Found in Translation

...it's kind of an improv

I’ve been thinking lately about how the fundamental processes of life always involve translations. By this I mean both biological life — life as we’ve been taught to understand it as the successful expression of genes in forming and maintaining physical bodies — as well as life as we live it: How our work, daily activities and relationships represent who we are on the inside.

Let’s start with genetic expression, however, since it’s a decent model for many of the other kinds of translation that go into being alive.  

In conventional “scientific” understanding, the genes carried in our DNA help the body to synthesize proteins and then from these proteins the physical organs and structures we are made of.  If we’re missing any of the ingredients needed to make that translation from gene to physical structure, the translation between the two may change. For example, if during pregnancy our mothers do not get enough folic acid, this raises the likelihood of a baby being born with a neural tube defect like spina bifida. But the ability to translate our genes into a complete and functioning body doesn’t stop when we’re born. Not only do children require nutrients to make a healthy, successful translation between their genetic potential and their developing bodies, in effect we are being born all the time as we continue to form our bodies from the nutrients we take in. 

Beyond nutrition, all kinds of environmental factors can affect our genetic expression, that is, the translation of our genes into observable structures and capacities. Years ago I heard Joseph Chilton Pearce cite studies showing that in a developing fetus the proportion of the higher-function forebrain to the survival-oriented hindbrain is associated with the stress levels of the pregnant mother. Higher stress levels are associated with proportionately larger “reptilian" brains, resulting in faster reflexes, yes, but less impulse control and less capacity to think and reflect. His point was that if we want to continue evolving, we would do best to protect our mothers-to-be from excess stress. Other factors, I would imagine, can get progressively subtle. Whole aspects of human potential may be going unexpressed simply because the way we’ve structured our society doesn’t support their development. The potential exists, but the translation is impaired.

I’m starting with what we in this culture call “physical” because we’ve be trained to think that way: nutrients are added into a genetic “operating system” and the physical body is then an “output.” Of course, I have to wonder how this cultural habit and way of seeing — call it ‘materialism,’ broadly speaking — affects our social and biochemical environment and thus our development. It’s worth thinking about. However, turning food into a “physical body” is just one of life’s many translations. We eat, or our pregnant mothers did — and then what? 

Most of the time, we don’t think about the fact that we’re accomplishing something pretty amazing when we turn a ham sandwich or a bowl of lentil soup into our living bodies. It just seems to happen, if you’ll pardon the expression, “automatically”. Or so we’ve been given to understand. But I suspect that on the micro level, our cells are experiencing life as if they are performing great acts of heroism, engaging extravagant lovemaking, putting on cosmic light shows and dramas, experiencing struggles with poverty and privation… in other words I suspect that in effect all the stuff going on at large is happening at a smaller scale inside us, right this very minute. 

On another level, some of this activity is supporting the translation processes happening as you now read or hear these words, right now. You may even emerge changed in some way from the translation processes involved in reading or hearing this language. Like physical digestion and assimilation, our use of language may also seem to be “automatic” much of the time. However, the language translation process — converting outer words to inner meaning — wasn’t always “automatic”.  Like genes, words are code. Exactly how we translate that code is in many ways just as miraculous, and as commonplace, as the aforementioned conversion of lentil soup into Clifford, Paul or Cynthia. 

I get great reviews on my lentil soups, by the way. I think the flavor helps with the translation process. 

About words, we tend to forget that at one point they meant nothing to us. We couldn’t make the translation. Then we learned a language. Though few people remember it, observing young children makes clear that, far from being “automatic,” it takes considerable effort to begin translating the noises our caregivers are making into intelligible and a presumably shared language. Babies are highly motivated to do so, however. So, we see them struggle and play. Play being what a baby calls work. They often fail to “understand” what is said, and they make amusing “mistakes” in their production of language as well. Eventually they can translate the words of others into understandings and actions, and translate their own ideas, feelings, and desires into shareable language. And then a few years later, after learning a language, in this society at least, most people also learn how to decode language that has undergone another translation to appear in written form. If we’re lucky, our parents read to us, modeling the translation process from printed to spoken word. 

