Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Pour ne plus faire semblant

Depuis trop longtemps je me dis que je dois commencer à bloguer en français. Ça devrait aller sans dire que je suis encore loin d'être un Samuel Beckett ou même une Nancy Huston. J'ai un français qui sert tout d'abord à me faire comprendre, parfois à l'écrit, mais le plus souvent à l'orale. Je n'ai jamais eu même la moindre pensée que le français pourrait devenir un jour ma langue d'expression préferée. Mais de plus en plus je constate qu'il n'y aura nul progrès, que je vais rester bloqué à ce niveau-ci pour le reste de ma vie, si je ne commence pas à faire des exercices de composition.

Bien sûr je pourrais commencer par écrire dans des cahiers privés, comme l'on aurait fait jadis. Mais pour l'une raison ou l'autre je trouve presque impossible d'écrire dans n'importe quelle langue des textes qui ne sont pas destinés à être partagés avec un grand public. Je ne sais pas. Peut être que je suis tout simplement trop vaniteux, trop asoiffé d'attention, mais il me semble triste et futile que de composer des lignes sans pouvoir les partager.

C'est un peu ça le principe même de ce blogue: j'écris pour écrire, mais je ne suis point capable d'écrire si je n'ai pas de lecteurs (que ce ne soit que des lecteurs potentiels, ça me suffirait). Ce qui est plus, ce blogue me sert depuis son lancement comme une sorte de repositoire d'idées sous-développées, d'arguments souvent mal conçus, et de souvenirs à moitié inventés. Tout ça est pleinement en evidence dans la série 'Etymology from Memory', par exemple, où l'idée est précisément de chercher à expliquer les origines de tel ou tel mot sans avoir recours à des dictionnaires qui pourraient très facilement confirmer ou, le cas échéant, réfuter mon hypothèse. C'est à  dire que faire des fautes sur ce blogue, c'est exactement ça la règle du jeu.

Je pense souvent à Edouard Limonov, l'écrivain (et fasciste, mais là c'est une autre histoire) russe, qui, ayant eu l'invitation à contribuer à un journal underground anglophone basé à Moscou, a accepté, mais seulement sous la condition qu'on lui promette de ne jamais corriger ses fautes, et qu'on le laisse s'exprimer dans son drôle d'anglais slavicisant. Moi, je n'ai pas d'éditeur ici, mais je partage la même vision que lui. Or, je vous promets, moi, de ne jamais regarder des dictionnaires, ni de googler des phrases dont j'ai des doutes, avant de publier ce que j'ai à dire.

J'aimerais bien pouvoir m'exprimer un jour dans un vrai français, un français soigné et élégant, un français dont je suis le maître. Pour le moment c'est clairement l'inverse: c'est la langue qui est la maîtresse, alors que moi, je ne peux qu'espérer de l'impressioner avec mes acrobaties maladroites, comme un chien en dressage. Ce qui me fait souffrir le plus, c'est l'incapacité d'être drôle en français, ou au moins l'incapacité de profiter des ambiguités dans la langue pour la subvertir, pour la faire faire autre chose que ce qu'elle est censée faire normalement. Pour moi c'est ça que parler une langue couramment veut dire. Tout le reste n'est que l'affaire des perroquets. 

On me dit souvent, depuis que j'ai appris le russe quand j'étais un adolescent, que j'ai 'un don pour les langues', alors que ce n'est pas du tout vrai. (Ici il faut ajouter que j'ai le grand avantage d'être américain, et donc d'une espèce qui est présumée être monolingue presque par définition.) En fait j'ai un intérêt pour les langues, ce qui n'est pas du tout la même chose. Quand on me demande combien de langues je 'connais', je ne sais vraiment pas quoi repondre. Je suis tenté de repondre que j'ai 'fait la connaissance' de plusieurs, mais je ne suis jamais devenu proche qu'avec 2 ou 3 d'entre elles. Je pense ici à Leszek Kolakowski, qui a repondu à la question d'un journaliste concernant le nombre de langues qu'il parle: Je fais semblant de parler plusieurs, mais je ne parle qu'une seule: le polonais.  C'est un peu ça dans mon cas aussi, mais ce que je me dis récemment c'est que peut être --et ça reste à voir-- je pourrai un jour ne pas seulement faire semblant de parler français, mais le parler pour de vrai.

