Amateur

Rocks.

In big piles.

Of rocks.

'We haven't invented the Hula-Hoop or anything. We're only contemporary. And if we're different from the rest of TV, it's because the rest of TV isn't even contemporary.'

'Listeners, not speakers, are the main reasoners'

Atop a massive tree stump, a Lime scooter on its side, as if a sacrifice.

'Like jokes, generally, slang is unsigned.'

'An insipid spiritualism supplants a decadent materialism.'

Most philosophical writing produced by academics is like business-to-business communication. Yet the customers of these philosophers are never served; they are always wrong.

I’ve learned some language at distinct points in my life. I never took a foreign language earlier on, so had to take some in college to satisfy a language requirement that most people got covered with credit for their high school Spanish. I opted for Russian and met the challenge erratically, with a couple few years of courses spread over my whole undergraduate career and extending into grad school, since I audited a bit when I had moved on to a math master’s. I never got to be particularly fluent at what I could manage, and I stalled at right about when my vocabulary was supposed to be expanding a lot to enable me to deal with written Russian. But one of my teachers, a native speaker, took an interest in me, and gave me a job assisting her with some translation of literary scholarship. We would sound out the nuances of meaning for what she had already worked up. In those years I was quite interested in the margins of the language-learning experience, acquiring books and records and consulting dictionaries and all that—I remember hunting down some Chekhov plays in original text, listening to Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (what all I remember at the moment: gribki, gribki!)—but I suppose it was more like a preparation for me, instilling interest in language and culture, than it was actually serving to establish an ability to speak and read.

The passion that took me into and carried me through graduate school, once I switched to philosophy, was Wittgenstein. The nature of my project, which focused on his writing as writing, required that I at least be aware of what that writing actually was in its original German, although due to quirks of its entry into the world it was extensively available in dual-language facing-page translations and the translations (of the later work I was interested in—there is persistent ambivalence over how to render the terse German of the earlier Tractatus into English) were deemed perfectly adequate by most philosophers. At some point, whether before or after my dissertation proposal I can’t recall, a friend observed that he always saw me carrying some book around but not Wittgenstein, which seemed to indicate a reluctance to write. I had read the Philosophical Investigations so many times, certain portions over and over endlessly, that I found it hard to see the text with unfamiliar eyes, to leave behind the scripts for what it was supposed to mean that I was acquainted with from the scholarship and from the general culture of reading Wittgenstein that existed among the philosophers I knew. I thought to get past this by looking at the German, but I found the constant availability of the English on a facing page too easy to fall back on. So I responded by getting hold of a purely German-language text and forcing myself to read it cold, with of course the memory of the translation always in the background. I think this proved to be a wonderful way to acquire a strong enough language skill to read with and grow from—for variety I moved on to Schopenhauer, which I used to reread a bit of every morning at the Hard Times over breakfast—and I still enthusiastically cite the experience when I want to encourage people to improve a language. Sometimes when I look back—heavy with regrets—at graduate school having basically taught myself to read German seems like the most valuable part of it.

It’s not exactly true that I taught myself (or that I ‘read German’ now—I can read plenty of it, for many purposes, highly sensitive to what it is I’m trying to read), since there were instructional books, some recorded lessons I never much took to, a German-for-grad-students short course I audited at some point, the kind designed to hustle people through the language requirements for Ph.D. programs that were by then nearly obsolete—but it’s true enough to my experience of learning. My knowledge of the text was crucial because it gave me a different level of comfort, of confidence about what didn’t make sense at the moment, so that I could go on with a good enough understanding. More than that, though, it gave me different grounds for caring about what the words said, about connecting them to my felt sense of meaning. I recognize that this is somewhat backwards as far as language learning usually goes, since the whole point of learning to speak first, or with priority at least over reading and writing, is that this grounds meaning in what the personal grounds of sense are in one’s first language (W.: ‘meaning something is like going up to someone’), in the gestural, relational, situational matrix of its use, in wanting to speak (French translation for ‘to mean’: ‘vouloir dire’), but all the same the felt sense of meaning I was most interested in was not so much the ‘five red apples’ part of it (as in the opening section of the Investigations) as it was the philosophical part, the part that was the first section of the Investigations. So it would be more to the point to say Wittgenstein’s writing, and caring about it, taught me how to read in German.

