The language of enchantment
Every morning, the first post on my blog is titled “Thought for the day.” It is simply a quote I find interesting from a writer (usually, it’s a writer) born on that date. Recently, the one I chose was by Italo Svevo, author of The Confessions of Zeno: “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
This struck me as a magical turn of phrase. It reminded me of some lines in Jacques Brel’s song “Ne me quitte pas” (“Don’t leave me”), lines that can roughly be translated as “I will bring you pearls / made of rain / from a land / where rain never falls” (“Moi, je t’offrirai / des perles de pluie / venues de pays / où il ne pleut pas”).
Memory as a gift from God enabling us to envision roses amid snow, an arid land shedding raindrops of pearls — this is the language of enchantment, words used not to designate or define, but to conjure marvels, to reveal the world as wondrous.
The older I get, the more I am convinced that many of our problems derive from a misunderstanding and misuse of language. It isn’t that we tend to define our terms too loosely but rather that our definitions tend to be too confining. I have long thought that the reason Socrates spent so much time talking about the meaning of words was not in order to arrive at a precise definition of one or another but rather to demonstrate that the more carefully one observes, and the more one thinks about what one observes, the more elusive things become. That is because words, when you get to the bottom of them, expand rather than contract. As Emerson said, “Language is fossil poetry.”
Words were sounds before they were ciphers. They were listened to long before they ever could be read. That a sound made with lips and tongue and voice could become associated with something encountered in the world — a tree, the sky, another person — surely is a kind of miracle. “In the beginning was the word” certainly applies to the world we inhabit.
I wonder if we do not do our children a disservice by teaching them to read too soon. A toddler in his crib saying a word he has learned over and over again, in a kind of incantation, so intrigued is he by its sound, may be nearer to the essence of language than any professor of linguistics.
I am reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s wonderful book The Poetics of Reverie, the first chapter of which is titled “Reveries on Reverie (The Word Dreamer).” This column I am writing has itself been a kind of reverie. I have deliberately avoided framing a conventional argument, with the usual definitions, premises and propositions, in order to suggest that by letting the mind wander, going with what one is re-minded of, one can arrive at something that seems truer than any syllogism.
It occurs to me just now that the word spirit means breath, and that in turn reminds me again that words were spoken and heard long before they were ever written and read. Suddenly I am prompted to juxtapose in my imagination the beginning that is the word and God’s breathing into man the breath of life. I can draw no conclusion from this. It is more satisfying simply to ponder it, as one might ponder the possibility of roses in December or drops of pearls showering the desert. The phrases and the images float in my mind and leave me with a sense of knowing that I can neither define nor utter.
The word may well be present in the beginning, but in the end there may only be a fullness of silence. Perhaps the ultimate proof of God’s existence is that the more nearly we apprehend him the less able we are to say anything.
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A wonderful and thought-provoking reveriy, Frank. Thanks for sharing.
Charles Baxter’s last paragraph in his essay ‘Stillness’, in which he examines The Great Gatsby, Housekeeping, and two novels by Wright Morris, begins thus:
‘So finally we arrive at wonder, which for me, is at the bottom level, the ground floor, of stillness. Wonder is at the opposite pole of worldliness, just as stillness is at the opposite pole from worldly action. Wonder puts aside the known and accepted, along with sophistication, and instead serves up an intelligent naivete. Why should anything be as it is? Why are things as they are? What if some fiction thrives, not on statements and claims, but on questions?’
I agree that yours is a wonderful meditation, Frank.
Perhaps just as all colours together become white – the colour beyond colour – so all language, at its finest and most capacious & extensive, is silence.