A Tooth for a Truth

Clichéd writing is no doubt sometimes born of the writer’s want of imagination, but it is probably as often the imagination’s necessary surrender to the irresistible power of actual and overwhelming personal experience.  We have now spent more than a full week visiting a number of the more prominent tourist sites of central and southern Sri Lanka.  My “initial experience of Asia,” as formed by our tour, is almost inevitably an anthology of clichés already exhausted before Kipling.  But it would be foolish not to recognize the wonder of the daffodil just because Wordsworth recognized it far better long ago.

            What I have experienced first is a sense of bewildering copiousness.  There is simply a muchness of practically everything, and often enough a too-muchness.  The sense of super-abundance begins with the human population, though it does not end there.  “You should see India,” they tell me.  Or “It’s nothing compared with China.”  Perhaps so, but if your terms of comparison are the Baxter County Fair, or even Times Square, you will feel overwhelmed.  The little towns—usually nothing more than long strips of ramshackle commercial fronts laid out on either side of a seriously overused road—are small rivers of human flesh and automotive metal.  Even deep in the country you see people everywhere along the roads, many of them carrying by hand, back, shoulder or head top an extraordinary range of burdens: baskets, branches of bananas, long bamboo poles, firewood, auto parts, unidentifiable parcels of mysterious shape.

            The vegetable world competes in copiousness.  The foliage is startlingly lush, the flowers astonishingly abundant.  Everywhere along the roads are fruit and vegetable stalls laden with large piles of (to me) exotic, bright colored, oddly shaped produce.  Someone must buy some of this, though the only actual purchase I have seen was our own, of two succulent pineapples at risible cost.  No place seems odor-neutral, but the spectrum of actual aromas is very wide.

           

            Our hosts and guides (my son Luke and daughter-in-law Melanie) are professional scholars whose special expertise has given a unique richness to our encounters.  Luke is a linguistic anthropologist, ever alert in this multilingual land to subtleties of which I am totally unaware.  Melanie’s doctoral work was in the field of South Asian comparative religions.  She is a fluent Tamil speaker—and a little edgy, perhaps, in a country that so recently crushed a Tamil-based insurgency.  It is her research project on iconographic aspects of religious syncretism among Sri Lankan Buddhists and Hindus that has brought them here, and that determined a travel itinerary that included numerous important religious shrines.

            Four great world religions meet in Sri Lanka.  Buddhism enjoys something analogous to the role and privileges of a state church in old Europe.  There are large numbers of Muslims and of Hindus, who in various parts of the country constitute local majority communities.  Christianity likewise has an important minority presence which, despite the misinformation of our western travel guide, is by no means limited to “colonial types”—of whom we have encountered few.  On Sunday we were at a Eucharist in a large and largely full Anglican church.  Among the congregants there were three visibly identifiable “Europeans”, of whom we were two.  That was an English language service.  I doubt that the character of the Tamil and Sinhalese services scheduled for later in the morning was likely to be less“indigenous”.

 a monk exposes the tooth casket to a moving stream of pilgrims

            American Buddhists of my acquaintance have insisted that they follow a “philosophy” rather than a “religion”.  I try to avoid controversy whenever possible, but coming fresh as I do from a lengthy morning’s ritual of the exhibition of the relic of the Buddha’s tooth in Kandy, I would be at least inclined to try to re-open the conversation.  If what I saw wasn’t religion, what was it?  Part of Edward Said’s argument in his famous book Orientalism is that western scholars have misrepresented the eastern cultures of their study in order to justify a supposed European “civilizing mission” of colonial exploitation.  To do this required presenting orientals as barbaric, exotic, mysterious, and/or inscrutable—in short very different from ”us,” very other.  I want to avoid that sort of thing, and so will refrain from describing the Epiphany of the Tooth as a scene from a Pink Panther film.

a bloguiste-eye view

            For a medievalist this is easily done, for what I see is not alterity but striking similarity.  King Louis IX (Saint Louis) erected one of the finest Gothic buildings in Europe, the Sainte Chapelle of Paris, as a reliquary to house Christ’s Crown of Thorns.  The Temple of the Tooth at Kandy is obviously a massive architectural reliquary built for a similar self-perpetuating purpose.  The manner in which the sacred relic is exhibited to faithful believers—or rather the manner in which a dazzling golden casket is displayed with son et lumière—is practically identical with the way in which the monks of Canterbury displayed the relics of Thomas à Becket in the fourteenth century.  But perhaps there is a danger in not allowing things to be sufficiently "other"?

