Bird Break

            Last week I was happily adding new bits to a piece I call "the never-ending novel" (first conceived around 1987, still far from finished).

            Doing so these days relies on a Yucatec hammock hanging in a patio enclosed on three sides. The fourth side gives on to a small, grassy yard, surrounded by a vine-covered stone wall and large trees and bromeliads. There's an aging black cat who shares the patio for his food and water. The cat is inclined to open one or both of the screen doors that lead into the house from the patio. He does not, of course, then close the screens again.

            The occasional bird, usually a kind of collared dove or  a grackle, shares the cat's food with the cat's tacit consent. The birds have determined me to be irrelevant. They calmly pass under the hammock to get to the cat food without sparing so much as a glance for me.

            Perfect for concentration, right? Except when... A sudden explosion of wing lift-off from the vicinity of the cat's dish ripped me out of a  monk's cell in the 15th century. I did not see the bird passing over me toward the trees, and glancing toward the screens leading into the dining area, I saw--with a sinking feeling--that they were open.

            My characters were left to fend for themselves. Cautiously, I peered into the house, just in time to see a collared dove zoom toward a large screened window; meeting resistance, it then swooped back through the living room and ascended to a small (and like the other, unopenable) square window, high above the floor, meant to give natural light to an otherwise dark space. And there it battled the glass until, worn out, it simply perched on the sill, looking out at the Caribbean sky.

Collared Dove rests on light

            The next two hours were spent trying to devise a means to help the bird  escape. The large window had to be covered, and all of the screen doors, opened (with crossed fingers that no other birds would join the dove in the interim), along with the heavy front door which was underneath the dove's chosen roosts . Plural, because it moved from the sill to a  ceiling light, between its repeated futile bouts of trying to escape through the same small window.

            Finally, with the help of a long metal pole and at the cost of  a (to me)  traumatic encounter that involved much beating of wings and fluttering and falling feathers, the bird dropped to the floor. Where it immediately saw the open front door. With great aplomb and admirable indifference, it calmly walked out into the afternoon.

            I hadn't really provided for a bird break on my writing schedule, but sometimes life just  goes its own way, doesn't it?

The Mean Streets of English

             

English ... is a thief language. We steal verbs and nouns from other languages.... It's terrible. There's this great saying about English lurking in alleyways, knocking out other languages and rifling their pockets for spare vocabulary. 

                                  from The Untold Tale (The Accidental Turn Series Book 1) by J.M. Frey

            Isn't that a delicious tidbit? The character who is speaking says she can't remember where she found that definition. Maybe Frey made it up? I went hunting for it, without success, but discovered something else: a Wikipedia entry for "thieves cant" that suggests all kinds of other things.

            Thieves' or rogues' cant, according to the discussion, was also known as "Peddler's French." English, the language that rifles through other languages to extend itself, was used by actual thieves for their own secret language, reshaping meanings to serve the purpose of the subculture.

            This idea would be more compelling if the same sort of thing weren't also known to exist in a South German and a Swiss equivalent, and elsewhere, I found a reference to a Russian version, too.

  Gran Canaria village street....

            Then, lo and behold, I found a web site titled "Thieves Guild" [http://www.thievesguild.cc/thieves-cant] which has a whole page dedicated to the English thieves' cant; you can even study it in simple form!  The site (which looks like a Dungeons and Dragons spin-off) says you can learn an advanced form, too, but you'll need a high level thieves' guild official to teach you.

            I love the concept of English as a thief language. (I've described it to English learners as a language that "borrows" but we don't give the bits and pieces back, do we? No. They've been appropriated, with or without permission.) It skulks in shadows, alert, ready to pounce... As to the "rules" of English, they're more like guidelines, with all their exceptions and options--as is proper somehow in a den of thievery, don't you think?

            It does beg the question, however: if language and culture go hand in hand, one shaping the other as they make their way through time, what might we make of the concept of English as a thief language in the context of the cultures of English speaking peoples?

           

What Story Do You Want to Be In?

            As stories go, there's a big one taking shape in the United States that every U.S. voter should be paying attention to. It's being woven out of many chapters and vignettes, by our presidential candidates. When the candidates speechify and approve their advertising, they're  each trying to create a compelling story that persuades us to vote for them.

            That's part of what political strategists mean when they talk about the "narrative" to be developed for the candidate. Basically, it's story-telling. The strategists want us to buy the story the candidate tells. But as voters, we need to do more: we need to think about the rest of the story, not just the part the candidate is telling us. We need to imagine the details; we need to consider the various ways the plot might develop. We need to ask: what will our country look like if this person is our next president?

            A political speech or advertisement is like a movie teaser. When we watch a trailer for a film, we know that we're getting bits that are meant to pique our curiosity so we'll go see the movie. We also know those bits are taken out of context. Often we imagine the different ways the piece of a scene we're shown might fit into the story.

 Hunger Games: a not unimaginable story

            A movie is entertainment.  If we guess wrong about the bits and pieces, it's irrelevant to our lives. But a presidential election has consequences. It's all very well, for example, for a candidate to thumb his or her nose at convention and "shoot from the hip." But what does that mean in the context of the real world? As an example, if we need to get cooperation from several fishing nations to secure the future of threatened Atlantic fish stocks, do ill-considered insults bring everyone to the table?

            What does it mean for governing if the President exaggerates a threat or departs from the facts so far as to completely misrepresent reality?  Frightened people are liable to accept, if not exactly agree to, suspension of fundamental rights in the interest of their safety. A candidate willing to frame the story he or she is telling in a way meant to scare folks is no less likely to do so once the presidency is attained. What does that mean for free discussion? For protest and assembly? For freedom from unreasonable search and seizure?

            History shows us some of the possible plot lines: scare stories led to the internment camps for Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor; in Germany in the 30s, Nazi propagandists made up specious claims about Jews and manipulated their gradual marginalization and final incarceration and murder, extending these tactics to  other "unacceptable" minorities; fabrication of non-existent threats from Iraq after 9/11 resulted in an invasion that began destabilization of the entire region....

            So as we watch candidates debate, as we watch campaign advertisements, we need to not only listen to the story each candidate is crafting. We need to also think about where that story might go after the balloons burst s and the votes are cast. We need to ask what the country looks like if that story is made real. We need to ask whether we want to be characters in that story. Because once it's real, it's our story, too.