Comme vous l'avez déjà remarqué, j'imagine, je n'ai écrit que quelques centaines de mots jusqu'à présent, et tout de même je commence déjà à m'appuyer sur les mêmes formules. L'oeuvre de Beckett contient beaucoup plus de mots que ça, et de ce que j'ai pu voir chez lui on ne trouve jamais ce genre de répétition, d'épuisement. Bon, ça viendra. Ou au moins avec le temps je m'approcherai à ça comme à un idéal. J'espère aussi que ce premier post (peut-on dire ça dans le nouveau jargon des blogueurs?) en français sera le seul à avoir ce caractère réfléxif, où j'écris en français et en même temps j'écris sur le fait, toujours étonnant pour moi, que j'écris en français. La prochaine fois il s'agira de Proust, peut être, auquel je suis enfin retourné après avoir fini trois volumes d'À la recherche du temps perdu il y a plus de dix ans. Ou peut être il s'agira de quelque chose qui n'a strictement rien à voir avec la langue française, comme par exemple l'idiotie da la campagne éléctorale américaine, ou l'évolution convergente des cerveaux des éléphants et des baleines. On verra. L'important est que j'écrive quelque chose...

'And...' A Memory-Fragment Circle

'Anders And' is the Danish name for Donald Duck (if I remember correctly, his rich uncle's name is 'Onkel Joachim'). 'And' here is not a sentence connective, but simply the Danish word for 'duck'; it is a cognate of the German Ente. In Germany, not only are old VW's known affectionately as Käfige or Beetles; old Peugeots are in a parallel manner referred to as Enten. One used to see many Peugeot Ducks with a little cartoon figure of a duck wearing a pilot's scarf and goggles, positioned somewhere near the gas tank and accompanied by the caption 'I fly bleifrei', or 'I fly unleaded'. If the French, who make the so-called Ducks, had the same habit, they would have painted the words 'I fly sans plomb' next to the gas tanks. Plomb is the French word for 'lead' and it is from there that we get our word for 'plumber': a man who works with lead pipes. Moving back to Germany, there is a line in a Bertolt Brecht play, I don't recall which one, where a character says something like: 'Only one life to live, and of all things here I am, a plumber in Detmold'. I often think something similar to myself, mutatis mutandis: 'Only one life to live, and of all things here I am in Montreal, doing whatever it is I do'. It is said that the first person to give the name 'Montreal' to what is now the largest city in Quebec was an Italian explorer, who called it 'Monte Reale'. Thus Montreal and Mount Royal, the mountain at the center of the city, have two separate naming histories, since the explorer was picking out not a royal mountain but a real mountain. Still, it seems, the real and the royal are really the same mountain, under different descriptions. But why are we lingering in the New World, when we started out in Denmark? The Danes used to have a few New World holdings of their own, and even dabbled in the slave trade. We're used to hearing of the 'Dutch West Indies' or --which is the same thing-- the 'Netherlands Antilles', but the 'Danish West Indies' sounds highly implausible. Even the Dutch ones are barely Dutch at this point. In Curaçao you must search long and hard for someone who speaks the language, and the creole that has evolved there, Papiamento, is overwhelmingly Spanish-based. If you look closely at a map, Curaçao and its companions are really more islands off the coast of Venezuela than they are Caribbean. The king of Spain once told Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, to shut up. All Spanish sounds too fast to me, but I imagine Chavez speaks it much faster than the king of Spain. Chavez is said to speak for the voiceless people of Latin America. Maybe that explains it. I once met someone who claimed to be fluent in Cajun, Kreyol, Joual, Pennsylvania German, and even the long extinct Hudson Valley Negerduits --thus to have mastered the dialects of a good many of the historically voiceless peoples of North America-- but to know not a word of the European stem languages from which they derive. The circle might split here into multiple paths, as I could note that 'joual', in Joual, means 'horse', and 'Cajun' comes not from Louisiana but from a real, and not  a mythical, place called 'Acadia'. But it must remain a circle and I suspect those lines would lead us to nothing but dead ends. 'Dead ends' in French are called 'culs de sac', which is to say 'butts of sack'; I'm not sure why but anyhow we're lucky circles don't have ends. Ends can be terminations but they can also be goals or purposes. Either way they're the sort of things had not by geometrical figures, and least of all by perfect figures such as the circle, but rather by beings or entities. An entity in Latin is an ens, which is what I hear sometimes when people speak of 'ends'. An ens has its ends. The ablative of ens is ente, and so 'through or by the Supreme Being' comes out as ente supremo. If this were not Latin, but a sort of German-Spanish macaronic, that phrase could easily be taken to mean 'supreme duck', but Onkel Joachim is, as far as I recall, as high as any duck is observed to get in the hierarchy of beings, or at least as high as can be conceived in the waterfowl mind of Anders And.

