Metaphysics by Dwimordene

[dwimordene-2011.livejournal.com]

B2MeM Challenge: B7: Aspects of Aragorn – Wooer; Deep Thoughts: Love; Languages of Arda: learning a language
N33: Deep Thoughts: beyond
Format: drabble
Genre: Romance
Rating: K
Characters: Aragorn
Pairings: Aragorn/Arwen
Summary: On language lessons and the performative contronymic.



Metaphysics

Aragorn cannot recall learning Sindarin or Westron – they were in mouth and mind and hands with his first word.

Quenya came shortly thereafter, but he remembers grasping for words, which emerged hybrid unwords. Rohirric was his first book language – not ‘til he heard it sung on the Road did he begin to understand.

Every language teaches a different breath, gives different eyes – one cannot move in them the same way.

Yet none have given him a graceful word and gesture to tell her, in all desire’s ardent hope of conjugation, love’s necessary truth: live beyond me, ‘tis enough you are.

---

Author’s note: Performative contronymic: an awkward neologism, inspired by the fact that love is both a desire for the beloved’s freedom and for the unfreedom of a mutually-concerning relationship. One says the first (somehow), motivated by the oppositional second – hence ‘performative contronymic.’

This has been your philosophy of language grammar lesson for the day.

"To posit metaphysics as Desire is to interpret the production of being - desire engendering Desire - as goodness and as beyond happiness; it is to interpret the production of being as being for the Other" (Totality and Infinity 304). Emmanuel Levinas gets fic credit. Again.

Comments

[hhimring]

"Live beyond me", both as in "Have a life apart from me" and "Survive me"?
You say none of the languages did this for him. Do you think Sindarin and Quenya would be less suitable for this message than Westron and Rohirric?
Thank you very much for my morsel of language philosophy for the day!

[dwimordene-2011.livejournal.com]

"Live beyond me", both as in "Have a life apart from me" and "Survive me"?

Yes, both - if he were only willing to have her survive him, that'd be a fairly controlling sort of love. He has to be able to accept that Arwen may not want to have anything to do with him, given that he has no canonical evidence that she has any interest in him whatsoever, be it romantic or otherwise, until the summer they affiance each other.

Do you think Sindarin and Quenya would be less suitable for this message than Westron and Rohirric?

No, not inherently. But "I love you" in any language seems to me hard. It's a common phrase, but love is very particular, and so the signs and words and symbols used to communicate it, just because they have to be commonly recognizable, give both a culturally-specific shape to that love, but remain approximations.

[hhimring]

Someone I know once wrote a poem claiming that Spanish makes this sort of distinction, because they have both "te amo" and "te quiero". I don't know enough Spanish to know whether this claim really holds water. Of course, it was an (English) poem, not a linguistic treatise!

[huinare.livejournal.com]

"Love" in English is particularly multi-tiered and vague. I know some languages do a better job at sifting various implications of our one word into other words--but yes, regardless of the language, there are really are not words to properly harness all the things that can be meant by "love." Aragorn's reflection on this is quite apt.

And I always enjoy your Levinas references even though I've yet to read the guy (tsk...you'd think I was sitting around reading fanfic or something else time-consuming instead)

[aliana1.livejournal.com]

I love this account of Aragorn learning languages, especially the hybrid words in Quenya--I can remember having similar experiences when struggling with foreign vocab and grammar. And it makes perfect sense that you can't truly understand Rohirric until you hear it in song. Your last line is terrific, of course--never being able to quite find the words, in any language.

But will you quit trying to make me learn things? It's the weekend, dammit! (Just kidding--I like your contronymic thing, and of course good old Levinas.)

[dwimordene-2011.livejournal.com]

re: hybrid words

I think anyone who has ever tried to learn to speak another language has been there at some point. You meant to say "por favor" it came out "Pleasavor" or whatever.

will you quit trying to make me learn things? It's the weekend, dammit!

No rest for the wicked - you have thigh high boots, after all. ;-)

[aliana1.livejournal.com]

you have thigh high boots, after all.

The real question is, did Levinas? ;)

[dwimordene-2011.livejournal.com]

This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas) is not the face of man who goes Rangering in Harlequin romances.

[aliana1.livejournal.com]

*shrugs* We don't know what he might have got up to in his youth, right?

[dwimordene-2011.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention it, but in his earliest published article, which I would describe as an academic letter home to Lithuania, reporting on the state of French and German literary-philosophical culture in the early thirties, he includes a brief comparative analysis of "trashy" French versus trashy German novellas (Harlequin romance!) in order to make clear the prevailing ideas about where passion and sensibility fit, and he concludes: "A Frenchman does not philosophize when writing pornography."

So apparently, in the name of philosophical science, young Levinas had to spend some time reading trashy romance novellas in foreign languages.

It was a hard life, I'm sure.

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

This is so very true.

[dwimordene-2011.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoyed it, Linda!

[zdenka]

I really like this description of learning languages.

[dwimordene-2011.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Lignota! Language is a favorite topic for me to write fic on.

[blslarner.livejournal.com]

An excellent look at what language is and does--and what it cannot fully do as well.