Greetings folks, hope you’re having a good holiday season, if such a thing is possible. I’m not a fan of the month of December—to me it’s just a giant stress ball and money sink, but you do you. If you need a break, I’ve got three things for you: some thoughts on learning a language, a reflection on another dreary episode of Star Trek, and an update on Patrick from Gambia. Enjoy, and I’ll see you again in 2022, a year so good they named it after a number.
At some recent point a photon passing through my head interacted just enough with an atom in my brain to trigger a cascade of further interactions, sweeping across my neurons like the ramified toggling of a field of falling dominoes seen from enough distance to erase the effect of the individual domino. A progression of information following the rules of fluid dynamics, until suddenly without warning a thought emerges from my noggin and directs my limbs to pick up my phone and engage with a program that begins to teach me German.
I’ve been addicted to this for about three weeks now.
I’ve dabbled in German for my whole life. As an adolescent I learned “yes” and “no” and the numbers one through ten from my Mom when we lived in Florida for a season between crises. She learned it as a side effect of living in Germany for several years, during which era I entered the world. I don’t remember Germany, but I think there’s something about living your life thousands of miles from the location of your birth, something odd about the spirit, as though it were missing a finger at the second knuckle or had a supernumerary nipple.
German was then the obvious choice when the high school counselor asked what language I wanted to learn. And so I spent two years under the tutelage of Frau Steele,1 whom we tortured as though we were trying to get her to confess to being a witch, which is actually possible. I’m not sure which of us was worse, but for a portion at least of the student body—myself prominently included—the class was open mic night at a club with a brick wall behind the stage. The contrived circumstances of characters in language textbooks didn’t help; the material simply craved our off-color emendations. Did Anna really just ask where is the wurst? I’m supposed to just walk past this chestnut?
In my defense, Frau Steele was every bit as immature as us, despite her apparent eins hundert jahren. One afternoon near the end of my second year under her tutelage, she volunteered me to assist two other students in the task of moving a full filing cabinet down a flight of stairs. I’m sure this was a violation of many state and federal laws, and we made an object lesson in why this was the case. We scooted the cabinet, a goddamn refrigerator for all relevant purposes, down the hallway to the stairs, and then, with the infinite care of teenagers, we knocked it on its side, making the floor shudder and a half dozen heads to pop out of classrooms up and down the hall. Perplexed by the stairs we took the most obvious course and shoved the thing like a sled at the top of a hill.
It bounced like a bowling ball down the steps but hung on the last one. We ran down and got ready to shove it off but since nobody was in charge one of my colleagues got it moving before I was ready, and the elephantine steel case dropped seven inches directly onto the big toe on my right foot, like slamming a hammer down on a bratwurst. My fellows nonchalantly shoved the case down the hall toward its destination, leaving me sitting on the floor gingerly extracting my foot from its shoe.
My sock was already soaked with blood. I didn’t really know what to do other than hop back to German class, where I was met by Frau Steele telling me it served me right.
I was on crutches for weeks and when the toenail grew back it quickly became ingrown and then infected and this required some amount of inpatient surgical repair which kept me on crutches for many more weeks. In retrospect, I probably missed a clean shot at a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
I learned some German though.
A surprising amount, in fact, and it’s stuck with me. I go through occasional spasms of enthusiasm for the language, but most of the words I know I learned from the venerable pages of Unsere Freunde, and although maybe I can’t conjure them under pressure, I remember them when they arrive unbidden. Who, after all, could forget a word as ludicrous as “pferd.”2
I brought my half-baked German with me to Germany, where my wife and I spent a portion of our honeymoon in the winter of ‘97 and ‘98. I know the idea of entering into conversation with a few scraps of a language is disturbing to some people, but for whatever reason it didn’t bother me much. Most people in Germany speak English to some degree, so you’re working with a net, and it got to be a sort of game for me to see how far I could get without having to bail out. It’s a lot like getting on a bicycle for the first time: you mull it over for a goodly amount of time, picturing how you’ll grab the handlebars and mash down on the pedals and then you do it and immediately overshoot your steering and then overcorrect and if you’re lucky the wobbles even out and you’re moving; if not you just ask, splayed out on the asphalt, if they speak English and you get your business done.
