Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  Divina mente coorta,

  diffugiunt animi terrores, moenia mundi

  discedunt. totum video per inane geri res.

  Because his divine mind arose,

  the terrors of the soul dispersed, the walls of the world

  separated. I saw everything driven through the void.

  For Lucretius, a materialist, the void is not a threat but the ground of all phenomena, through which atoms, which act as seeds, mingle with one another to create life. At death the seeds disperse and bounce again through the void until they coalesce with other seeds to create a new entity. No soul remains.

  This is pretty much what I’ve always believed: that the soul cannot exist without the body, its container. As we continue to translate I keep discovering—or forcing, I’m not sure which—similarities between Lucretius and Zen Buddhism: Both believe we are not solid, separate, or permanent. The universe is a continual unfolding, with atoms going off in different directions to form something entirely new. Lucretius’ void is not all that different from the Zen concept of emptiness. It is the ground of being, that place of momentary silence between the busy churnings of the mind, that qualityless quiet one seeks in meditation.

  This sets me to stewing over the word “void.” As in English, this versatile member of the House of Ids is both noun and adjective: inane, inanis (noun) and inanis, inanis (adjective). The noun extends the adjective’s meaning of “empty, void, abyss” to mean also “vanity, worthlessness, an idle show.” To Lucretius, the void is simply empty reality, something with its own form of clarity. Vanity is the rush to cover it over with posturing, with an idle show or persona, which literally means “to sound through.” Thus the void “sounds through” the persona. And what is persona but one’s identity, purpose, career, ambition, all cultivated to fill otherwise empty days. Here begins the mental churn that I first experienced in college, at my first introduction to Zen Buddhism. How does one get underneath the persona? How can one exist in emptiness?

  It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with extremely aggressive breast cancer, with twenty-seven positive lymph nodes, and was more than likely to die within a few years, that I began to explore the Zen concepts that had been long waiting for the turn of my attention.

  Though the possible death sentence failed to lead me to religion (as it had not claimed Zappa at the end, nor Hitchens), it did lead me to meditation and ultimately Zen. Fortuitously, I had begun my exploration three months before I was diagnosed with cancer. I’d read Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness, and it spoke to me, spoke to slowing down, which was the thing I most needed to do. Thay (as he is known to his followers) was giving a three-day silent retreat at the Omega Institute near my home in Rhinebeck, and I signed up. I’d wanted to go the year before, but when shrink, husband, and best friend all scoffed at the idea of my being silent for three days, I opted out. The following year, determined, I went anyway. “I’m sure you’ll be more silent than anyone else there,” the Ablative Absolute said.

  Meditation worked something of a miracle for me. It gave me something to hang on to during the months of chemo and helped me approach illness not as a battle but as an opportunity to free myself. I demoted myself from a management job back to editor. I subscribed to allopathic, homeopathic, and spiritual remedies. Though the latter were never god based: yoga, long sits meditating in the rose garden at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine (now gone; in its place, a condo) and on benches along the Hudson, watching the sun set over the mighty river. My companion book was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I also worked with a hands-on healer. Harry Bayne’s method was visualization, rather than analysis; there was no god talk, only the comforting laying on of hands, and gentle questions. Once, early on, with me abed and exhausted from the effects of chemo, he asked, “Do you have any ideas about why you have cancer?”

  “Drivenness,” I said, the word zooming out of my mouth before I’d even thought it. “Cells moving too fast, doing their job too fast, uncontrollably driven the way I am.”

  “What does that look like?” he asked.

  I saw myself at eight years old, at the Kiwanis Club luncheon with my father, wearing the pretty lavender dress my mother had sewn for me, my pigtails lavender beribboned. The local newspaper printed a photo of me handing my father his name tag. You can see the love in our eyes. We were alike, even then.

  As the healer encouraged me to expand the image, I saw myself as a lavender-clad donkey with a stick-wielding father following close behind me. Were those the terms of his love? Or simply what I had internalized along with his love?

  “What does it feel like if you stop?” the healer asked.

  I couldn’t visualize anything, but I could make the sound, deep in my throat, a ragged gasp of panic and fear.

  “What do you see now?” he asked.

  I saw the void, and I was afraid.

  I still see it, and I am still afraid. Is the anxiety I scurry around to avoid in fact fear of death, as Lucretius claims? I have always thought of it as a fear of meaninglessness and purposelessness. My drivenness is antithetical to the peaceful life that Epicurus and his followers Lucretius and Horace extol. Is it part of my prima materia or simply my persona? Are my studies merely a new way of fleeing myself, of creating a new persona—Latinist—to avoid staring down the void my life might become, the void that Mother had dropped into? She had failed to create for herself a viable persona once motherhood had ended. It wasn’t death she was afraid of, but life. “I’m done,” she’d told me the last time I saw her. “I see no reason to stay alive except someone needs to take care of your father.”

  Mother died when she was only sixty-six. Our family was due to gather at home to celebrate my father’s seventieth birthday, the first time we would all be together in thirteen years. Mom had been anxious about the gathering: The anticipation of making a big family dinner overwhelmed her. She had cooked and cleaned and sewed and watched as, one by one, we had moved off to college and into lives different from any she could have imagined for us. She seemed diminished by each departure, and her alcohol consumption increased.

