One of my favorite books is Enchanted by Orson Scott Card. It's a different rendition of Sleeping Beauty, and I absolutely love it! Orson Scott Card has a way with words. No one who has read any of his books will deny this, but there is something very different about this book and the levels of communication within the pages. It is so interesting to me to read about things like this because as I read I'll dog-ear a page so I can go back and re-read a paragraph or a certain way something was phrased. As I was reading a certain passage caught my eye and got me to thinking. Forewarning... it's a rather extensive passage, but it is all necessary. Promise...
'For Katerina, her second modern kitchen was perhaps more interesting than that first, not because it was so different from Sophia's, but because she now realized that everyone had these items in the whole world, and not just the wives of gods. But then, as Ivan watched them together, laughing over the awkwardness of their language, he began to realize that there was a level of communication that he hadn't appreciated before, a level of below language - or was it above? -in which two people recognize each other and leap to correct intuitions about what the other means and wants and feels. Do all women have this? Ivan wondered. And then thought: No. Mother never had this with Ruthie.
In Sophia's kitchen, Katerina had not even attempted to be helpful, as if she felt that the level of magic was beyond her. But in Mother's kitchen, Katerina, unasked, immediately set to work helping. In a way this didn't surprise Ivan at all-in Taina there had been no sense of princesses as fragile creatures who had to be waited on hand and foot. He had heard much about what a deft hand Katerina had at the harvest, able to tie off a sheaf of wheat faster than anybody, with fingers so agile that, as the saying was, "She could sew without a needle."Pampered princesses came much later in history, at least in Russia. What surprised him was not her willingness to work, then, but rather her instinctive grasp of what Mother needed her to do. She seemed to know what tool Mother wanted and, most amazing of all, where it was in the kitchen. This was something that Ivan had never grasped. He had grown up helping his mother from time to time in the kitchen, certainly with the dishes, but he always had to ask where the more obscure tools went.
Finally, when Katerina went straight to a drawer and found the weird little grabbing tool that Mother used to pull the stems out of strawberries, Ivan had to flat-out ask, "How did you know?"
They looked at him like he was crazy.
"She told me," said Katerina.
"She was talking about how the field-grown strawberries were finally coming ripe, so it wasn't all greenhouse berries. She never once said what she needed or where it was."
Mother and Katerina looked at each other in puzzlement.
"Yes I did," said Mother finally. "You just weren't listening."
"On the contrary," said Ivan. "I was listening very closely, because I was amazing at how much proto-slavonic you have already fallen into using, and I was amazed at how much modern Ukrainian Katerina was understanding. I could repeat your conversation to you word for word, if you wanted."
Mother looked at him in helpless bafflement. "But I could have sworn I said... I needed a..." And as she spoke, her hands moved exactly as they would have had she been grasping the tool and using it on a berry. Now Ivan remembered that she had made that gesture, and saw what he had not noticed before, that Katerina's hands imitated it. So what was passing was mechanical knowledge, not language, and Katerina apparently recognized the tool when she saw it, because her hands already knew how to use it. Not only that, but she had got such a feel for the kitchen already that she knew where in the kitchen Mother would have put such a tool.
Ivan tried to express this to them, but now language did fail them all, language and, perhaps, philosophy, since neither Mother nor Katerina had the male obsessiveness with mechanical cause-the mechanisms by which tings worked in the natural world. What they cared for was intentional cause, motivation, purpose. When they wanted to know how to do something, it was because they intended to do it and needed to know. While Ivan wanted to know how things worked precisely because he couldn't do them himself and he felt a need to understand everything around him. IN both cases, it was a matter of trying to be in control of the surrounding world. For Ivan, the question came up immediately: Was this thing between Mother and Katerina something all women could do? Or only these two women? While to them, all that mattered was that they were in the kitchen together, and they liked and understood each other despite the language barrier, and the mechanism, as long as it worked, was unimportant.'
I know that I have communicated to someone much as Katerina communicated with Ivan's Mother. I'll use hand gestures to show what I mean rather than try and verbalize it. Especially when I can't remember the word I am looking for. The way Ivan describes the difference between how a woman thinks, and why they ask things, and the way a man think and why he'll ask thinks was beautiful! I know guys have their own language with one another, but a girl not only has a language but a way of being. It's no wonder guys are always so frustrated by a group of girls! The book continues on to talk about a womans intuition. As the saying goes, 'The woman always knows.' Most of my closest friends are guys. The majority of them have a girlfriend, or a girl they are aiming for, and I can always tell when they are texting them, or when the phone call they are ignoring is from that specific person. I can always tell when something is going to happen with a girl, or when one of my boys are smitten by someone, if it is love, etc. I don't know if that is just me, or if all women can do that... but I like it.
No comments:
Post a Comment