B2MeM Challenge: B7: Aspects of Aragorn – Wooer; Deep Thoughts: Love; Languages of Arda: learning a language
N33: Deep Thoughts: beyond
Format: drabble
Genre: Romance
Rating: K
Characters: Aragorn
Pairings: Aragorn/Arwen
Summary: On language lessons, and the performative contronymic.
N33: Deep Thoughts: beyond
Format: drabble
Genre: Romance
Rating: K
Characters: Aragorn
Pairings: Aragorn/Arwen
Summary: On language lessons, and the performative contronymic.
Aragorn cannot recall learning Sindarin or Westron –they were in mouth and mind and hands with his first word.
Quenya came shortly thereafter, but he remembers grasping for words, which emerged hybrid unwords. Rohirric was his first book language –not ‘til he heard it sung on the Road did he begin to understand.
Every language teaches a different breath, gives different eyes –one cannot move in them the same way.
Yet none have given him a graceful word and gesture to tell her, in all desire’s ardent hope of conjugation, love’s necessary truth: live beyond me, ‘tis enough you are.
Author’s note: Performative contronymic: an awkward neologism, inspired by the fact that love is both a desire for the beloved’s freedom and for the unfreedom of a mutually-concerning relationship. One says the first (somehow), motivated by the second – hence ‘performative contronymic.’ The real trick, I think, is to do it while avoiding the emotional contradiction called “hypocrisy.”
This has been your philosophy of language grammar lesson for the day.