Fortune
Maybe it’s from ‘fort’: a strengthened or strengthening place. And from ‘tune’: a kind of hymnic or hummable sound. That would make fortune a kind of melodic endurance.
Ah, but this is English we’re etymologizing here. It’s almost never that easy, that direct. Just too many conquests for facility. Anyone who makes a serious go of ESL has merit.
Turns out fortune is closer to ‘chance’, ‘luck’, ‘fate’ even, for the Latins from whom we have it. ‘Fate’, you frequenters of Nights of Grief and Mystery know, commands this weighty mandate: ‘What shall you do, now that the Gods have spoken?’
But go far enough back – as in Proto Indo European, about as far back as there is – and you get ‘bher’, which probably means ‘to carry’- hence, ‘bear’. Or possibly – my preference here – also ‘to be carried by’.
That puts meat on the syntactical bones of ‘child of fortune’. It makes ‘fortune’ a neonatal fact, something like ‘smiled upon, as if in/from the cradle’. Fortune’s children haven’t the usual lineage. Those who are charged with gracing them with a name have the work of recognizing the mark of their heritage that already rests there upon them.
By that standard, you wouldn’t want to make your fortune. You’d be better off being made by it.
*
The maker’s mark is upon us all: this is how it seems to me. There’s an omphalos there, a sign of the work taken up in the making of us, the pouring in of intent.
There are some upon whom this rests heavily, with disproportionate gravity. Some of us are born to the daily work of making our way. It’s one foot first, and then the other for them. Some are the Wednesday’s children of the destiny ditty: full of woe over the unease of it all. Some of us are barely here, ‘lightly here’, as Leonard put it, blessed by brevity, more sojourner than stranger. Some are affably adrift, some aloft. Some of us stumble with ballast in our pockets, some with beauty, the scales fallen from our eyes.
It happens that some people are utterly where they belong. In the great ‘go figure’ of life, they are the unwobblingly arrived. Be it the grace of timing or the timing of grace, their kind oils the great gears of life, too. Going about their allotment as if the givens are gifts, they belong.
Belong: ‘be’, the Old English prefix that intensifies what follows, and
‘long’, the ache and arc of affinity and kinship whose incandescent
marvel is that closeness to the longed for thing deepens the longing.
*
A disarmingly long time ago now I was born aloft by an invitation to come teach in Iceland, a place I at that time mightn’t have easily found on a map. Elin brought us round the island, with a quiet pride of place that blessed the proceedings. An Atlantic storm dumped acres of snow on Reykjavik the night of our first event, a Griefwalker screening, and still the place was full when I stepped onstage. For several years I was a regular come from away, and loved the time there. The Orphan Wisdom School manifested there, and other undertakings.
During one of those I was spirited up to the far north and west of the place. There I met a true native son of the north. From our first moments standing on the wind whipped road into his yard I could see that he so utterly belonged, as a child of fortune does. Though we couldn’t talk, still we could mean fairly well together. Thereafter, as I sat to write a book of elderhood, that meeting summoned from me a whole chapter, whose title, We’ll Both Be Old Men, I drew from the blessing he summoned and wrapped around my shoulders when it was time to leave his farm. In that story’s telling you can tell how well met we were. Among a host of small gifts he that day entrusted me with was a very strong desire to be an old man.
His name is as solid a man’s name as there is: Arngrimur. With some license I’d translate it as ‘the visage and demeanor of an eagle’.
demeanor: from mener ‘to lead or direct’, from the Late Latin minari ‘to threaten’, ‘to drive a herd of animals’.
Imagine what a locative event being named that way must have been. I didn’t know him well enough to say I loved the man. But I loved that he appeared, that the world summoned up his like somehow. And in the years after our meeting I not very secretly drew sustenance from my face’s resemblance to his, as if my lineage was honoured and made solid somehow by it.
Elin has sent me a note to say that Arngrimur has just now died from among us. I may now be in the old age he wished upon me. Even so, I am a little more alone in it with this news, as old men can be when old men die from among them.
Fly, Arngrimur.
Signed: Griefwalker.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
