A book of verse and thou. For Valentine's

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Just for once, I thought I’d do a post for Valentine’s day. Normally I’d avoid it, since I think that Valentine’s Day, like Easter, Christmas or, indeed, the Eve of All Hallows (OK, OK, Halloween if you prefer), have all become little more than excuses for commercial exploitation.

But the words above, from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, happen to pop into my mind today, and they struck me as somehow appropriate for St Valentine’s. The words are really Edward Fitzgerald’s, since his ‘translation’ is in reality his own composition, a fine poem of the English language, inspired by the Persian Khayyam.

A loaf of bread beneath the bough
As seen by Edmund Dulac

That quatrain seems particularly apt when accompanied by the Edmund Dulac's illustration, reprinted in the edition my grandmother owned and, according to the inscription, gave me in September 1980.

There’s plenty wrong with the illustration. The man holds the book, and he’s lying down with bread and wine next to him. The woman is standing, ready apparently to serve, and offering nothing but herself and her looks.

On the other hand, there is a haunting quality to the picture that touches me all the same, a peace, a stillness, as well as the elegance and stylisation – just look at the overdone crescent moon in the background, its horns stretching far further than is natural. It creates an effect that is otherworldly, while it makes one think, and above all admire.

It all seems to fit with the poetry. A little sustenance to feed the body; a little wine to lubricate the soul; a little verse to charm the mind; and the company of two people with all the qualities to enjoy them. Yes, even on their own, on the edge of the wilderness, as the previous quatrain proclaims:

With me along the strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown

There we can create our own little morsel of Paradise against all the annoyance of everyday life. That strikes me as a better way to celebrate Valentine’s day than any card, or even a bunch of flowers.

Danielle and I will probably watch a little TV rather than read any poetry. But we’ll raise a glass to each other anyway. And then I might raise another to my grandmother. It’s in the copy of the Rubáiyát she gave me that I keep a drawing of her when she was thirty.

My grandmother, Yeta Bannister
At 30 years of age, in 1930

To be honest, I enjoy it as much as the picture. Or the verse.

Have a great Valentine’s.

The great question of unquestioning animals

Had an interesting conversation with my son David (no, that’s a complete coincidence: we didn’t meet until he was nine and I was 28, by which time we’d both been called David for nine and 28 years respectively) (yes, yes, he’s my stepson really, but the distinction’s not really worth making: I got to do the important part of his rearing, like teaching him to do the washing up, and he learned really crucial things from me, like doing the washing up is a lot less painful than the consequences of not doing it).

Is that all clear now? Can I get on with the story?

Anyway, it’s been a while since either of us was either nine or 28. In fact, it’s about 38 years. And for a long time now, he’s been teaching me at least as much as I’ve taught him. Fortunately, he’s tended to focus on subjects of more interest and less tedium than washing up.

The latest concerned animals learning language. He’d recently heard a podcast on the subject, from The Infinite Monkey Cage.

David. One of the philosophers
I'm privileged to have as sons

We’ve taught certain animals quite a lot of language. I remember reading some years ago about a Chimpanzee who’d mastered 800 words. Not using voice, of course, but sign language. It had learned words such as ‘ice’ and ‘box’ and had revealed a creative streak when it combined them into ‘icebox’ for refrigerator; ‘water’ and ‘bird’ it combined into a single word for a duck. Pretty smart stuff, don’t you agree? OK, sonnets will have to wait for a while, but still not bad, I reckon.

“Ah,” David told me, “but what the podcast was telling me was that the animals never learned to ask questions.”

Now, that had me fascinated. Is that really what separates humanity from other animals. Is it our capacity to think in terms of “what?” or “when?” or even more important “why?” To say nothing of “what the hell?”

We’re always questioning things, aren’t we? As Edward Fitzgerald put it, in his original masterpiece that he insisted was nothing but a “translation” of Omar Khayyam’s Rubayiat:

Into this Universe, and why not knowing, 
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.

We’re constantly concerned about where we came from, and where we’re going to, and why. Other animals sensibly focus on whether they’re comfortable now, in which case they enjoy it, or not, in which case they go somewhere else. And where they’re going to find food. Or possibly sex. But without asking “why?”

