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artofbeinghuman · 4 years

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#true words #words #word game #interesting #people #human #english #language #create #makeuseof

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artofbeinghuman · 4 years

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artofbeinghuman · 4 years

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“When I was a kid, I thought Marathi was a forbidden magic language.” Jaya smoked and counted the birds on the telephone poles. One, two, three, four, she mouthed the words in what I presumed was English.

“Chār,” she finally said and smiled at me from under her sunglasses. “Did you feel that? There’s a power there, in that word. When you think of the word ‘char’ in English, you’re thinking of something burning, something on fire. Dark marks of a painful oxidation. And Marathi just uses that word to mean the number 'four’.”

I aimed my phone at the telephone pole and took a picture of the birds. One of the birds ended up blurred as it took flight exactly when I pressed the fake button on the screen.

“My dad taught me, when I was a wee lass,” Jaya said. “He wanted me to know my heritage, where I’d come from. He always said that if you don’t know where you’re coming from, how will you know where you’re going?”

I checked the picture in my phone gallery and wondered if I should delete it. “I don’t know if that makes much sense,” I commented.

“Right?” She turned to me. “He was that sort of man. But right, yeah, he taught me a lot of words. Each word was like a talisman, something with a special, hidden power. Everything sounded so occult. Man, everything sounded so wrong.”

“Did he teach you grammar?” I asked.

“A little bit. After he became project lead, he just went from one task to another, and he spent less and less time with me. That just made the words all the rarer, you know? It made them more forbidden. The little grammar I knew became incantations, spells, like dark mantras that you can use to curse your enemies.”

“Did you?” I asked.

“Yeah. There were a couple boys back in school, they used to annoy the shit out of me. I cast a spell on them.”

“What was the spell?” I watched her look away.

“I’m too embarrassed to say.”

“You’ve made it this far, might as well go all the way.”

She shook her head a little. “I said, Āmbā mānzar khāto. It scared the shit out of them, they thought I was a voodoo bitch.” Jaya spat out her words, like she wanted to get to the other side of the sentences as soon as possible.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

She laughed. “Mango eats cat,” she said. “Or maybe it’s the other way around, I can’t tell. I never really figured the grammar out very well.”

I didn’t laugh, but I could have, if I was less dead inside.

“He taught me these words, but we still spoke in English all the time. So he’d tell me that ’zhāḍ’ means 'tree’, and I was supposed to believe that. I mean, that sounds like the name of a vampire demon or something.”

This time, I laughed.

“But I kept the words, yeah,” Jaya finished her cigarette and pressed on the stub with her sneakers. “Kept them locked up here, in my head. I couldn’t use them with anyone, and I couldn’t see any reason to use them with myself, so they just… floated in there, I guess. In my head.”

“A forbidden magic language,” I said whimsically. “That’s a very alien concept to me. I’ve only ever known one language, so I can’t even imagine what it’s like to understand another.”

“But that’s the thing,” Jaya took her sunglasses off. The sun had retreated, and the sharp orange sunshine had melted into a twilight. “When I went to Dad’s hometown, I was eighteen. I didn’t know what to expect. But then, there was everyone there, saying words I new, stringing them together into mantras and spells. And none of them were occult.”

I opened the car door and got into the driver’s seat. She went around and sat in the seat next to mine.

“My grandmother would just say ’Yeīl tenvhā dūdh māse ye… or something like that, I forget how you string them together. Anyway, it sounded so surreal, and all it meant was 'Get milk and fish on the way back’. Bit by bit, I felt like all the secret, forbidden, occult magic words I’d learned were slipping out of my grasp.”

I pulled the car onto the highway and pressed on the accelerator.

“I think around then is when I began talking less to dad. The mystique was gone. It was like the rain had washed away something about our relationship. No, it had washed away something about me.”

“No more magic,” I said dryly.

“No more magic,” she repeated and didn’t say anything after that for a while.

Later, when the twilight was giving way to the dark, she groaned. “It’s a sad thing,” she said, “When magic leaves the world, that is. It’s not a sudden death. It’s more like the realisation that someone you knew online is probably gone, and they’ve been gone for a long time, and no matter how many times you text them, they’re never going to text you back.”

I glanced at her to check if she was okay.

Her eyes were closed. She mouthed the word ’bābā’.

#humans #humanity #human #words #wordsoftheday #interesting #life #love #sacred #magic

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artofbeinghuman · 4 years

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#social media #thoughts #foodporn #so true #quotes #intovert #tumblarians #writers

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artofbeinghuman · 4 years

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#poems #poetry #words #love #quote #picture quotes #deep #thoughts #life #happiness #people #fall in love #surprise me #human #humanity #world

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artofbeinghuman · 4 years

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#reblog #wordsoftheday #true words #words #thinkpositive #thinking #emotions #human #humans #people #mindset #mind games

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artofbeinghuman · 4 years

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“Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against. Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best; instead, one is to perpetually immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.”

— Anthony Daniels

#thinking #psychology #emotions #deep thoughts #artofbeinghuman #humans #critical thinking

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artofbeinghuman · 4 years

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Feeling it more lately