This is the first issue of Published Drafts. Expect topics as random as the publishing intervals.
—
There's something delightful in discovering a word that doesn't exist in your mother tongue, one to which no translation does justice. It feels like you've beaten the game, stumbled upon something an entire civilisation overlooked.
Often, the indescribable is the result of ignorance, the word exists, you just don't know it; occasionally, it's that the language we inherited is one word short. The Spanish wrote that it "jumped" to describe the bounce of the first rubber ball they saw.
Europeans hadn't seen things bounce before - imagine the challenge, upon their return, of explaining what they had observed. Spanish was one word too short, Spaniards one concept too poor.
—
I find introspection a frustrating endeavour because it disproportionately confronts me to that linguistic shallowness. I don't know why. Maybe I just don’t know the words. Maybe collective puritanism prevented the words from emerging. Or the inherently solitary experience of one's feelings and the absence of shared, discernible reference points would make them meaningless or impractical anyway. Or maybe it's just that I lack self-awareness to the point I wouldn't be able to put the right words on whatever mood I'm currently in even if I was staring at them.
—
Reading Ruth Margalit's incredibly touching eulogy for her mother, I stumbled upon the Hebrew word malkosh. It refers to the "last" rain, "a word that only means something in places like Israel, where there’s a clear distinction between winter and the long, dry stretch of summer".
As Margalit points out, malkosh can only be used in retrospect, but by definition you know it'll come. As you stand under the warm raindrops however, you have no way of knowing with certainty that those drops are the last ones you'll be seeing for a few months. But sometimes you can still feel that this isn't just any other rainy day. You can feel that it's malkosh.
You may very well be wrong - but there's an incredible truth to that feeling. As today marks the return to relative normality in France, I started thinking of the various malkosh this pandemic accelerated. Malkosh that no one saw coming, that no one got a chance to sense.
I'm probably way worse at sustaining relationships remotely than the majority of people my age, but with dampened prospects for travel & public reunions, many budding friendships will die prematurely. Romances too. Some only got to say goodbye when it should have been adieu.
In some cases, the unpredictable nature of malkosh is what allows us to enjoy those moments. The last drinks before growing apart or the sex just before moving on wouldn't be the same if we were certain they were never to be repeated. But this time we weren't allowed the organic randomness of the upcoming malkosh. It was just very sudden, for more or less everyone, at the same time.
—
Yesterday was the last day of our lockdown in France. This wasn't really malkosh. We knew it was coming, but we also knew when. It also wasn't malkosh because today isn't the start of a new season. Lockdown may start easing, but much of the haze remains. The hardest bit may be ahead of us, as we realise the things we were longing for are yet to return & the people we missed most might not really be the same.
During the lockdown, a friend wrote to me saying "I’ve found the monotony quite distressing, as if up until now I’ve only felt like I was living a life because I managed to create constant change". She put it better than I could have. She also encapsulated the incredible restlessness I've long found our generation filled with. I hope this crisis will prompt us to sublimate it, and mark the malkosh of an era of commentary, ceding the stage to a generation of creators.
—
If you liked this first issue, feel free to share it or forward it.
—
As a closing note, I wanted to share a draft for one of Calder’s mobiles (I might make a tradition of this). The mobiles share some of our restlessness: both fixed in space and in perpetual motion, seemingly unstructured but ultimately balanced.
Thanks for sharing!