[For Franz Wright]
I have said before that you (or I) cannot make up a language. Children may play at making up a secret language, but what they are doing is creating a code, using different words or sounds in place of the words used in their daily language. Scholars, such a J.R.R. Tolkien or Anthony Burgess, may invent languages, but these are a sort of mathematical exercise: no one speaks the language these men invented for their fictions. The one extended and widely supported attempt to create a language, the Esperanto movement of the mid-twentieth century, failed completely. Today the language is spoken only by small clubs who meet and use it as if it were a parlor game.
Who creates a language? We do. Not I. Not you and I. We. We
are as real as – I might argue more real than – any “I” or any number of “I”s. The group (village, community, tribe) precedes
the individual, both logically and historically. Individuals exist only as abstractions of
relationships.
*
There is, however, one part of language that an individual
can invent: names. Bell could call his aural recording device a
“phonograph.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin
could name their website “Google”. The
power of naming is so great that it is rightly considered a gift from God: Adam is given the task of naming all the
creatures in the Garden. Naming is his
only work before original sin drives him and Eve to labor in their respective
ways.
It is important to note the one significant limitation on
this power: you cannot name
yourself. If you do, it will never be
more than a nickname or a “stage name” or a “nom de plume”. Those who
know that you made it up will always say that “it’s not his real name.” You must receive your real name, since your
name is a sign of your relatedness.
The power to name is also the power to command. Repeat the name of a demon the ritually
prescribed number of times, and the demon will be summoned to appear before
you. Jacob wrestled with the angel
demanding to know his name so that he could have power over the angel and
summon him at will. This power explains
the Biblical prohibition against speaking the name of the Lord, making it the
unspeakable name, whereas the name of the Evil One “is legion” – i.e., there
are a million of them.
I have read that George W. Bush always gave the people
around him nicknames. He renamed them as
an expression of his power over them, as a King renames a knight (“I dub thee
-- ”) or as the church renames a nun when she takes her vows. His lackeys apparently felt flattered by
Bush’s condescension, but his true peers, such as Angela Merkel, were offended.
*
Poetry – and religion – offer us something like new
languages, and examining their scope and limitations in this light helps us
understand more of the nature of language.
Religions in general and their sacred texts in particular
are what I might call “hyper-languages”.
They use ordinary language to attempt naming and explaining those
aspects of human experience that are inexplicable in words. The mysteries of Creation, of birth and death
and life after death, of the injustice of life, its horrors and its beauty, are
all the subjects of religious discourse.
But the language created by the prophets, by the writers of sacred texts,
and by the inventors of religions, are languages of icons and symbols. They use narrative, metaphor, and imagery, which
are themselves all conveyed in ordinary language, to attempt the communication
of ideas about that which the human mind cannot entirely understand and which it cannot
therefore represent in words.
Poetry, too, uses ordinary words to convey images that speak
the unspeakable name of God, that express the yearning of the poet’s soul, and that
portray the life of the world as it truly is, beyond the limitations of the
human mind. Joseph Campbell said that he
thought “Religion is really just a misunderstanding of poetry”, and I would add
that the converse is also true, that poetry speaks a personal religion, that every
poem is a sacred text.
*
Here is Wallace Stevens talking about the reality behind the
perceptions in our minds, about the things of the world as they are beyond our
thoughts:
Of Mere Being
The palm at the end of the
mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human
meaning,
Without human feeling, a
foreign song.
You know then that it is not
the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers
shine.
The palm stands on the edge of
space.
The wind moves slowly in the
branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
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