Words Matter

Love Makes the World Go Round

2008-12-12T17:59:00.000-08:00

One of Virgil's most famous remarks is this: "Love conquers all." It's from the classic Eclogue 10, Gallus, and the somewhat larger context is this: "In hell, and earth, and seas, and heavens above, / Love conquers all; and we must yield to love." That final remark is very important, for love can only conquer all, if we yield to it. This sentiment finds a new expression in one of the most famous late-classical and early medieval works, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. This work from the sixth century AD is also, among other things, a work written in prison, where its author was falsely sent for a year (as I recall). The work has to do with Lady Philosophy who comes to console the prisoner (Boethius) to lift his despair.

What is amazing about this text is that its "message" has a lot to do with Thoreau's (though I doubt that Thoreau simply imitated it). Lady Philosophy consoles Boethius by telling him about the transitory nature of all earthly "goods," and by advocating the cultivation of the pleasures of the mind (This, in essence, is what Thoreau also endorses). The world's evils can be, thus, overcome by "virtue." At the heart of Lady Philosophy's message is the idea that it's love that makes the world go round. The relevant chapter has a song devoted to the idea that love is lord of all. The final lines of the song go like this:

Tribes and nations Love unites
By just treaty's sacred rites;
Wedlock's bonds he sanctifies
By affection's softest ties.
Love appointeth, as is due,
Faithful laws to comrades true—
Love, all-sovereign Love!—oh, then,
Ye are blest, ye sons of men,
If the love that rules the sky
In your hearts is throned on high!

What is also present in this song (and idea) is that it's "divine" love that we must - to use Virgil's words again - submit to. It's the love "that rules the sky" (divine love) that must come into our hearts. So love is the greatest good for us. Without it, we are nothing (as is also writ large in Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians).

W. H. Auden included this same idea in the original version of one of his poems ("September 1, 1939"), where he gives expression to it this way: "We must love one another or die."

"Poetic faith"

2008-11-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

In Chapter 14 of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge brings up one of his most famous dicta, the "willing suspension of disbelief . . . which constitutes poetic faith." I was watching a movie the other day on DVD. It's not a great movie, but it's entertaining enough in its own way. It's one of those movies that explores a man in freakish and cruel control of a woman - in this case a husband who imprisons his wife on a secluded island in a wilderness somewhere. The movie is Devil's Pond (2003) and it stars Kip Pardue (as the husband) and Tara Reid (as the wife). The blurb on the back of the DVD says this:

"What starts out as a romantic honeymoon getaway soon turns into a nightmare when [the wife] finds out that her new husband has no plans of ever letting her go. Trapped on a deserted island with no communication to the outside world, [the wife] realizes that only one of them will make it off the island alive!"

I don't think I'll spoil the movie for you (if so, sorry about that) when I tell you that, of course, after immense and at times bloody struggles it's the wife who manages to escape - and this is also what we as viewers ardently desire and long for. For most of the movie all we see is the two of them, alone on this deserted island. So where does the "suspension of disbelief" and that famous "poetic faith" come into the picture? Well, as you know (if you have ever had the pleasure of watching a movie on a DVD), these disks have a lot more on them than just the movie itself. Like a behind-the-scenes account of how a given movie was made. It's when I watched that part of this particular DVD that the idea of the "suspension of disbelief" and the "poetic faith" that it constitutes popped into my head. When I watched this part of the DVD, all my "illusions" got busted. The couple was not alone on that island. In fact, there were more people there than I thought that small island could possibly accommodate. No need to list them all. The director was there as well as the whole "motley crew," including stunt doubles.

After I had finished watching this part of the DVD, I had decided to watch the movie itself again. I wanted to see if I could still watch the movie as if by some magic I was merely witnessing events that were actually happening and that only I could see. For isn't this what happens when we watch a movie by ourselves? Even if we watch it in a theater, don't we feel that we are allowed to see something that's actually happening right in front of our eyes? Indeed, we allow ourselves the pleasure of the illusion that is always already created by a whole bunch of people behind the scenes. We see happenings that are made up, that are fictitious, and that are made up slowly by a whole bunch of people. (And, of course, we really know this behind, as it were, our own scenes.)

