I think this period is about taking stock. Over the past decade and a half I have been very busy. Yesterday I compiled a list of all the residencies I have undertaken since 2000 as part of preparation for a talk to give to my students about working with organisations. It is an impressive list. At the time I probably felt that I wasn’t doing enough even though I was working flat out including carrying out several freelance projects and holding down a teaching post.
Taking stock.
Learning a new language as a way of giving myself the chance of a beginning. Over the past few weeks learning Spanish I have realised that I am not and cannot be a beginner. This is rather disappointing. The reason? I have an accumulated knowledge about language, about grammatical structures, a sound knowledge of French and a highly developed knowledge of German and these feed into my experiences with Spanish. It is a kind of innate understanding of how languages work. I use the word ‘innate’ there advisedly. Because it is learnt, but it is also, of course, innate.
As a baby I learnt how to speak. As I learn a new language an intense joy arises in me which I know to be a memory of that first experience of language. Learning to speak amounted to access to power: acquiring the tools to articulate my experience, to ask for what I needed in the language of those who were bigger than me and in charge of my well-being. Being able increasingly to take charge of one’s own existence in the world and the entry into language must be one of the most significant steps we make.
So, language is power and learning a new language is a re-living of those first, early, empowering stages. And when I learn Spanish now I am assisted by my previous experience, both in its general and its particular nature. Therefore I am not and cannot really be a beginner. Instead, I am a ‘builder-upon-er’ in that I am building upon what went before. And the feeling of it all just beginning, of it being new resurfaces,, as if it is new, which is the wonder of it all.
