10 | the crisis of language
Annie and I, with others, are having many discussions about language. We are doing this because we are treating the marks that arose on Hesh’s back and in the salt mine for Annie as linguistic signs that may portent something for humanity’s future.
We are unsure how to begin translating them. First, we must solve our own linguistic confusion. In our discussions we do not always agree. We follow disorderly threads as we share our thoughts. We do agree that the languages of humanity are in crisis. Although we are not sure what we mean by declaring this. We are also aware that we are approaching these marks from the point of view of only one language—our own, the primary language of this territory.
When I was leafing through my quotations to see if anything could help us, Annie became irritated. She believes my attention to my collection of written quotations is an obsession with content, not form. She accuses me of not paying enough attention to form.
“Primal form is what exists,” she said. “Content is what language shapes into conceptual form.”
When I told her that I perceive the marks we are working to understand as pure forms, not content, and that they may have no linguistic meaning to offer us, she became angry. Our disagreements aside, we all are working steadily on imagining how language needs to change to offer a new network of thought, even consciousness, inside of which persons can imagine anew.
We agree that words have great power to affect the images that are seen and that this directing of the image with certain intentions may be the greatest power of words. We also agree that there are different ways of achieving multiple truths that may all lead to the same ultimate truth—just as the variability of visible nature points to the “truth” of the natureword, the necessity of the universe that lies outside visible nature.
Annie has pointed out that it is humans’ animal nature that has constituted the physical world, but that it is humans prevailing—like the grasses prevailing in the earthsong meadow—that has allowed humans to articulate their private selves, which is wherein ethics are formed.
Annie may be onto something with wanting language to adopt what she calls vegetal qualities and we all decided to make a chart based on comparing the movement of blood, which is the life sap of animals, and the movement of the vegetal sap of plants. We made a chart attempting to list what described the movement of blood—life force, force of life, forcing life, et cetera—and the movement of vegetal sap—flowerage, dormancy, prevailing, et cetera. At the bottom of the chart we wrote: Blood is always moving at will. Vegetation’s apparent fixity is momentary because it, too, is always in motion. The stuff of animal nature is visible desire. The stuff of vegetation is subtle fixity.
“Language is corporeal. It issues from our bodies. Imagine bodies, living or written, injected with blood and with vegetal matter,” Annie said, as we were studying the chart. Those of us who had gathered looked at her in astonishment because she did not seem to be including herself in this description.
“Oh, like myself,” she smiled. “I forgot.”
We all laughed. This is the first time I have seen Annie smile since Ahm died.
While we admire the chart we made, none of us can discern any practical use for it. Yet I have found a quotation from a poem called “The Meadow.” I will give it to Annie and the others. I believe they will appreciate the poem’s vegetal references.
For me, this quotation means humanity may ever persist through evolution of all its voices. And we shall persist through evolution of our understandings as we try to interpret the marks we here are trying to comprehend.
At times then—or we might say as well at certain places—
At times, our nature—
I mean to say, in a word, both Nature on our planet And what we are each morning on awaking—
At times our nature has prepared us (for) a pré [a meadow] …
… The vegetal earth at times takes over again … The marvelously tedious
Monotony and variety of the world,
In short, its perpetuity.
But still we must pronounce them.
Speak. And, perhaps, parabolize.
Say them, everyone.
—Francis Ponge, pp. 226-28
Francis Ponge (1979) Tr. Lee Fahnestock. The Making of “The Pré.” Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press.
Searchlights in People’s Hands is now available from Penumbra Press
Vivian Darroch-Lozowski is Professor Emerita at the University of Toronto. She has authored several books. She continues to read, draw, and create various other traces and markings in her efforts to understand human nature.
minor literature[s] 