           

 

at the mosque in Galle

A Cultural Exchange

I am determined to mount a post in this first week of our Sri Lankan visit simply to prove that I have not succumbed entirely to the mental dislocations that left me seriously discombobulated for the first forty-eight hours of my stay in Colombo.  I now realize that whatever I may have thought in the past, this was my first experience of seriously long-distance air travel.  Never again will I use the phrase “jet lag” in glib or casual fashion.

            Nonetheless I have managed to accomplish a few of the essential things, beginning of course with an elephant ride.  I did it.  Photographic evidence does exist, though for technical reasons it cannot be produced at this time.  But I can promise you that a man with a brutalized coccyx needs no external documentary evidence.  We also toured the national museum in Colombo, where we saw many beautiful examples of early Buddhist sculpture.  Sunday was Father’s Day, and it was a particular pleasure for this old father to be able to celebrate it in the company of his youngest child, a rather new father, particularly as the celebration included a superb lunch in one of the capital’s premier hotels.  Should my son Richard read this post, let him eat his heart out at the news that at least five members of his immediate family have viewed the Sri Lankan gray hornbill—up close!           

            The next day we set off, the five of us distributed among three generations and three benches of a chauffeured van, on a tour of a few of the more notable sites of the land, one goal of which will be the reliquary shrine of the Tooth of the Buddha in Kandy, the old capital in the center of the island. We are just now at a fancy resort, the Chaaya Village at Habarana, a spacious sprawl of beautifully landscaped mini-chalets with tiled roofs and elegant, spare interior decoration.  Agile lemurs wander about the grounds.  There seems to be a new exotic bird in every tree.  At least this characterization applies to our section of the village.  We discovered on our lakeside walk some additional acres allotted to mini-mansions denominated the “Superior Suites” and the “De Luxe Suites”, leaving us to infer that we must actually be in the “Inferior Suites,” though the management has diplomatically refrained from proclaiming that on a sign post.

Starting Off with a Bang

 View from the pier

The conspicuously leisurely tenor of last week’s post was already succumbing to pre-packing jitters when the ringing of the telephone interrupted this initial sentence after its third word.  (I am not making this up.)  On the other end of the line was my daughter in New York.  She was concerned that I might be on campus—meaning, of course, the Princeton University campus.  Now as a matter of fact I was sitting in my private house, in what my wife calls my “Empire” and I call either my “library” or “the pressroom” as fancy directs me.  Although it was only eleven in the morning I had already twice been to, and returned from, the campus.  I had gone swimming early as usual, conveying myself to and from the gymnasium at a lively pace on foot.   I later returned by vehicle after the Student Center had opened to see whether I could achieve a piece of travel-related business.  I couldn’t.  And so I got back in the pick-up and drove across Route 1 to the Credit Union, where I could.

            My daughter then explained her strangely urgent concern about my location as it related to the location of the Princeton campus.  For the Princeton campus had been, for the last twenty-four minutes, under an emergency order of evacuation.  There had been a bomb threat!  Why should my daughter, roughly fifty miles away on the campus of another university—why should she be aware of an emergency on my campus, one mile away, of which I was entirely unaware?  I have not yet found the time to explore that question, but I did go immediately to the University website where I found, under the lurid rubric: “BOMB THREAT ON CAMPUS; evacuate immediately!” the following:

There has been a bomb threat to multiple unspecified campus buildings. Please evacuate the campus and all University offices immediately and go home unless otherwise directed by your supervisor. Public Safety officers and Princeton Police will direct drivers leaving the campus and those without cars will be directed to evacuation sites. You will receive an update later today. Do not return to campus for any reason until advised otherwise.

            Lately the university website has been noisy with alarums.  Last week it was a black bear poking about Dodge Osborne Hall.  When precious, manicured Princeton NJ becomes too Wild West, it is obviously time to take off for the Mysterious East, which I propose to do tomorrow.  In the meantime, though, all the putative excitement has rather diverted me from my bloguistical plan, which probably can, however, even yet be manhandled into a spurious conformity with the day’s explosive theme.

