Slovio

When I sat down originally to write this I had a clear outline of the progression of the post in my head. First I would relate my day at the cabin in broad strokes, making everything a bit more grand and pathos-laden than it really was. Then I would step back to muse on something of more general anecdotal interest—whether political or historical or ethical—and see where it took me and how, once lost in this wilderness of anecdotal interest, I might navigate back to the safety of the Log Bird Nest. I picked up my computer to begin. By instinct, I checked my e-mail. I responded to a message or two, setting off a typical series of Internet-borne tangents to satisfy a contingent curiosity. The ultimate tangent landed me at www.slovio.com where I was acquainted with Slovio, the pitiable latter-day Slavo-centric answer to Esperanto that has had some trouble catching on. From the Web 0.1-looking website, an outwardly positive testimonial to the language:

Mark, USA:
I am a student of the Russian language, and have found it very difficult to learn Russian. I have even spent several months in Russia, just trying to understand it. When I got back to the US, I was very frustrated, and did not know if I wanted to continue with Russian, but then I found Slovio, and it has made my life so much easier. I still study Russian, but as a shadow of Slovio. I find Slovio almost easier and more flowing than my native language of English. I can read a passage, and even if I do not know a word, have a complete understanding of that passage. Slovio is amazing, and I would love to see it become a universal standard in Eastern Europe. I have also tried Slovio with some of my Russian friends, and although it sometimes takes them a second to understand me, they normally have no problem. This language is great! Thank You!

Even allowing that the testimonial might be real, it was stupid: Both stupidly written (experienced) and stupidly cited, being so unconvincing, amoebic and feeble. We needn’t worry about the drifting dabbler who hatched Slovio being co-opted by the folks at Burston-Marsteller, not before he can realize his flabby utopian dream of using Slovio as the grout to give body (spirit) to an amorphous, vaguely incestuous unity of Slavs, or, failing that, to seal his own shriveled spirit into the bombastic sarcophagus of a new Language whose taproot has penetrated the soul of an ancient tribe—honoring him in death while honoring all Slavs in their idealized state. A couple clicks through the search engine results revealed that Wikipedia’s Slovio article had been deleted by site editors on the grounds that the subject lacked ‘notability.’ According to the eliding editor, “Slovio is not alive anywhere [but at] www.slovio.com.”

Who can fathom the extent to which fanatical and irrational obsessions determine the courses of personal and communal destinies? Why are some so susceptible to forming attachments to doomed causes? Why, in this man’s case, the middling contentment with the role of meaningless, ridiculously marginal jester? Why should the realm of the laughable, the pathetic and the forgettable be the realm in which the great bulk of men are destined to be, to dwell, to ‘occur’ in the sense used in Infinite Jest? Is there a dogma that will soothe this particular wound in the human psyche? Or, is there a positively identifiable content that characterizes a significant life that I—for instance—have acquired or am in the process of acquiring that this man didn’t and won’t? Who can assure me that no one has come across some utterance or project of mine in some ever-fresh virtual heap of mental tailings and had the same nauseated reaction of contempt alloyed with world-weary resignation?

There is laughter in the contemplation this flaccid latter-day Quixotic figure, yes, but look a bit longer, and there is also fear, vertigo, delirium. Far from helping me negotiate a passage through the fear, the laughter stages a descent into fear that is all the more shocking. Why, with all our ideological and technical ingenuity, have we not managed to fashion better screens to block out the bleak horror that both grounds this kind of marginal obsession and infects us with its dread when we allow ourselves to look too long at the destinies of those swept into the abysmal gutters surrounding the main stream: Those unfortunates without the artifice to be included in the lie, or in the official reactions to the lie.

Years from now I may be asked, “What, Markus, were you doing on the day Obama was elected?” I peck out the following by way of aide-mémoire. I rose at 8 to let Tipper out to pee. Tipper is a shaggy old mutt who pledges some vague allegiance to the terrier breed. She is epileptic, snaggle-toothed, plagued by halitosis (much better since the pulling of several rotten teeth and a course of penicillin), does nothing but sleep between bouts of contented feeding, provides nothing in the way of utility, and is somewhere between the ages of 15 and 17. Tipper is also my companion in the house.

After Tipper’s matinal purges I put on some coffee and made my own ablutions. I ate bacon and eggs and had coffee and sat down to work. An impossibly pointless catalogue about tables, chairs, storage units, shelving systems to be traduced, detail by detail, from Swedish to English. When the pointlessness became too oppressive I read two articles: One an analysis of the Arizona Cardinals’ defensive renaissance in the playoffs, the other a principled cry of outrage from the Left commentariat on some subject or other. Ah—not so. It was about the crimes against the Palestinians, whom I wish I could help and whose destiny I pity, and whose tormentors I hereby hollowly condemn. I was corralled back to my document by the grim mathematical logic of compensation per unit time. I will not accept work unless I can parlay it into a certain number of dollars per hour, and by slacking I cheat my own production quota. Some time later came a relieving call from my distant girlfriend. I turned in my skull-explodingly mind-numbing assignment around lunchtime—there is no thought involved in a business translation, because atmosphere and context do not need to be painstakingly reproduced: The language and cadence and contextual assumptions are always the same.

In the afternoon I spoke on the phone to a friend and to the members of my family while baking almond cookies and roasting a duck. The cookies turned out fair to middling, while the duck, though lean and gamey by nature, roasted well and gave a reasonable amount of character to a stuffing pieced together from an onion, a potato and a green pepper. While the duck roasted, I strapped on my snowshoes to go check my snares.

I have three operating snares. Two are within five minutes of my back door, with a third about an hour’s hike up the mountain. The failing light meant I would only get to check the two today, putting me at risk of wasting an animal. Remember what I wrote yesterday about not warranting the prudence of my undertakings? The first snare is a squirrel ramp. It consists of a series of nooses suspended by wire gallows over a pole that is leaned against a tree in order to offer credulous squirrels an energy-saving shortcut to the canopy. But there was no catch, no sign of disturbance. I had leaned the ramp against the tree in question after discovering a pile of nutshells at the base, so I left it in place in hope that a reckless squirrel might hazard my gauntlet of nooses. The next snare is about a quarter mile up the hill. It is a simple noose placed over a snow burrow and hitched to a nearby bush. I’m not sure what lives in the burrow, but it or something else had encountered the snare and yanked it off the hole. Squirrels were mocking me from the canopy as I inspected the scene. I shook an admonitory fist at them, then reset the snare and went home, where I played the part of frustrated varmint hunter as I sat on my porch and glassed the backyard by the fading light, shotgun across my lap. As fond a day as any, I suppose, to consider later and square with the annals of overwhelming and incoherent power.