Short fiction: The Bridesmaid

She knew she was supposed to be happy. She was not just a "bridesmaid", but "Maid of Honour". When she thought about it, which she did too often, it was a dumb term, something out of the Middle Ages. Or for the Middle Aged. She was thirty-seven and never married. What a horror, in these times of frantic brides knocking each other over to find the perfect foamy, huge-skirted gown.


She had come close, but only just.  By thirty-seven, if you were straight and even nominally attractive, you'd usually be engaged at least once, maybe twice. And yeah. It had been her turn, sort of. She'd had a different circle of friends then. But not really: it was the same circle, before they all got married. They were "different", all right, but in another way.


But it lasted six months, then he moved away for a promotion, promising to stay in touch. The promotion won out.

Then there were the babies. "If you want one," a "friend" said to her the other day, "you'd better get cracking." She was cracking, all right, but not in the way her friend meant.


What was this, anyway - the Wedding Bell Blues? Whatever happened to feminism and equality and the banishing of suffocating old medieval traditions like the virginal white gown and Daddy "giving you away" (which had connotations she didn't even want to think about)? Marriage was on the way out, was what they said, to be replaced by serial monogamy or open relationships where partners came and went, stopping at "home" only to refuel.


But it didn't go that way. Hardly.

Over and over again, she handed over the prize. Over and over again, she applauded, wept, tried to catch the bouquet (hating herself for even trying to do something so inane) , and generally put her heart out on the railroad tracks to be demolished once again.


Her cherished friends were all on the other side of some sort of barrier, especially the ones who had babies. They were exalted in some way. They spoke another language that excluded her, and she knew it. She remembered introducing some of her friends to their future husbands, and winced. She had actually been the agent for their happiness, giving her own away in great armfuls like so many wilted roses.

New Age thinking would say that she made this situation happen, that she recreated childhood hurts and rejections, and that all she had to do was decide to be different. Then a dozen good-looking, single, employed, non-addicted guys would come stampeding into her life. And it would be different. SHE would wear the golden crown; THEY would applaud and weep.



Except that it would be different for them too, her friends.  They were already married, had babies. Their lives were "solved". Never mind how many of these tenuous unions would fall apart in the coming years (and she knew how many of them probably would).


She was alone. She'd helped them along, given them a boost, supported them, gone to the goddamn bridal showers and played the stupid games, gone to stagettes with greasy muscle-bound gay men prancing around in their underwear. But she couldn't say no, because to be Maid of Honour was an honour. It would be like handing back an award, wouldn't it?

She looked in the mirror, took a big fat red lipstick, drew a red x over her face. What was it Liz Taylor wrote on the mirror with lipstick in that movie, Butterfield 8?  Ah yes: NO SALE.


You see, that's the thing. I'll never get to hand that award back because I'm not even in the running, am I? And if I've helped those nominees, given them a leg-up by lavishly praising their novels in my reviews, helped them line up in the gateway for the top literary prize in this country, I'm not supposed to be bitter or angry, am I? Am I?

Because it wasn't really a bridesmaid thing. Not really. And I'm 57, not 37. I guess I'm just living in my imagination again. What a thing for a writer to do. Unthinkable.


I've been reviewing books for a million years, it seems. Not that I don't enjoy it or find it engaging work. I know what it is to BE reviewed, too. I had almost unanimous positive reviews for my two novels, but unfortunately nothing happened. They were sent back to the publisher almost immediately, and now my account with them is in the red.

No one told me it would be like this, that I would owe my publishers for my glowingly-received, non-selling book. It sounds like the most pathetic thing in the world.


It was an honour (were we speaking of honour?) to review those two books, those two contenders for the Prize, and I wouldn't take back anything I wrote, because it wasn't "praise".  I was just saying what I thought.


And  it's not that I don't want them to be in the running. It's just that I want to be in the running too, before I get too old to stand up. And for some reason, that embarrasses everyone. I'm not supposed to mention it or even think of it, or everyone looks away as if I have done something unspeakably humiliating on the carpet.  I've violated one of those thousand-and-one invisible rules I never caught on to.  I guess it makes me look ungracious.