            As we are planning to be gone for a couple of weeks, we thought it might be nice to work in a visit to Rich, Katie D., and Ruby, who kindly invited us for an overnight on Saturday.  Their house on Coffey Street is being prepped for some major additions and renovations, but by extreme good fortune they have found a rental, on the same street, a couple of hundred yards even closer to the water.  One feature of their temporary abode is extremely unusual in New York houses: it has a narrow extensive, leafy front garden.  Practically all the others are set close to the street and have back yards.

            The yard has a small brick patio shaded by a substantial maple tree.  Between a couple of other trees Rich has slung a hammock.  The effect is of their own urban Catskill cottage or, perhaps, given the particular use to which we put it, a cabin in the Smokies.  For Katie D. is a Tennessean and a fair guitar-picker—an outstanding one, actually, for a Yalie.  Joan had thought to bring along her violin and the music for some old jigs and reels, and Rich, Ruby, and I got to enjoy a Red Hook Hoedown right there in the leafy front garden.

Red Hookers fiddling, Ruby raviing           

 But that was actually the second installment of the “circuses” subdivision of our pagan Sunday morning—the “bread” part consisting of huevos rancheros and other transgressions at a local eatery known as Fort Defiance.  The morning began early with a big bang—or several of them, to be precise, and in rapid succession.  Coffey Street ends, sort of, at Valentino Park, from which a sizeable, well built pier juts out into the bay, affording a superb view of the Statue of Liberty.  That means that the pier likewise affords a superb view of parts of nearby Governor’s Island—including a certain large abandoned building thereon that, at precisely 7:36 am, was spectacularly destroyed by controlled implosion.

   not long for this world

         The building had once served as military housing, I believe, and was of an exquisite ugliness.  If ever there was a building that deserved what it got, this was it.  In-the-know early birds, of whom there were probably fifty or more, congregated on the viewing plaza of the pier.  This is what we saw.  Rich got it all on tape.  You can read more about it on his blog.  The campus bomb threat, I am happy to say, has ended in a welcome whimper. 

           Next week, Sri Lanka!

Leisure Suits

Michaelangelo's Rachel and Leah, adorning the tomb of Julius II

            Immediately following the Dante seminar reported on last week we moved into the Princeton University Reunions weekend.  The Princeton class reunions constitute a phenomenon that must be seen to be believed.  I taught at this place for forty years and hence had personal connections with individual students in forty graduating classes.  I came to know and sometimes know well dozens of older alumni who graduated well before my arrival.  Furthermore this summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of the completion of my doctorate in the department of which I would one day become the chairman.  Hence the emotion was copious if viscous.  On another occasion I might try to summarize the experience in a brief essay, but I rather doubt it.  Suffice it to say that this year the heat was stifling, the food too abundant, the spiritual and physical effort rather exhausting.

            We had as an overnight guest on Sunday a very old and genial but rarely seen friend from the class of 1973, now an aging Stanford professor.  We had a most mellow evening, and I awoke on Monday with a strange sense of well-being.  Perhaps what was strange was not the sense itself but its explicit perception.  Robust good health should be a norm, but my experience over the years has demonstrated an inner perversity that allows me to appreciate feeling really good only when I am actually not feeling so hot.  I know that I am not alone in lamenting the unhappy paradox that too often presence can be confirmed only by absence.  As the Canadian philosopher J. Mitchell puts it,

                        Don't it always seem to go
                        That you don't know what you've got
                        Till it's gone…

            On this occasion, however, I was keenly aware of what I got while I still got it, so to speak, and that was an appreciation of a lack of obligation.  Such obligations as I had recently liquidated were hardly onerous.  My current book had been put to bed at the publishers, and was beyond my powers to alter for good or ill.  I had talked a little about Dante with a group of highly intelligent people.  I had given a ten-minute talk at a Reunions panel discussion.  And I had mowed the lawn.  What other worlds to conquer could there possibly be?  I had absolutely nothing I had to do before taking off on a trip to Sri Lanka (!) in a week’s time.  I was luxuriating in a rare feeling of leisure.  That feeling lasted until the early afternoon, when I succumbed to the nascent worry that I was somehow wasting time.