  “I think we never gave you kids enough direction,” she’d complain. But what direction could she have given us, she whose only life outside the home was bridge and golf, leisure activities, not passionate pursuits? She made it clear that she’d hoped I would become someone else—who or what she couldn’t say, only not who I was and definitely not someone who charted a course opposite to hers.

  Only years later did I realize what Mom had wanted was intimacy in exchange for all she’d done for us: She wanted to see herself reflected in us. Yet when she looked at us she couldn’t see herself at all. And when she looked at herself she saw only emptiness.

  Early in the morning, seven days before we were to arrive, my mother dropped dead. I’ll never know if the arrhythmia that killed her happened naturally or as the result of cigarettes, sleeping pills, and the bottle of vodka she consumed every day. If an autopsy was ever performed, my father chose never to tell us the results.

  Lucretius is a superb poet as well as a philosopher. Like Ovid, he makes his words act out his meaning.

  Ex ineunte aevo sic corporis atque animai

  mutua vitalis discunt contagia motus

  Thus, from the beginning of time, the shared union of the body and soul

  learns the motions of life

  The second line is what is known as a golden line: a line of dactylic hexameter, composed of only five words thus: adjective (mutua), adjective (vitalis), verb (discunt), noun (contagia), noun (motus). The adjectives and nouns are intertwined and visually picture the reciprocity of what is being expressed.

  The term “golden line” is first attested in an obscure English grammar from 1652. It was never referred to as such by the Roman poets or rhetoricians, though they used the device extensively. Was it used to demonstrate high art or for
convenience? And why is it called golden? No one seems to know.

  Lucretius vividly diagnosed the drivenness that still plagued me, that had sent me running back and forth to New York for the past few years:

  If men are able, in the same way as they seem to perceive a weight press upon their soul and fatigue them with heaviness, to recognize from what things so great a mass of evils stand on their heart. . . . Thus they might not live their life, as we generally see a man who does not know what he wants for himself and seeks always to change entirely as if that will enable him to put down the load. Often he goes outside . . . when he is wearied to be home, and suddenly he returns since he feels no better outside. . . . He flees himself in this way, but . . . he is not able to escape at all, therefore against his will he clings and hates . . .

  Clinging and hating: This again echoes the practice of Zen meditation, which is practicing not to cling to our feelings. Lucretius describes, in many verses, what Rupert Spira, a Zen master, says in a phrase: “The two core elements of ego are a sense of lack and fear of death.”

  Although Lucretius allows that some suffering in life is unavoidable, he feels it is temporary and that pleasure, not suffering, is the first principle of life. Unlike Lucretius, Zen—and all Buddhist philosophy—begins with the perception that life is suffering and that the pursuit of pleasure is the root cause of most suffering.

  In February, midsemester, I attended sesshin, a four-day silent retreat, with my sangha, No Traces Zendo. At the end of my year in cancerland, I had sought out a Zen teacher. I wanted to hang on to the calm I had found in chemo, and I suspected Zen, along with the Iyengar yoga I had been practicing for seven years, was the way for me. I found No Traces and Nancy Baker, a lay teacher in the Soto Zen lineage who was also a Wittgensteinian philosopher who taught at Sarah Lawrence College.

  After a few years sitting and practicing with No Traces, I entered jukai—the formal rite of passage to becoming an official Buddhist. This included hand sewing a rakusu with the other students in my sangha (I was the first to finish) and copying the long Soto Zen lineage on scrolled parchment (ditto). When Nancy saw I had misspelled “Eihei Dogen” on my lineage scroll, she remarked, “Everything you do, you do fast, Jakuan. You even misspelled the name of our progenitor on your lineage because you hurried. Why are you always in such a hurry?”

  Nancy gave me the dharma name Jakuan, which means Serenity, literally Jaku-an: peace of nirvana. She was careful to explain that a dharma name is given either to characterize your practice or to express what your practice seeks.

  During sesshin, each day, after three hours of sitting, followed by breakfast, we had a ninety-minute work practice for which each of us was given a task that we were to spend the entire ninety minutes accomplishing. The tasks might include dusting bookshelves, which had been dusted the previous day during work practice; or vacuuming the floor, which had been vacuumed the previous day during work practice; or cleaning a bathroom, which had been cleaned the previous day during work practice. Not much cleaning actually needed doing.

  I didn’t like work practice; I found it a waste of time, even though time, during those many hours of sitting, was ever expansive. I usually tried to score a job on the third floor, which I could do quickly, then retire to my room to nap. I’d been awake since 5:00 A.M. And what was the purpose of cleaning something that didn’t need cleaning?

  One day I was assigned to clean Nancy’s room, a 10x12-foot chamber on the second floor. I opened the door and found Nancy sitting on her bed reading. I began to dust the windowsill. “Slower, Jakuan,” she said, without looking at me. I dusted more slowly. “Slower, Jakuan,” she said again. I tried to go even more slowly. “Slower, Jakuan.” She kept repeating “Slower, slower, slower,” until finally, as I dusted, I went so slowly that I could see every crevice in the wood grain and the infinitesimal dust particles that resided there.