But I do wonder, because I am human and can't shut up the way I know I am supposed to, when in God's name it gets to be my turn.

Do husbands fall from the sky?

The answer to that, my friends, is: sometimes.

I can't say I never complain about my partner - in fact, it can be a sort of competitive sport among women. Natter, natter, natter. Meanwhile, the ones who have really grave concerns - such as, he's hitting her, or hitting on other women - tend to remain silent.

It's a funny thing. Complain, complain, complain - he doesn't understand me, he leaves his socks on the floor, he watches sports with a glazed look on his face, etc. etc.

It dismays me that when women get together, so much of their talk is negative. In fact, they often seem to support each other in their negativity rather than try to build up each other's strengths.  By negativity I mean a sort of powerless moaning, which on some level is meant to trigger a certain response, "Oh, yeah, I know what you mean."

Empathy for suffering. Good in small doses, or maybe when you need to offer serious comfort. But sometimes I want to remind these people - hey, did this guy fall from the sky? Do you remember any part of your wedding vows? Forsaking all others, in sickness and in health, etc. etc. Maybe I'm wrong, for God knows I've been wrong before, but that sounds to me for all the world as if you are choosing that person to be your mate, not just for 72 days but forever, or at least as far as mortality will allow.

You picked him, dear, didn't you? Out of all the men in all the gin joints in all the world, you selected this guy to be your mate - you singled him out, and then you were no longer single.

He didn't fall from the sky.

Falling from the sky doesn't just apply to life partners. Jobs are especially prone to the syndrome. OK, I know the economy is lousy and a person can't always just dump a job that hasn't worked out. But in too many cases, there is a sense that the person was relegated to this job without any personal control at all, like being sent to Siberia. And thus the endless complaining.

It's a case of playing the victim. "They" are the culprits, the big bosses, the ones making you suffer. You didn't have anything to do with it at all, did you? And that means you can't do anything about it. Ever.

And in many cases, since this is a relatively free society, out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, you applied for and were hired for this job because you wanted it, which means you chose it. Which means you didn't choose all the rest of them. It was this one. This one. Your cherished choice, the one you whine about day and night, non-stop.

Jobs don't fall from the sky.

I guess while I'm in this mode (never critical, of course), I'll get a few more things off my chest: truisms that drive me crazy, which most people never really stop to look at closely or analyze. They just repeat them like parrots, trusting that it's the "right thing", not just for them but for everyone to live by. And if you don't, it means you're some sort of spiritual spoil-sport.

People love to say that "x" was "meant to be". I don't know what that means. It always applies to a stroke of good fortune, never bad. If a person's whole world collapses, if he or she loses a mate or a job or a home, they never (EVER) say, 'It was meant to be." No, it only applies to those rare times when good fortune rains down from the sky like so many fluttering dollar bills.

Meant to be. Of course! This is somehow attached to "things are exactly the way they are supposed to be," which if applied to the Third Reich would mean we'd all be speaking German (or, more likely, dead). Acceptance is not just preached in recovery circles, it's rammed down people's throats. I once tried to write about this in my "other blog" and was torn to pieces by all those "accepting" 12-step people, who said I belonged in a mental hospital for daring to express an alternate view.

I guess there are no alternate views.

I have some problems with acceptance, yes I do. Women who are being battered by their partners often do things like put makeup over a black eye or come up with stories about falling down the stairs or walking into a wall. Is this a form of acceptance? I don't know. Is she trying desperately to accept a situation which I refuse to believe is "exactly the way it is supposed to be"? I wish someone would explain this to me, because it makes no sense. It makes about as much sense to me as "turn the other cheek" (so you can hit me again).

There are others, less dire but still annoying. I'm not saying I never do them, just that I wish I could stop because they don't make sense to me either.

If it's never happened before, then it will never happen in the future. It's a strange form of magical protection, like crossing your fingers or wishing on a star.

"If I speed/drink/close my eyes while I'm driving, I'll never have an accident because I've never had one before."

"I smoked all my life and never got sick so I won't ever get sick and besides, my great-great-great-grandfather smoked 16 packs a day and lived to be 206".

