(in the combined spirit of “commit early, commit often” and “working in public” I’m going to start using this forum as a place to keep drafts that are clean but unfinished)
Piracy, Play, and Communities of Practice
Even though English is my second language, I don’t remember learning it. I was very young, and the young mind is limber to new patterns, but there were also very strong incentives for picking up the language. These incentives were not based on the technical aspects of English, nor some notion of national identity, but rather on the fact that other human beings around me spoke it, and if I also spoke it then I could talk with them, thus receiving neural rewards from the social-seeking circuits of my brain. Not only did it allow me to participate in the rituals emerging around me, but it opened up the possibility for coordinating with others to create our own rituals, for the present and future, and reflect on past rituals. I wager that my happiest moments were when I was consistently using the language without realizing it, in the midst of play where words often transformed to primal exclamations; my saddest, when I was painfully aware of being silent (or worse, silenced) when others around me were not.
Today, I love learning, practicing, and thinking about the language (and languages in general) from many perspectives: the grammatical, etymological, historical, literary; the unique rythmic and tonal qualities of languages, the harmonies and dissonances between words within and across languages, the happy accidents of discovering rhymes and rhythms in everyday speech. Perhaps this propensity towards the more “reflective” aspects of participating in a communication protocol made me very comfortable in silence early on. Over time, I discovered that I didn’t necessarily need to be actively speaking with or be in the proximity of other human beings to connect with them. The language itself, even when temporarily separated from its utility in social rituals, served as a sort of living artifact that I carried with me every I go.