Yearning

I’m not doing well these days because there’s a lot on my mind and that makes it very hard to concentrate. My thoughts are like the worst crossroads in Portland, Maine, where five - or maybe ten - streets meet and the stoplights twist in the wind so you can never be sure if it’s all right to turn left or the oncoming traffic is going to slam into you. All I can do is hope for relief, maybe by distracting myself from what’s going on.

To that purpose, I’ve decided to create a scrapbook. Yes, that’s not something people do anymore, but I like the term, and I’ve loved scraps all my life. It’s no mystery to me, but you probably aren’t interested in the reason, so I’ll keep it to myself. Just know that scraps have an extraordinarily deep meaning for me.

Now my scrapbook in itself is not extraordinary, and all I hope to accomplish with it is to leave a record of this feeling I’ve been having of wanting something, desiring, hoping to accomplish or find or learn from it. In essence, I want to record the feeling more than my success in dealing with it. I yearn to understand what’s going on, inside me, inside my town, the world. I yearn to make sense of things because if I stop to think about why I’ve developed this longing, I’ll definitely end up in the center of that crossroads, in the middle of five or ten streets, and will never survive.

Yearning is many things, resembles many other states of mind, and I’ve set out, in this scrapbook project, to create a kind of word blanket to huddle under and think. Some of you might be familiar with the crazy quilt, made of countless scraps of fabric assembled with an array of stitches. The stitches are intended to be a learning process but also to show what the sewer has learned, what skills she has acquired. The material that follows is my attempt to pull together bits of my yearning, joined with no real pattern or structure. I’ve just stitched them together, free association style.

I’m starting out with a verb that just popped into my head, probably left over from a poem. It’s in Galician. When I started looking it up, a world of synonyms and definitions appeared. Now I’m pretty good in the language, but certainly learned a couple new vocabulary items. I’ll insert a few translations in case anyone comes across my scrapbook after I’m gone.

devecer [to yearn, wish for, crave]

1

(devecer por)

Desexar con ansiedade. [to desire, anxiously]

Cando era mozo devecía por ir ás festas. [When I was young I loved going to parties, lived for them.]

SINÓNIMOS [synonyms] adoecer, alangrear, eslumecer, rabiar, reloucar

2

Ir a menos.[to decrease]

A finais do verán comezan a devecer os días.[At summer’s end, the days start getting shorter.]

SINÓNIMOS [synonyms] acurtarse, degaxar, desgaxar, minguar, rever

~ Dicionario da Real Academia Galega [Dictionary of the Royal Galician Academy]

So this word for yearning, in Galician, becomes many more words or threads or paths, and on top of that the English doesn’t conform to a single word either. Craving is a sweet sorrow, perhaps, but I’ll get to that later. There are so many ways to deal with desire, and some of them are not lacking in pain.

Now my yearning turns to a distant memory of a song. It wasn’t one I particularly liked, but it was catchy. A few lines keep coming to mind, accompanied by the urgency of the melody:

[Verse 3]

Sometimes I stare in space, tears all over my face

I can't explain it, don't understand it

I ain't never felt like this before

Now, that funny feeling has me amazed

Don't know what to do, my head's in a haze

[Chorus]

It's like a heat wave

Yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah (But it's all right, girl)

~ “Heat Wave,” Martha and the Vandellas, 1963

It’s not easy to figure out what the singer really wants, but it appears she can only keep going with her need to have the man in her life; maybe not so much because of him as because the feeling is giving her pleasure. She enjoys her desire, despite the frustration it causes. That reminds me of a poem by Rosalía de Castro, whom you may have heard me mention before. In the poem, the speaker removes the the thorn or nail in her heart and the pain subsides, but she is left with no pain and that hurts. She yearns to suffer in the way she was used to suffering.

Among my scraps I found a word I’d forgotten, but now resurrect and want to consider its value:

Sehnsucht. German."longing", "desire", "yearning", or "craving". Difficult to translate accurately. [adapted from Wikipedia]

That is straightforward enough, but just like the Galician devecer, it is much more than three or four synonyms or translations. Looking further, I find:

Sehnsucht is a deep emotional state; it describes an intense longing, craving, yearning or “intensely missing” something or someone. English translations do not do this term justice; it is a much more emotionally charged word in German.

Someone can possess Sehnsucht for a faraway place – a deep yearning to be somewhere else, one that consumes your thoughts. Someone could also have Sehnsucht for another person; two lovers separated by distance may possess this sort of craving for each other. Someone could also have Sehnsucht for a different life – one that occupies their dreams while their reality is mediocre.

[Word of the Week]

Notice the issue of translation: all languages have ways to express desire in the face of absence or loss, but the term used in one of them doesn’t have a good equivalent in other languages. They’re all ‘almost but never good enough’, to paraphrase the Ariana Grande song. I can’t help wondering if almost really isn’t all we need, that we should just be satisfied with that.

The problem is that Sehnsucht brings me back to Galician and thus to Portuguese. Clearly those languages, which are pretty much overlapping, also understand longing. Yet once more I read that we can’t expect an equivalent in any other language. I’m referring to saudade or soidade:

Saudade (plural saudades) is a deep, untranslatable Portuguese and Galician word for a melancholic longing or nostalgic yearning for an absent person, place, or thing, often mixed with the bittersweet understanding that it might never return, blending sadness for the loss with happiness for the past experience. It's a profound feeling of missing someone or something intensely, from loved ones to a past time, sometimes described as a "pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy". [AI overview]

And, yes, the pleasure of pain is here in this term as well. It’s as if there’s no other way to be happy and there is no way out. If I were to subscribe to Ramón Piñeiro’s filosofía da saudade, which I’m not going to include here because I’ve misplaced the book, I’d say it’s a quality of the intimate character of Galicians and Portuguese, like a genetic feature. No, Don Ramón, I’m not buying that.

However, as I struggle to make sense of these fragments, wondering why they have come to me in different languages, I realize that a person can yearn in more than one way, using many words. It just depends on what we do with that feeling. Devezo, Sehnsucht, Saudade… often include loss or absence, brokenness. Yes, I feel broken, even though the cars speeding across that intersection of five or ten streets have yet to run me over. I have just enough time to include one more scrap, and cry for joy that I’ve found it among the huge pile nearby. This scrap nudges me and asks to be included. Its form of yearning goes beyond a single heart to something bigger, and translates the longing into hope.

I need hope right now, so I’ll make my strength last long enough to add one last scrap and will try not to let myself think I no longer have any:

….

Here on the pulse of this new day

You may have the grace to look up and out

And into your sister's eyes, into

Your brother's face, your country

And say simply

Very simply

With hope

Good morning.

~ Maya Angelou, Inaugural Poem