Salvete, friends!
A shorter picture-filled dispatch today, to complement last week’s letter.
We’re collectively lamenting how the world has gone on since the pandemic started. We froze, or we’re still frozen, and it seems few of us got the breather—good long breathers—we should have, if society and the workplace were more caring and had its head on straight. This has come up in force in my own life as I face yet another online semester in my PhD program in the fall and I got close to pushing hard reset myself. Not because I need it to keep my status in the program or because my research is stalled, but because I wanted to breathe so badly. I see this in the students I and my friends work with too: it’s beyond burnout, it’s implosion, or explosion, or both, depending on the kid.
Lately I’m finding other ways I can breathe and I delight in the moments when I see my kids stumble on their own ways. I’ve been scrolling through outdoor photos more, less for a trip down memory lane as pulled in by how the world is still out there, waiting for when we’re ready.
My favorite tutee right now (yes, we all have favorites) only, and consistently, wanders from the plan we make together when it’s going to be beautiful out and he wants to be outside observing his snakes, frogs and lizards. Sadly I don’t get to go find herps with him, but I imagine he does so with some measure of awe, wonder, openness. He is reticent to share that he went outside instead of doing his work; I am thrilled.
For myself, through old photos and the fresh ones I take on my walk, I reconnect to my once-ingrained sense that the world out there is always there for me to step into. It’s not expecting me and it won’t be happy (or not) when I show up—it will outlive me and it doesn’t care.
I find that glorious. I don’t have Auden’s sense that the stars “don’t give a damn” and I don’t want that “the more loving one be me.” I have no need to project a gap onto the world that yearns to be filled with any sort of desire. The inanimate world’s total indifference gives my love space to grow and breathe, lets my love take all the space it needs without crowding out something wonder-worthy.
This is the sense in which I feel the world opening up again: mostly myself to it, since that disinterested, lovely one never closed. The harder work is and will be growing to meet the world again, opening out my dulled feeling world that is turned too far into itself right now. It’s good work.
Articles from me this week: a translation and a(nother) meditation too
I believe translation is a deeply creative act of interpretation that gives translator and audience far closer access and understanding of the text than most analytical work. I’m starting to share my translations for that reason—to legitimate the work and show that it’s part and parcel of my PhD life, not a distraction. Here’s my translation and brief discussion of the preface to natural philosopher Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon, often translated as The New Science.
What I hope readers come away with: a deeper sense of how steeped in art and humanities science was at the time, and a conviction that things should become that entwined again. Note also: Bacon is in conversation with the ancients and values their contributions for what they are. He does not reject them wholesale or dismiss them as mere superstition as the breezy version of the history of science often asserts.
I’ve found this synthesis in my German studies, thankfully, as I talk about in this post (auf Deutsch) about how German is the language of my dance, the one that made dance possible for me after 28 years on the planet with severe body-shame and scared smallness. The big long words are there too, yes (though not in this post) and you can get as analytical and heady in German as in any other human language. But consider: my favorite German word is the two-syllable umarmen - to hug, literally something like “a putting around of the arms.”
Lassen wir uns die Welt umarmen—let’s go about hugging the world, enjoying that it doesn’t hug back.
The special nature of hugs is that you always get one just as you give one.
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