  At some point Nancy’s gaze returned to her book. I continued to dust more slowly than I’d ever dusted before. I discovered new universes of dust. One of the tables had latticework between its legs, and I folded the dust rag so that I could wedge it between the holes and slowly move it back and forth, like dental floss between teeth, to clean the base of the lattice. When the bell signaling the end of work practice rang, I hadn’t entirely finished dusting the four pieces of furniture in Nancy’s room.

  My Latin study is another form of meditation for me, another way of slowing down, of turning off the engine. I have to translate Latin the way I cleaned Nancy’s room—slowly, mindfully, meditatively—checking for embedded bits of meaning. It is impossible to work on a translation quickly. If the task I choose for this last era of my life is to learn to slow down and enjoy the moment, then Latin is my primary practice in accomplishing that.

  CHAPTER 13

  Haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.

  These studies nourish youth, entertain old age, embellish success, provide refuge and solace in adversity, bring pleasure at home, do not hamper us when we are away, and are our companion through the night, on our travels, our rustication.

  —Cicero

  For the past two years, I had been scouring the Internet for all things Latin. I’d discovered a few “Living Latin” programs, most held during the summer. SALVI, Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum (North American Institute for Living Latin Studies), offered both weeklong and weekend immersion programs at various venues around the country where Latinists lived together and spoke only Latin.

  The Paideia Institute hosted summer programs in Rome and Greece, and winter-break programs in Paris, where Latin was both studied and spoken. Paideia is the Greek term for the humanities. Humanitas in Latin, these are the studies that were thought necessary to create intellectually well-rounded citizens and included grammar, geography, gymnastics, mathematics, music, natural history, and philosophy—essentially the same disciplines pictured in the Cornaro window at Vassar’s Thompson Library.

  I had contemplated going to a February SALVI weekend, held in an old plantation house in West Virginia, but it seemed like a long, cold, snowy trip and a bit too much of a commitment: They required attendees to sign a contract agreeing to speak only Latin during the entire weekend.

  Paideia was offering a Living Latin weekend in New York, so I signed up. It seemed a lot less daunting than the idea of speaking only Latin for an entire weekend among strangers, all of whom were likely much better Latinists than I. The Paideia weekend ran from nine to five on Saturday and Sunday, with a break for lunch, and I had the refuge of a non-Latinist friend’s apartment in which to revert to English Saturday evening.

  One week before the event a reading packet arrived: The subject of the weekend was to be laughter, De Risu. The forty-page booklet included excerpts from essays by Quintilian and Cicero, a scatological satire of Claudius by Seneca the Younger, as well as antique and modern jokes (all in Latin), epigrams, riddles, nonsense poems, and dialogues. On the last page was a seventy-line poem in which every word begins with P, titled “Pugna Porcorum” (“The Fight of the Pigs”), by Publius Porcius Poeta (Poet of Pork). Why so many Latin pigs in my life?

  I began reading the Cicero. My heart sank. It would take me many tens of hours to translate this; I was not ready for the weekend. I had hoped that Paideia would be my first venture into New York City’s Latin community, and community was what I most longed for in this new life. I was, and would always be, an outsider as an auditor: Though my classmates and I were friendly, we would never see one another after the semesters ended, and the professors had their own world.

  I decided my participation would have to wait another couple of years. I was brave but unwilling to walk into a situation where I would be entirely at sea, so I wrote Jason Pedicone, the director of the program, telling hi
m I thought my mastery of Latin was not up to a weekend of speaking.

  The next day he wrote a reassuring note, encouraging me to attend. “All levels are welcome,” he wrote, “and you won’t be the only novice there.” And then, an hour later another e-mail arrived:

  “I just checked out your Web site and now I REALLY want you to come to our conference! It’s important to me to cultivate people from beyond the walls of the academy who are doing cool things like you are and who think Latin is important, as you obviously do. Last year, for instance, we had a writer from the Boston Globe and a documentary filmmaker show up. They were both Latin novices but had a good time, and it was great to hang out and make their acquaintances. So please come as our guest (don’t pay), check out the event and our organization. I’d really like to meet you.”

  With me, flattery will get you everywhere: Someone REALLY wanting me? Who was I to refuse such welcome? Since it had always been my plan to follow this pursuit into whatever odd corners it led, here was a corner I was duty-bound to explore.

  And perhaps it would be fun. It must be: Paideia also offered cenae Latinae (Latin meals) at which only Latin was spoken. Would such confabs continue if they weren’t fun? I imagined it would be something like a science-fiction convention, with all the eccentric enthusiasts enjoying one another’s company.

  Over the past two years, I’d become more and more aware of the similarities between classicists and science-fiction enthusiasts; in truth, classicists seemed like a kind of subset of the science-fiction world. I knew Siddhi was into science fiction. He wore an orange bracelet inscribed with “Follow the creed. Live by the creed.” When I asked him what that stood for (as any good epigrapher would), he explained it was from Assassin’s Creed, a science-fiction game he played online. I knew Alissa was a fervent science-fiction fan, too, as was Ben Stevens.