Revisiting Egypt

I spent a month or so wandering around Egypt in the late spring of 1998. I went there from Germany, where I had been studying for the previous year. I did not inform anyone of where I was going, not my roommates in Münster nor my parents in California, and this charged the trip with a tremendous extra dose of intrigue and excitement. It also exposed me to intense crises of existential loneliness. A few dozen German tourists had been mowed down the month before by Islamists while walking through the Valley of the Kings, and the conventional wisdom was that you were not supposed to be wandering around at all, let alone wandering around without having left the proper emergency-notification information.

One night, on top of Mt. Sinai, I tried to sleep, shivering in a sleeping bag, as a group of Chinese evangelicals sang 'Amazing Grace' around a campfire, in Chinese, for hours on end. I decided to walk back down to the settlement at the base of the mountain. It was terribly cold and dark and I could not see the trail. There were flighted creatures --bats or birds, I don't know-- swooping down as if to harass me, and I quickly grew uncertain that I would find my way. No one I knew had any idea what country I was in. Was this an enjoyable sensation? It was a sort of epitome, in the old sense of encapsulation, of the generally manic-depressive condition that had brought me there in the first place, which might be summed up by the motto: I'm free! I'm free! I'm alone.

There were camels along the highway of the Sinai --real camels, not show camels, let out to graze by their Bedouin masters-- and the driver we hired to take us from Sharm El-Sheikh to wherever it is up near Israel that you can sleep on the beach for cheap (who the 'we' is is a question I might not have time to get to here, in any case it didn't last for the duration of the journey), he didn't think the prospect of hitting one of them was an important enough reason to turn on his headlights. He said it's inconsiderate to oncoming drivers to make them drive into the glare. There's the fatum mahometanum Montesquieu wrote about, I thought.

I had left Cath Neumann back in Cairo. She was a punk from Leeds, and had spent the previous eight months hitching from South Africa to Egypt, by herself. She was slowed down in Botswana when two adolescents held her up at knife-point and forced her to hand over her earthly belongings. Though an anarchist, she pressed charges, and the next she knew she was testifying in a drawn-out trial, which ended in the sentencing of two sixteen-year-old Africans to something like forty years in prison for stealing a white girl's backpack.

Anyway this is just to say that Cath had been around, and was not afraid to mingle. I, being utterly afraid or at least loath to mingle, really did not belong in Egypt at all. I was younger then and unlike today --I am now as good as invisible on the streets of any city-- easily got wrapped up in pointless and often dangerous conspiracies with just-met coevals. By the end of my first day in Cairo I had been talked in, by some smoothie named Hamdi with a bit of English, to going to the state-run liquor store, at which one needs to show a foreign ID in order to enter, to make some provisions for his cousin's wedding. It quickly came to seem to me that everyone in Egypt has far more cousins than I do, and they are all perpetually about to get married.

I had been pressured by Hamdi into this errand, pressured into a taxi with him to some squalid quarter of the city, into strained fraternity of a sort I would never even think of attempting with my own countrymen, until at some point I reached my limit of tolerance and began to yell at him: I don't know you. I don't care about your cousin's wedding. You have your alcohol, now have fun. I'm going back to my hotel.

On my way back, walking down a narrow alley just near Tahrir Square, I was accosted by a group of urchins. Their leader looked to be about sixteen; he had some sort of grease in his hair and a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his t-shirt. "I hear you've been to the liquor store with Hamdi," he said. Yes, I replied, I suppose I have been. There was a tense silence, and I imagined he was about to pull a switchblade or something, but then he cracked a smile, and said, as if quoting a line from Menace II Society, or The Outsiders, or West Side Story: "You know what? I respect you."

I'm honored, I said, and I started walking. I entered the lobby of my hotel, a cut-rate and dusty but still majestic colonial-era building, and I started to walk up the spiral staircase. The kid followed me in and rushed to hit the buttons for the old cage elevator. "I'll bring the elevator for you. You wait," he said. I told him I preferred to walk. "I am getting the elevator. It is coming. You wait." I kept walking. When it arrived he got in and, moving up through the middle of the stairs, quickly caught up with me. "I did this for you," he pleaded through the wire mesh of the cage. "Why didn't you wait?" Old elevators scare me, I explained as I continued to move up the stairs. "You disrespected me," he said.

When we arrived at the hotel level an employee saw the kid in the elevator and began yelling at him in Arabic. The question of respect and disrespect ended right there, as my would-be blood-brother, Hamdi's rival, a familiar nuisance to the hotel staff, darted out of the elevator and disappeared down the stairs. The employee went back to the dingy desk and sat down. Behind the counter he had a black-and-white TV, on which he was watching a public address from Hosni Mubarak. Cath was sitting on a sofa in the corner writing post cards.  She was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Oscar Wilde: "I have nothing to declare except my genius."

