Meandering in Search of a Point
As Churchill famously said, “Never, never, never, never give up!”
I’m on a streak! 280 days without missing a single lesson on my Duolingo¹ quest to learn Spanish. That’s 1 hour and 40 minutes every freaking day for over 9 months that I labored over their lessons.
I know. I know. Some of you are saying, “Hold on! That’s a good Reader’s Digest moment, but what does that have to do with writing? More to the point, what does it have to do with Genius in a Bottle, and especially our newsletter?”
My answer: Well, Bucko, you should know I’ve never let a little thing like irrelevance stop me in the past. And I usually can find a way to bring it around to a kind of hazy point at the end.
So, let’s try.
I’m a writer. And as a writer, I love to read. The more that I read. the better I write. Now, a couple of years ago, I read the translation of Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which I got for free (as I do all my Classics), and somewhere in the middle of it, I was stricken with the thought, “Wouldn’t it be nifty to read Don Quixote in the language Cervantes wrote it in?”
Also, I’m the absolute biggest fan of the late Leonard Cohen, so I tossed in Federico García Lorca who was a vast influence on the poet/singer. So now the great Don Quixote and the Poesia Completa by Lorca (also free) stand in stately splendor on my Kindle virtual bookshelf, waiting for the key in my pitiful brain to unlock their eloquence.
But I’m so damned impatient! You don’t know how anxious I am to be able to collar some innocent bystander and in my humblest voice to say, “Oh, yes, I, um, just finished reading Don Quixote (wishing there was an R in it I could trill). Oh, ahem, not the translation. I read it in the original Spanish.”
But more importantly than that — and here’s the point that worm was burrowing through my brain-apple to expose: I am a writer. And, as a writer, I’ll not be satisfied with simply reading novels and poetry books in Spanish.
I’ll have a strong urge to write in my new language. I know I will! And yes, I’ll probably think that my words will be pretty doggone special. I’ll be looking for an audience, because …
… after all, isn’t that part of the writer’s psyche — this need to share his/her humanity?
Now this is the important point: I’ll want the gift I’ll be sharing to be in my second language, Spanish, but I won’t want my gift to be the shell of language, itself. I’ll expect nothing less than to have the language be a nutshell that, when cracked open, will magically reveal my deepest thoughts, saturated with what is unique about my soul’s personal journey through life.
But, in my heart of hearts, I know that nutshell will suffer many, many blows and dents before it cracks open.
And here, brothers and sisters, is my alluded-to point (with worm debris still clinging to it): out of what little I’ve learned in my 280 days wrestling with the living, squirming organism of the Spanish language, I have developed such empathy for my siblings on GiaB whose second language is English. There are many of you on Medium, some I’m sure, right here on GiaB, who have hundreds of stories or poems wriggling inside you — and blow after blow has continually rained down on the shell that still resists cracking.
Please, dear siblings, speaking as an editor who has read your offerings, please, please keep pressing against that barrier. If we editors at GiaB have rejected any of your writing, I urge you not to be discouraged, especially if English is your second language. Keep leaning in, pressing against the barrier. If you refuse to give up, one day — I promise you — one day you’ll experience the cracking of that shell. And your audience will be waiting to cheer you on.
Well … now I see it is 11: 40 AM. Duolingo¹ is frowning. She doesn’t like it when I’m late for our lesson. I’m thinking again of Churchill’s words …
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