I got a kick out of constructing excellent first sentences for conversations. I had constructed a jewel when we arrived in the tiny river town of Theilheim am Main, a short distance from Würtzburg where I was born. I had it in mind to visit the people my parents had lived with in that distant time, and I knew only their name and their address. This was before cellphones and I didn’t bother trying to find a map that covered this speck of a town. Instead I just practiced a single question over and over in my head as we trundled along the highway on the nummer zehn bus.
The bus stopped and we hopped out. There was a small market in front of us, so we walked over, went inside, and I asked the woman, “Wissen Sie wo Lehmgrubben Strasse ist?” Now I know this probably a complete grammatical mangling of my intent, which was to ask people where fatuously named Lehmgrubben Street was to be found, but when I finished the question my interlocutor immediately launched into a long string of German, gesticulating meaningfully with her hands. The German was all gibberish, but I took note of the hand waving.
We ambled off in the direction she’d indicated, and after a few minutes we found a guy washing his car. “Entschuldingung,” I said to him, “Wissen Sie wo Lehmgrubben Strasse ist?” Again came the slurry of impenetrable German and the hand gesticulations. Again we took note of the direction in which his gestures were aimed and when he reached what seemed to us the end of his spiel we thanked him and headed off.
Strictly speaking, this didn’t actually work. Turns out a series of vague waves of the hand will eventually cause you to walk past someone you already talked to and they will divine that you’re lost and offer assistance in English. But it was fun while it lasted, and we did find the house in the end.
Was this a wise use of my time and energy, struggling for years to learn to express myself in the most basic terms in a language spoken by just over one percent of the world’s people? What, just so I could go to Germany and fail to understand the answers to my carefully prepared questions? Well it was an experience and I got a story out of it and that isn’t half bad. But here’s a thought worth savoring: there is one time in your life where you’ll get to learn hundreds and thousands of words over a period of a couple years. You never get that again—face it, even if you could find a thousand English words you don’t yet know, most of them are not going to be words you’re going to use often. They’re probably mostly going to be medical words or the chemical names for bottom-of-the-ingredients list preservatives. Dive into a new language and you’re an infant again, learning all over those signal words that live most close to your heart and your life.
Star Trek: Miri
Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s 1954 debut novel, is a sophisticated allegory about civilization and the will to power in which a bevy of children stranded on an isolated island in the Pacific strive to organize their society according to the temperament of each character struggling for control, eventually devolving to open warfare and murder.
“Miri,” the eighth episode of the venerable maiden run of Star Trek, twelve years the junior of Golding’s masterpiece, seeks to colonize the same mindspace with its story of children living alone on an alternate Earth after the adults succumb to disease, but falls closer to Children of the Corn.
The disease in question is the result of longevity experiments gone awry. The older you are the more quickly you are consumed by the blue sores that quickly appear on the faces and limbs of Kirk, Bones, the ever irritating Yeoman Rand, and two red shirt security guys who are easily pushing fifty and should by all rights be dead before the credits stop rolling. Spock is immune because of—what else?—his green blood, but you also get a free pass if you’re a prepubescent, and as a bonus you age very slowly.
So immediately we have time pressure enough to boil away any potential meaning in the episode—they have to find a cure in 50-odd minutes minus commercial breaks. And pretty quickly they discover the planet’s only inhabitants—a bunch of annoying kids who chant rhymes and wield a sort of implausible slang that prefigures Anthony Burgess’ much more competent coinages for A Clockwork Orange (e.g. grups for grown-ups) and generally just act like kids would act if a guy in a director’s chair pointed a bullhorn at them and told them to act like kids. They act like they’re acting like kids.
