We once knew someone who didn’t believe in mangoes.
We were wondering, idly and aloud, whether people have ever believed or will ever believe that “blue raspberries” are a real thing because so many drinks and candies and stuff carry that name and he, with great confidence, said that “people will totally believe in blue raspberries” because “they already believe in mangoes.”
We thought he was joking, but it was an odd enough statement that we asked a few clarifying questions like “Are you joking?” and “For real, are you joking?”
He was not.
He believed, we’ll keep this short, that “mango” was a flavor created in a lab somewhere that had no natural, earthly referent. It was, in his mind, kind of like “bubblegum” flavor. “Mango” existed as an artificial concoction of molecules corresponding to a particular taste sensation, but “mangoes” were nothing and nonsense.
It’s rare that we’re met with this kind of wrong out in the world, so we didn’t really know what to say other than “Mangoes are a real fruit. They grow on trees.”
He thought we were fucking with him. We threatened to take him straight to the grocery store. We would buy him a mango even. He refused. He didn’t want one. He doesn’t even like mango flavor, he said. We noted then and note now that he insisted on referring to “mango flavor” rather than mangoes tout court.
At a certain point, we thought he was fucking with us. How could he have gone his whole life without seeing a mango or hearing someone refer to them? How was that possible? He didn’t have an answer. He said he probably just sort of shrugged it off as people using the wrong word.
“What did you think they meant by ‘mango’?”
“Like, something that has a mango-type taste, y’know?”
“What does that even mean? That’s not real. You didn’t think that.”
He did.
We asked him about his beliefs in other fruits/flavors. We asked about his views regarding peaches, kiwis, strawberries. He quickly got very annoyed. When we asked about blood oranges he appeared genuinely afraid to answer.
We stopped inquiring when we recognized the extent of his embarrassment. (He may have been blushing deep red.) We were just curious about what existed in his world and how it existed. We really wanted to know if he thought that pears were an urban legend, grapefruits a conspiracy.
Nothing much hangs on mangoes, we suppose. We could have let this man’s beliefs go unchallenged and neither we nor he would suffer much in the way of consequences. Whether or how mangoes exist doesn’t (as far as we can tell) have much of an impact on much of anything. Your stance on mangoes is mostly irrelevant to most non-mango things. Regardless, it seemed (and maybe still seems) important to sort out this man’s ontological perspective. If his view of mangoes was (let’s say) imperfect, then what (we wondered) might his views be of less readily tangible things? What did he believe about stars, feelings, numbers?
We’ve lost touch with this man (not because of this, although this didn’t help cement a bond) so we’ll never get any of the answers to our many questions. We do, though, hope he has since gone out, bought mangoes, ate them, and thought of us unfondly.
We don’t think about this man or his mangoes very often, but when we do (as we’re doing now) we think of another man and his beliefs about love.
This man that we knew once told us, unprompted, that he had recently begun to believe in love. He clarified immediately (we probably made a face of some kind) that he meant romantic love. He’d believed in friendly love and familial love, but romantic love was something else. He was in a relationship, he said, and he was, he thought, now romantically in love. This was the first time that he’d ever felt this way and, he told us, he didn’t really believe that romantic love was real prior.
“What about all the songs? And the books?”
“Thought they were exaggerating or wrong.”
“About love?”
“Yeah, it seemed like something made-up. Like evil or phlogiston.”
We didn’t, again, know what to say here. This was more complicated than mangoes. We felt more sad than curious by this man’s admission. He’d spent, at this point, years and years looking at instances of romantic love with keen suspicion and skepticism. The idea of living like this was harrowing. Thankfully, his doubt about eros (or something like it) fell away when he experienced it (or thought he did). We didn’t have to or feel compelled to disabuse him of false ideas (even if we were tempted to insist that romantic love and evil might be very similar in lots of ways). He quickly shifted away from ontological and conceptual stuff onto how much in love he was with his (then) partner.
We wondered (though didn’t ask) if his partner knew that romantic love was brand new to him, if his experiences affirmed or discounted the things he’d seen or heard or read about love elsewhere.
We couldn’t, ourselves, recall when or how we’d come to believe in romantic love. We were, probably, naive enough just to take it as a given, as an obvious and unquestionable part of the world that would arrive (and depart) at unspecified junctures.
As with the mango-disbeliever, we’ve lost touch with love-disbeliever. We know, though, that the instance of romantic love he told us about did not last. Or, rather, the relationship that inspired him to adjust his beliefs regarding love isn’t what it was. No idea, now, where things with him and that person stand - but we imagine his notion of love has changed as a result. We hope he hasn’t reverted to skepticism or hardened his heart against the concept altogether.
