resistance

I am having intermittent trouble remembering that I should be interacting with people in service situations in English. Maybe this is not too surprising.

It is, however, I sign that I miss the not always gentle resistance offered by life elsewhere, in other tongues. Some of them offer an ideal difficulty in human interaction, in the day-to-day of getting papers, phonecards, containers of fermented milk products, pastries. A robust grammar and some tricky consonants are like the right amont of gustiness on the walk to work, some five or six meters per second of cool salt air catching your coat and making you work to stride forward. You lean on the force of it and it gets in your hair and makes you feel the root of every strand tingling. Up at eight meters per second it may blow your mouth open and force you to laugh, but weirdly, when it comes out it is a genuine laugh that is then whipped away over Skerjafjörður past the bobbing eiders. One feels dramatic and impressive just for walking in that wind. It is a pleasurable struggle.

Losing that resistance can be troubling. At worst, the sudden ease of all linguistic transactions results in a sort of universal vertigo: one may fall in any direction. Up, for example. On a bad day, though one is confident in one's own ability to get meaning and expression to match up and also to grasp what others mean when they speak, none of it feels particularly meaningful.

In this context I am reminded of runes. The commonplace about the graphemic system of the runic alphabet is that the staves are so shaped as to let their forms stand out when incised on shaved stick of wood. That is, the letters are designed to be cut against the grain. Their legibility depends on it, even, if you care to push the point, their very meaning.

It's a fine theory. It has a data problem, namely that we don't have any runes carved on shaved sticks of wood from the very earliest period of use. We have some from much later. But it is nonetheless a fine theory with a lot going for it. It's making particular sense to me at the moment in this rather still air.