            The problem is, leisure is complicated.  It rather depends upon how you assess the hierarchy of doing something and doing nothing,  Don’t just do something.  Stand there!  In Latin, leisure was called otium, and it was generally a good thing.  Its negation was negotium—“negotiation” or “doing business”.  As you can tell from the current use of the adjective otiose, however, we have a deep suspicion of otium.

  Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)      

                 I have in my time read at least two terrific books about leisure.  The first, one of the classics of my radical youth, was Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which was among the first volumes in my small personal collection of the Modern Library.  Veblen takes as his arena of inquiry the sociology and anthropology of the Gilded Age—the 1880s being sort of Reagan’s Eighties on Steroids.  It was Veblen who invented, or at least popularized, the idea of conspicuous consumption: “Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.”  Veblen was not a Marxist, but like Marx he advanced a “labor theory” of value:   “Labor wants pride and joy in doing good work, a sense of making or doing something beautiful or useful—to be treated with dignity and respect as brother and sister.”

            The Theory of the Leisure Class is brilliant, often quite witty, and finally very sad; but it does not entirely discredit the concept of leisure.  Veblen is naturally selective in his literary representations of the idle rich.   Not all of them were lighting cigars with five dollar bills.  The entire current issue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Spring 2013) is given over to a fascinating long article or short monograph by Timothy Husband entitled “Creating the Cloisters”—meaning, of course, the fabulous collection of medieval art housed in a translated monastery in Tryon Park in upper Manhattan.   This great boon to humanity came about through the sometimes comical and often extremely busy activities of numerous American Mandarins of the leisure class, especially John Davidson Rockefeller, Jr. 

           

            One place where the old “good” sense of otium survived was the medieval monastery.  In medieval monastic texts otium was often praised as the enabler of contemplation.  Mary was superior to Martha, and Rachel to Leah.  This medieval concept was ably articulated in modern form by the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in a book with the arresting title Leisure: the Basis of Culture (English translation with introduction by T. S. Eliot, 1952).

Josef Pieper (1904-1997)

            It may surprise us to learn that culture and cult (cultus, religious worship) derive from a common source.  Pieper argues that real happiness is to be found in the shared worship of religious community—a gratuitous and materially unproductive activity made possible only by leisure.  “The ultimate meaning of the active life,” he writes, “is to make possible the happiness of contemplation.”  Against this truth the clouded human mind instinctively rebels. "Man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift."  So I sat down at the computer and started to write an essay about—leisure.

The Urge to Purge

           

I am writing this essay in the interstices of a busy week, one destined to become busier still with the crescendo of the Princeton University reunions at week’s end.  I have spent most of the daylight hours of the past few days at Palmer House, the elegant mansion usually used by the University to feed and water visiting trustees and other big-shot guests, engaged in elevated thinking about the central section of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Purgatorio.  The occasion is the current gathering of Professor Robert Hollander’s remarkable “Alumni Dante Seminar” that used to hold biennial meetings in Tuscany.  I don’t expect even those “loyal readers” of my vain imagination to recall a post of June 30, 2010 dedicated to this amazing event, but its consultation would provide some useful background. 

 Palmer House: Not a Tuscan castle, but still not too shabby

            In my not infrequent forays out of the ivory tower during my active career—to post offices, sports events, religious services, etc.--I soon learned that “real world” people had very little idea of what an English professor does for a living—if anything.  A common reaction to learning that I was an English professor was, “Well, I’d better watch my grammar.”  It’s very touching that many people still believe that someone is invigilating grammatical usage in the Republic—touching, but as even a cursory review of the public press will demonstrate, hopelessly naïve.  What English professors do, or at least did, was to attempt to teach people to read well.

            The truth is that many commonly shared experiences of daily life—cooking a meal, driving a car, mowing the lawn, having sexual relations, playing a game, using a computer—can be done more or less well, with superior or inferior competence, and with greater or less satisfaction.  The variable factors include native ability, formal training, the clarity of volitional investment, and the amount of experience or practice.  All these elements, and others, come into play in reading a book, especially if the book has been written by a genius who makes serious demands upon his readers.  Such a man is Dante, and such a book his Divine Comedy.