The details are fuzzy but soon enough Cath and I were setting out to Giza to see the pyramids. Now she had seen the Nubian pyramids of Sudan and for her there was something far too easy about this quick jaunt out of Cairo. But the ease of it, and the conventionality, lent it a sweet character, something almost like what could be called a 'date', if the two daters' politics and personalities weren't so stubbornly exceptional.

We took a bus, and along the way she told me about a costume party at her commune in Leeds where she went as the 'personification' of the Situationist slogan: Sous les pavés la plage. Soon enough we were accosted by another young man who wanted, somehow, to implicate us in his life. He happened to live in Giza, and before we knew it we were sitting on the dirt floor of his parents' home. His mother and sister cowered in the kitchen, and periodically darted out to serve us bean paste, bread, and tea, without ever looking us in the eyes. The young man showed us his Boney M cassette. A donkey stuck its head in through the sheet that hung in place of a front door.

I have no memory at all of how we extricated ourselves from that meeting, nor of the subsequent visit to the pyramids.

Throughout my time in Egypt I was struck by the uniformity of men's hairstyles: short, parted on the side, moustaches without beards. I couldn't detect the existence of even the most marginal fashion subculture, or of any diversity of taste or manner at all. This impression of homogeneity contrasted with the rich internal lives of the characters in Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, which I had bought at L'Orientaliste and had been reading during the trip.

At times it struck me that I would have felt I understood things better if I had remained content to read an Egyptian novel or two in Germany. The only encounters I had had in Egypt were these aggressive, almost menacing attempts at immediate friendship on the part of young Egyptian men. I have never been an easy friend to anyone, and I had no point of reference in my previous experience for what they seemed to be proposing.

I was not aware at the time that the superficial impressions I was forming were the superficial impressions of a dictatorship. There ought to be a word for it, oughtn't there: these oppressive regimes that nonetheless manage at the same time to convince Westerners that they stand for nothing so much as fun-and-sun (and perhaps a bit of edifying antiquity). It is interesting that the first two countries to catch fire in the wave of Arab revolutions currently underway, Tunisia and Egypt, are the two that have most successfully coupled base kleptocracy and pseudodemocracy with vapid and lucrative tourism industries.

I realize of course that one should not expect to learn much from the superifical impressions of a young flaneur. But I also think that the respects in which I was wrong might be more revealing than the reports of an expert traveler with some reason to believe he is right. In particular, I think my inability to relate much of what I saw --the desperation, the uniformity-- back to politics resulted from the mystified status of Egypt (like, perhaps, Thailand) in the traveller's imagination (even that of the not-totally-idiotic traveller, the traveller who would really like to learn): the impression based on the richness of antiquity, and sustained by the tourism industry, that the political reality of life in these places is somehow a parallel universe, even a distraction from their deeper nature. 

Anyway the stunning revolutionary outburst of the past week has made all that seem more naive than ever before. I imagine it is boys like Hamdi and the kid and the Gizan who are most likely to get hurt by Mubarak's thugs, and that their willingness to throw themselves into such danger is born of the same desperate willingness they had to make friends with me. I am thrilled that they have finally arrived at a moment when their wills can be turned to a better cause.

Etymology from Memory, #5

'Seminal'

It has recently been brought to my attention that academic philosophers, along with saying 'human beings' instead of 'man' and 'they' instead of 'he', are expected to avoid the word 'seminal' altogether in their published work. This is of particular concern to me (I'm delighted, in contrast, to let 'man' go; as for 'they', I do regret that we were not able to come up with a gender-neutral pronoun that is not at the same time number-ambiguous), since I have just written an entire book on semen (or, more precisely, a book in which one of the central concerns is the variety of explanations given in the 17th century of the role of semen in the generation of animals and in the transmission of specific form), and I am fairly attached to this noun's adjectival form.

Beyond my personal need to go on talking about what I write about, and writing about what I know about, I am also fairly concerned about the way superficial changes, implemented in the name of eliminating bias from academic discourse, inadvertently impoverish that discourse. In the present case, it seems to me that anyone who does not like the word 'seminal' must be a monolingual speaker of English, or at least must not know that, while 'seminal' is the adjectival form of 'semen', 'semen' itself just means 'seed', and the term was likely extended by analogy in the first place from the domain of agriculture to describe the fluid emitted by male animals. When the term is extended by even further analogy to describe abstract principles, e.g., when Augustine speaks of rationes seminales or 'seminal reasons', it is fairly clear that he has in mind plain old seeds --as in the seeds of a pear from which a pear tree might grow, and which are found within the closest thing a pear tree has to ovaries-- and not the fluid he so regrets being tempted to eject. At the more concrete level, well into the 18th century generation theorists regularly referred to a hypothesized 'female semen': for them, as for Augustine, what is seminal is not necessarily male, but simply whatever plays a role in the generation of natural beings, plant or animal (and sometimes also mineral).