This is linked to "if I did it before, I can do it again," which is a nice myth that is sometimes even true. "If I recovered from cancer," "if I lost weight," "if I was financially stable" or "sober" or  "married" or "happy" before, then I will automatically be that way again.

Nothing is automatic. Nothing is even known. We invent these myths to make ourselves less anxious about the often-violent twists and turns life can take. The people who cling to these axioms have never experienced the gut-sucking sensation of having the bottom drop out of their lives. Or maybe it has happened to them once too often.

OK, one more while I'm here, and it may stem from the acceptance myth. "Critical" is bad. You shouldn't be critical, ever. It means you're being judgemental, which is always wrong.

I beg to differ. Critical means using your powers of discernment to figure out if a situation is right or wrong for you (i. e. getting married: or did he really fall from the sky?). It means a careful assessment of both sides, pro and con. It means being rigorously honest with yourself (which you're also supposed to do in recovery! So how does that jibe with all that propaganda about acceptance?). It's using your God-given human gift of evaluation. Tell me what is wrong with that.

As I bumble and rumble along the often-rocky path of my life, I am beginning to develop a radically new philosophy which more closely fits my current world view.

Anything can happen to anyone at any time.

Do you want to know where I got this philosophy? You'll never guess.

Superman.

I am sure Christopher Reeve used to be one of the special protection gang, until he took a disastrous tumble from a horse and was rendered completely immobile from the neck down.

After years of acclaim largely built on his physical prowess, it was all blown to hell in an instant, along with his previous philosophy (for there was no way in the world his accident and paralysis was "meant to be"!). He was in the trenches, and he stayed that way until he died. He didn't walk again, and for all his public bravery he probably knew he wouldn't.

It was on a talk show, perhaps Oprah, that I heard him make the statement I am increasingly adopting as my personal code, creed, or whatever you want to call it: anything can happen to anyone at any time. 

Yes.

We don't have special, magical protection simply because we wish for it or believe in it. God does not play favorites. Things happen, they can happen to anyone. We do have some control, yes (our powers of judgement and discernment, unless the propaganda of acceptance washes them away). We choose certain things, and we can sometimes (but not always) unchoose them, walk away. Reeve didn't choose that accident, even if it was the result of doing something he loved. Though he became an example to the world, demonstrating raw courage in the face of unimagineable adversity, I am sure he would have had his old body back, any day, any way.

So much for that old saw, "there are no accidents". Sure there are. Ask the cops on duty in a snowstorm, the ER nurse, the pastor trying to console the parents of a child killed in a car crash. There are no accidents! How consoling is that? To me it sounds like the most  monstrous cruelty, and has a smugness about it, a flavour of "well, it's all in God's plan" that I would like to shove up the nose of the next person who says it.

So how much did Christopher Reeve accept, and how much did he actively resist?  I am sure it was a mixture. Whatever dire limitations he faced, he kept on with the struggle. It was in his nature.  In a metaphoric sense, he really did fall from the sky, but made of his disaster a daring, even death-defying example of life stripped bare and lived raw. A life set free from the suffocating comfort of illusion.  

(I just have to add a p.s. I'm not sure where that J. K. Rowling quote about acceptance came from, but I'd sure like to accept some of what SHE has.)

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Gif of the week/century: FACE PLANT!

Too English

Just as my mother used to claim that you can be "too Irish", it's also possible to be too English.


If the English were really too English, I mean too TOO English, there wouldn't be any more English and the problem would be solved.


In case you think I'm a racist or at least a cultural philistine (whatever that is), be assured I'm both English and Irish, and the two bloods have been clashing in my veins since my birth (if not before). I carry around with me a tiny IRA of the mind.

But never mind all that, I've been trying once again to get my mind around E. M. Forster, a writer I've attempted a few other times (always running away screaming). He's an odd one, always taking twists and turns that seldom make sense. I decided to start with "the gay one", Maurice, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young Englishman (what else?) of wealth and privilege, trying to resist his overwhelming attraction to another Englishman (of same).


Forster is all about class distinction and is often dead-accurate about the hideous emotional damage it can do, repressing the soul unto suicide, but he also plays games with it. When poor closeted Maurice finally has a consummated sexual relationship with another man, it's with a servant, a gamekeeper named Scudder. As if he has to roll in the mud to gratify his senses in such an unthinkable way.