            Most people, if they think about medieval Christianity at all, are likely to think of it as a tissue of irrationalities.  In fact much of what seems strangest and most extravagant to many follows remorselessly from the typical medieval obsession with logic.  Take the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, for example—not to be confused, as it often is even in the middlebrow press, with the Virgin Birth.  Though the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was formalized only in the nineteenth century, the idea had been around for a long time and became especially popular among the Franciscans of the thirteenth century.  The Immaculate Conception became necessary in order to neutralize another teaching, never officially dogmatized, concerning the inheritability and transmission of original sin.  If Jesus was to be free of it, his human parent must likewise be free of it.

            Something very similar probably accounts for the roughly contemporaneous birth of Purgatory, which was a logical necessity of developments in twelfth-century moral theology.  It was nearly impossible that a human soul, however strenuously mortified by ascetic practice, could move directly from the sordid hurly-burly of human life to the experience of the Beatific Vision.  For souls in hell it was too late.  They were doomed for eternity, and time had for them no meaning.  But souls destined for salvation needed a time-based place where they could clean up their acts, a kind of spiritual decompression chamber.  The theologians called this place “Purgatory”.  There were dozens of classical and early medieval literary visions of heaven and hell, but Dante was on his own in devising an imaginary geography of Purgatory—a tall mountain with encircling pathways of ascent, at the top of which was the biblical earthly paradise!

            Purgatory did not survive in the churches of the Reform.  One of the thirty-nine “Articles of Religion” minces few words in expressing the Anglican opinion:  “The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory…is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.”  So far as Dante is concerned you would have to say that it is brilliantly invented.  The same might be said of Robert Hollander’s alumni seminars.  A scholar of international reputation, Hollander is one of the most erudite and productive students of Dante in the world.  But he is also a master-teacher whose students often want to continue reading with him decades after their graduation.  

Il professore in action, May 2013: photo Maryanne Maletz

            A few years ago he and his wife Jean—both of them poets themselves—published a new three-volume edition of Dante’s poem that combines a graceful and scrupulous English version with what is in effect a discreet encyclopedia of annotation.  It is a format that can encourage a beginner, yet satisfy a hardened veteran.  Medieval spiritual writers were keenly aware of the variety of gifts and capacities displayed by the human condition.  Speaking of the human soul’s thirst for divine grace, Thomas Aquinas says roughly the following: it doesn’t matter what size bucket you have so long as your bucket is full.  Gregory compares the sacred text to a watercourse.  It is a gentle stream in which the lamb can safely wade; it is a deep river in which the mighty elephant can frolic.

Translators at work

            It is sufficiently obvious that Dante intentionally set out to weave a web of similar complexity.  I suppose it is possible to enjoy the Purgatorio as a fast-paced “buddy flick” in which in which two poetic sidekicks, Dante and Virgil, share some pretty far-out adventures.  By all means do so if you are so inclined.  But then you might want to drop by the Home Depot to pick up a larger bucket.

           

Post-Apostrophical

I dedicate this essay to one of those Copernican moments of spiritual life when a chance epiphany reveals the depths of some modest marvel until then only superficially considered, and thus modifies or even obliterates mental habits so long indulged as to seem innate.  They are all the more to be savored because they are so rare.  I must look back four decades for a close parallel to my recent aperçu of the apostrophe. It must have been about 1970 that I blundered upon the invaluable monograph of Dr. Margarete Braun-Ronsdorf entitled The History of the Handkerchief.  I perhaps did not see a new heaven and a new earth, but never again would I sniff at a modest textile accoutrement apparently hardly less transformative in its invention than the wheel, the stirrup, or moveable types.  Such achievements are nothing to be sneezed at.

            This past week David Adams, our man in New Hampshire, who frequently sends us cultural gleanings he rightly suspects might otherwise escape our attention, shared the good news coming from the west of England about the Mid Devon Council deliberations. The good news, of course, was that the Council had reversed itself on its policy, rashly announced earlier, regarding apostrophes.  Several old, cast iron street signs within the Council authority—in particular, that for the notorious “St. Paul’s Square”—brazenly (or at least ferrously) included visible apostrophes that were proving indomitable to the fashioners of GPS technology.  Naturally the Council legislated the removal of the apostrophes forthwith.

