January, and the river is high and fast, muddied waters rolling around huge fallen trunks that shift in every upstream downpour. We haven’t swum there for a while, instead occasionally dipping shiveringly into lakes that seem safer but lack the starlit skies or peace and quiet. Perhaps we are all getting old, and losing our stomachs for cold, cold water and routine risk-taking. Instead, I run much more and find my pace and distances increasing, as long as my knees hold out. Even on Christmas Day, I slide out in the darkness to do a quick loop before anyone else wakes, getting air in my lungs and short miles on my feet, warm early lights blinking on as I pass houses in the pre-dawn.
As various of us in the house attempt to improve our various levels of various languages, I was caught by this opening to an old Edward Said piece in the LRB:
“All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life.”
Poor me, poor me, far too long-past still aware of my other-ness in my family, play on, tiny violins. (But he goes on to describe his timidity and total lack of will, where my own problem was being pure will, nothing but impulse and urge, need and taste, a tiny Achilleus, with a terrible enraged terror that mushroomed when things went against me. Poor everyone.) The linguistics of his family, his mother in particular, make me think about how strange and difficult it must have been for my own mother to have raised us in something other than her mother tongue. Although, to use that term seems wrong, because her mother also had to raise her children in a different language, different from the one in which she was raised. Three languages in three generations, two women moving on, fleeing something dreadful or dreaming of something better. Or both.
Did my grandmother still count in her native language, muttering under her breath in the numbers that were her first pattern? Did she wake up with a start after falling asleep on a soft armchair and speak a few words of her childhood tongue?
I’ve just finished Be Funny or Die, which is not only appropriately hilarious to the title, and brilliant on the format and language of jokes, but also wonderful on the structure and language of writing, of speaking, of sharing things with those in or out of your group. Among the housemates here, we revel in all the family shorthand and slang, a mixture of quotes and references, mispronunciations which have stuck, strange, slanted semi-deliberate malapropisms which describe the thing better than the real terms, nicknames, in-jokes, loan words from half-learnt languages and grandmother-tongues, songs, jingles, hymns, and hyper-specific labels from the wittiest member of the extended family which are somehow so precise they can be used verbatim for entirely different occasions. I wonder how it feels to have a totally different language twenty or thirty years in to a life, so that childhood references handed down from parents and grandparents are words your own children can’t understand. Do the French have a Just William? Does Spanish have an equivalent of ‘Give him a nod, Mr Pip’?
Perhaps the greatest thing we can find is that shared language, a steaming soup-vat of memories that have made us laugh, or that recognise with a spark a previous moment twisted through the current one. The patterns that we perceive aren’t ever new, not really, although the surprise of discovery and realisation in each joke is what makes us laugh, and bonds us together in ways essentially unchanged since language began.
Several thousand years ago, Homer (poet, not Simpson) became rather famous for his two epic works, and several thousand years later, Christopher Nolan decided to film one. (A hill on which I shall, if not die, then happily debate for hours: The Prestige is Nolan’s only great film, and his Batman films are some baffling exercise in global gaslighting because they are… really awful. Solemnity is not the same as truthfulness; nihilism is not the same as realism; grey is not the same as sophisticated. In fact, don’t get me started on one current Oscar-bait hit, a film which mistakes ‘GCSE-Drama-rehearsal-shouting-over-one-another-plus-a-lot-of-gut-screaming’ for powerful realism. If you can’t be bothered to show even the slightest hint of umbilical cord or placenta in any of the three births you feature, you are no more an emotionally realistic film director than the makers of the Coca-Cola Christmas campaigns.) But The Odyssey’s trailer doesn’t bode well.
This YouTube critic says that the Odyssey is the more colourful adventure story compared to the haunting monotony of the Iliad, but I still remember my A-Level Classics teacher’s surprise when our class of a dozen girls voted the Iliad their favourite of the two. The poem is full of sun-baked pain and love — between Achilleus and Patroklos, between Hektor and Andromache — and human spite and pettiness and power-play and grief, of smug Odysseus and swaggering oaf Agamemnon, of pragmatic and weary Priam and shocked, traumatised Chryseis and Briseis, traded like casino chips, of the terrible looming tragedy of war and the moments of humanity, a father lifting his child in the sun, a soldier weeping for his lost love, then driven into a terrible berserker fury. The Odyssey, on the other hand, was some fork-tongued anecdotalist taking ten years to get back to his family, some of which was bad luck on his part, sure, but a healthy chunk of the decade was him playing house with a beautiful woman and mentally practising the Bronze Age equivalent of ‘sorry, my phone battery was dead and the trains got cancelled’ to the wife at home being hungrily circled by a bunch of axe-wielding psychos who were pretty open about being after her money and her absent husband’s throne. Forgive us if, even at the tender age of seventeen, we weren’t convinced by that shit. (Also, when Matt Damon Nolan-ishly growled in the trailer, ‘After years of war, no one could stand between my men and home,’ one housemate said in a cheerful tone, ‘Well! It’ll be interesting to see if anything does get in the way of his men getting home!’ and I was glad beyond words to live with people who have read the Odyssey and know how to use irony just to please ourselves. Be funny, indeed.)
Who knows what’s ahead of us, whether it will be journeys and monsters, loss and myth-making, or whether we will all be able to lift our children into the sun and pour out libations to celebrate peace and good times. Either way, I hope to see it. And I hope to be with people who’ll share good jokes with me.