The book was made into a pretty good Merchant-Ivory film in the early '80s, with Hugh Grant playing Maurice's celibate bro-mance (and dishily, I must say). It was to be the first of many. Most people think of A Room with a View when they think of Forster, and that movie with all the singing and Maggie Smith and Helena Bonham-Carter with the teeny corset and her hair all poofy, and, of course. . .that kiss.


The passionate kiss in the field of barley by a virtual stranger, the free-spirited and somewhate declasse George Emerson, is much played up in the movie, but in the book it's pretty tame. Lucy Honeychurch (and what delicious oxymoron in that name!) is a sweet young thing on her first trip to Europe, and while gallivanting in the fields of Tuscany she has her first taste of eroticism. Well, almost; quite. In the book it's a field of violets, and George "stepped quickly forward and kissed her". On the cheek, we later learn. But even this mild little display threatens to ruin Lucy's virginal reputation.

So OK, we have all that class/sex stuff that the author obsessed about. But this isn't what I wanted to write about, at all. As I mush through the forests with Forster, occasionally coming up for great gasps of air, I encounter things so odd, so droll, so English that it beggars description.


Like this sentence. "Playing bumble-puppy with Minnie Beebe, niece to the rector, and aged thirteen - an ancient and most honourable game, which consists in striking tennis-balls high into the air, so that they fall over the net and immoderately bounce; some hit Mrs. Honeychurch; others are lost."


Not a sentence, really - can't follow the syntax, but what's this bumble-puppy? Who ever heard of such a thing? I do like the sound of it though. It evokes images of very young puppies bumbling around, their eyes not yet open and barely able to properly walk.

I think of mud puppy - maybe the assonance, or whatever it is. That 'uh, uh' thing. As a girl, I wanted a mud puppy; I wanted a salamander; I wanted a newt; I wanted a toad. I wanted anything slimy or crawling. I put tadpoles in jars and watched the transfiguration. I took snakes into the house, into my bedroom. I never found a mud puppy, or a salamander for that matter, but it wasn't for lack of trying. I read about them in books. I never knew they grew to this size however. Pretty disgusting.

Bumble-puppy. . . almost sounds like a dessert, doesn't it, a cobbler or a Brown Betty? My Dad, English (but not that kind of English - way down the ladder) used to talk about a pudding called "plum dupp". Turns out it was a mispronunciation of plum duff, though I must say I've never had it.


Should I invent a dessert called bumble-puppy? Could it have bumbleberries in it? Come to think of it, there's no such thing as a bumbleberry. It just means a whole lot of berries mixed together, doesn't it? And what about a hush-puppy? Can you eat them too, or only wear them?


It all gets so confusing.

Trying to find images for bumble-puppy yielded pictures of puppies in bumblebee suits. This reflects the literal way we North Americans interpret things. To the British, at least to Forster's surreal exalted British, it's a made-up game with, it sounds to me, a made-up name.


Lucy sums it all up: "Oh, it has been such a nuisance - first he, then they - no one knowing what they wanted, and every one so tiresome."


Frightfully.

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The Iceman Cometh: equine salvation

OK, so. . . I did find more info on that disastrous "horse crash" I posted yesterday, in which a dozen horses (later identified as Icelandic and only the size of ponies: their riders' feet nearly touch the ground) fell through the ice in a sickening row like so many toppled dominoes. It's shocking to watch, and at first it seems completely hopeless: how to drag a dozen terrified horses out of icy-cold water before they succumb to hypothermia? The rubbery ice immediately begins to sink, which makes matters worse.

But notice: the horses have their feet on the ground, thank God, so they at least don't have to tread water.

To back up a bit: these horses were displaying a gait called tolt: a sort of running walk which is supposed to be unique in the world, but to my eye looks similar to the gaited saddle horses from the States such as the Tennessee Walking Horse. Even at these flying speeds, they always have a hoof (or two? Can't see) on the ground. The riders sit completely level, but this isn't unique either: take a look at a good Western rider (even in an old John Wayne movie: his horsemanship was top-notch) and you'll see the same thing.  

