The sun falls hard here at the beach
The sun falls hard here at the beach, and rises just as fast. In the morning I go down to the sea and write, then study Spanish, then head back for coffee.
Every day I spend a couple hours studying Spanish. Sometimes it takes all day to get those hours in, because after 20 minutes my brain is soup and I have to take a break.
One of the main reasons I came to Mexico is that I don’t want to die a monolingual American. I hope to catch a glimpse of underlying human reality, and I don’t think I can do that from only one linguistic perspective.
When I was in college I wanted to be a philosophy professor. I wanted the steady income, the prestige, the health insurance — all things I’d missed growing up.
I spent my senior year studying Nietsche, the philologist and father of psychology and post-modernism. Nietsche talked me out of going to grad school. He said it would be cowardly to not give music and songwriting a shot.
Philology is the study of language, and I have always wanted to honor Nietsche, my first fierce mentor, by learning at least one other language — so here I am.
Spanish is hard. The complex grammar makes my brain feel old. The speed and music of Mexican speech provokes strange currents of fear and shame in me when I can’t understand and respond.
But it’s also exciting. I feel like a child again, come into a new world. I am dependent upon the kindness and patience of my hosts, and they rarely disappoint.
I feel so vulnerable ordering food, asking for directions, or attempting a dumb joke in Spanish. The child in me kicks and screams at being so helpless. “Why is this happening?!”
“You spent all these years growing up and learning how to do shit,” he says. “Why have you put us in this position?”
I guess you could say we’re getting reacquainted, he and I. He’s learning to play in a new sandbox. And I get to play alongside him.
