In Between

Diotima - Plato's Symposium

Anyone who has interacted closely with a speaker(s) of another language for any sustained period likely has no dearth of miscommunication anecdotes rich with the small triumphs and humiliations that follow verbal collisions.

International business has developed protocol for cross-linguistic exchange that includes polyglot professionals and translators and something like a Google Translate can help average monolinguistic citizens live-chat with fellow gamers during online raids or write atrociously disjointed emails to an uncle’s second cousin in France looking to come westward to study English but there aren’t many solutions for in the flesh communication.

Trying to buy your daily pastry from the staunchly non-English-speaking women with huge biceps and floury hands behind the counter of your neighborhood Ukrainian bakery can be an Olympian struggle. Then, there are restaurant kitchens. Sweeping horizontally across cuisine types and geography, the monopoly of kitchen jobs held by Spanish speakers in the U.S. has created compelling linguistic environments in kitchens small and grand.

According to the National Restaurant Association, the industry is one of if not the largest private sector employer in America, netting around 600bil in profits last year, comprising 4% of the GDP and employing about 13 million people, challenging a large chunk of them to build some kind of communication-bridge. Whether you’re a sleepy morning commuter who wants a coffee and a bun from impermeable Ukrainians or you’re a server and need a line cook to hold an ingredient to avoid sending a customer into anaphylactic shock, you’re going to need to communicate.

Often, what isn’t related in hand gestures and exaggerated facial expressions also isn’t spoken in English or Ukrainian, English or Spanish, but in some middle tongue between the two. In kitchens, the resulting hybrid language is called “Kitchen Spanish” (visit the eponymous website to learn more about this marvelously useful chimera.)

We’re familiar enough with the concept of lingua franca; it develops in geographical regions where people from different linguistic cultures coexist or in pockets of confrontation like a restaurant kitchen. What’s relatively undocumented is the ubiquitous and persistent generalized process of adjustment and the inception of an intermediary (language, art form, design style) between two poles.

Even speaking to someone with moderate English proficiency, we often modify our language. One might say: “make” rather than “throw” a party, or “do exercise” instead of “go to the gym” to a speaker of a Romance language. It’s also common, if insulting folly, to order Chinese food in a fractured jumble of nouns and verbs with just a whisper of an Asian accent. In either case, it’s not quite English that’s being spoken. Any CELTA certified ESL instructor (probably others too) will tell you that this is not the way to teach but we’re not teaching, we’re communicating, in a space between two languages.

This in-between space is created by confrontation in many theaters. Going back to restaurants, in the ZAGAT guide for NYC, listings under “Italian” will include, without differentiating, restaurants serving two distinct types of food: Italian-Italian and Italian-American. Italian-American is the cuisine hybridization of Italian and American cookery traditions and is part of the legitimate cultural heritage of people of Italian descent living in the United States. The Italian chefs and staff who run Italian-Italian restaurants would take major issue with the stuffed calzones and baked lasagna at a Brooklyn Vinnie’s being labeled: Italian. It’s not quite Italian food that’s being served. It’s material evidence of a new form resulting from the confrontation of two distinct entities, food entities, all delicious.

 

Likewise, the Mediterranean homes speckling the hillsides of the Southwest, which so many families enjoy living in, architecturally, aren’t Mediterranean or American Modern, they’re in-between. There’s space here too for comparisons to pop science and pop art - that products and practitioners are in-between - but as these issues are contentious and here “between” is often seen as “less than” we’ll avoid protracted discussion and move on to speculation about the significance of in-between states.

Perhaps, new forms born in negotiation between existing bodies speaks to something fundamental in the nature of human beings. Humans seem to be constantly adjusting and amending ourselves to ourselves and the outside world; in our private conscious minds can be found fodder for the personalities of ten men, often, outgoing behavior flourishes around gregarious friends, while we’re somber and reflective in pensive company. Romantic relationships are frequently described as being successful when two people can learn to exist both as individuals and harmoniously as an adjusted pair.

In Plato’s Symposium, party guests, including: Phaedrus, Aristophanes and of course Socrates agree to discourse in praise of the god Love (Eros), to pass the evening soberly, as they’re hung-over from the previous night’s celebrations. Socrates relates the speeches of Diotima, a woman from Mantinea, who taught him that Love is able to constantly seek what is good and beautiful because he is between god and mortal. A great spirit of in-between, Love is between: wisdom and ignorance, wealth and destitution. Any knowledge of the true form of beauty comes from Love, that “always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes.[1]”

 

To some, life is a constant state of becoming; humans search for the best, truest ways to be ourselves, and in this search we bond with what we see as good or beautiful, material and immaterial, and through this process, negotiate new selves and new ideas, and are improved. In love, we create, through reproduction, which allows the best parts of ourselves a mortal’s chance at immortality, and we create immaterially (for Socrates/Plato, loftier enterprise) through art, philosophy, and laws, which endure to make life better for posterity. It is the state of in-between and the desire for good, truth and beauty that spurs all of man’s most inspired creations.

Kitchen Spanish is probably not an exalted art, fruit of Eros, but it’s certainly a product of this in-between state, reminding us of a process of negotiation and adjustment through which new forms are born and we progress. It allows us to communicate, and might save your life if your hyperactive immune system attempts to deprive your lungs of oxygen when you ingest peanuts, and that’s certainly a good thing.

Post Script:

Anyone who needs to convince an intransigent homophobe that a man’s love for another man is a natural and beautiful thing has a powerful tool in this B.C.E. dialogue and should present the afflicted party with it as soon as possible. Also, John Cameron Mitchell fans will recognize the basis for Hedwig’s "Origin of Love" in Aristophanes’ speech, so that’s a treat.

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[1] Plato. “Symposium,” trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett: 1997) 457.