In the poem ‘Loveliest of Trees’, at the age of twenty, with only fifty years remaining of his allotted span, he says:
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.[7]
The spring blossom has turned in his mind to the snow of winter – a chilly symbol of mortality. The mixture of appreciation, thoughtfulness and regret comes close to the heart of the meaning of aware.
The cycle of the seasons, with growth, maturity and death exhibited in falling petals and dying leaves, is the traditional way to demonstrate aware, but it applies throughout life. A glimpse of a faded photograph on an old woman’s mantelpiece showing her as a young bride; the dry, curled pages of a precious childhood book; a crisp, shrivelled leaf about to crumble away into nothingness – all these could inspire the same wistful sense of inescapable mortality.
There is sadness, but it is a calm, resigned sadness, and it is coupled with a humble acceptance of the beauty of existence. Perhaps the whole concept might seem maudlin at first glance, except that the concentration is not on death and the end of everything but on the fact of its existence. It is a bittersweet emotion but essentially a positive and life-affirming one.
Cocok
(Javanese)
A perfect fit
Speakers of English, it seems, would like to be seen as a tolerant, non-judgemental, open-minded lot. We have the phrases and proverbs to prove it: ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison’, ‘Each to his own’, ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice’. We are not going to be dogmatic about what is best or worst, we are saying: people have their own preferences, and we respect them.
But if the non-judgemental self-image were true – if we really were so unwilling to lay down the law and tell other people what they should think – surely we would have a single word to express the idea, rather than having to rely on a few hackneyed clichés? A word we could use, for example, if someone asked us if we knew a good restaurant, or if a book was worth reading, or whether a particular model of car was any good.
As it is, we can say the restaurant, the book or the car are good, or bad, or somewhere in between, and we may think we’re being helpful. But the truth is that you may hate the sort of food that someone else enjoyed in the restaurant, you may be bored by the book that they found fascinating, and you may find the car that they drive and love a bit uncomfortable and old-fashioned. We each have our preferences.
What we need is a word like the Javanese cocok (cho-CHOCH, with the final ch pronounced as in the Scottish loch).
An inadequate translation into English might be ‘suitable’, although cocok can be either an adjective or a verb: a thing can be cocok or it can cocok. I could say that the restaurant, or the book, or the car would be cocok for you – that you would like them. But that is only scratching the surface of this fascinating and beautiful word. One leading anthropologist has suggested that cocok means to fit like a key in a lock, or to be exactly right, like the medicine that cures a disease. Javanese villagers might say that their greatest ambition for their children is that they should find a job which is cocok. If two people agree in such a way that the view of each one not only supports the other but brings to it subtleties and nuances that the other person had not thought of, then their opinions will be cocok.
In its purest sense, the word means that two things fit together so perfectly that each one gains meaning and value from the other: together, they are greater than the sum of their parts. It has its philosophical roots in Kejawen, a Javanese synthesis of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and animism, which sees the whole of creation as an intricate fitting together of its disparate parts – everything visible and invisible, past, present and future. That is the aim both of the individual soul and of creation itself; everything that is cocok is part of a greater, eternal metaphysical harmony.
If that sounds a rather grandiose way to express a preference for one restaurant over another, a liking for a particular book, or the choice of one car above all others, then that’s probably because you haven’t bought into the concept. The Javanese themselves might use cocok to describe their food, their clothing, or even their government. And, after all, however good a restaurant meal may be, left alone it will simply congeal and go mouldy; eaten, it will become part of you, while you will have a satisfied, fulfilled feeling of well-being and grow strong and healthy.
But perhaps if English speakers can’t accept the world view from which the word comes, then English doesn’t really need the word. Certainly, anyone who asks in English if a car is any good will look a bit strangely at you if you tell them it’s cocok; maybe the sense of oneness with the harmony of the eternal universe is a cultural step too far for us to take in our daily lives.
Except …
If you are lucky enough to have found the partner who is the one person in the world with whom you can envisage spending your life, one who understands you and feels like part of you, then you might one night murmur in his or her ear that they are truly cocok and explain what the word means. And then just wait for the result. It beats flowers or chocolates.
Duende
(Spanish)
Visceral or spiritual feeling evoked by the arts
William Wordsworth observed that poetry had its roots in ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’[8] – that a poet might experience the heights and depths of emotion, but he needed time and calm to transform them into poetry. His words have become inseparable from the English Romantic movement. But they remain only a pale and partial shadow of the Spanish concept of duende (duEND-eh), which is the soul or spirit at the heart of music, poetry or any artistic performance.
In Spanish and Portuguese mythology, the word referred to a sprite or fairy that might play tricks on travellers astray in the forest, or sometimes to a more sinister red-robed skeletal figure who carried a scythe and presaged death. Those whom he visited could sometimes be inspired, in their fear and mental turmoil, to heights of creative brilliance. That quality of inspiration is at the heart of the word’s more modern meaning.
According to the twentieth-century Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, other inspirations for creativity – the muses or the angels – come from outside the artist, but duende comes from deep within. It needs, Lorca said, ‘the trembling of the moment, and then a long silence’ – a little like Wordsworth’s thought, then. Duende, though, goes much further. For artists or performers, it may produce a moment of shattering brilliance, a complete absorption in their art, like the abandoned ecstasy of a Spanish dancer; and without it, the most technically perfect production will be lifeless, without soul. In his 1933 lecture, ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’,[9] Lorca tells the story of an accomplished singer being told: ‘You have a voice, you understand style, but you’ll never ever succeed because you have no duende.’
7
A. E. Housman,
8
Preface to
9
Federico García Lorca, ‘Play and Theory
of the Duende’, published in