But doesn't this also happen when we are reading a novel? We don't think about how the story of the novel was made up. We just get into it and "see" what happens in it just by reading the words on the page in front of us. We don't think about the fact that a given writer wrote those words - on paper in the old days, on a computer's keyboard these days. And if we are reading a physical book, we don't stop to reflect on the fact that it had gone through its own "motley crew" before it became a physical book. Like an editor and a copy editor, and then the printer and the binder, etc.

Coleridge was simply giving verbal expression to something that we as human beings are apparently wired for: the capacity to overlook the making of a movie or a book in order to just see the story unfold, and to believe that what we are seeing is really happening right then and there. This is just one of the miracles of the human mind. According to one scientist, Robert A. Burton, M.D., "[e]ach neuron's DNA provides general instructions for how a cell operates and relates to other cells; it does not provide instructions for logic, reason, or poetry. And yet, out of this mess of cells comes Shakespeare and Newton. Consciousness, intentionality, purpose, and meaning all emerge from the interactions between billions of neurons that do not contain these elements." [The quote is from Dr. Burton's On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You Are Not (New York: St. Martin's Press: 2008)]

It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that the mind is somehow more than the brain, that it's a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Yet the mind, according to scientific consensus, is nothing more than what's generated by the brain and its billions of neurons. We can only wonder at what appears to be nothing short of a miracle. Ah, that "willing suspension of disbelief . . . which constitutes poetic faith" is alive and well, as long as we ourselves stay alive and well. And one of the ways in which we may enjoy this miracle of the human mind is by watching movies or reading novels or poems. Isn't this just incredible? Yet don't we believe it anyway?

"A Window to Another's Soul"

2008-10-26T21:06:00.000-07:00

My title comes from a quote by a brilliant novel with the unlikely title of Harvey & Eck. It's written by Erin O'Brien, and in its way it's a breathtakingly enchanting latter-day epistolary novel. Which is what the novel that's usually acknowledged to have been the first English novel was, too (Samuel Richardson's Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded). Ah, letters written over a period of time and strung together in chronological order can unravel a wondrous tale. I intend to write more about Harvey & Eck elsewhere, but right now I want to zero in on a quotation from the book, and say a few words about why the passage in question is so incredibly dazzling in its "message." I do want to situate the quote, though, to set it up, as when someone sets up a scene from the preview of a movie.

The novel consists of letters written by a young woman who happens to be pregnant and angry (for reasons that I won't spoil for my readers here). She begins to write letters to a "stuffy" librarian, and she actually mails them to him. But she doesn't give away her telephone-book identiy (for lack of a better term - I was going to say "her true identiy," but that won't do, because that's exactly what we get in her letters). In any case, she signs her letters as "Harvest Moon" (which in time is shortened to "Harvey"). The person she is writing her letters to is a certain Timothy J. Ecklenburg (later shortened to "Eck"). The "stuffy" librarian begins to write letters to Harvey as well, except he can't send them, since he doesn't know her telephone-book identity. To make a long story short, let me just say that in the process of reading Harvey's letters as well as in that of writing his responses, Eck undergoes a significant change. The correspondence with the angry young pregnant woman humanizes him and ends up giving him a new lease on an emotionally satisfying life. At a fairly late point in the novel, our librarian says a wondrous thing about books:

There is nothing further from calm than a shelf full of books. For these are the screams and the shouts and the moans of humanity, quiet only on the outside. Each volume might appear dignified and solemn as it sits between its brethren, but all of that changes as soon as you open the pages and look through a window to another's soul.

This is as good a description of what a book is as it gets. For, indeed, what we find in a book while we are reading it is a human being talking to us from the depths of his "soul" to the depths of ours. Much has been (and more will be) written about the art of reading, but we can't get away from the essence of it. When I read, I am in touch with another human being in a most intimate way. I let him or her enter my mind and take over my person, for the duration of the reading. The French critic Georges Poulet has a brilliant essay about this called "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority." In this essay when Poulet talks about criticism he is actually talking about what happens in the act of reading. "Every word of literature is impregnated with the mind of the one who wrote it." Which is why "to understand a literary work . . . is to let the individual who wrote it reveal himself [or herself] to us in us" (italics Poulet's).