Now I take it that it is too much to ask of people, even academic philosophers, that they eliminate all appeal to metaphors of planting and growth in the way they talk about their own ideas and the ideas of others. Strictly speaking, ideas don't grow from seeds, but strictly speaking when we understand something we are not standing under it, and we never really see what other people are saying. Our primary experience of the physical and biological world, and of our physically and biologically embodied existence in it, is the source of many of the linguistic resources we have available to us to describe mental processes, and it is hard to imagine what the language for describing our mental lives would look like without these resources. The growth and development of biological entities is a fairly fundamental process, and thus not surprisingly a source of metaphors, but it is in fact just this sort of metaphor that we are being asked not to use when we are asked not to use the word 'seminal'.

One might reply that de facto 'seminal' has come to connote male animal seed, and thus that when applied to ideas it connotes male ideas (whatever those might be). On this line of thinking, whatever the term may have originally connoted in Latin does not matter, and it is futile to insist on a strict, etymologically based understanding of the term, since actual use determines meaning, and so on. But it seems to me that this very line of thinking brings to light a deeper problem than the one addressed by a cosmetic correction of language: that in our way of thinking, and not only in our way of speaking, generative force, whether of ideas or of offspring, is associated with the male, that it is males who carry the seeds of things. The solution to this problem, however, is not to stop using the word 'seed' and its associated adjectives, of which 'seminal' is one, but rather to seek to revive the full range of possible connotations of these words, to insist that what is seminal is not just the ejaculations, verbal or fluid, of the male of the species. Rather than reducing the number of entries in the lexicon, we should be seeking to increase the number of meanings listed under each entry, especially those with such a rich historical life, and such a basic and deep connection to human experience of the natural world, as 'semen'.

Snowy the Goat from Memory

Like any respectable academic, I am happy to do my part to keep C. G. Jung relegated to the outer fringes of the unsalaried intelligentsia. Yet I do often wonder whether there might not be something to the idea of universal archetypes. For example, I was raised up in an entirely secular household (I like to call it 'subtheistic': it is not that there was ever any conscious rejection of religion, but only that the range of concerns never extended as far as the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being), yet nonetheless I understood from very early on, without any familial indoctrination into Christian symbolism, that goats are the embodiment of evil. This sense was corroborated by my first-hand experience of my very own pet goat, Snowy. I was convinced that Snowy was a shape-shifter, and could, if she so chose, get up on her hind legs and walk bipedally, or could even discourse, if she so chose, upon the futility of human endeavors. I must have been very young when we went to collect Snowy, at some miserable trailer park on the outskirts of Rio Linda, a town that is already itself an outskirt. We entered one of the trailers to negotiate with Snowy's owners. There were goat pellets all over the trailer's floor, and Snowy herself was sprawled out on the couch. I seem to remember --though I was only six or so, and it is all very vague-- that Snowy was lying on her back, facing the television in rapt attention, just like any other trailer-park resident. And that's not all: I could swear that I remember Bob Barker on the television, barking about the prices of products on his program, The Price is Right, and that I remember Snowy, with the chunky remote control trapped between the sofa and her cloven hoof, adjusting the volume, shaking her head in distaste at Barker's antics, then changing the channel to find a tawdry soap opera more suited to her caprine sensibilities.

My mother wrote a check and we led her out to the pick-up truck. In the following years my sister and I and our friends would develop an elaborate mythology involving Snowy and her various powers. She went through many transformations in our imaginations, but was always, on balance, a malevolent being. (She also backed us into corners, on several occasions, and head-butted us repeatedly, until we were reduced to cowering lumps, or until an adult came to pull her away; my sense is however that our fantasies of her evil sprang up independently of her real-world orneriness.) If I recall correctly Snowy died, in the prime of life, of a stomach disease that often afflicts goats. We mourned her as much as any pet --except perhaps Rose the Irish setter, who killed 200 of the neighbor's turkeys in one night, and brought them back to display them on our front lawn, an achievement for which she was summarily 'put down' by the county officials--, and never held her evil against her.