I found more instances on YouTube of many horses parading in a row (and most of these videos had Icelandic text so I couldn't decipher them), so this must be their traditional method of displaying them. They're not racing, as some sources have said. They have special shoes with something like cleats on them to gain traction on the ice, but it seems to me these people were too trusting about the relative thickness of that ice and the possibility of cracks. Placing tons and tons of weight on ice in a straight line is asking for disaster.

I found a video too poor-quality to post from a show (a guilty pleasure of mine) called Untamed and Uncut which draws much scorn from my husband (and he watches some pretty hokey stuff of his own, and I never say anything). It features close encounters with every kind of animal, disasters and near-disasters with wildlife and tame-life alike. The announcer goes on and on about certain catastrophe and gruesome death in a histrionic way, though everything is always resolved by the end.

This video gave me more information: when the crash first occurred, there was much thrashing around and panic. Actually, the horses were calmer than the people. Each rider tried to pull his/her horse out of the water. It was chaos. Then a man they called The Iceman (don't have his name, and don't have all those little symbols to spell it anyway) arrived on the scene and quickly organized the disaster.

All the riders formed a co-ordinated team to pull out one horse at a time, determined by a sort of triage (which horse was shorter, which horse was in the most distress?). Then the Iceman had a brilliant idea that no one else ever would have thought of.

Obviously the horses were unable to gain a foothold on soft, sinking ice. There was much mad scrambling and wasting of energy. Then he decided to make himself the foothold. He got down on one knee under the water, lifted the horse's forehoof and placed it on his knee. Instinctively the horse thought, foothold, and pushed up and out and freed itself.

Impossible, you say?  Remember, these horses were almost completely submerged in water, so they would be much more buoyant than usual. They weighed considerably less than a full-sized horse, perhaps by 200 pounds. They had special shoes on, and while they probably shredded the guy's knee, it would help them overcome the inevitable slipperiness.

This was an example of fast and innovative thinking which saved equine lives. It's horrible to think of having to destroy a horse slowly succumbing to hypothermia because there's just no way to get him out.

I've seen many videos of  the "tolt" gait in slightly different forms, and the horse just flies, but it's not unique, and whatever the custom in Iceland, it should never be performed on ice. Never mind that "nothing like this has ever happened before" (and that's another one of those idiotic "truisms" I am going to attack in a future post: the "fact" that if it never happened before, it will never happen in the future.)

As I have said so often before, anything can happen to anyone at any time. And it can even happen to shaggy little horses on the ice.

(Spot the non-Icelandic horse! Hint: he once got stuck  in the mud, and could run very fast to the barn.)

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http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225

Disaster in Iceland

I first saw this as a gif (just the horrible falling-in part) and was very upset by it. Managed to track it down pretty easily by googling "horses fall through ice": it happened in Iceland, where some bright bug decided it would be cool to parade eleven stocky Icelandic horses over ice that was who-knows-how-thick (or thin). Think of the weight on the ice of those thousands of pounds of horses, proceeding not one by one (which might have made some kind of sense), but in one impressive high-stepping row. One crack is all it would take.

Idiots! The horses look done for, but as the video unfolds the news isn't quite as bad as it seems. Still, without quick action, horses and riders would all have perished of hypothermia. Think of the terror of those horses floundering around in ice water, unable to gain purchase on a too-thin sheet of sinking ice. Those people should never have access to a horse again.

(The eeriest part is the slow-motion replay, in which you hear slowed-down screams of horror and yells for help.)



http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Singing in the dead of night

This started out as something else. Something about Twitter, Tweets, twights, twats (sorry, it's just too tempting) and other things I can't get used to. Not so much the three-or-four-syllable "communications" that people fling at each other, using splng tht lvs a bt t b dsrd. It's the whole concept of alarmingly shorter and shorter attention spans resulting in messages that have been reduced to a nanosecond-long chirp.

Worse than that: like the frog in the pot, the water temperature gradually increasing until the frog is quite contentedly cooked, nobody seems to notice or particularly care what we have lost.