Miri is the oldest of them, on the cusp of adolescence and thus in immanent danger from the disease. Naturally she falls for Kirk, who does shockingly little to avoid leading her on, and her jealousy of Rand, who is just a pathetic ball of tears and thatched hair in this one, leads her to betray Kirk to the kids’ sneering leader Jahn, played by Michael J. Pollard, who at the the age of 27 and a year away from his turn as C.W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde was somehow deemed sufficiently young-looking to play a preadolescent. Jahn steals their communicators, which they urgently need to test the antidote Bones has whipped up between scenes. For a few minutes it seems as though everything is toilet-bound until Kirk descends upon the children and gives them a stern talking to which somehow convinces them to give the communicators back. I’m not real sure when or how he was able to accomplish this, though I sense that the key moment is when he uses the phrase “I double-dare you.” Yes, for real.
This turns out to be moot because back in the lab Bones just tries out the antidote without the tests and it works fine. The episode ends like the director was late for a bus, and here we are, left with a handful of impressions but no real idea what this was actually about. Kids are spooky and bloodthirsty but in the end you can reason with them if you use their secret language? That’s the modus operandi of every Christian youth group minister who has ever sat backward on a chair and told a bunch of kids they want to rap. Kirk is a sexual predator? That much we already know, but there’s something particularly creepy about the way he eyes Miri and touches her way too much. Consider the following exchange:
KIRK: What's your name?
MIRI: Miri.
KIRK: Miri. A pretty name for a pretty young woman.
MIRI: Pretty?
KIRK: Very pretty.
Jesus Kirk, what the hell?
I keep waiting for the moment where this show asks a serious question; God knows there are whole libraries of books full of reflections on the ontology of Star Trek or the epistemology of Star Trek or the eschatology of Star Trek or whatever, but eight weeks in I’m not finding much there there. I think the answer must lie somewhere in the intersection between the show and the cultural scene in which it took root. It’s worth remembering that Star Trek was a failure initially, lasting only three seasons—just barely enough to make it eligible for the syndication which would save it. Syndication brought it to the afternoon audience of young, impressionable kids like myself who saw something in Spock and his pointed ears, in the flip-phone style communicators which would eventually become digital handcuffs around all our wrists, in the potential, maybe, of a starship capable of going pretty much anywhere and encountering anybody. The fact that it encountered the kids of the cast and crew chanting “bonk on the head” perhaps wasn’t such a hindrance to us, as that’s where the Enterprise had been, and our imaginations were populated with thoughts of where it might go.
Let’s hope to God it goes somewhere soon.
Patrick Update
Since I last talked to y’all about Patrick we’ve had a smattering of both triumphant and harrowing moments. The laptop arrived only a week after I shipped it, and Patrick was beside himself with joy. “This is the happiest day of my life,” he told me.
I realized too late I’d neglected to include an adapter capable of connecting to The Gambia’s 240 volt, 50 hertz electrical system. A hundred-dollar check had arrived in the mail so the Patrick fund was replenished, and we decided that the best bet would be for him to travel to the nation’s capital, Serekunda, to purchase the adapter. I wired him $50 to cover the expenses. He walked to Brikama and took a van to Serekunda—it was his first time in the capital. That night he sent back photos of the laptop and its adapter, and he told me that with the extra money he was able to buy two weeks’ worth of rice and beans and noodles. He was very excited.
Unfortunately, a week later he learned he was not accepted to college. They told him he needed to repeat 12th grade math and science, which sadly he can’t do until next fall at the earliest. I told him he could learn what he needs off of Khan Academy and that I would tutor him. His spirits lifted and we began the task of evaluating his current level.
That’s where things stood last Thursday, but I have not heard from him since.
This doesn’t bode well. Once before he went silent for three days, and it came out that he’d had to take his Granny to the hospital in Brikama because of a bad asthma attack. I presume the current silence must have some similar explanation; I can only wait and hope it’s not something worse.
Names changed to protect the guilty.
Horse.