Etymology from Memory, #3

There are at least three distinct kinds of tartar, and I would very much like to know whether they are really all that distinct, or whether they may be traced back to a common ancestor. The first is what we today call a 'Tatar', that is, a Turkic, Muslim inhabitant of Tatarstan and the surrounding areas of un-Russified Russia; the second, the stony plaque that covers our teeth if we neglect to wage unending battle against it; the third, a culinary term associated with a certain way of preparing, or not preparing, steak. Now the first and the third are easy to deal with, along Lévi-Straussian lines. It was only over the course of the 17th century that the Russian empire succeeded in expanding and subduing the Mongol and Turkic nomads within their vast territory, but these people remained nomads, and thus, from the point of view of the sedentary Christians, entirely outside of the bounds of civilization. And what can be more uncivilized than to not even cook one's food? Already in a Paris note of 1676, thus some years before Nicolaes Witsen's monumental Noord en Oost Tartarije of 1691 made Tartary more widely known in Western Europe, G. W. Leibniz suggests that it would be interesting to study the effects upon health of eating only food prepared à la Tartare, which is to say, raw. (I do not quite know how to account for the 'tartar sauce' one is given at Long John Silver's and perhaps elsewhere when one eats fried fish.) Now, what about the tartar one battles with Tartar Control Aqua-Fresh? Is this an echo of Russia's own centuries-old Tartar-control problem? I think it might be, but again, since I am doing this all from memory --for that is the exercise-- I am not going to check. It is important anyway to note that dental tartar is only one variety of a vastly more widespread category of residues of interest to early chymists (to use the term Bill Newman has reintroduced in order to avoid the charged connotations of 'alchemists'), including tartar of wine (potassium hydrogen tartrate), cream of tartar, oil of tartar, and so on. Now there is also an Arabic word --I think it's darad--, meaning 'dregs' or 'sediment', from which the chymical notion of tartar may derive. And beyond that there is the Tartaros of the Greeks, which was a sort of Hell, and which was consciously invoked by the chymists in translating, for example, Sal Tartari as 'Salt of Hell'. Now, my suspicion is that the fortuitious convergence of these three independently derived notions of tartar --one Turkic, one Arabic, and one Greek, all with severely negative connotations, either for reason of what they refer to or simply of where they come from-- serves to increase the appeal of using the term to describe a vast category of disparate, lowly, damnable things over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries. How steak tartare later became a delicacy is a question for another time.

Etymology from Memory, #2

Among my favorite consonant mutations in the evolution of modern English is the split that occurs in many words from the Norman period for which today we have two variants, one with an initial gu-, coming from the Romantic continent, and one with a w-, rooted in the unromantic Anglo-Saxon and Celtic island's prehistory. Thus guerre becomes 'war', guichet becomes 'wicket', 'guarantee' and 'warranty' radiate out from a common source, William becomes the cousin of Guillaume, and wardens and guardians do the same job at different spots in the alphabetical order. This last split is of particular interest. 'Warden' or 'ward' is a consummately Germanic word: it comes from the same root as the modern German Wirt ('innkeeper' or 'barkeeper'), as well as warten ('to wait') and Torwart ('goalie', literally 'gate ward'). In at least one of its original senses a ward is thus the person who tends to the stuff of life, whether food, or drink, or a warm bed. Already attuned to this antiquated notion of wardenship (so unlike the role of a low-end functionary in the American prison system), I was delighted recently to come across, in Cassidy and Ringler's fine edition of Bright's Old English: A Grammar and Reader, the following etymology: the Anglo-Saxon hlaf-ward --literally 'loaf ward' or 'bread guardian'-- would later be shortened to hlaford, and later still to loverd. This would be distilled further, in accordance with some law whose name I do not recall (not Grimm's, anyway) in modern English into 'lord'. A 'lord' (and perhaps even the Lord), is thus the one who watches over the food supply, for which 'bread' stands in by way of synecdoche. 'Lady', in turn, evolves from hlaf-dige: 'bread-kneader'. So the lady makes the bread and the lord guards it, and life goes on.

Etymology from Memory, #2

Somewhere Roland Barthes says that he knows he is a proper European above all when he thinks of fruits: for him, even oranges are exotic, while mangoes and papayas and the like are simply alien. The fruit par excellence is the apple, joined by its lesser cousins the pear and the quince. If citrus, then lime.

In European vocabularies, it often happens that new and unfamiliar things are named by reference to familiar old things: this is like that, someone says at some point, but with a twist. For Europeans, in fact, many things are apples of a sort: there are pine-apples, earth-apples (French pomme de terre; Dutch aardappel), seed apples (i.e., pomegranates), apples of love (pomodori, originally pomi dell'amore), and so on. Often indeed, new and unfamiliar things are said to be like old, familiar things, with the specific difference of being 'of the earth': thus an aardvark is an 'earth pig', even though pigs were already rather earthy to begin with.