            Gadgets and gizmos are today’s idols of the market-place, and Asian electronics would certainly have prevailed over our mother tongue had it not been for the forceful and effective intervention of Mr. John Richards, founding president of the Apostrophe Protection Society.  I don’t know Mr. Richards personally, but he is an inspiration to us all. He and his fellow Apostrophians are fighting the good fight against the growing horde of punctuational barbarians, who seem intent on abusing the generous easement allowing the use of the apostrophe to indicate the plurals of figures and letters (see “Getting My Historical ZZZ’s” [GLGT 5/1]) in a most slovenly fashion.  They want to use it for any damned plural that comes along.  A few of the most benighted seem to think no letter s should lack its apostrophic prelude.

            Perhaps people might use apostrophes more intelligently if they knew what an apostrophe is: namely, a labor saving device invented by efficiency minded medieval scribes.  Mrs. White taught me that the apostrophe was “the sign of the possessive”.  That was all well and good so far as it went.  The man has a horse.

The man’s horse is white.  In general, the once robust declension of English nouns has become dull and flaccid, but there is in that ’s at least the memory, wreck, or relic of a perfectly good Old English genitive (“possessive”) singular: mannes.  “Womman,” in the memorable words of one of Chaucer’s talking chickens, “is mannes joye and al his blis.”

 ...ye's, well, almo'st all...

            Where did the apostrophe come from?  If you were a medieval Latin scribe, you got tired of repeatedly writing out in full certain very common prefixes (such as con-, cum-, pre-, pro,  praeter- and many others), which could easily be indicated by convenient short-hand signs.  Common “case endings” in noun declensions (orum, arum, inis, and so forth) could also be usefully abbreviated.  Some medieval Latin manuscripts are virtual abbreviation orgies, and nearly impossible to read.  The standard scholarly manual (A. Cappelli’s Dizionario di Abbreviature latine ed italiane) is more than 500 pages long.  One very common case ending (-us, as in the imaginary Latin hocus pocus, mediocus) was one of several  abbreviated with a pen stroke approaching the modern “apostrophe”: hoc’ poc’.  Jesus=Ies’.

            Thus did the apostrophe come to signify a dropped letter or letters.  One very odd thing is that for a time the convention continued in some printed books.  Chaucer in the fourteenth century wrote mannes (two syllables, voiceless s).  Milton in the first line of Paradise Lost (seventeenth century) writes “Of Mans first disobedience…” [pronounced manz with voiced s, one syllable, no apostrophe].   Very soon the “correct” form became man’s, but with only an elite few having much of a clue about the habits of medieval scribes or any “missing letter”.

            There are a few other interesting survivals of medieval scribal practice.  A horizontal line (macron, or “long” mark) above a consonant doubled the consonant.  The same sign above a vowel signaled a following nasal.  This is the origin of the Spanish tilde in words like año (year).  Indeed ñ eventually achieved its own independent status in the Castilian alphabet.  The medieval practice is more clearly preserved in Portuguese, as in the national capital, Lisbõa, and the name of the greatest of Lusitanian poets, Luís de Camões.

            The names of the punctuation points generally derive from the compositional elements to which they were related by early grammarians.  Thus the period related to the sentence, while the comma (Greek for “segment” or “clause”) to a discrete element of a sentence.  The Greek colon (member) was a smaller part yet.  The surname of Christopher Columbus in Italian was Colombo, but its Spanish version was Colón (Cf. the capital of Panama), a fact that allowed him to exercise his wit in constructing a mystical or kabbalistic “signature”. 

 [colon] XpistoFERENS     =     Cristóbal Colon

The etymology of apostrophe itself is complex, as two distinct ideas have been confused in a single word.  As a rhetorical term an apostrophe was a speaker’s “turning aside” to address some abstraction or nobody in particular: “O Death, where is thy victory?”  But it was also an elision of letters, and then the sign of such ellision [ ’ ].

            Newspaper accounts suggest that John Richards may build on his political triumph in Devon by founding a Comma Protection Society.  I could get behind that, though far more urgent is the need for a Sodality of the Semi-Colon.  Now there’s a truly endangered species.

