"To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake
is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
~ Pema Chödrön
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My final oral Spanish exam in college was spent mostly in the bathroom. Technically, I kept my partner and professor waiting because I was dry heaving. Contrary to popular belief, I don't talk well under pressure. And yes, I can now say some of my favorite conversations have been with people who neither of us shared a common language--gestures, shouting single words, lots of hand movement, barely using grammar and always our faces for inflection. But it's our faces, our consoling nods, even tears and of course the infectious state of laughter--is the sort language I don't shy away from learning. It's when I feel I have to have the exact words, I freeze.
I passed that Spanish exam thanks to the young Barcalonian professor with a good sense of humor. My partner was a pre-med student riding her grades with a focused hunger. She had no interest in the subjunctive. She merely wanted the exam to be perfect. Why she selected me for her partner still baffles me, perhaps because I kept quiet while all the other pre-somethings shouted to be first. Maybe because my homework was perfect. I just never spoke.
Years later while sitting on a bus headed to the remote mountains in southern Poland did I realize why I once had a fear of a foreign language. I really just like to listen. I like time to take in the inflections, the slurs of z's of Polish, the nasal of French, the sing song to Italian--words in rhythm. Frankly, it's poetry of people with their mouths open when you cannot know every word. It's notes hanging in the air. It's song when you finally learn enough to speak back.
Once while sitting next to a nun on a train, which could have been any train at any time of the day or night in Poland, I heard this word through the walls of another cabin being said with force. I had only been in Poland a few short days and spent my first weekend exploring a small walled city. It was dusk. I had just been to Sandomierz, which is a city I say with fondness both in sound and knowing of its beauty. But that night with all of us quiet in the cabin which is common practice when sharing a car with a holy person, I learned a new word.
At the beginning of learning Polish, I would just mouth the words or try to, when you are dealing with a language whose basic expression for sorry is prezprasham, it takes awhile. But that word I heard through the walls was not sorry nor was it sandwich, it bellowed out into the silence with anger. I thought part of the word was night, nods, so I tried mouthing it silently at first and then tried putting sound to it. As soon as I said it out loud, the nun, looking straight up at me--eyes wide and and cold--did three hail marys and went back to her rosary beads. I later learned the word was neither an expression for night or shoot. Let's say the word involves the act of having sex with one's mother.
I would later hear that word being shouted at an airport in Amsterdam by a man who didn't have the right paperwork to travel to the US for Christmas, heard that word in alleys from men who sat there all day and only talked to dogs and silence and later would I find myself yelling it at a ticket taker on a bus when he claimed I was using the wrong ticket, a man who was using physical force with me to pay him 100 zloty. But before that moment, I struggled with Polish.
I had come to Poland with the hope of getting a Fulbright to work on translations of Polish poetry. Thought I might need to learn Polish first to do this. I had a tutor who spoke perfect English, German and Russian and for two years I took lessons twice a week, only took public transportation and listened to Polish music in the mornings before teaching. I thought I was a shoe-in for the scholarship. Needless to say, the Fulbright was granted that year I applied to another University of Michigan grad whose name was Margozha, a Polish American who spoke perfect Polish.
A few days before I rode that bus where I was harassed by a ticket taker, I found out that I didn't get the scholarship and felt really depressed and sank into a state of sadness similar to the kind of sadness I had that morning of my oral exam for Spanish, frozen fear. Textbooks claim people have flight or fight when faced with adversity. Me, I just freeze. I sink in a quiet space of total immersion in a state of hopelessness which is perhaps why I am so fond of the Poles. Polish, as you might imagine, have many expressions for ones soul being lost, ones sense of hope being grayed by an impossible future.
Yet what I also adore is the spirit that lies within these states of fielded grief. Some bright poppy that rises from under the tank tracks dirt. Hope in Polish is just as powerful as the word soul.
And maybe that's what happened that day, the day I was on a bus and punched my ticket after visiting my Polish tutor for the last time. I was moved by hope. I clutched my bag of grammar books and wondered if I would ever use them again and what was I going to do with my dream of translating, looking at the bus window of spring awakening, when suddenly, I was pushed. Now being pushed isn't odd or startling in Poland, it's actually the norm in large crowds, but the bus had been empty. This man already snarling pushed me again and told me I had the wrong ticket. Shouting he told me to pay money in cash, now. I didn't even budge. I looked at my ticket and then up to his face and said, this is the right ticket, I'm not going to pay you. He pushed again. Shouted closer in my face, telling me I needed to pay. And maybe this is when my instincts kicked in, when that fight arose. But I didn't use physical force. In perfect Polish, I said, go fuck yourself and your mother and stop yelling, stop pushing me. Stop thinking because I am foreign it doesn't mean t don't understand rude. He backed off.
I got off the bus shaking. As I walked back to my apartment, I started to laugh. Maybe out of relief or as a release, but mostly because I had done what I would never have been asked to do in a university setting, no poem would ask of me to shout back to a man with angry hands, no language tape would teach me to tell someone to fuck off with such clarity. Such perfect pitch.
And maybe that's why this fall I felt lost the way I felt so lost when I first went to Poland. I just didn't know the language, I don't speak home. I felt I would return every day from work to a country whose language I didn't speak. You cannot buy a Rosetta Stone for the language of home. But I am learning. The kick of the furnace in the cold morning, my footsteps on the newly laid wood floor and my view out my bathroom window after I ride my bike in the dark and how I can outline my leaf filled yard, slowly by visual memory as I look out from my shower in the dark. This new country, my home I know has a language. I keep telling myself, it's like Polish--a language people never expect someone to learn let alone become fluent. Why take on something so difficult. But I remind myself that this language of house is made up of words and it will take time to put into sentences. Grout, molding and joist are to name a few. A few I now put into sentences.
Now, I don't travel much unless it's to Home Depot or Lowe's. But I think of it like a town in this new country, where I need to bring the right guide book along, make sure I have some idea of what I am looking for before I go, maybe I take a tour of say, light fixtures since I now know how to re-wire and install lights.
I remind myself that learning a new language like anything that is worth doing well, takes more time than you could ever imagine dedicating yourself giving. Giving not because you expect something in return or a scholarship or award, because learning it is the act of being present. The way learning another language helps you feel close to people so unlike you in history, but so close in spirit. To try and get close enough. Present enough to learn a new song, a swear word which might be just the right word at the right time. Like in the crawl space with spiders and dust, I found myself, as might have imagined, cursing in Polish. Cursing and smiling all at the same time to the silence of this new land,
this new nest.