French has been a different experience for coming after all this, and for being easier, so much closer to English. But I also went at it differently. There were books I wanted to be able to read, some French I had already looked at, but basically I started with a very different register or level, at a different speed, by doing Duolingo’s French course on my phone during the pandemic. I was sick and laid up very early on, and for a while I was spending hours a day, literally hours, completing lessons. Duolingo is notoriously lopsided—it’s not ideal for training to speak—but it also enables all sorts of idiosyncratic unevenness in practice, or at least did before their recent revisions to corral people into narrower paths. Since I was practicing intensively the speed I was moving at mattered less to me, so also the repetitiveness, and for a while rather than moving on to new material at lower levels I was sticking it out with every single topic until it was exhausted, something I’ve gathered they don’t exactly advise as a best practice. Eventually, when lots of speech exercises were available to me, or the speed-conditioned drills, I was certainly flogging them far in excess of the normal expectation.

But it did its thing. It brought me to a point where I could read a lot of written French with pleasure and curiosity—importantly, even when I don’t follow everything exactly. I’m much more interested in my own experience with this language because my history with the previous ones makes the qualities of the experience of learning stand out more, be more available for reflection than frustration. Russian I associate with, among other things, the stultifying experience of sitting in the library media center, playing the audiotapes that accompanied the textbook for the first semester (which I got partway through before dropping, for the time being). Learning German, I read philosophy more than anything, and what I recall is more the frequency with which I would infer meaning thanks to the assurance provided by the predictably restricted vocabulary of philosophy and the logical patterning that lends supportive structure to its prose. In French it is much more often that I go by feeling, guess, tolerate vagueness (in what I comprehend, not in what’s there). Not knowing a language makes it hard to exercise patience, because without sufficient reward of sense, without ways to orient yourself and feel like you know where you are and where you’re going, you can easily resent every new absence or disappearance of sense, and this inhibits your generosity of mind and your willingness to prove to have been wrong (even to yourself, when reading—always conscious, no doubt, of possible situations of speech where one stands to lose face when incompetence is revealed). But with more experience and with a stronger stage of development it seems patience comes more readily; what I miss this time around I’ll get better at eventually.

One of the things I’ve been reading is Maigret novels. A while back I noticed my reading, on the level of sentence to sentence and word to word activity, going through a transition of phases, as it were. I care about getting the sound right and I do a lot of reading aloud. This seemed to correlate with a certain limitation of my pace at reading, as if I couldn’t read silently any faster than I could read aloud (which meant, roughly, speak or listen, too: my limit was tied to that index of my ability). One day, however, I felt as if my mind had relaxed; I could move along the text more easily, ‘hearing’ it without having to put as much distinct effort into subvocalizing or speaking it inwardly. And obviously this helped me with sense-making: the parts and wholes that I could take in with some sort of immediacy seemed to grow a bit.

I thought of this the other day when listening to Vieux frères, an album by the group (they say ‘collective’) Fauve, which is basically high-speed spoken word (bordering on slam poetry or rap at points) set to moody beat-curious contemporary indie. I like this and I’ve played it off and on, about 30 times (decent for me) in the four years I’ve had it, but I haven’t listened so closely that I can unlock the lyrics. Sung French is hard enough for the obvious reasons, but the velocity and volume of words here would be overwhelming enough in English. Anyway, as my ability has grown the record has grown in accessibility. I’ve been trying to listen to more spoken French, YouTube and podcasts and whatnot, to improve my listening, and I’ve found that like my reading, but in a way more irresistibly, it prompts me to speak in turn. I’ve read that the neural or brain subsystems for speech repetition, like speech shadowing or echolalia, operate more rapidly than recognition or comprehension of what’s heard even does, which is apparently explained in terms of what gives us our capacity for first language acquisition. What I noticed distinctly the other day was that I caught a lot more of what the Fauve vocalists were speak-singing than before, while at the same time the pace of the lyrics was overpowering my modest little ability for speech repetition. Yet it wanted to come out.