Head Trip

           
I hear that the twenty-first century will belong to biology as the twentieth did to physics.  This is sort of bad news for me, since the small biology I know, though it proved sufficient to allow me to play my modest part in the perpetuation of the species, is pretty primitive.  I did have a high school biology class, and in it I was taught something called Haeckel’s Law: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".  I never quite got it, which is sort of good news for me, since a biologist recently told me that nobody believes it anymore.

            I went in a different direction.  I went wordwards.  Saint Augustine says that all study has but two possible objects: things and signs.  In general, scientists study things, humanists signs—the richest of all sign systems being human language.  So the question I set out to answer was different from Haeckel’s.  I wanted to know what ontogenizes recapitulation (or capitulation, for that matter).  The answer is philology.  Philology ontogenizes recapitulation.  Fleming’s Law.

            If all this seems a little obscure, just wait.  It will gradually become entirely opaque.  I grew up off and on an Ozark farm.  Its chief product was Hereford cattle, but no one in those parts has the moxie to call such an operation a “ranch,” a word in any case now chiefly used for gated communities in suburban Las Vegas.  The number of cattle owned by a cattleman is of course of economic significance, but no one would commit the solecism of saying they had “thirty cows”.  Such a person had thirty head.

            It was probably about in my ninth year—while pondering the distinction in usage daily heard on the radio farm reports between the sales figures for head of cattle and pork bellies—that the inestimable importance of the word head for Indo-European cultures flashed upon my mind.  It was confirmed via the headlines of a newspaper, though it was at that time intuition rather than philological fact.  When I eventually learned a little Latin and in particular the Latin word for head, caput, things began to fall into place.

            Philology ontogenizes recapitulation as follows.  A capitulum was a heading on a piece of writing, including such writings as legal contracts and peace treaties.  If you made up a list of main points you were capitulating.  In Shakespeare’s English both winners and losers did it.  There was no more shame in capitulating than there is in recapitulating today.  About the same time I realized that the unparalleled opulence of the English lexicon was the result of a certain kind of Anglo-Saxon greed.  Chaucer and his literary successors were not satisfied with one good Old English word for head.  They wanted also its French equivalent and a learned Latin version as well—three in all: headline, chapter, caption.  When the English plundered Latin directly, they went for the c-words; French gave them ch-words.  So the head of a military band is a captain, the head of an Indian tribe a chief.  The captain of the kitchen is the chef.

            But we must return to our muttons—or rather, since this is mainly about our language, to our cattle.  Marx was depressingly right.  If you want to understand history, follow the money.  Read almost any contract and you will find your property divided into two classes: moveable and immovable.  Chaucer still used the French meubles for “furniture”.  Your castle, on the other hand, is generally immovable, even if it is in France and called (challed?) a chateau.  The situation becomes somewhat perplexing, however, when we consider certain things that had happened to the French language by the time our English forebears began to plunder it in earnest.  In the twelfth century the inter-vocalic s of certain Latin words withered away in Old French, leaving only the (modern) circumflex to tell the sad tale.  This meant that a hostel became an hôtel, a provost, a prévôt, etc.  A little later, furthermore, some nouns ending in –el shifted to –au.  The modern French word for a heavy burden is a fardeau; but Hamlet in his famous soliloquy explains the motive of those who will bear fardels.

            You can then easily grasp that castle (castel), and chateau (ex-chastel) are obviously the same word in different garb.  But these words are no less clearly related to the s-losers cattle and chattel.  Cattle used to mean any worldly possessions, but the particular priorities of agrarian culture eventually won out.  For a brief linguistic period we tried to distinguish between live and inert property with the phrase quick cattle (today’s livestock).  Quick used to mean lively in its literal sense, as in the clause of the Creed that proclaims that Christ at his Second Coming will judge the entire human race, “the quick and the dead”.  So lawyers agreed on the distinction between cattle (animal possessions) and chattels (inert possessions).

            Both, of course were forms of capital.  Indeed, capital and cattle used to mean the same thing.  I don't suppose it is necessary to supply the etymology of the word capital?—from caput, “head”.  So naturally you know what real capital punishment was.