The uniformity of the term for a given foreign plant or animal is a fairly good indication of the recentness of its introduction: there is no European language that does not use some cognate of 'banana' to describe bananas, and from this one can conclude that their history in Europe is a fairly recent, simple, and traceable one. English, as far as I know, is the only language not to use some cognate of 'ananas' to denote pineapple: a fairly straightforward history, with a special footnote for the English. Oranges are described by one of three possible names: orange and its variants (English, French and German orange, Italian arancia, Spanish naranja); appelsin and its variants (in the Scandinavian languages and in Russian, a designation which treats the orange, I think, as a special kind of apple); and portokal and its variants (in Turkish and Romanian, among other languages). So the orange is either named for a region of the Netherlands that would eventually send out colonial lords to places where oranges grow, or it is named for the apple, or it is named --I think, and again I'm doing this all from memory so the whole point of the exercise is that I not check to see that what I'm saying is true-- for Portugal, a country that is perched right on the edge of non-Europeanness, that, since the 15th century, has been more of a portal to non-Europe than a part of Europe in the strict sense. The gateway to the places with oranges lends its name to the fruits themselves.

Another, perhaps better known instance of transfer from geonymy to bionymy is the turkey, who was originally discovered in the Americas but referred back to by its namers to the Ottoman world. In French, by comparison, it is said to be a dinde, which is to say 'from India', and this is also the source of its name in Turkish: hindi. I seem to remember hearing that the Arabic word for turkeys accuses them of coming from Ethiopia. I also seem to remember hearing that on a state visit Woodrow Wilson once presented Atatürk with a live turkey, on the assumption that there was some kind of natural affinity between the bird and the place. In fact, there is no natural affinity at all, Turkey (or India or Ethiopia) simply lends its name to the bird because the bird appears strange, and in the European imagination these places are nothing but vast repositories of strangeness (see, e.g., Pliny the Elder on the Indian satyr).

It would be interesting to see the naming of new and exotic things developed into a proper science: I suspect the orange with its three kinds of name, the orange that was already enough to arouse Roland Barthes's suspicion, could go a long way towards providing a typology for the study of xenonymy in general. 

Three's Company from Memory

It's 1983, and John Ritter is still alive, and Don Knotts is still alive, and Suzanne Somers is still carbon-based. There's this other thing people do called reading, but I've never tried it. There will be time for that later, I tell myself. For now, the entirety of my sentimental education is derived from sitcoms. These are enough.

It's 1983, as I've said, and so Somers's Chrissy has already been replaced by Terri the nurse. Somers had overestimated her value to the program, and stormed off the set when her demand for a raise was rejected, right onto the set of the fully paid advertisement for some balm or unguent that has served as her habitat ever since. So the intro, the Terri-intro, features a whimsical tour by golf cart of the San Diego Zoo, rather than that primitive intro they used to have where they weren't even at the zoo, or Disneyland, or anywhere. Mr. Furley and Larry are at the zoo too, but by now Larry has been thoroughly marginalized, which is good, because he was always repulsive, not like Jack Tripper, who has a poster of the Beatles in his bedroom, one I'd like to own myself. Already at the zoo Mr. Furley sees something that makes his exophthalmia appear even worse than it ordinarily is, probably Terri's cleavage. Janet is a non-entity, sexually speaking.

Anyway the situation that gives life to the comedy stems from Jack's claim to be gay, a claim he has made only in order to circumvent the building superintendent's refusal to let a heterosexual man live with two women as his roommates. Norman Fell's Mr. Roper, who had been married to a hideous harpy, was the one to establish this initial situation, but Knotts's Furley took over for him with great gusto. Furley himself confesses a taste for co-eds, whatever those are, but insists that rules are rules.

So it's 1983, and the trip to the zoo is over, and Jack has a hot date that, if he is lucky, will culminate in necking. This time he cannot avoid Furley's panoptic exophthalmia, so rather than breaking off his date he invents for himself an identical twin: he pretends to be his own identical twin, though non-identical, at least, with respect to sexual orientation. Furley asks the 'twin' where he is from. Texas. Furley asks him what his name is. Jack panics. Austin, he says. Ah-hahh, says Furley. Austin from Texas. He likes the sound of it. Jack puts on a cowboy hat and makes a great spectacle.

*

It's 2008, and I'm at the Berlin Opera watching Le nozze di Figaro. I think back to all the zany scenarios I mastered early on, all that opera buffa, and am grateful for the education I've received.

Etymology from Memory, #1 (Postscript)

Neuron-based memory is often more sluggish than its prosthesis, Google, so it was only late yesterday that I realized I should not only have attempted to explain the bios-vita-quek conjuncture, but also to explain how it came about that life, Leben, leven, and other Germanic words for the biotic condition do not share in this distinguished lineage. Now it might be a surprise to learn that part of the answer has to do with the intervention of the humble loaf, which originally had none of the connotation of the verb 'to loaf', but had instead only to do with bread, and indeed is a cognate of the Russian word for 'bread', namely xleb, and, if memory serves, of the Gothic or Mittelhochdeutsch hlaif.

