Adminicle: collateral evidence of the contents of a missing document.
I need a new language. A new spoken or written language. Arabic looks beautiful at a glance, and esoteric. Japanese, for as much as I understand of the way it works, might be the easiest for me to pick up.
There is a feeling I have had since youth, a feeling that I am missing something in the English language, missing a history of expression, a heritage of context from which today’s words and biases of articulation evolved. I feel like today’s English is but a headline, a “Daily News” resource which is rich but nevertheless only symptomatic of the rising, the rising of ideas from sparsity to baroque and back to sparsity, the same ideas trading places back and forth across centuries.
During my first forays into musicology texts I felt a certain constipation when reading materials translated from other languages into English. This should come as no surprise, but I remember next moving from those texts back to “natural” American English and feeling the same unease, the same sense of gruff inarticulateness moldering thickly in the words which swirled on the page before me.
I want to know what is missing, and the quest to learn another language might open some windows into that abyss, but I do not imagine that other cultures and societies have answers that America lacks. I do not expect answers, only questions. If I do pursue speaking or writing/understanding other languages then it would not be a culturally- or politically-motivated pursuit but a human and possibly spiritual one. I have never trusted language as a documentary tool and yet lives and civilizations are regularly reduced to a few lines of text. And nothing communicates chaos and unrest like text. War and violence are ephemeral but text is forever.