As we get older, for most people, using language starts to seem, once again, pretty much “automatic”. We become fluent in one or more languages. But the reason I put the word ‘automatic’ in quotes is there’s a big caveat to that, just like with the conversion of food into our living bodies being "automatic.” Processes that appear to be “automatic” actually took a lot of practice, focus and effort to get right. I mean, right now I’m using a facility with written language that took me decades to develop. I’m still translating, though. There’s a lot I wish I could say that I’m finding difficult to put into words. It’s actually not that easy to do this. You may be reading or hearing words, but it’s super important for you to understand that as you do, a lot is going unsaid. Between what I’m trying to express and what I’m actually able to put into words, there’s a gap, and at times it appears this gap is just as wide as the one between the bowl of soup and hummus I had for dinner last night and the fingers now typing on the keyboard the following day. In both cases, a translation problem has been overcome as best as I can currently manage. 

Of course, the gap between “soup & sandwich” and a human being, or between perception and expression represents both a challenge and an opportunity for discovery. A lot can happen in the spaces where our translations happen. That’s really where the action is. True, a lot can also be “lost in translation,” and as a result pieces of ourselves and capacities may seem to go unexpressed, at least for now. But the process of attempting to accomplish these translations, admittedly with various degrees of success, engages forces well beyond.

Let’s take a look at another example to see how this works. Many people have experienced music instruction, sometimes in schools. Some musicians are largely self-taught. Gaining any kind of facility as a vocalist or instrumental musician requires mastering numerous translations. Say it’s piano or guitar lessons. We hear sounds and patterns as we hit keys or strings in sequence. We learn to individualize our fingers’ movements on the keyboard or fretboard. At first the hand positions may seem strange and even uncomfortable. But over time we learn to recognize different chords, “notes,” or other notations on paper and to associate these with different sound patterns and hand movements. 

We practice these. After a while, some of these movements become, yes, “automatic.” The translation process feels less and less strained. As this happens, our instruments or voices have the potential to become more and more a vehicle for personal expression. It’s not just “a collection of notes” but something qualitatively different: It’s music. But we had to gain some facility with translation processes to make that happen — hearing, remembering, seeing, touch, and movement. All of these are translations. Beyond that, as with genetic expression, all kinds of things get factored in. Charlie Parker is quoted as saying, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” Music is born through us. We feel the emergence of it. It comes into the world. And it involves effort and practice and then eventually, it involves allowing it to just flow.

Likewise, we are more than a collection of cells doing things “automatically.” We’re people. Strange to say, but this needs emphasis right now. 

As for the classic child’s question: “Where do babies come from?” that can be perpetually updated to “Where are we emerging from now?” 

If we’re honest about it, we don’t have definitive, final answers to either of those questions. The best I can come up with in this writing, this essay, this attempted translation, is to say that we emerge as the products of ongoing process of creative translation. We emerge not from things but from the spaces where things interact. The spaces where such translations happen are not mere physical spaces but multidimensional interiors of unfathomable depth and scope. 

Any musician will tell you it’s not just the notes but the way their sequence and quality shapes the spaces among them. Likewise as I write it’s not the lines but what’s between them that will make it worth listening to, or reading. What I’m hoping to share here is “where I’m coming from”. Where I’m coming from is not a thing, it’s a space. Through many translations, I’m rendering a translation of that space, and I’m inviting you to see how it feels to share in it by making your own translations.

Going back a few steps here, it’s not about the soup, it’s what happens in its translation, what we become through it. It’s only a bit of a stretch to say that WE are the music that emerges from that translation, that amazing, ongoing virtuoso performance. 

And it’s not just our lovers but the space we make by being together that changes us.  Same goes with anything else, because that space is where the translations happen.