The Literary Piano

[C]an a crocodile really weep? The experts say yes: they have tear glands just like most other animals. And zoologists have recorded alligators, close relatives of crocodiles, shedding tears while they’re eating. This parallel may be significant—rather than being an emotional response, the shedding of tears probably happens because of the way crocodiles and alligators eat: when eating their prey they will often huff and hiss as they blow out air, and their tear glands may empty at the same time. The idea of crocodile tears being false was used both in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and in Shakespeare’s Othello. They provide just two of the many allusions in literature that have cemented the idiom in the language.

Incidentally, the word ‘crocodile’ means, literally, ‘worm of the stones’. It is from Greek, and is a reference to the croc’s habit of basking in the sun on the shingly banks of a river.

I remember learning German—so beautiful, so strange—at school in Australia on the other side of the earth… . I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English—Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung. I liked the sweeping range of words from ‘heartfelt’ to ‘heartsick’. And I liked the order, the directness that I imagined in people. Then, in the 1980s, I came to live in West Berlin for a while and I wondered long and hard what went on behind that Wall.

[…] I think about the feeling I’ve developed for the former German Democratic Republic. It is a country which no longer exists, but here I am on a train hurtling through it—its tumbledown houses and bewildered people. This feeling needs a sticklebrick word: I can only describe it as horror-romance. It’s a dumb feeling, but I don’t want to shake it. The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name. East Germany has disappeared, but its remains are still at the site.

The first time I went [to Germany], in 1999, I couldn’t bring myself to say so much as Guten Morgen. The sounds felt false coming out of my mouth, so instead I spent my time speaking English apologetically. Not that the apologies were needed. In Paris, yes, but in Berlin people’s attitude is “Thank you for allowing me to practice my perfect English.” And I do mean perfect. “Are you from Minnesota?” I kept asking.

In the beginning I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like “Cut the cake and lie face down in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl.” I’m guessing this comes from having watched too many Second World War movies. Then I remembered the umpteen Fassbinder films I’d sat through in the eighties, and German began to sound conflicted instead of heartless. I went back twice in 2000, and over time the sound of the language grew on me. It’s like English, but sideways.

[…] For the latest trip, I wanted to do better, and so I downloaded all thirty lessons of Pimsleur German I, which again start off with “Excuse me, do you understand English?” As with the Japanese and Italian versions, the program taught me to count and to tell time. Again I learned “The girl is already big” and “How are you?” (“Wie geht es Ihnen?”)

In Japanese and Italian, the response to the latter question is “I’m fine, and you?” In German it’s answered with a sigh, and a slight pause, following by “Not so good.”

[…] There’s no discord in Pimsleur’s Japan, but its Germany is a moody and often savage place. In one of the exercises, you’re encouraged to argue with a bellhop who tries to cheat you out of your change and who ends up sneering, “You don’t understand German.”

“Oh, but I do,” you learn to say. “I do understand German.”

From books, films and even advertising—and from other children and adults often unconsciously acting out these miscellaneous stories in a tangled web of real-life literary simulation—we discover that a girl is pink-sugar and lipstick nice and that a Mercedes Benz gives businessmen a golden aura. We learn that kings and queens are born with royal blood and that, once a year, a genial man in a red-and-white suit flies in from the sparkling North Pole attracted by radiant trees. … That is, we come to grasp ourselves and our world through language and the imagination it affords, rather than through any direct or unmediated experience of reality.

However, as the example of Santa suggests, language is in no way beholden to the conditions of our existence. Indeed, the immateriality of language has made it possible for us to imagine flying to the moon, mobile telephones that signal to mirrored satellites, and missiles that self-propel like colossal bullets through the atmosphere—all things that in our modern world have been made material. In other words, the same virtuality of language that accounts for the unicorns, fairies and wishing chairs that fly through the spangled skies of childhood also underlies the technological innovations we take for granted in the ‘real’ world.

Language, which haunts us like the soul we have long suspected inhabits our core, gives us this capacity to escape or transcend ourselves and our world—a message that literature, which embraces the imaginative force of language, delivers to our innermost selves. We are not, literature teaches us at the deepest level of our beings, bound to ourselves or to our world. While we may have first glimpsed the potential of another life through childhood reading events, we remain eternally and magically capable of an experience of language and of being that, in the aesthetic nature of its thrill, can be thought of as intrinsically literary.