Every two weeks, a language dies.
The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.
In 1974 Angela Loij died. She was one of the last Ona Indians from Tierra del Fuego, way out there at the edge of the world. She was the last one who spoke their language.
Angela sang to herself, for no one else, in that language no longer recalled by anyone but her:
I’m walking in the steps
of those who have gone.
Lost, am I.
In times gone by, the Onas worshipped several gods. Their supreme god was named Pemaulk.
Pemaulk meant “word.”
February 22. SILENCE
In Istanbul, known in those days as Constantinople, Paul the Silentiary finished his fifteen love poems in the year 563.
The Greek poet owed his name to his work. He was in charge of silence in the palace of Emperor Justinian.
In his own bed, too.
One of his poems says:
Your breasts against my breast,
your lips on my lips.
Silence is the rest:
Tongues that never pause I detest.
February 23. THE BOOK OF MARVELS
One day like this in 1455, Europe’s first book printed with moveable type came off the press and it was a Bible.
The Chinese had been printing books for two centuries, but today Johannes Gutenberg initiated the mass circulation of the most gripping novel in literature.
Novels tell but don’t explain, and there is no reason why they should. The Bible does not say what Noah ate to reach the age of seven hundred by the time of the Flood, nor what method Abraham’s wife used to become pregnant at ninety, nor does it clarify whether Balaam’s ass, when arguing with its owner, spoke in Hebrew.
February 24. A LESSON IN REALISM
In 1815 Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from his prison on the island of Elba and set off to regain the French throne.
On he marched, accompanied by a steadily growing army, while his former official organ, Le Moniteur Universel, swore that the people of France were eager to die to protect King Louis XVIII. The paper said Napoleon had “sullied and raped the soil of the fatherland,” called him “foreign outlaw, usurper, traitor, plague, bandit chief, enemy of France who dares befoul the land from which he was expelled,” and announced: “This will be his final act of insanity.”
In the end the king fled, no one died for him, and Napoleon took his seat on the throne without firing a shot.
The same daily went on to report:
The happy news of Napoleon’s arrival in the capital has caused a sudden and unanimous outburst of joy, everyone is hugging, cheers for the Emperor fill the air, in every eye are tears of bliss, all rejoice at the return of France’s hero and swear the deepest obedience to His Majesty the Emperor.
February 25. NIGHT OF THE KUNA
The Panamanian government passed a law commanding “the settlement into civilized life of all existing barbarous, semi-barbarous and savage tribes in the country.”
Its spokesman announced: “The Kuna Indians will never again paint their noses, only their cheeks, and they will no longer put rings in their noses, only in their ears. And they will no longer dress in molas, rather in civilized attire.”
The religious ceremonies of Kuna women and men, which offended God, were outlawed, as was their mania for governing themselves in their own traditional way.
In 1925, on the night of the twenty-fifth day of the month of the iguana, the Kunas used their knives on all the policemen who forbade them from living their lives.
Ever since, Kuna women wear rings in their painted noses and dress in their molas, a splendid art form done by needle and thread instead of paintbrushes. And Kuna women and men continue holding their ceremonies and assemblies on the two thousand islands where they defend, by hook or by crook, their shared kingdom.
February 26. MY AFRICA
At the end of the nineteenth century, the European colonial powers met in Berlin to divvy up Africa.
Long and hard was the fight over colonial booty, the jungles, rivers, mountains, lands, subsoil, until new borders were drawn, and on this day in 1885 a General Act was signed “in the Name of God Almighty.”
The European lords had the good taste not to mention gold, diamonds, ivory, oil, rubber, tin, cacao, coffee or palm oil.
They outlawed calling slavery by its name.
They referred to the companies that provided human flesh to the world market as “charitable institutions.”
They cautioned that they acted out of a desire to “regulate the conditions most favorable to the development of trade and civilization.”
And if there were any doubt, they clarified that they were concerned with “furthering the moral and material wellbeing of the native populations.”
Thus Europe drew a new map for Africa.
Not a single African was present at that summit, not even as decoration.
February 27. EVEN BANKS ARE MORTAL
“All greenness shall perish,” prophesied the Bible.
In 1995 Barings Bank, the oldest in England, faced bankruptcy. A week later it was sold for the sum total of one (1) pound sterling.
The bank had been the financier of the British Empire.
Independence and the foreign debt were born as twins in Latin America. All of us were born owing. In our corner of the world, Barings Bank purchased nations, rented founding fathers, financed wars.
And believed itself immortal.
February 28. WHEN
When he was descending a spiral staircase onboard ship, it occurred to him that protein molecules might travel the same way, in a spiral over a wavy base. The thought turned out to be a scientific breakthrough.
When he discovered that automobiles were the reason he coughed so much in the city of Los Angeles, he invented the electric car, which was a commercial failure.
When he came down with kidney disease and medicine did not help, he prescribed himself healthy food and bombardments of vitamin C. He got better.
When the bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was invited to speak at a scientific conference in Hollywood. And when he discovered that he had not said what he wanted to say, he went on to lead the global campaign against nuclear weapons.
When he received the Nobel Prize for the second time, Life magazine decried it as an insult to all Americans. By then the government of the United States, suspecting him of communist sympathies, had taken away his passport twice, or perhaps it was because he said that God was an unnecessary idea.
His name was Linus Pauling. He was born along with the twentieth century.
February 29. NOT GONE WITH THE WIND
Today’s day tends to drop off the calendar, but every four years it finds its way back.
It is the strangest day of the year.
But there was nothing strange about this day in Hollywood in 1940.
In routine fashion, on February 29 Hollywood gave nearly all of its awards, eight Oscars, to Gone with the Wind, which was a long sigh of nostalgia for the good old days of slavery.