtle nuances and accents needed to be able to buy second-hand men’s clothes (#33).
I’m not just learning skills; I’m decoding the many languages needed in life. ChatGPT suggested putting them in a visual map:
What excites me now is not just learning all these languages, but seeing how they collide. Yoga and running speak to each other. Magic tricks slip into Tarot. Guitar shapes harmonica. Each new language expands the grammar of how I move through life, setting me free from tradition. In this, I can learn a lot from Joyce. Not perfection, but invention. Not mastery, but fluency, in all of life’s languages.
Hasta la proxima,
Jasper