Arboriculturalism

I've been strangely productive lately so please enjoy this extra treet...(sorry I couldn't resist).

As an environment volunteer in Nicaragua, I’ve been thinking a lot about trees. Not just about the need to plant more of them in order to protect streams, rivers, and watersheds, prevent erosion, and help reduce dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in the air, but also about the incredible variety of trees and plant life and the culture of the people that live among them. Needless to say, the culture surrounding trees in Nicaragua is different than in the United States. Trees mean many things to people here: shade, medicine, food, firewood, furniture, fence posts, animal feed…the list goes on.

For the last few months I’ve been drawing these trees poco a poco, working on them in quiet moments of repose…and now I’m finally finished! Since they seem to embody a lot of the significance of trees in Nicaragua, I thought I’d put ‘em up on the ‘ol blog and let the public devour them.

This is a real tree that I began drawing at Selva Negra in Matagalpa during my group’s In-Service Training in March 2011. It’s growing on a tiny island in the middle of a lake and at that time did not sport any leaves or flowers or fruit—but that didn’t stop it from being host to a myriad of other plant life. A great majority of trees in Nicaragua don’t just stand alone, but form the substrate for other organisms such as lichens, epiphytes, and fern species. These trees are truly ecosystems in and of themselves.

This tree was inspired by a grove that the bus passes on its long trek to Santa Lucia from the highway. The roots are exposed, yet they crush and crumble the rock in which they grow, and the branches are stretched out, pushed and pulled by the force of the prevailing wind. In the dry season when I started this drawing, most of the trees truly looked dead, but this is the great illusion of many plants in the summertime. It’s pretty amazing how trees can and will grow anywhere and with any conditions, even without water for 6 months and straight through a boulder.

This tree was inspired by the innumerable fence posts that line the roads of Santa Lucia. I’d say that the general fecundity of life in Nicaragua can be illustrated no better than with the image of the fence post tree. In order to make a fence post like this, all you need to do is find a branch from an existing tree, chop it off with your machete, and plant it about 6 inches in the ground. With some rain and sun a few weeks later it’ll start to sprout little branches and shoot out roots, and after a couple months it’ll be covered in leaves. Then you can begin chopping off the branches that grow off the top for more fence posts or even for firewood, and if you need a shady place for your cows to rest, just let the branches grow out!

I hope these images speak a little more deeply than would be possible using only words. The captions I put with them aren’t really meant to explain the drawings, but to just give them a little bit of context. If you have any questions or comments about trees or Nicaragua or drawings—or trees in Nicaragua—or drawings of trees—or drawings of trees in Nicaragua—please leave them for me, I’ll do my best to answer them!

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 2)

Since I am still actively learning the Spanish language, there are a few different levels of proficiency with which I can communicate, completely depending on the context and the content of the conversation, that is, depending on the words and phrases I’m required to use in a given situation.

At a fundamental level, the most effective level of communication, the Spanish words materialize with more or less the same fecundity as they would in English. For example, I can greet someone, introduce myself, comment on the weather, say where I’m going, and say goodbye with a fairly high level of competency and with a fairly low level of thinking about translations. In fact, at this level, the Spanish words and my thoughts seem to fuse together like they do in English. Unfortunately, not all of my Spanish speaking experience can take place at this fundamental level.

The next level is a level of searching, that is, trying to think of words and expressions that I know in English and making guesses about how to phrase or pronounce them in Spanish. It’s about using a network of associations to communicate and really represents the essence of learning. I think of my English knowledge as a kind of springboard that I use to launch myself into the realm of Spanish. Maybe I pull off a perfect dive and maybe I belly flop painfully. Sometimes it feels kind of like grasping about in the dark for gems.

For this reason, the searching level can be both very satisfying and utterly disheartening. It just depends on the rate of success. For example, I was once trying to describe a fork in the road, so I chanced the phrase “un tenedor en el camino” and I got some very strange looks. But other times I’ll guess right and get super pumped. The expression “to kill two birds with one stone” seems to translate directly (matar dos pájaros con una sola piedra). Those are the times I love learning Spanish.

But it’s just as important to understand what others say as it is to be able to articulate your thoughts. The problem can be illustrated thusly: I’ll be chugging along happily thinking I’m the best Spanish speaker in the world, talking about things I’ve talked about before and therefore know how to talk about…and then the topic changes and someone throws in a string of brand new words. My dreams of linguistic prowess are crushed, suddenly and without mercy, and I have to bashfully explain that I have no idea what’s going on. Sometimes I’m saved by the fact that the person with whom I’m conversing can dumb down what they’re saying and rephrase it using words that I know, but that doesn’t always happen. It’s made very clear at this level of communication that when learning a language, listening and speaking are really two sides of the same coin.

