Gavagai!

Last night was our cooking class, and although I don't think the recipes are reproducible in America (can you buy lotus in Wegmans?), it was very enjoyable. Laoshi demonstrated a technique for us - I forget what exactly - and said that it was called something - good heavens, this is like an anecdote Bertie Wooster would tell - tao or something, some sort of verb. Anyway, I was reminded of that Quine example about the rabbit. I never used to like Quine all that much, but actually he has some very bright ideas and very snappy taste in hats. So there's this fellow traveling in a country where he doesn't speak the language, and he and his native guide are out in a meadow when a rabbit comes running out of the shrubbery. The native points at the rabbit and says "Gavagai!"

So what is the other guy supposed to think? He's going to naturally assume that "Gavagai" means "rabbit" - but why? Couldn't it just as easily mean "fur" or "running" or "Let's shoot it!"? This is called the Whole Object Assumption and it's used to explain how babies learn language, but it can also be applied to second language learning. Even though I have advantages babies don't - for instance, I knew the teacher was giving us a verb - there are always going to be several things the word could mean and when it comes to that more organic language learning, as opposed to rote memorization from the book, it's hard to map the word onto the appropriate concept.

Does this observation justify eight months in China, not having hot showers or internet access? I sure hope so.

Buffalonians will no doubt be familiar with the case of Malcolm Watson, and even though it was in the newspaper and everything I feel like a malicious gossip bringing it up. But the man was my teacher and it's been on my mind. My dad gets it partially right, I think, in the link above, especially the fact that we can't really understand it and we shouldn't really try. Yet I want to try, because even though I knew, even at fourteen or fifteen years old, that here was a man who shouldn't be given so much power over teenage girls, still his "I'm proud of you, Emily" meant so much to me - and here I'm not talking about five or six years ago when he had the power to reduce me to tears or send me out into the hallway just because he could - I'm talking about this past year, when I went back to Sem to say hello to my old teachers over Thanksgiving break. The fact that I had made him proud meant so much to me.

I couldn't sleep last night. I spent a rather frenzied hour writing more or less incoherently - poetry, heaven help me, as well as prose in my journal - and then lay awake for hours, fretting. This happens to me sometimes - I just can't slow my brain down enough to get to sleep. I was thinking about Mr Malcolm, and Jay, my main advisor at Smith, who is so similar to Malcolm and yet so fundamentally different. Since I started college, I've had a sort of theory that the difference between Malcolm and Jay is the difference between high school and college - it's the difference between being treated like a prisoner - okay, a kid, let's say - and being treated like a future colleague. Because that's what Jay and Jill and my other professors at Smith have treated me like since I began.

But I trusted Malcolm Watson, and I trust Jay - I trust him when he says I will get into grad school, I will be a logician. Last night as my brain was spinning at a million miles a minute and insisting that I'll never get anywhere, I'm a phony and any minute now I'll be found out, I told myself "Jay says you'll get in, and he says there's never been a Smith student who all the faculty thought would get into a top-knotch school for philosophy and who didn't - Jay says you'll be fine and you can bet your life he'd tell you if it were otherwise. Jay doesn't suffer fools, and he's not going to waste his time if you don't actually have a shot." That's what I told myself, but I barely slept all night and when I did I had deeply disturbing, parent-issue dreams, which makes sense when you consider the weird parent-issues Malcolm always inspired in me. I'll never forget the dream I had when I was maybe fifteen in which my father died and my mom immediately married Mr Malcolm, rebuking me "Stop crying for your father! Mr Malcolm is your father now!"

"I'm proud of you, Emily."
"You have written a perfect poem."
"I want to write your college recommendation."

And I want to look him in the face and say, "I am so disappointed in you."

I have Mr Malcolm stories, but I can't kick him when he's down. I'll leave it with this: every student at Sem had a nickname, given freshman year by Mr Malcolm. I didn't care for mine especially - my name is Emily, it was chosen by my parents with love, it was a gift - and so my junior year, every time Malcolm called me by the nickname, I corrected him - "Emily." Until, finally, he stopped using the nickname and I got to be Emily. I'd won my name back. I think that the ability to stand up to this brilliant man who frightened me so much might just be the most important of the many things I learned from him.



Wow, that came out of nowhere, sorry. I'd better go eat weird things, so that next time I'm at a computer I'll have something a little less intense for you. Who's up for some more scorpions?