Still. At least David and I had some fun trying to imagine the kind of questions other animals might ask us if they ever asked any at all.

Such as:

“What makes you think learning to speak is such a big deal anyway?”

Or

“Why the hell do you want to train me to ask questions? Do you think you’re likely to have any satisfactory answers?”

Though the one we preferred was:

“Is there any way I can ask you without offence to just fuck off, leave me alone, and let me get back to the peace I was enjoying before you came along and disturbed my tranquillity with all this nonsense about speech and questions?”

Sorry about the bad language. I can’t help feeling it probably best expresses the way other animals would think about our obsession with teaching them things.

If they ever bothered to think about it at all, that is.

Tense about language, easier about life

Ah, Valencia. Charming city. Full of surprises – the convent that has become a bar and restaurant where you can eat Asian street food and drink a glass of wine under the stars and the palm trees, for instance, or the park that’s kept so clean that it can be hard to find a stick to throw for the dogs.

Valencia gets Spring going

It’s not all magic, of course. There are downsides. One is that Spain works at a higher volume than Britain. People don’t simply meet and have a discreet chat in subdued tones. They seem to feel that they haven’t fully demonstrated their joy at being with friends unless they talk loudly enough to be heard three blocks away. That can be a little tedious in the street during the day, but at 2:00 in the morning in the flat next door to ours, it can be a real bane.

But the benefits vastly outweigh these minor inconveniences. If nothing else, it was sheer joy to be enjoying Spring there, a point driven home to me here in Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire), where I’m looking out on a cold winter’s day under grey, rain-laden skies.

Danielle and I both feel that, to fit into our new life, we need to master the language. As it happens, I already speak a little Spanish, so my new tutor’s first action was to assess my level (far from high). She came up with some curious conclusions.

One was that I sometimes drift into an Italian accent. Not altogether surprising, since I was born in Italy. But, to be honest, I have no idea what an Italian accent sounds like in Spanish. To my tin ear, both accents sound Mediterranean. Which is perhaps a measure of just how much I have to learn.

What’s more, it’s a little exasperating. To sound Italian when I speak Spanish might be more acceptable if I didn’t sound so English when I spoke Italian. Why can’t I have an Italian accent in Italian?

But my tutor’s major concern was over my mastery – or rather lack of mastery – of the past tenses. I keep using the wrong one, she tells me, in rather a random way. It’s not as though I always use the imperfect when the simple past would be more appropriate, say, which would be a far more comprehensible error, and far more easily corrected.

The truth is that I can never remember how the verbs work in the past, so I just use whichever form comes to mind first. I make an approximate stab at the tense, in the hope that the person I’m talking to will translate it to what I actually mean, understand me, and make allowances. 

For an Englishman who sometimes sounds Italian.

Since my command of the future tense in Spanish isn’t a great deal better, that leaves me comfortable only with the present.

This is ironic since a character flaw of mine is always trying to get ahead of events, planning what I’m going to do and what steps I have to take to make it happen. This sort of hankering for the future is what the French call fuite en avant and the Germans Flucht nach vorn, both of which mean a flight – in the sense of escape – forwards. It’s odd that there’s no real term for it in English, since Anglo-Saxon nations are no more immune to this sad disorder than anyone else.

Equally, I have a tendency to live too much in the past, for instance spending too much time concerned with a period, within my own lifetime, when the Brits were rather more open to others and generous in their tolerance than they’re proving right now. So forwards or backwards I go, to the serious detriment of the here and now.

The Rubáiyát of Ommar Khayyám
Lots of good advice, not always easy to follow

“Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet?” asks Edward Fitzgerald’s version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Excellent advice, but I’m not good at following it.

Except, it seems, in Spanish. Apparently that’s a language in which I truly live for the moment. Poor mastery of the future, none at all of the past.

It’s almost enough to make me wonder whether I really should pursue my studies of the language. If my current limited skill allows me to tackle a deeprooted character flaw, is that perhaps a price worth paying? Maybe I should just learn to live with being a foreigner who sounds English and occasionally Italian, and can’t account coherently for what he was doing yesterday. And stop constantly planning for a future that may never happen, or regretting a past that’s gone for good anyway.

Curious what language learning can tell you about yourself.