Anyway, tweets. Why tweets? Somebody (now probably massively wealthy) thought up this idiotic avian name. Couldn't be more idiotic, unless it was Cow Pat or something. Airbrained. Lightweight. Imagine Keats ("My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness. . .") twittering, tweeting Ode to a Nightingale. Shakespeare ("Love tweets not with the eyes, but with the mind/ And therefore is winged Twitter painted blind") chirping like the bloody chirper he actually was ("chirper" being a nasty name for a blithering Englishman).

"You'll have to learn how to do it," my husband says to me, "because you won't be able to survive if you don't." That's worse than sex. I'll have to do it, as if it's some dire and unpleasant bodily function you nevertheless can't avoid. But what alarms me is what fun everyone else is having, doing something I just bleepin'ly dread.


So anyways. Somebody had the bright idea that we should all become birds, and just twitter and twatter, nitter and natter at each other all the day long. Birds chitter and chatter, but they also kill. They evolved from dinosaurs, more directly than any other living species. In fact, they are now known to be the only direct descendents. Dinos ran around with feathers on, you see, long before they learned how to fly. I can't imagine how creepy that must have been.

Given the shrill vocalizations of most birds, including Jasper my addle-headed lovebird who must think he's a full-sized Amazon parrot, those dino-birds must have been deafening. They probably had the same cold round beady black eyes my pet bird has, those scaly feet (some remnant of lizard scales, no doubt). My bird feels a strong attachment to me, but that's because he's convinced I'm either his mother or his mate. Without the steady flow of seed mix, he'd completely ignore me.

So anyways. What am I getting at here? Nothing much. Why not Bark-bark or Neigh-neigh or Worm-bluggh (or whatever worms do to communicate)? No, it had to be Twitter.


I'd call that Twittiotic.

Tweet, tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet

What? HWAET!

Oh Lor', here comes anodder one-o-dem lessons she loyks to gie' us which is mos'ly opinion. If you've been following this long choo-choo train of thought which started with Dennis Potter's landmark TV series The Singing Detective, I've been exploring English dialects, and now find myself at the mother lode: Beowulf, which scholars tell us (and they're lying) is the first great poetic work of the English language.

English language, you say? Just look at the cauldron of oatmeal you see below (way, way below: I somehow had a lot to say today). It's so garbled and Germanic, I only included a tiny snippet. The first "word", hwaet, which really should be followed by an exclamation mark (if such things existed then), was once demonstrated to me by an English professor. He walked into the classroom, stood at the front of the babble, and said, in a resonant English-teacher voice and with the greatest of authority:

"HWAET!"
The room stopped dead.

He pronounced it more like waat. Like two boards, long pieces of wood slapping together. It worked. This little syllable is remarkable, because it can mean so many different things:

"Come and listen to my story 'bout a man named (Beowulf)".

"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale. . . "

"Ahhhhhhh, shaa-daaaaaaaaap!"

It means pay attention, listen. It means, as an informal speaker might say, "So." Or "Anyway." "Right." "As I was saying. . . " "Listen up." "OK then. . ." (except much more dramatic: how many of these Old English bro's really understood literature?).

I won't even try to get into Beowulf, it's too long and impenetrable even translated into "normal" English. I took a Chaucer course years ago and it was fascinating, mainly because the prof was fluent in Middle English and recited Canterbury Tales in a gusty, careening voice that somehow made it understandable. For all that, I guiltily bought a line-by-line translation, Middle English on left, "normal" on right, in order to pass the course.

As you can tell, I'm more fascinated than proficient in the study of language. Sometimes just the thought of it, the very thought of it, gives me the shivers. I've also made a semi-formal study of anthropology at university level, and one of the subjects that comes up repeatedly is the development of language. More so than tool-making or even planting crops, it marks the threshhold we crossed into becoming fully human.

Here's what I larr'nd. There were many hominid strains (humanoid, in anthro jargon), many of which died out under plague or warfare. There were so few people (or near-people) in the band, it wouldn't take much. Evolutionary dead ends. But how many of them developed language, and what did it sound like?

Why does every human culture invent language, and how does that come about?

What was the first word? The first sentence? What did early hominid/humanoids feel compelled to name? Did they name themselves first?