And I suppose there is a third level of communication proficiency after the fundamental and the searching, which can be characterized by absolute incomprehension, and which I will (accordingly) call the level of incomprehensibility. I don’t often find myself operating at this level of (in)communication in Spanish, gracias a Dios, but every once in a while, if I stop paying attention to a conversation, I will become utterly lost, be unable to contribute anything, and start looking for a way to leave.

~

So I find myself describing a few separate things here. There is thinking and there is speaking and then there are words. Thinking seems to be made up of internal verbal strands and speaking seems to be made up of external verbal strands. The building blocks of both of these kinds of strands then, are words (hence verbal strands). I suppose it might make sense to talk about words specifically as those elements of oral communication—that is, the constituent parts of speaking—but I want to talk about thoughts, those unspoken but nonetheless articulated elements of language, as being made of words as well.

I will unpack then, exactly what I mean when talking about “words.”

I want to appropriate words as being vehicles for articulating meaning. That is they can articulate meaning taciturnly as with unspoken thought, and lingually, out loud as with speech, and of course written down as well, but this is not an important distinction for my purposes here. To put it bluntly, thoughts are unspoken words and speech is spoken words. But there is something I’m leaving out in this relation between words, thoughts, and speech, and that is unarticulated meaning. What I want to find is the source of thoughts and speech, and this means thoughts without words, preverbal thinking, pure unformulated meaning. And I want to call this source, this unarticulated meaning, a feeling. My intuition tells me that a feeling precedes a thought. (don't worry I'm not even going to try to adress how intuition fits into this.........)

Stay tuned for the next installment as I dive into the main metaphor of the argument!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2 ***
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 1)

*Chrestomathy-a selection of passages from an author or authors, designed to help in learning a language.

I have been immersed in the Spanish-speaking world for over a year now and it still fascinates me to no end to think about what must be going on inside my head as I learn things. Have synaptic pathways been re-routed? Have my “normal” modes of thinking been qualitatively changed by the process of assimilating a new language?

My intuition tells me that they have, and I certainly want the answer to be yes since that would indicate progress toward my general goal of “learning Spanish,” but there’s a creeping doubt that comes to me every time I think hard on the topic of language. Have I really been learning Spanish, or have I just learned a bunch of Spanish words that I translate back and forth from English? Is thinking in Spanish a necessary condition for gaining fluency? Are there aspects of language that can only be accessed by native speakers? How much of fluency is cultural? Can a monolingual person ever truly become bilingual? This frantic line of questioning seems to spiral down to oblivion, evading satisfactory answers…

But here’s the million-córdoba question as far as I can tell, the one that really gets at the heart of the problem:

Can meaning be separated—that is, does meaning stand alone—from the language that expresses it?

It seems to me that learning a second language can help parse apart the nature of language itself and shed light on the relationship between feelings and thoughts and the words that express them. In this series of posts I’m going to try and clarify that hazy relationship (commenting on the ontological status of meaning along the way) by drawing from my own experience in learning Spanish as a second language.

~

When I speak English, my native tongue, it seems to me that during day-to-day conversation, during those commonplace exchanges about the latest gossip, what I’m going to eat, or what I did yesterday, there is no perceived premeditation in word choice—I don’t have think about the words before I say them. The fluidity and ease with which I can express my basic needs and wants, my nuanced ideas and subtle impressions, is a striking aspect of the effortless way I can exist in my environment when speaking my mother tongue. I have a thought, usually accompanied by some sort of mental image, and the words are simply there as if they were the thought itself. Indeed, the majority of the time I speak English, and not just in day-to-day communication but in more involved conversation as well, my thoughts, words, and what I say seem to be one in the same. It must be said however, that the deftness with which I can employ the English language only becomes noticeable in comparison to the embarrassing ineptitude with which I speak Spanish.

In sharp contrast to the fluid relationship between my thoughts and words when I speak English, speaking Spanish is a constant struggle. I think this struggle can reveal, however, something important about the ontological status of meaning—that is, where and how meaning exists.

This is the first installment of a continuing series called Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy. No one knows how many posts there will be in the end, but I'm working on a fairly long essay on this subject, and the post you've just read is the introduction. I'll try to post a new volume every week until I'm finished writing...hopefully this self-imposed deadline will give me the motivation I need to finish it! Don't forget to comment!

• Volume 1 ***
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement