Inclusive Language

 Émile Littré: 

¡No pasarán!

Every writer has their cross to bear.  I say that because after offering token resistance, English teachers throughout the North American continent have had to abandon the defense of the generic masculine singular pronoun as used by such classic writers as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Katherine Anne Porter—need I go on?  So as grotesque as their may be, it beats endlessly repeated his or her.  “Every dog has his or her day”?  All this is a necessary tribute to what is called “inclusive language”.  Being a fairly modern sort of a fellow I am all in favor of inclusive language except, perhaps, when unleashed upon the repertoire of great sacred music.

Fortunately our own native tongue, English, and especially American English, is inclusive by long habit, indeed one might say exuberantly inclusive.  In this it differs dramatically from an exclusive language like French.  I was reminded of this while reading a characteristically interesting post on one of the blogs I follow, “A French Education.”  Its author, P. B. Lecron, reminds us that “The French take protection and preservation of their language seriously, so seriously that a commission specialized in terminology and neologisms maintains an inventory of and oversees the introduction of new words officially admitted into the language.”

France is a great nation, and its contributions to world culture are dazzling.  But every now and again the French come up with something that gives one pause: the revolutionary Committee on Public Safety, let us say, or the Dreyfus Affair, or Jean-Paul Sartre.  Somewhere along that spectrum of dubiety one would have to place the institution of the French Language Police.

 Le Robert, from the bloguiste's library

Language is somewhat like war.  (What isn’t?)  The Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s famous formula for military success was to “get there first with the most”.  I just conducted a scientific experiment, and discovered the following.  The French lexicon comes in at about fourteen inches.  The English lexicon comes in at about thirty-seven inches.  We just have more words, and I mean way more words, than anybody else.  This richness of the English vocabulary is not the product of committee deliberations in which some graybeards vote on whether or not one can say weekend or fin de siècle.  No.  This is America.  You can say whatever the hell you please.  If it jives, it thrives.  If not, not.  You can stick that in your cybercarnet.

OED, from the bloguiste's library

Imagine that Archbishop Stigand had been able to chair a committee to sniff out neologisms immediately following the piratical Norman invasion of 1066.  Old English was a well developed Germanic language, and it had serviceable words for most things that a peasant—I mean of course a churl--came across in the course of the day.  There was a nice compact one for the animal that goes moo-moo.  It was cú, “cow”.  The committee could have nixed beef.  The oink-oink animal already had two words: swín and *picga.  Surely we didn’t need yet another, (ugh!) pork? But a great language is not some tender seedling that needs to be preserved under artificial light in a hothouse.  The idea that it needs “protection and preservation” by a committee is funny, facetious, hilarious, not to mention drôle.  

 Archbishop Stigand: too busy for words

The way to grow a great language is to let it go with the flow. Anybody who has read Beowulf even in translation knows that there were four hundred and twelve English words meaning guys who run around with spears, swords, lances, and bucklers maiming and killing each other.  But a truly inclusive language knows no limits.  So we glommed onto some more, including the Norman warrior.  (This was before some earlier Parisian committee decided to banish W from the French language, where in the old Norman texts it played such a noble role.)

Nothing is more important in such a society as that of early England than what we now call “homeland security”.  Primitive Germanic clearly had several perfectly good words for a fortified place.  Among them was the word that developed into the suffix –burg in High German (Hamburg, etc.) and in modern English –bury (Canterbury, Salisbury, etc.)  What Canterbury meant was “the fortified place in Kent”. 

One of the Latin words for a fortified place was castellum.  The obvious English reflex is castle, and we find place-names with -castle in them, with or with actual castles, all over England.  But in France castellum first became castel, then chateau.  But since in a feudal world a castle is a conspicuous example of real property, the word came to mean other kinds of property as well, goods and livestock.  The English word chattels denotes the former, while cattle denotes the latter.  But of course many of the folks building the castles in England were still speaking French when they did so, and we get the characteristic French ch in Chester (and many others).  West Chester PA is simply the town west of Chester PA, but Westchester County NY derives eventually from an English castle that was, in relation to some other fixed point, west.  Today you can butcher one of your cattle, turn it into steak Chateaubriand, and wash it down nicely with a couple of glasses of a chateau-bottled vintage—and not for a moment realize the circle of linguistic tautology in which you are swirling.  And there’s no committee to stop us.

 Old Castle and New Castle.  You tell me which is which.

Esse est percipi

            Most of my readers are probably familiar, vaguely, with the name of George Berkeley.  Berkeley (1685-1753) was a philosophical Anglican bishop who developed an odd metaphysical theory summed up by the Latin maxim esse est percipi—“to be is to be perceived.”  If your scholastic Latin is getting rusty you may prefer to recall the problem of the tree falling in the remote and uninhabited forest.  Since no one is there to see it or hear it fall, since indeed no one will ever know the slightest thing about this putative tree, is it even possible to say that the tree has ever existed?

The Right Reverend George Berkeley

            This argument fascinated me in Philosophy 101 half a century ago.  Much longer ago than that it seems to have infuriated my culture hero Sam Johnson who, kicking away a small stone that lay on his path, said “Thus I refute Berkeley”—a remark I find more baffling than “Esse est percipi,” actually.

            Berkeley was laying the groundwork for his religious metaphysics, of course.  What guaranteed the existence of the universe, in his view, was its constant perception by the mind of God. 

Berkeley’s hypothesis makes various appearances in English literature.  I seem to remember it, for example, in the opening chapter of The Longest Journey, to my mind the best of E. M. Forster’s novels, which would have to mean that it is very good indeed.  Nor should we forget the contribution of Monsignor Ronald Knox, a clerical wit of an earlier generation, who wrote a splendid limerick on the theme.

There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad.

Brilliant, but perhaps upstaged by its anonymous riposte:

Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
--Yours faithfully,
                         God

Well, anybody who ever writes anything and sends it out alone in search of a public is likely to face a certain amount of Berkeleian anxiety.  Maybe God knows about it, but does anybody else?

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

That of course is Thomas Gray, another formidable eighteenth-century English gent, in one of the great and gloomy poems of our tongue, the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”.  We know that Keats wanted a single simple inscription on his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”  But what about under water, those “dark unfathom’d caves of ocean”?  Have I spent my professional life reforesting a remote and unvisited wilderness?

            My first “major” publication, which cost me months of work, was a long essay on the Old English poem usually called “The Dream of the Rood”.  It was published in 1966 in an obscure but erudite Jesuit-edited journal called Traditio.  According to my argument, which I am still prepared to entertain, “The Dream of the Rood” is not merely a poem written in a monastic milieu—that seems obvious—but a poem allegorically about the monastic life.  My essay received the usual academic guerdon.  It was “cited”.  It “appeared” in bibliographies.  Do not indict me for undue cynicism if I tell you that neither of those facts is in itself convincing evidence that anybody ever read it.

Thomas Merton, O. Cist.

            Well.  One of the great Anglo-American religious writers of the last century was Thomas Merton (1915-1968), a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and the author of The Seven Storey Mountain and other influential books.  I read a couple of them in my youth; but I never met him, nor indeed knew much about him.  A few years ago I did have one strange “encounter,” when I was in the early stages of writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos.  Thomas Merton, it turns out, was an undergraduate at Columbia right in the middle of the Red Decade.  He knew Lionel Trilling slightly and was a kind of protégé of Mark Van Doren, one of the famous English professors of his age (yes, there are some) and a mentor to various literary eminences.  During this period Merton very briefly participated in the Columbia cell of the Young Communist League.  It turned out that the cell for which he was destined was of another sort.

            In 1968 Merton died by electrocution in a freak accident in Bangkok, where he was participating in an ecumenical meeting with Zen Buddhists. I read about it in the press.  That may have been my last conscious thought about Thomas Merton until about two years ago.  I was at the concluding “social hour” of some large academic conference, wearing the obligatory name-tag, and desperately trying to fight my way through to the hors d’oeuvres.  The guy next to me says, “You’re not the John Fleming who wrote about the ‘Dream of the Rood’ by any chance?”

            The very same.  Well, he explained, he was writing a biography of Thomas Merton.  And?  Well, he had read all of Merton’s private diaries, which apparently are housed in a large archive of Mertoniana at Bellarmine University in Louisville.  One of the last entries in the last of the extant notebooks preserves the careful notes he was making on an essay that had caught his fancy: John V. Fleming’s “The ‘Dream of the Rood’ and Anglo-Saxon Monasticism.”  One of the most famous monks of the twentieth century had been reading my article about monastic life just before he died!

The opening section of the "Dream of the Rood" in its unique text in the Vercelli Book.  How an Anglo-Saxon vernacular manuscript ended up in northern Italy is an unsolved mystery.  My guess is that it had been in the possession of a dying English pilgrim.  The poem begins with the majuscule letter: HWæt, ic swefna cyst secgan wille... "Listen!  I shall tell you the best of dreams..."

Reading the Leaves

It seems to be generally true that people in the autumn of life respond with sharpening attention to the annual coming of the autumn of the year.   Such at least is my own experience and that of others with whom I have spoken.  What might be called the incremental poignancy of the autumnal is neither surprising nor necessarily lugubrious, but it is somber and arresting.  It demands its high seriousness.  Keats wrote his famous “Ode to Autumn” when he was, I think, twenty-four years old.  Can one imagine how much richer yet it might have been could he have written it at seventy-four?  But of course for Keats twenty-four was autumn, and late autumn at that.  He knew it.  That is why he could say in another great poem that he had “been half in love with easeful death,” even as in this one he can eroticize Autumn herself as a woman in the willing oblivion of a narcotic sleep, death’s simulacrum:

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies….

            Read the whole of the Ode to Autumn.  You will find in it a remarkable density of perfectly chosen images, with one strange lacuna.  Keats says nothing about leaves.  In the parts of the world I know best, Autumn is all about leaves.  The Fall of the Year is a leaf-fall.  But the fall is preceded by the turn—the transformation of the green of life into the yellow and red hues of a slow-motion immolation.  Dante envisioned the Beatific Vision as an ocean of photons.  But by then he had been strenuously prepared by Beatrice.  Most of us would find that sea of light impossible to bear, but I can imagine walking on a leaf-strew path in the waning autumnal sunlight filtered through the glowing canopy of a deciduous copse.

 The path from the back of our house: without Beatrice, the best you can hope for

            A scholar is likely to have another wistful association with leaves.  The Latin word for leaf was folium, from which we get our English foliage.  But long ago that word folium took on an extended meaning.  It meant a piece of writing material, a sheet of paper or of parchment, a page of a book.  When one leafs through a book, one is idly turning its pages.  To turn over a new leaf is to make a new beginning.  Chaucer in a mock warning to prudes that they might be shocked by the Miller’s Tale, advises them thus: “Turne over the leef and chese another tale…”  (This is advice, however, to be followed only by those who are willing to miss the second funniest line in world literature.)

            In the early periods of printing, important books were made from large sheets of paper folded a single time in the center to make a signature of four pages, two on the front and two on the back of the sheet.  That was called printing in folio.  Think Gutenberg Bible or the First Folio of Shakespeare.  (If you are slow off the mark, think Second Folio of Shakespeare).  Fold the sheet again; the pages will be smaller but you will have twice as many of them.  That was printing in quarto, and it was still plenty big.  Most books you have read will have been printed in octavo—three folds of the big sheet, sixteen pages of text.  No matter what the format the printing was always done on single large sheets, meaning that the printer had to take care to get the pages in the right place.  The reader had some work to do, too, cutting the pages open so they could be turned one at a time.

            The folium as writing surface was not entirely metaphorical.  At the dawn of written history all sorts of materials were used—bones, bark, wood, animal membrane, and of course leaves.  One leaf-writer of note was the all-knowing Cumaean Sybil, among the most famous prophetesses of ancient legend.  Her leaf of choice, Varro tells us, was the fibrous palm.  Her sooth-saying gift was honored by the later Christians, for whom she was the precursor of the prophet-king of Israel.    The great Latin poem about the Last Day, probably written by Thomas of Celano, biographer of Saint Francis, begins thus:

Dies iræ! Dies illa                                    [Day of wrath!  That day
Solvet sæclum in favilla:                        will dissolve the world in ashes,
Teste David cum Sibylla!                        as David testifies along with the Sibyl!]

Michaelangelo's Sibyl: Oh, sweet mama, treetop tall, won't you kindly turn your damper down.

The Sibyl knew everything there was to know, and she wrote it all down on her leaves.  That was the good news.  The bad news was that as a librarian—excuse me, I meant of course Information Technology person—she was a nightmare.  Neither storage nor retrieval was her thing.  She simply tossed her prophecies down anywhere in her vast and drafty cave, where Nature soon enough did to them what she does to all fallen, brittle leaves—blew and beat them into powdered compost.  The search for a needle in a haystack is child’s play compared with the search for truth in a pile of leaf mold.

This is why Helenus, the friend of Æneas, has advised the hero to seek the Sybil’s revelation in spoken rather than in written form.  And so he wisely does.

                                          Foliis tantum e carmina manda,

                                    Ne turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis;

                                    Ipsa canas oro. [Æneid, vi. 74-76]

“Only do not commit your verses to the leaves, lest they fly about, the sport of strong winds.  I beg you to speak them yourself.”

Jan Breughel's Sibyl: The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...

A scholar spends a lifetime raking up neat piles of leaves, but don’t count on the Sibyl to guard them for posterity.  She is too heedless, too oblivious.  She, too, is drowsed with the fume of poppies.

           

           

           

Shifting Signifiers, or Signs of the Times

Omnis doctrina vel res vel signa est, sed res per signa discuntur.

                        Augustine De Doctrina Christiniana

At the beginning of his brilliant essay on the principles of interpretation Saint Augustine says that “All teaching concerns either things or signs; but we learn about things by means of signs.” Human language is a system of signs essential for social interaction and especially for learning and teaching.

Augustine loves binary distinctions, and he now makes one with regard to signs themselves. There are two kinds, natural signs and conventional signs.  Think of the signs of fire.  If you see a plume of smoke rising on the horizon, you know that there is also fire.  Smoke is a natural sign of fire.  Smoke always “means” fire, and smoke means fire everywhere on earth.  But what about the word f-i-r-e?  The word is also a sign for the thing fire, but not a natural sign.  It is a conventional sign, agreed upon by social compact.  It is a sign that would have meant nothing to Augustine himself.  The sign f-i-r-e did not exist in the year 400, and even its hypothetical primitive Germanic ancestor would never have entered his Mediterranean ear.  To signal the thing fire to Augustine you would have to use Augustine’s conventions rather than those of Hrothgar.  You would have to say ignis.

In a very famous Supreme Court case (Schenck, 1919) Oliver Wendell Holmes opined that “falsely to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” was not constitutionally protected speech--not in the face of a "clear and present danger".  But you could probably shout “ignis!” with relative impunity even at a Senior Citizens’ Matinee at the Classic.  I may think that the decline of Latin is a clear and present danger, but I doubt that the Supreme Court would.

A little Greek lad who hears the word b-e-t-a will see one thing in his mind,  the little Roman boy another.   The disyllable beta does not by laws of nature mean anything.  It is not a natural, but a conventional sign.

 ....beats me...














No conventional sign can mean anything until you sign onto the convention.  Think of the monosyllable g-i-f-t.  A gift is a desirable thing, at least in Anglophone regions.  It is less so in Germany, unless you positively grock on potassium cyanide or Zyklon-B.  What this means is that if somebody gives you a gift, hope that it is in Boston rather than Berlin.

BOSTON         or

BERLIN?                                                                                                                                

Augustine was trying to prepare people to approach the Bible in some other spirit than that of a Rorschach test.  My purpose in this post is very different, though I will in passing commend Augustine’s essay to the alarmingly large number of my fellow Bible-readers who seem to think that the Word of God is English, subspecies Jacobean.

 ...all Greek to me....

What dawned on me was an odd extension or corollary of Augustinian linguistics.  It seems possible that an entire language can become a conventional sign. On Sunday last I went to the University Chapel for the monthly Communion service.  The cornerstone of this mini-Amiens cathedral was laid in 1922, when a buck was still a buck; and cynics almost immediately christened the building “Princeton’s million dollar answer to materialism.”  Well, let them scoff.  The space is magnificent, and the music excellent even when, as on this occasion, many student choristers were still away on Fall Break.

Chapel services are ecumenical Protestant, though the Gothic architecture pushes the envelope well beyond the comfort zone of, say, John Knox.  The Eucharist has the traditional structure, though Catholics, of whom a fair number attend, must face the anomaly of pronouncing the words of consecration themselves, thus practicing if not approving Martin Luther’s concept of the priesthood of all believers.

But the implications of one odd feature of the service only now struck me with full force.  The old Roman Catholic Mass was in Latin.  We still use Latin words (the Gloria, the Sanctus) to denominate certain parts. One of the principal reforms of the Reformers, adopted by the Catholics themselves after a brief lag of four centuries, was to translate it into the local vernacular.  But here we were in a rather WASPish conclave of central New Jersey singing these parts in Spanish.  Princeton, N.J, is reasonably cosmopolitan, but it is not Miami.  I cannot be sure that there were no native speakers of Spanish in that substantial congregation, but I allow myself to doubt it.  Yet there we all were lustily praising El Señor with authentic south-of-the-border (the Massachusetts border, that is) accent.

The explanation of this phenomenon is not so simple as the fact that our musical settings do in fact come from an Argentinian folk mass.  I have never heard this crowd singing “A Mighty Fortress” in the original German.  No.  The explanation is that in a certain American politico-ecclesiastical context the Spanish language itself, quite apart from any of its individual verbal signifiers, is becoming a conventional sign.  What it signals is a vague but benevolent aspiration to catholic fraternity and recognition of that biblical category called “the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed.”  I rather doubt that it signaled the same thing to Lope de Vega, but then conventions do shift.

An Upside to the Medicare Crisis

I believe that most of my students are younger than I am.  Ordinarily that observation would be of a banality so oppressive as to forbid it entry even to a blog post, a tolerant genre usually welcoming even to the huddled masses and teeming refuse of one’s most aimless thoughts.  But the circumstances are special.  For the last several weeks Wednesdays, which I had come to think of as “blog days”, have also been “teaching days”.  I have been teaching in an eight-week course, with a two-hour seminar each Wednesday morning, in a local “adult education” program called The Evergreen Forum.

Education for the “older student,” “continuing education” or “life-long learning” has become a vast enterprise in this country.  There can be few communities of any size in America that are without some kind of Adult School, Senior Center Seminar, or local Elderhostel.  In a college town like mine there are at any moment probably half a dozen such academies offering to “non-traditional students”—a bizarre circumlocution for various categories of post-adolescents--poetry workshops, master classes in sushi preparation, introductions to quantum mechanics, Civil War history, Contemporary Chinese politics, or the novels of Virginia Woolf.  By request I have built my own seminar around historical and cultural questions raised in my recent book entitled The Anti-Communist Manifestos.

I have for several decades occasionally taught in such venues.  I have frequently given talks in lecture series sponsored by groups with names like “The Old Guard” and “Fifty-Five Plus”.  In fact I once taught a course on Dante’s Divine Comedy in this same Evergreen Forum.  And I have always enjoyed what I light-heartedly call geriatric education because of the fascinating people one meets.  Furthermore there is a considerable relief in being able to assume a shared general knowledge of such matters as the principal adversaries in the Second World War, and the broad outcome of their struggles.  (Unfortunately, I’m not quite kidding.) Still, it is a bit of a shock to me to realize that I myself am older than many of these folks.  I have become a “non-traditional teacher”.

New York, 1953

In my current seminar there are a couple of people who were at City College not too long after the War, when memories of the Red Decade were still vibrant.  They were there to see the street demonstrations to “save the Rosenbergs”.  There is a mathematician, a Russian émigré, in his youth forced—and this well after the Stalinist period—to join the Komsomol if he entertained any hope of educational advancement.  The capacity of such students to bring living memories of their real life experience to our topics of study is priceless, and affords one kind of mental exhilaration simply unavailable in an Ivy League graduate seminar. 

 

Moscow, 1953

This is the up-side of the fact that lots of people are living longer than the actuaries of the 1930s thought they ought to—a situation know to our politicians and pundits as “the Medicare Crisis.”  Many of them are not in fact on ventilators, and they spend more time at the computerized card catalogue than in the catscan machine.

Most of education, and practically all of humanistic education, is about remembering.  Our enemy is ignorance, especially that form of voluntary ignorance that is cultural amnesia.  Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts is the title of a book (2007) by Clive James, a brilliant work first drawn to my attention shortly after its publication by my old friend Dick Schrader.  I immediately bought a second-hand copy.  Then about a year ago a young alumnus friend actually gave me a brand-new copy of it.  I didn’t tell him I already owned it—there is no such thing as a surfeit of great books—especially as I had by then no idea where my first copy was.  (It turned out to be on loan--which I could now make permanent loan.)

At the Evergreen Forum the focus of this week’s meeting is Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (1946), a book now long forgotten, but in its day a powerful thunderbolt of literary anti-Communism and a grievous insult to the fantasies of American and French leftists in the immediate post-war period.  Kravchenko was a Soviet industrial engineer, an expert in pipe-rolling, who in 1944 seized the opportunity of an assignment to the Lend-Lease mission in Washington to defect and seek political asylum in America.  He was born in 1905, so that his autobiography was in effect a personal history of the entire period of Bolshevik power.  Its version of Soviet realities was rather different from that to be found in the pages of such intellectually prestigious American organs of opinion of that day as the Nation and The New Republic, let alone those mandarin journals published in Paris by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Kravchenko had personal connections with only one among the high and mighty of the Soviet state: his boss, the Georgian Grigory Ordzhonikidze, who became Commissar for Heavy Industry in 1932 and committed suicide (with Stalin’s encouragement and possible help) in 1937.  Only as I was thinking about this week’s seminar did I remember (discover?) that Clive James has a brilliant little essay on Ordzhonikidze, who is in fact the only “O” in his alphabetically organized book.

Grigory Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937); strong enough to bear the blow

Since being murdered by Stalin has for certain historians been enough to forgive the likes of Bukharin and Zinoviev for their own enthusiastic participation in a state founded on mass murder, James calmly challenges the nascent belief that Ordzhonikidze “might have been some sort of proto-liberal” by quoting a passage from a letter Ordzhonikidze wrote to Kirov in 1934.  “Our cadres who knew the situation of 1932-1933 and who bore the blow are truly tempered like steel.  I think with them we can build a State the like of which the world has never seen.”  The “situation” referred to was the genocidal Soviet policy of state-managed famine in which about five million Ukrainians perished.  The famine is known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor—the Hunger—and it must class with history’s epic atrocities; but it didn’t take long for cultural amnesia to set in.  Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for in-depth reporting on the Soviet scene in 1932-1933 without ever noticing the Holodomor.  There were a surprising number of things that western intellectuals failed to notice about Soviet Communism.

Those hardened heroes gutsy enough to “bear the blow” were Communist apparatchiks who organized and carried out the murder.  The chief apparatchik was one Nikita Khrushchev, best-selling author of The Crimes of Stalin.  It was hard work, but somebody had to do it.  They did indeed create a State the like of which the world had never seen.  We have seen several more since then, though, and if we succumb to cultural amnesia we are likely to see more yet.  Continuing education is not such a bad idea.

 The Ukraine, 1932; not strong enough to bear the blow