There is more to reading than meets the eye. If we are reading the way we should, with the same spirit with which (according to Emerson) the text was written in the first place, we become one with the writer. As Nobokov used to be fond of saying, good readers identify not with the characters in a book, but with the writer who wrote it. It is easy to do this with Erin O'Brien's splendid epistolary novel. I couldn't put it down, as the saying goes. And if you happen to pick it up, you might just have the same experience.

That Autobiographical Touch!

2008-06-19T23:24:00.000-07:00

Early in his Summing Up W. Somerset Maugham makes two interesting statements. The first is this: "Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other." The second is of a different nature: "The gift of speech, as we know it, is not often accompanied by the power of thought." It seems to me, though, that without "the power of thought" neither fact nor fiction in a work of literature can be of enduring quality, what used to be said to pass the test of time. I also keep thinking here of T.S. Eliot's triune hierarchy: information, knowledge and wisdom, in ascending order - for wisdom is the goal, knowledge moves toward it, and information is needed, well, to inform knowledge. But the true end is wisdom.

I am not sure where I come in as a writer, but I hope somewhere that's a good place. You see, I have just gotten a collection of my short stories published, The Heart Ages, But It Doesn't Grow Old. And in re-reading my own stories - a few of which I wrote quite a number of years ago - I keep finding bits and pieces of my self. Was I always conscious when these slipped into the pages of a story here and there? I am not sure. I do recall that when I wrote the opening paragraphs of one of my stories, "The Mermaid and the Madman," I "stole" an episode from my childhood, a moment that's 100% autobiographical. It somehow inevitably fit into and got the ball rolling with that particular story and its touch of "magic realism."

Do we as a rule strive for something more than just entertainment, even if unwittingly? Do we strive for what Wordsworth called that "something far more deeply interfused"? Whatever true wisdom may be, it must be something insightful, something that gives the reader what Oprah is fond of calling "Aha moments." A sudden vision of heretofore unrealized thought infused with a feeling that "this must be so." One never knows when something like this will slip into a story or a poem. But it's probably the secret reason behind all our efforts as writers.

"Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?"

2008-03-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

This famous line from Shakespeare's As You Like It (III, v, 82) is actually in quotation marks in the play. The line is a quote, of course, from Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander. The line is spoken by Phebe, a minor character in the play, a shepherdess who has fallen for Rosalind disguised as a young man, and whom another minor character, the shepherd Silvius, loves. What is interesting about the line is the one that precedes it, which is "Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might." And then comes the famous question. What I find fascinating about the two lines together is that Phebe should know of Marlowe's poem (who has died by the time of the story of the play) - nay, that she should have read it and be able to quote from it. This is highly unlikely, though nothing - it seems - is impossible in the Forest of Arden.

It is, obviously, Shakespeare himself who knows of and has read Marlowe's poem (who has died in 1593). This is a rare bit of scholarship on Shakespeare's part. And what is of further interest in the line is that in many of Shakespeare's plays love is frequently love at first sight. It seems that the Great Bard believed in this from Romeo and Juliet on through The Tempest. In that final Serene Romance, as it is usually called, love at first sight happens simultaneously to both Ferdinand and Miranda, just as it has also happened "long ago" to both Romeo and Juliet in that lovely "pathetic tragedy" where love cannot conquer all. And, indeed, in the annals of love, love at first sight is a wonderful thing. Would it always work in real life as well! There may well be times when it does, but what makes it sustain itself is another matter, a deep and abiding mystery. Scientists may question what poets seem to know for sure. And in our heart of hearts we are all, I think, poets when it comes to love, especially perhaps when it comes to love at first site.

On a Line from Faulkner

2007-08-17T07:42:00.001-07:00

"Memory believes before knowing remembers." This line from the opening of Chapter 6 in Faulkner's Light in August made an indelible impression on me when I first read it in my 20s back in the 1960s. As the years went by, though, my mind played a trick on it. I changed a word in the passage and kept quoting it that way whenever the discussion seemed appropriate for bringing it up. I changed the word "believes" to "knows," so that in my mind and in my spoken words the passage became "Memory knows before knowing remembers." For some reason this struck me as an incredibly profound flip-flop between knowing and remembering.

