8. Helter-skelter

An article published in the Journal of Consumer Research claims that polyglots change their personality as they switch languages.

My experience is in broad agreement with such a finding:

I cry only in French.
I calculate only in English.
I demand and give orders only in Mandarin.
I laugh only in Spanish.
I apologize only in Italian.
I borrow money only in Esperanto.
And I lie only in pre-Babel languages.

Meaning I have numerous probable states, each sharing limited responsibility for the discrepancies found between what I say and what I do. Many egos, each in turn temporarily in charge and matching the cultural cosmogony under which I operate at a given time.

Languages are forces able to mold multiple pathological patterns within the individual. That’s what the research found.

For the untrained observer, there may be commonalities mediating all these personality outbreaks, but each time an alphabet is formed, the secret and underlying desires of the person are affected - delineated in a new rhythmic atmosphere.

Polyglots, therefore, may have some problems identifying their inner-most self. A single glance in the mirror can tell me which countenance words today will choose to fetishize; but tomorrow is another day…

In this linguistic kaleidoscope of personalities resonating with each new shuffling of grammars, I can create versions of myself with the artistic innocence typical of hyperbolic geometry.

The tumbling and reflections of all my objects of attachment give me the shape of a crystallographic structure: an impersonal, inviolable individual thanks to quick rotating permutations.

I can even break at will my own silences into new symmetrical combinations, leaving tormentors behind in the wasteland of their stagnant monolingual attributes.

My parents lived in the United States until I was about four years old. At home, they only spoke French. Whenever I stayed with them, I also spoke French. Even though I was too young to socialize outside by myself, I somehow mysteriously managed to learn English. I have no memory of this apprenticeship. I only remember being careful about never showing to the family I could function as well as an Anglo-Saxon.

They realized I was fluent in English much too late, about ten years too late, when I became a hippy openly and indiscriminately reading Herbert Marcuse, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg.

By that time, I had understood my mother’s clandestine nature, my father’s mental topology, I knew where their vanishing points lay, and why their fragments of humanity could sometimes escape my sensor-sweeps.

The multiple portable com-stations seated in my brain had had all the needed leisure to identify and divert the kinetic energy emitted by my parents’ speech signatures, and this enabled me to rocket skyward the day I chose the timelessness of exile.

I did not explain my reasons. I simply blasted upward. And regrouped my numerous selves in a single drop of blood – that's all a tiny LSD blotter can absorb.

And I swallowed the acid.

At maximum acceleration, I headed for a flurry of strident and not-so-sentient pop festivals. I damaged my life-support circuitry, explaining why I never transmitted status reports in any of the abecedarian formats my genitors would have found intelligible.

My vernaculars having gone totally pell-mell, I became not as clever as I once had been.

Helter-skelter, I sang.

Truly hoping, dear, you'll have an easier adolescence than mine, I kiss you goodnight.

Laolao