Proverbs: Řo e agoläm až lavísian

Řo e agoläm až lavísian.

“Nothing matters except dancing.”

Řo e agoläm (‘it’s not important’) may have been the first Verdurian sentence that really stuck in my head. It’s certainly one of the most useful phrases to learn in any language. We seem to have a cross-cultural tendency to use conversational tags like this to defuse unwarranted, unhelpful or unsavoury anxieties, and switch communal focus either to something more pressing (“It’s not important. What really matters is…”), or, ironically, something more fun (“It doesn’t matter. Let’s go and get some ice cream.”).

The Verdurian reflex is particularly useful in that, due to the language’s syntactically fluid adjectives, it can be either specific (‘it/that is not important’) or general to the point of nihilism (‘there is no important thing’). Mandarin 没事儿 méi shìr has a similar flexibility, due to another feature shared with Verdurian, the freedom not to state a syntactic subject. In all these senses, řo e agoläm is a potentially worthy translation of Masha’s catchphrase, the dreary panacea of Chekhov’s Three Sisters ‒ “vsë ravno” or ‘all is the same’. Notoriously resistant to translation, it is glossed by one source as “it’s all the same, it doesn’t matter, (I) don’t care; anyway, still, in any case”, and is another phrase that has rattled around my head a lot, this one since my nihilistic teenage years!

Other good candidates for the Verdurian translation would have to include fsë e nenë, the most literal (‘all is the same’), clearly showing Verdurian’s Slavic influence. A lovely single word surfaces as an option: šinenë – monotonous [‘all same’]. I can imagine Masha muttering it wearily, with no grammatical scaffolding at all, as her sisters exclaim “Soan mažtanan, soan mažtanan, otál fruece dy tana epam!” (To the city, to the city, as soon as ever we can!)

If only Chekhov had heard of ice cream. Or had danced a little more…

Dancing seems to be the cultural lifeblood of Almea. Perhaps the most vivid expression of this is the central position of cauč, dance both cosmic and physical, in Endajué, the chief religion of the Xurnese civilisation to Verduria’s south. But Almeans across the planet seem to love to dance.

An Endajué faithful engaging in a physical expression of the cauč.
Image © Mark Rosenfelder

As a musician, I think practically about these things, and know that wherever Almean dancing is mentioned (frequently and often) there is probably some sort of music going on too ‒ no smoke without fire. Nevertheless it is my sense from many Almean texts that it is the dancing that really gets the attention.

When I grew up we had the internet, so I tend to find that the bodies of my generation move, in general, like forgotten old farm machinery. The 70s and 80s seem to my mind’s eye, by contrast, like one long disco, and perhaps this generational story goes a little way to explain my perception of a zealous Almean interest in dance. (It may be, in fact, that dance is an art form particularly diminished by modern living, and that Almeans are only as interested in dance as people here used to be, until we had a way to endlessly entertain practically every part of our neural architecture without lifting a muscle anywhere except in our hands and eyes.)

I was lucky enough to have an insight into a culture which did wholeheartedly embrace dance when I spent a few weeks volunteering with a theatre project in Lucknow, India, in 2011. The group of us who were visiting were invited to a party, at which we were thoroughly schooled in thrilling routines learned from Bollywood films for well over an hour, to the point of delighted, sweat-streaming exhaustion. Our hosts, still raring to go, then turned the tables: “Great, now you show us some of your English dances!”

We did the Macarena like a convention of C3P0s made of ham, and whilst it was a laugh I don’t think any of us had ever been more embarrassed of ourselves. It wasn’t actually (or principally) our bodies that were inept ‒ our project focused on the differently abled, and some of the bodies who were vastly outdancing us showed disabilities and disadvantages of various kinds ‒ but somehow, our spirits lacked the practice of humbly throwing themselves into a physical nirvana of rhythm. In this practice, we needed guidance, and were not ready or qualified to guide.

Someone managed to negotiate a switch back to the Bollywood routines and the evening melted back into an exhilarating, blood-pumping river of joy.

I’m sure that interest in dancing fluctuates in a realistic fashion across Almea, and wouldn’t want to make too many sweeping cultural statements! I’m not even sure the sentence which inspired this post (found in the Verdurian Dictionary under až ‘except’) is a Verdurian proverb, or simply an example sentence ‒ though it has the feel of the commonly spoken about it to me.

Still, I like to think that Almeans are dropping hints for us here and there to get out of our virtual boxes and groove for a bit. We haven’t been uploaded to the cloud yet… And as I discovered in a Lucknow garage, my whole body and mind subsumed in the frenetic pulse of a shared ritual, dancing really can be the most agoläm of diversions. I think it’d have done Masha some good.

See also: agoläm