Early anthropology texts assumed language developed to aid men in communication during the hunt. No mention was ever made of the inconsequential task of bearing and raising children, not to mention gathering food for meat shortages (hunter-gatherers, remember?). And the meat shortages could go on for months, even longer. Would humanity even be here without all those nuts and berries?

And you know what it's like when a bunch of women get together, my God! The jabbering never stops.

Maybe language developed to break up fights between the men. Come on, you guys! Can't we all just get along? And Leonard, get away from Penny once and for all.

Somehow or other, and this is the part that eeries me out, some upright-standing apes, not much more evolved than gorillas or chimps except for their opposable thumbs, began to grunt and yell in a meaningful way. Maybe it started out with a call, a "hey! Look over there, Hairy-butt, an antelope." (Or was it hwaet?).

Maybe it was "no, I don't have stretch marks, but my boobs are getting huge," or "Get off me, Hairy, I have my period."

Or, "Hey, Gronkette, let's go out and save humanity by gathering a few nuts."

So slowly, or maybe not so slowly because I believe evolution happened in bursts (a theory known as "punctuated equilibrium"), language evolved, and it was probably different in each little pocket of humanity that was bumping along the rocky road of evolution. I don't believe anyone was thinking in terms of tablets or apps or whatever-the-fuck they are (I'm hopelessly behind here), just surviving day by day, trying to get their basic needs met.

It was a long, long way from grunts and gossip to hwaet, and it's been a longer way, it seems, to the murdered grammar and twisted syntax I've sometimes analyzed on this blog. The language is being shredded, devalued, and slowly but surely, school kids are less and less aware of the cultural deeps they come from. Who will teach them references to the Bible (too archaic) or Chaucer (too weird), or even J. Alfred Prufrock or Howl? It's all going away. In its place will be the lols, WTFs, tweets and twats, and other mindless verbal monstrosities that drove me away from Facebook, probably forever.

Oh OK then, I'll shut up, and here is a snippet from this Beowulf, if for no other reason than to show you how many different ways a few lines of literature can be interpreted. NOW do you see where human misunderstandings come from?

Beowulf, the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem by an unknown author, was composed some time between the 8th and the 11th centuries. The text exists in only one manuscript which dates from about the year 1000. The poem was largely unknown until the first printed versions of the poem were published at the end of the eighteenth century. Soon, short English translations of various parts of the poem began to appear, and within a few decades, in 1833, the first full-length English translation was published.

Since Beowulf is written in Old English, the earliest known form of the English language, one might assume that it would be easy to translate, at least easier than works printed in languages more substantially different from modern English. Yet looking at the many translations of Beowulf that are available in bookstores and libraries, it's immediately apparent that they have important differences in language, form, and style. This immediately raises the questions: Why are these translations so different? And how can I decide which, if any, is the "best" to read?

To begin answering these questions, let's look at the opening lines of the poem. The boxes below contain the original Old English version and my own literal (word-for-word) translation.

ORIGINAL Hwæt. We Gardena in gear-dagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

LITERAL What. We of the Spear-Danes in old days of the people-kings, power heard, how the princes brave deeds did.

Next, in the following boxes, look at how four modern translators have rendered these lines.

R. M. LIUZZA Listen! We have heard of the glory in bygone days of the folk-kings of the spear-Danes, how those noble lords did lofty deeds.	BURTON RAFFEL Hear me! We've heard of Danish heroes, Ancient kings and the glory they cut For themselves, swinging mighty swords!
SEAMUS HEANEY So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of these princes' heroic campaigns.	MICHAEL ALEXANDER Attend! We have heard of the thriving of the throne of Denmark, how the folk-kings flourished in former days, how those royal athelings earned that glory.

You'll note that the differences begin with the translated versions of the opening word of the poem, Hwaet. This word, literally translated into modern English, means What, but its Old English meaning is somewhat different. In Old English, when stories were told orally by a storyteller, the word Hwaet was used to get the audience's attention at the beginning of the story in the way that a phrase like Listen to this! might be used today. Translators know that just using the word What wouldn't make much sense to modern readers, so the four translators above have chosen words which they hope will convey a similar meaning.

http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225