Cristo, el Verdadero Amigo

Cristo, el Verdadero Amigo: I saw this on the back of a van and felt the warmth well up in my heart, in a way I never could have in reaction to any of the English translations I can come up with. I hate to think of anyone without a verdadero amigo. It may as well be Cristo. Cristo will not let you down. 

Everyone else can, by dying on you, if in no other way. Maybe in Spanish it's trite to native speakers, I don't know, but the only languages I've begun to learn well enough to sense the nuances in were ancient ones. I could do better in those than in English in getting new understanding and insight.

Take "arête." As a translation "excellence" doesn't cut it. It's an entire concept of culture and appropriateness. Evidently "simpatico" works in that way, comprising an ill-defined world of meaning which is, at the same time, entirely clear in it's fuzziness, being in the realm almost of harmonics.

English to me is so screwed up in this respect: so many words are too concrete and commercialized to be useful. I think English can rock in the macrocosm of writing. It's an incredibly rich language in it's scope, with so many innovations and introductions from interesting places.

And there are multiple strains of Latinate and Romance stuff, roots, particles and words, on top of the Germanic base. Though it's a great language there are problems at the atomic level. "Virtue." That's another reasonable translation of "arête," but it sounds like a whole lot of un-fun.

It also doesn't begin to capture the idea. Let's say we stick with "arête" for now. It's a word in English as well or should be.  I don't think he came up with it but E. F. Schumacher wrote about convergent and divergent problems and the corresponding kinds of thinking needed to address them. 

My fear is that American English has gone all convergent. We want answers, solutions without trade-offs, because we define everything worth having in terms of control and productivity, so it's all about solving problems and durable goods. Fine, but try to show the value of el Verdadero Amigo.

In that arena, or the value of arête. It's pointless. Must everything have an obvious point? For me it's what's worth worrying about, all the divergent things, where there are trade-offs and uncertainties and indescribable aesthetic joys and where there's room for the truth of human inadequacy.

A linguist once told me that to be funny something had to be un-captured by language, somehow elusive of it, so the convergent world of capture and containment is also humorless. Soulless. The convergent world is important. You want bridges not to fall down but soul matters as well.

Even if you can never properly define it or put your finger on it, because it's soul that gets you to sympathy and kindness and, one hopes, perhaps, to el verdadero amigo, the true friend, or maybe true friendship, where one can be simpatico in the world, with happiness and with humor.