We weren’t very generous to these men when they disclosed their beliefs. We just thought them wrong and unfortunate. They were, of course, but there’s still an edge of truth to their views that we didn’t then want to admit. Mango-flavored things are, more often than not, only tangentially related to actual mangoes. Synthetic mango-type flavoring is, as this man believed, more or less untethered to any natural, earthbound fruit. Romantic love, likewise, is often exaggerated or (in a manner of speaking) wrongly depicted in songs and books and all sorts. To take Disney depictions of love as true and accurate would cause you (and likely has caused you) incredible psychic and emotional harm. While these men occupy a strange and stubborn end of the spectrum of belief regarding mangoes and love, they come to that end honestly enough.
It might be fun, we think sometimes, to invite these two men to read Love in the Time of Cholera (in which a mango tree and love in various forms feature prominently). We’d really like to hear about what they see and why and how.
These examples are unusual maybe, but only because they illustrate something that is usually left undisclosed. The content of people’s concepts (mangoes, love, or otherwise) are rarely explicitly disclosed. We talk about concepts (or instanciations of them) as if there’s some shared, concrete, and fixed common ground undergirding them when, truly, there’s not really any such thing. We might want to say that, as speakers of a language, we carry around a core definition of these concepts (as words) - but we never really engage in using words (or thinking with them) according only and just to core or basic definitions. No one is navigating the world with (or only with) a dictionary.
Our view of romantic love might have considerable overlap with yours, but - were we to sit and talk for a while - we’d quickly run into differences and disagreements. Our view of mangoes might be, well, more congruous with yours - but there’s all sorts of finer grain stuff smuggled into that concept (e.g. what you know or do not know about the history of the mango, the politics of the mango trade) that might mean our appreciation or understanding of this (tasty?) fruit diverge quickly and widely.
The pliable and variable character of concepts is, maybe, what we find so exciting and interesting about poetry. It is often so linguistically sparse, its ideas and images so distilled, that we find ourselves stilled by a (seemingly?) straightforward concept and forced to consider the many and various ways that our view of that concept resonates or doesn’t with what’s on the page.
A reader, last week, directed our attention to the Yiddish Poetry showcased and translated by Daniel Kraft (check it out here). We’ve read every (free/unlocked) post now. Reading about the lives of these poets and examples of their poetry we’ve often gotten stuck on big ideas. Mentions of God and death give us pause, prompt us to reckon with our own ideas or beliefs about these things, our own experiences with them, and consider whether or how they hold up against the lines we’re reading. Our historical circumstances, metaphysical beliefs, and life as whole would seem to have to come into play. This, though, is may be wrongheaded. The God on the page is no less encumbered by difference or significance or complexity than, say, the concrete particulars mentioned elsewhere (thinking here, specifically, of the red poppies in Kadya Molodowsky’s “January”).
Reading these poems, we find ourselves at various points not unlike the man who doesn’t believe in mangoes or the one who didn’t believe in love. Conversely, we sometimes discover ourselves too dogmatic or literal about one thing or another, too naive or simple-minded or unquestioning.
Reading poetry (and poetry in translation in particular) is always, when we do it well, about tracking or appreciating the transit of concepts. It entails the willing opening up of our ideas to those of another by way of particular abstractions (fleshed out somehow or another). We don’t always do this well, though. We get stubborn or embarrassed, reluctant or overeager. It’s hard (for us anyways) to let mangoes and love and God and death float free of fixed, steady, or easy ground such that they might take new or different or better shape over time.
It’s often hard to let go of the particular and strong concepts we’ve built up for ourselves. But when we’re willing to engage in something hard (what, really, makes it hard? And why, further, call such work ‘hard’ exactly at all) it’s… we’re not sure. We don’t have a ready concept for the peculiar kind of reward and pleasure, awe and impatience, that comes with reading poems. Saying it like this, though, makes it sound like something distinct from eating mangoes or being in love or contemplating God or dying. It might, though, all be of a kind.
Correct us, though, if we’re wrong.
P.S. If all this talk of concepts seems far too rarefied and abstract, we’ll note here that some people had a very bad day yesterday because they have/had a particular concept of spring. Spring might mean various things. Blossoming flowers, gradually warming weather, incrementally pretty trees. Spring in Montreal often means all that, but it also sometimes includes (as it did yesterday) snow and (as it has for several days) abusively cold winds. The kinds of concepts we carry around, far from being mere matters of academic concern, have a meaningful purchase on how or if you raged at the heavens yesterday and had a generally bad time. Of course, distrusting all weather in April and May (as we ourselves do) leads to its own set of problems and frustrations. We could go on about all epistemic and emotional drama of semantics and ontology for a long while, but it is (temporarily) nice (?) outside so we’re going to get while the getting’s good. Know what we’re saying?
Spring Snow
"It entails the willing opening up of our ideas to those of another by way of particular abstractions (fleshed out somehow or another)."
Or how to take life in.
"We don’t always do this well, though. We get stubborn or embarrassed, reluctant or overeager. "
And as long as we keep trying it's enough ❤️
All these concepts are subjective, are they not? We can never know what objective reality is (if there is one). We need concepts to help us navigate the world. Agreeing on them is secondary and probably unnecessary.