So at some point, and I really do not know when, the ancient Germanic tribes started using the word for 'bread' to denote life itself, since, obviously, bread sustains life, is a condition of life, and thus, in some primitive way of thinking into which it's not all that hard to work one's way back, is life. The bread/life connection is vividly evoked by Charles Mason Sr. in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon of 1997, who believes (and here I am not writing from memory, but from the printed page) "that bread is alive, --that the yeast Animalcula may unite into a single purposeful individual,-- that each Loaf is so organized, with the crust, for example, serving as skin or Carapace,-- the small cavities within exhibiting a strange complexity, their pale Walls, to appearance smooth, proving, upon magnification, to be made up of even smaller bubbles, and, one may presume, so forth, down to the Limits of the Invisible. The Loaf, the indispensible point of convergence upon every British table, the solid British Quartern Loaf, is mostly, like the Soul, Emptiness."

A suspicion I have yet to follow up is that Mason Sr. is being made by Pynchon to paraphrase a commonplace of the chemical philosophy of Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, who posited a theory of bullae or bubbles as lying at the origins of the forms and qualities of the diverse things of nature: a sort of inversion of corpuscularianism for which the basic ingredients of nature are not hard, solid, particles, but rather empty spaces. Forms are of course very close to souls or vital principles, and it would be remarkable to learn that someone other than a fictional character could have held that bread is alive in view of its composition out of bullae. More on this soon.

Another common semantic shift occurs not between 'bread' and 'life' but between 'stomach' and 'life'. Thus for example the Russian word for 'stomach', zhivot, is identical to the Czech word for 'life'. Paracelsus believed that the stomach has its own, subordinate soul, the Gastrianax, which takes care of digestion, while a short distance away the Cardianax sees to the beating of the heart. I had not previously noticed that the organs to which the Spagyrite ascribes their own branch-manager souls, and thus the organs that are in their own way alive, are also the organs that consist, like bread, mostly in empty space. 

Etymology from Memory, #1

Some years ago in the Houston Museum of Modern Art --and I'm recounting this from memory alone-- there was an exhibition of the works of a professional artist that consisted entirely in her posting on the walls of the museum enlarged transcripts of her attempts to write out 'Shakespeare from Memory', that is, to tell the stories of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello et al. without consulting the texts or any texts about them. I think she also tried the Bible. Now as art this was entirely uninteresting, except perhaps as an exercise in the forgotten ars memoriae. As an art in the sense of techne it is something we all do all the time, and something worth doing. I myself often do it with word origins, about which I generally know quite a bit, but about which I'm generally a little off when I don't consult the proper written sources.

G. W. Leibniz thought that when every last word in the Scripture has been analyzed to death, and after we'd moved on and exhausted the holy writs of neighboring cultures, and perfected the philological study of pagan learning, all of which he seemed to have thought would take another century or so, there would be no other source of ancient wisdom left but the study of etymology, and particularly of its toponymic and hydronymic sub-branches.

He believed many words are onomatopoieic in origin. Take the German adjective quek, which means 'alive', and which has a few surviving English cognates, e.g., 'quicksilver' (i.e., mercury, argent vif in French, so named because it appears to have an internal principle of activity rather than to be purely inert like most other elements), and fixed expressions such as 'the quick and the dead' (which means not 'the fast and the dead', but 'the living and the dead'). Leibniz believed that this word had the same source as the verb queken, which is nothing but the sound frogs are thought to make in German, and that for the primitive Germanic tribes the croak of a frog came to serve as an emblem of life itself. Croaking was a pure expression of living, from which we may already infer that queken did not have the secondary meaning that 'to croak' has in English. 

Leibniz was wrong, and in fact quek comes from a common Indo-European root. I don't recall what the Sanskrit is, but the Greek is the well-known bios. If bios and quek look nothing alike to you, it might help to insert vita between them, which seems to share a bit in both. 

Today's scholars of ethnotaxonomy often do for Indonesians what Leibniz sought to do for the ancient Germans. I recently read something by Anthony Forth on the onomatopoieic origins of words for 'bird' in Eastern Indonesia. I'd give you a reference, but as I've said I'm doing this from memory. A full reference I can give without further checking is to Sigrid von Schulenberg's work Leibniz als Sprachforscher (Frankfurt a. M., 1973), which I take to be a comprehensive study of the birth of ethnolinguistics.