Bloqueo

I am writing this post from Maryknoll, where I have stayed all day today. A full morning of classes, as per usual, then I attended Mass with Joshua, Charles, and the Korean students, with two of the Korean priests concelebrating. The main celebrant preached in Spanish and Korean. Then, a treat: lunch with the Maryknoll community. I spent some time this afternoon with Father Ken, to whom I have gone for confession, and who is something of a spiritual guide for me here. I am so grateful to him for his good cheer, his empathy, his patience and understanding, and his willingness to wear a New York Mets jacket even in these times of mediocrity.

One more day of classes until recess. Four more class periods until a week of rest and renewal. It is the right time for a recess. My mind is tired. I do not know how it was for Joshua, but for me I experienced a few mental blockages, especially toward the end of the second period and the fourth period. My brain just could not, would not, release the words to my mouth. We are on the last lesson in this textbook, a review of the three past tenses we have learned (preterite, imperfect, perfect preterite), and for some reason I could not toggle from preterite to imperfect when we switched the sense of time. I have said this before, and I will say this again: it is one thing to learn a language (aprender) and comprehend everything you learn. It is another thing, a much different thing, to acquire the language (adquirir), to absorb it into your tissues and let it live and breathe in you. You have a different sense of time in Spanish than you do in English because you have different grammar to shape different thought forms to construct that different felt sense. The subtleties are not completely identical. Small wonder I have a hard time integrating these grammatical rules into organic speech. I am trying to graft a different way of perceiving and expressing reality into an organism conditioned to perceive and express it in the only way that it has acquired deeply over 41 years.

In spite of the difficulty and deeply ingrained resistance, I want to overcome the mental blocks. I could not go over or around or under those blocks after too much mental heavy lifting of them in conversation. Oh well. The class periods eventually came to end. The workouts ended. We will try again with renewed strength. And I can honestly say I gave everything I had until there was no more to give.

This evening I had planned to have dinner with a couple of the volunteers with the Mennonite Central Committee who were students earlier this year. They live several blocks south of Convento San Francisco, south of La Cancha. Alas, one of the housemates is sick, so it is prudent for them not to have company tonight. That vegetarian chili will have to wait a while. We will reschedule this social event; hopefully we will come together a couple of weeks from now. With travels to La Paz and Oruro lined up, next week is spoken for.