Synchronicity

This is part of my book hoard - the books I own, therefore do not have a deadline by which they must be read.  As I say, only part of my hoard.  

This morning several things happened that seemed to be a 'thread'. 

The first was viewing a video comment from Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, answering questions from children, one of which was what was your favourite school subject?

He said language.  He said he loved language and has learned to speak French (our other official language here in Canada) and Russian (because astronaut, working on the Russian space station he had to.  Plus he just likes languages.)

Then Abby Franquemont posted about discussing words in different languages.  She said:

"This made us have to have a whole discussion about “window” in Quechua. Why? Because at higher altitudes like where I grew up, traditional houses don’t have them, only colonial and later ones, and they’re called “ventana” or “wintana” depending on your beliefs about transliteration and representing the Cusco Quechua accent.

We literally called around asking people for their opinions and no two were the same, and this is one of the things about Quechua. None of the answers are wrong. Neither is any one of them correct. They are all descriptive. And this is what makes colonial language speakers really struggle.

We could have asked a university professor of Quechua or a schoolteacher who has pioneered multicultural and bilingual education centering Indigenous communities, and eventually I will, but that also kind of misses the point of #runasimi which is that it’s for people to communicate with mouth noises."

It was an eye-opening comment.  Quite literally.  I'd been scrolling through twitter trying to get my first coffee into me and my eyes quite literally snapped open.  And pieces started falling into place.

Like Chris Hadfield, I have always loved language.  Unfortunately I cannot seem to wrap my brain around any other languages than English, not because I can't learn the vocabulary, but because of the grammar.

But language, the written variety in particular, has always been fascinating to me.  Books were a magic carpet for me from my earliest memories.  I simply love to wallow in a good book, where the author uses descriptive language.  Hmm.  Descriptive language.  Yes, a good description that makes me SEE something, some ordinary thing or object in a fresh new way.  A story that brings illumination to human emotions fascinates me.

A story teller that sees the humanity in us all excites me, helps me understand other people, their feelings, their wounds, their motivations.

I started thinking about all the authors I particularly love to read and all, every one of them, has this gift of being able to see beyond the obvious and help me to see it too.

During this time of pandemic, with so much stress, I have been having a hard time focusing and my reading of actual books has been reduced to almost nothing.  It has only been the last couple of weeks that I have found myself needing the distraction of a good book and begun to read with more regularity.

Library books.  Books with deadlines.  I still can't tackle anything too complex - like Dorothy Dunnett, whose books you might just be able to make out sitting in that heap on the hearth.  She is an author who isn't as well known as she should be.  She is, as others have commented, an author's author.  Many of the really good authors I read for their stories are also fans of Dunnett.  But in addition to a fantastic observer and interpreter of human beings, she is complex.  And I just can't sit and read in large chunks right now.  I need smaller 'tastes'.  But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate a great writer.

Regular readers of this blog will notice that I haven't been listing books I have been reading.  Because I haven't been reading books.

However, I am working to make that change because I find it helps me get through the stressful days, the days of uncertainty, of not knowing what will happen in the coming months.

So I finished Laurie R. King's latest Riviera Gold the other day and started Terry Windling's The Wood Wife yesterday.  Both quite different writers, both with a good way with words.

And I am going to think further on how we communicate with mouth noises.