American life had changed him. Now he loved hand tools–oh, the infinite varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea.

-Ha Jin,* A Free Life

I’ve started writing in English about ten years ago, when I found that English was the only language my friends wanted to read in. Even the Russian ones, from whom in America, just like from me, our native language bled out slowly. We’d sing and stop mid-couplet because the next word was a word we no longer knew. Like a parasitic chick of a cuckoo, an English word lay in our minds instead.

Some of us sought treatment–a few daily doses of Babel, Gogol, Chekhov, Mandelshtam, Tsvetayeva, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, Pushkin, Pushkin. Others let the mother tongue dry and shrivel. Me, I’ve spent years trying to treat English like another variety of Russian. But English can’t do the things that Russian can. Rhymes don’t come easy. Word order isn’t a matter of tone and style, but grammar. An ear for Russian rhythms is useless. Sometimes, I ditched English and wrote in Russian, knowing I wrote for no one and that I was completely alone. At other times, I just got angry–at English and its ways, at my readers for not understanding, and at myself for failing to make them.

Then yesterday, somewhere between reading Ha Jin and reading Thomas Hardy, I realized that I’ve fallen for this tongue, this Anglo-Saxon Latin bastard that swells and prospers by plundering the languages of this world and taking their best words. I stumbled on this line of Hardy’s in “Neutral Tones”–”And a few leaves lay on the starving sod”–and realized I didn’t know exactly what the word “sod” means. So I went down the Oxford English Dictionary rabbit hole. Sod. Peat. Turf. Greensward. The distinctions between them are the kind of details I would have never thought of (a peat is a slice of soil taken from a bog, but turf must be taken from a dry patch of land; a sod is brick-shaped, a greensward is thin). And, of course, for most of these, the origin might be Pixie, might be Frisian, might be Dutch–but is mostly unknown.

We are alike, English and I. I am Ukrainian by birth and upbringing, half-Russian, half-Jew by ethnic origin and culture, and now an American by choice. I, too, am a mongrel. What better language could I have hoped for to write in?

* In the interests of full disclosure, mentioning now that Ha Jin is my former teacher.

He sighed. “Maybe the singularity will get us before all that.”

“What singularity?” I asked.

“What singularity? You haven’t heard about singularity? How could you not have heard about singularity? It’s the next step in human evolution.” By this point, of course, he had Wikipedia open. Twenty articles on singularity, but none seemed to be about evolution. Of course, I was skimming the screen. Who ever actually reads on the Internet? Apparently he does, because he found what he wanted.

“You don’t actually think that there is a next stage in human evolution, do you?” I said. I meant that maybe five hundred years from now, we’d all be taller, smarter, and darker, but we’d still have two legs and two arms and the same faces. But singularity isn’t about biological progress—it’s about humans becoming obsolete when machines get smart enough.

“All these nonsensical charts. You always have to have nonsensical charts when you talk about singularity.”

“Maybe they aren’t nonsensical. Maybe the singularity’s upon us and you human just aren’t smart enough anymore to understand.”

*

My mother complains about her co-workers. The company policy is to always use a calculator to do addition. The other women enter the wrong numbers sometimes and get an answer an order of magnitude different from what you’d expect. They add 55.47 to 20.15 and get 756.2, and then write that down. Once upon a time my mother was an engineer. She complains.

*

In Britain, trucks are driving through small villages. Hundreds, thousands a day. Those roads were maybe built in the reign of Victoria, but William IV’s time might be more likely. The trucks don’t fit, they drag roofs off the houses, they glance against those small English cars.

The GPS systems tell the truck drivers what the shortest route is, and they plough right through.

The villagers want out. They want their towns and their toy roads taken out of the satellite routes database.

We are heading backward, to an age where you could set off and find a place that’s not on a map. We are past the age of science fiction. We are entering fantasy territory now, you and I.

A year and a half ago, I drove everywhere with the GPS. But I’d still miss the turns. The GPS would become quite shrill with me. “Turn around NOW.” “Recalculating route.” “Turn around NOW.” My uncanny aptitude for getting lost dumbfounds even the machines. Perhaps that’s why I have hope they’ll never supplant us all. Surely, in my stupidity at least, I am not unique?

I remember someone driving into a river because her GPS had told her to. I hear the computers are nicer now. They tell you to turn when safe or convenient. Maybe soon someone’ll write a new voiceover. “Please look in the rear mirror to check for vehicles and housing structure you might be inadvertently hauling away at your earliest convenience.” “Right turn in five hundred feet. Please turn on your right turn signal.” “Now entering the state of New York. Use of cellular phone headsets while driving is illegal.” “Now entering the state of Texas. No teaching of evolution is allowed.” Then our outsourcing of our thinking and the distributed computing project could be complete. Then we could really spend our driving time on doing something useful.

My mother had bought natural gas in pressurized canisters at my insistence. They are big ugly unwieldy things. Heavy too. We used them in the country, where there were no pipes.

There had been lines for them all week. Old ladies with canes, shoving, pointing. How did they take these canisters back, all those tiny women?

I asked my mother. She said she borrowed a skate board from the neighbors’ kid downstairs. Put the cannister on it and shoved it along. Hardest part was keeping the gas upright.

People laughed when they saw her. My tiny little 65-year-old gray-haired mother trotting and limping behind a phallic-looking red gas canister on top of a very fancy set of wheels.

This morning Russia cut Ukraine off. Various news sources say Ukraine has reserves for 2 days. Maybe 2 weeks if everyone conserves. Then it’s 0 degree weather with no heat coming from the pipes. No gas to cook.

How did we get here? How bad will it get?

It’s funny how we used to joke about this. Russia cutting Ukraine’s energy off. Flipping the switch. What was funny about this? The sheer implausibility? The fact that the gas pipe is called “Brotherhood” to symbolize the eternal bonds between two great Slavic nations of Russia and Ukraine? Maybe the thought that no matter how bad it got, it could still get worse?

2000% annual inflation in 1990s? Finally getting your salary 4 months late and now all it’s worth is a box of cheap domestic-made cigarettes? Well, it could always get worse. Russia could turn off the heat.

Funny ha-ha.

Today is the 14th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Bittersweet to have the former republics turn on each other today. The one thing I have always treasured about the Union was the feeling that so many of us were going through it all together. So many people in so many places. All my compatriots, my partners in enduring communism.

I remember the shock a couple of years after the breakdown when they found a retiree on my mother’s block who froze to death. Things were getting really bad. There were no jobs. Some people worked a year without being paid. The woman could not pay her bill, the rumor said. They cut her heat. She froze to death.

Did they have to thaw her, I’ve always wondered? Is that what they did with her at the morgue?

How did we get here? How bad will it get?

You can read more about the crisis (the new cold war, one of the British papers called it) here, here and here.

I am off to try reaching my mother for the 20th time.