I’ve gone back to studying Italian. For the last couple of years I have been struggling with learning Spanish. To my dismay, very little of the language would stick to me, this in spite of living in an area with a huge Hispanic population. The more verb and vocabulary drills I would perform, the less I would be able to use what I learned in actual conversation. What would issue forth in my attempts at exchanges in Spanish would be colored by an odd Italian tinge in grammar and accent.
A few weeks ago I woke up thinking in Italian. As if a dam had burst, the words kept pouring forth. Along with them an illumination: for me, learning certain languages have been more like remembering something I forgot. Italian clearly fits in this category. French and English were like that. Others, like German and Spanish, wouldn’t cohere in my mind and the words would stick to my tongue, but that would be the extent of it. A mouthful of gritty stuff I could neither spit out nor swallow.
I don’t travel well. That is, the thought of setting out for trans-Atlantic flights (or even trans-continental ones) then exploring foreign cities doesn’t fill me with anticipation or excitement, only with an amorphous dread, most of the time. It’s no wonder then that I found a way to get around, if not with my body, at least in my head, through words, or in the idea of different worlds. Other languages have been more than, well, more words to me; they have been gateways to seeing the world anew.
In this last while, when unexpected pressures have made my days somewhat unpredictable and mostly dependent on others, small chunks of Italian provide a space, if not exactly a place, in which my troubles have to stay outside the limits of articulation.
Italian as treatment for the reduction of anxiety – what an unpharmaceutic solution, but what great side effects, no? Alice Flaherty, the neurologist who wrote The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, observed that most brain damage that causes language problems also causes changes in mood, which makes of language a “mood-altering” substance, when you think about it:
“The psychologist Dylan Evans has argued that language was the first mood-altering substance. It can improve mood in several different ways: by consoling, by entertaining, and by venting. The first two ways benefit the hearer, the third, the speaker. Language can also worsen mod, of course as in verbal abuse or the assertion of social dominance, or simply through boredom.
Consoling, although generally a service provided by one person to another, can also be done for oneself, as when we whisper silent words of encouragement when we feel low. Cognitive behavioral therapy attempts to create just such an internal monologue and it can be as effective as antidepressants in treating moderate depression.”
Well then, consolation in Italian, at least for me, is like sugarcoating the pill, as well as giving the world a brighter, more golden hue.