To this day I am not entirely sure what my version really means. How can memory know something that knowing doesn't remember. Or, rather, know something that knowing will only catch up with later. "Before knowing remembers" clearly implies that knowing will remember also what memory already knows. But, of course, I wasn't remembering the quote right at all. For "[m]emory believes before knowing remembers" is not the same. Here something hypothetical comes before certain knowledge. Again, it seems that perhaps certain knowledge will or can catch up to what memory "believes," but the belief comes before knowing.

So what is the significance of this? I have taken the line out of context on purpose. It seems to me that there is something truly useful for us all in the passage. Don't we all have memories that may, in fact, be altered by time in our consciousness? And doesn't the belief that what we remember is what really happened then alter the subsequent knowledge we retain of whatever the memory happens to be? Perhaps the first time we fell in love? Perhaps the first kiss? Perhaps the heartbreak of unrequited love? Or, as in the novel itself (and this is its context) a version of the "primal scene"?

There is just something unforgettable about the idea that our memories believe things that we can't even knowingly acknowledge. If that's what the line means. In any case, I would be curious to know if any of my readers (should there be any) would tell me something about how the passage strikes them. Whether they read Light in August as well, and - if so - whether the line made an impression on them, too, that they just can't seem to shake.

Recycled Words

2007-08-05T05:39:00.001-07:00

The subject for this post maybe slightly misleading. I want to say a few words about titles of books that are actually quotations, in this instance from two poems by Wallace Stevens.

From "Sunday Morning" we get On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems (1969). This book by Helen Hennessy Vendler deals with Stevens' poetry, as its subtitle clearly indicates. Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (1987). This book by Mark Turner is, according to its "Foreword" by George Lakoff, "a truly interdisciplinary" study of the way the human mind works by means of metaphors. The book shows, says Professor Lakoff, "that the study of the literary mind is an integral part of the study of the mind in general."

From "The Idea of Order at Key West" we get Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (1975). As the subtitle indicates, this book by David Tracy addresses itself to the study of theology, more particularly to the new ways in which religious language can be seen to correspond with our general human experiences in life.

These recycled words have always fascinated me. They certainly make the books in the titles of which they are used enticing. And the books themselves - certainly the ones I just mentioned above - are worthy of the great poems from which they have been taken. I have a hunch that only Shakespeare's words have generated more titles than Wallace Stevens' poems. In addition to titles, Shakespeare's words have also given us common expressions the origins of which many people may not even know. Two such expressions come to mind for me at this moment, "a foregone conclusion" and "misery acquaints one with strange bedfellows."

There is a sense, of course, in which all words are recycled, since they are used over and over again every time we speak or write, but there is a special place in our language for words that become titles or common expressions by being taken from works of literature. I can't imagine life without literature. Poems or plays, stories or novels, even movies make an impressive contribution to the way or ways in which we enrich our understanding of what we as human beings are all about, or about the way or ways in which we create our communal or individual realities.

What About Helen Keller?

2007-07-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine, Danial McCasoway - the author of Letters from Eden - upon reading my second post here, about Saussure's contention that a word to be meaningful needs both the signifier (sound/image) and the signified (the concept), mentioned Helen Keller. He recognized the fact that Helen Keller could not have access to the sight or sound of words, that she needed a substitute, which in her cases turned out to be touch.

Helen Keller's example gives us a strong case for the fact that in some sense language does indeed create reality. Her account in her autobiography is a deeply moving recollection of a pivotal moment in her life: her discovery that "Everything [has] a name" and that "each name [gives] birth to a new thought."

People who haven't read her autobiography will undoubtedly have seen The Miracle Worker (1960), the classic movie which depicts the moment at the water fountain where the young Helen realizes that the water flowing over one of her hands is "w - a - t - e - r" as it is spelled into her other hand by her teacher.

