The richness of a rainforest
The beauty of other languages is that you can see… beyond the walls your own grammar has constructed. The mind finds easy passage in some avenues, where in English, say, or German or some other tongue, it had been constricted. Why consider the Earth an anarchy, a Babel? Were it not for the incomprehensible complexity of our language, we would reduce the richness of a rainforest to the flatness of the desert. The mind is master and the mind is also the creation, and our thoughts draft pathways that our spirit can walk, from early lessons to later experience.
What is it that he meant? What can she be saying, her sounds and her gestures, her body’s movement, her silences?
They add up to part of the mystery, and one that is closer to home than the galaxies, and more accessible than the heart of an atom. So you begin to listen, and sound by sound, word by word, you create a roadmap of sense, you build a road into the sense of a people. The halus propriety and depth of Bahasa Jawa beside the dynamism and openness of Sumatran dialect; the friendly welcome of Midwestern emigrants, enriched with the deep soils of the plains; music and hope painted on a wall of struggle in Brazilian Portuguese; or the multitude of Indian dialects enveloping ancient secrets and wisdom… all packages to be unwrapped, the gift of diversity is the gift of youth, the gift of growth.
I prefer not to arrive at the end, and to have this beautiful and painful mess too neatly ironed out. That would be to tell someone the story’s ending before they had a chance to read it; or tell the joke’s punchline too soon. Speaking for myself, I would rather have more mysteries to discover, every day – every day, until I greet the one mystery I can never unravel in this physical body. Maybe with enough practice while I am alive, I can keep my eyes open at it’s end.
Speaking for my people, it is the endeavor which keeps us sharp, as a race, keeps us striving against the dark, falling into the dark, striving up again toward some Light which was born into us, or into which we were born.