Helen Keller's case is such a moving example of how the "mystery of language was revealed to" her in that unforgettable moment that the movie was made two more times, as a made-for-TV movie in 1979 and in 2000. In the 1979 version Patty Duke, who originally played Helen Keller, plays Helen Keller's indefatigable teacher, Ann Sullivan.

The fact that Helen Keller had overcome the two main obstacles in the acquisition of language, for she had neither sight nor sound, testifies to humanity's infinite capacity for overcoming odds, and for the miracle of language to do its magic in spite of it all.

"That which we call a rose . . . "

2007-07-19T00:40:00.001-07:00

In my first post here I put forth the idea that - in some sense - language "creates" reality. It does not, of course, actually turn things into things, if you will. It's just that we need the names for things in order to see them as such, in order to see them for what they are.

A good way to see this is to recall a child asking, say, her father questions like "What's that?" The child is usually satisfied when he or she is told the name of the thing. "That's a horse, my son," as the case may be. Thereafter the child knows what a horse is. Language works like that, kind of.

Now Juliet's famous remark about the sweet smell of a rose regardless of its name is not as innocent as it may seem. She is arguing with herself against seeing Romeo as her personal enemy, when it's just his family name that's supposedly an enemy of her family's name. She would rather that Romeo renamed himself. That way their love would have no obstacles in its way. Wish things were that easy.

The fact is that we can't just rename things. And the reason why is itself interesting. Ferdinand de Saussure made a significant dual contribution to linguistics. His first is the definition of the linguistic sign, and his second is an assertion about it.

He defined the linguistic sign - the word - as consisting of two elements, a signifier (sound/image) and a signified (concept). Now these two elements are both within the linguistic sign, to put it this way. In other words, the signifier is not by itself the word. And the signified is not the thing the word names out there in reality. No, for a word to be meaningful, it needs at once to be both a signifier and a signified, combined.

Here's an example: The word "tree" consists of the letters I just spelled out. In this case this is the "image" of the word (the signifier), because it is written (if I had spoken it, it would have been the word's "sound"). For an English-speaking person to understand the word, he or she needs to have - always already - its concept (the idea of a tree) as well as its sound/image (the spoken or written form of the word).

When you hear a foreign language that you don't understand, you don't understand it because you don't know the concepts the sounds/images carry with them. You understand your own language because you have learned which sounds or images go with what concepts. Clear?

Now here is the whammy: Saussure has also put forth the idea that the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary! There is no reason why the concept "tree" should have "tree" as its sound/image! If the connection between the signifier and the signified were "natural" rather than "cultural," we would all speak the same language! To learn a language is not just a matter of learning its sounds, but to also learn the "concepts" (the meanings) that go with each of its sounds. I hope that this is clear, too.

But there is more: once the connection between the signifier and the signified has been "established," it becomes conventional. And you can't break it! That's why a rose is a rose is a rose, and not some other name. Sure, it would look and smell the same no matter what its name happened to be, but once its name is rose, it's rose, period.

Sincerely,
Steven C. Scheer

Does Language Create Reality?

2007-07-16T04:41:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, when I taught my comp courses, I used to emphasize the idea that language creates reality. Students resisted this, even though I gave them the following "choices" to consider carefully:

Things are what we say they are!

or

Things are what we say they are!

The second version, with the emphasis on "say," would sum up the "Creative Theory" of language. As opposed to the "Expressive Theory," which assumes that the names given to all things - material as well as immaterial - already have the names we give them. This commonsensical view is totally erroneous. For one thing, as Ferdinand de Saussure, the famous linguist and the father of structuralism has pointed out, if words were "natural" rather than "cultural," we would all speak the same language.

In a sense we do all speak the "same" language, but different languages use different words with which to create the things and ideas the words name. The English "tree" is "Baum" in German and "arbre" in French, and so on with each different language.

So when we realize that language creates reality, we recognize the difficult to accept fact that it is through and by means of words that we see and understand (or even misunderstand) what we call "reality."

***

In other blogs here I shall keep exploring the many ways in which "words matter" in our lives. I shall throw light on poetry and prose (fiction, too), as well as movies - because I do consider movies to be part of literature. More of all this later.