Advice for the deaf
It is simply profounder, the poet Gottfried Benn writes in his considered essay on old age, to suffer the human lot in silence. A statement like that looks suspicious coming from a writer whose collected works fill several thousand pages in the Klett-Cotta edition. The same applies to Pascal Quignard who, at the latest count, has published over eighty titles. He says of himself in an interview, ‘Et plutôt que porte-parole, je me sens porte-silence’. If he isn’t a spokesman then, he must be a rather peculiar kind of quietist.

Without language how would we ever know that suffering in silence is meaningful at all, as these writers claim? What both writers are hinting at, I think, is that the very act of speaking (not to mention writing) opens the deconstructive possibility of irony.

The true master says nothing, his readers being his living intentions.


Phenomenology of the jawbone
The higher, robotic ‘iron angel’ lifeforms that will ultimately be destroyed by rust and mould in Stanislaw Lem’s story ‘The White Death’ observe the gross custom exhibited by members of the species among which they find themselves stranded: these repellent organic lifeforms keep stuffing various other objects into the back of their face. It is not known why they do this, whether it is some kind of destructive ritual or a method for draining off venom or a brute manifestation of greed, ‘for [they] would consume everything if they were able’.

The robots are of course observing human eating behaviour. And what these organic lifeforms are doing is, as we have guessed, all three – insofar as eating is the incorporation of knowledge into bodily substance. Genesis starts with a story about eating because like other mammalian species it is our fate to have to tear the substance of other living things apart in our mouths while using the same orifice to create the variety of sounds, intimate and public, that we call language. The self-image of our own nobility as the unique ‘language animal’ was always going to be compromised by the nature of the base needs passing through the same mouth. As Samuel Butler put it, ‘Eating is touch carried to the bitter end’. The mineral solidity of teeth gives them a terrifying quality. And as if biting, grinding and chewing weren’t daunting enough, we then have to swallow what we eat. Swallowing is the mechanism which allows for the prehension of foodstuffs and prepares them, already partly broken down and pre-digested, as a bolus to be propelled towards the acid bath of the stomach while ensuring that the airways remain protected. And while phonation might be the least important laryngeal function in terms of brute survival, it is certainly the most expressively ‘human’ function.

Even then, for some observers, speaking can seem as gross a custom as eating. This is the narrator’s conclusion in Céline’s novel Voyage au bout de la nuit: ‘When you spare a thought for how words are shaped and spoken, our sentences hardly stand up to the disaster of their slobbery origins.’

Little wonder, then, that in some Gnostic tracts, the intestinal tract is regarded as the refuge of the serpent of the first chapters of Genesis, the snake somehow having wound its way into the Adamic anatomy there to be transformed into a hollow tube. And why Jesus, in one of his parables (Matthew 15:11), attempts to reverse the ethics of consumptive thinking: ‘Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.’

This was hardly a revolutionary observation: already Proverbs had recommended the ways of discretion and reticence. As the popular saying has it: a closed mouth collects no flies.


Meuh!
Even a bovine can arouse a Mesopotamian god if her hindquarters are shapely (binûtam kazbat).

The first representations of the Egyptian goddess of love, Hathor, in the sixth dynasty (circa 2500 BCE) were in the form of a cow: some can be seen in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Later depictions show her with a horned headpiece and holding the sun-disk. She was at various times mother, daughter and wife of Ra.

In some versions of the myth of Io, Zeus turned his latest conquest into a heifer in order to hide her from his wife Hera, who then sent Argus Panoptes, the all-seeing giant, to watch over Io and prevent Zeus from visiting her. She must have still been desirable as a heifer, since she later gave birth to Zeus’s daughter Keroessa and a son Epaphus. (It ended badly for Argus, who was killed by Hermes although his hundred eyes ended up as the ocellate decorations on peacock feathers.)

The name Eglah, one of the lesser known of the eight wives of King David in the Bible, means ‘heifer’.

Gertrude Stein had a thing about the bovine too. She wrote about ‘making a cow come out’, which meant (it is safe to infer) bringing Alice B. Toklas to orgasm.


A big perhaps
‘Mungkin’ was a Malay word I became aware of hearing very often (and even used a lot myself) when I worked in Indonesia, essentially because my limited knowledge of the local lingua franca required me to listen very carefully indeed to understand anything at all. ‘Mungkin’ expressed a certain hesitancy and reluctance on the part of native Indonesians to commit themselves, and perhaps it wasn’t surprising I was hearing it since I was trying to get them to commit themselves to work for our health project. That was why I had adopted it myself: I had to keep my options open when I didn’t fully understand what conclusions they might beget.

Now I read of an anthropologist who spent a year doing fieldwork (Stephen Pax Leonard) in the town of Qaanaaq in north-western Greenland, one of the most northerly permanent settlements in the world; he writes that ‘ammaqa’ (‘perhaps’) was among the common Inuit words that floated through his conversations with the locals. Going into the dark winters, this expression of disengagement more than the solitude or lack of light led him into a kind of depression. To go beyond the borders of his ontological safety zone and find the local people unbudgingly non-committal must have been exasperating. ‘Perhaps’ is surely a word that expresses all the ambivalence of indigenous peoples about the benefits of modernity. And not just indigenous ones. Jacques Derrida was surely on safe ground when he asserted that ‘no category for the future is more appropriate than that of the “perhaps’’’.

It has been written that Flaubert discovered the pivotal importance of ‘peut-être’ the further he worked his way into Madame Bovary. The forthright statements of the traditionally omniscient narrator give way to hedgings and equivocations: ‘Should she write to her father?’ Emma wonders. ‘It was too late, and perhaps she regretted not having given herself to the man.’ Flaubert’s work marks the hinge at which literature lost its wholeness and totality (as mourned by Balzac) and became ‘decadent’ – fragmentary and haunted by contingency. That is what the adverb ‘perhaps’ signals. The omniscient narrator of realistic fiction was no longer a feasible notion – hence the indirect free style of his scandalous novel Madame Bovary – and the narrator, in the future, would be just as hesitant as his subjects. (And as the life of Flaubert inadvertently shows, the novelist of the future would have to be every bit as much social scientist as storyteller.)

‘Perhaps’ was also Samuel Beckett’s favourite word, although his biography suggests there might be something disingenuous about his plays for a depleted world, or at least a gulf between the writer Beckett and the citizen Beckett: a man who really believed in the ultimate futility of all effort wouldn’t take arms against Fascist absolutism, as he so courageously did during the Second World War. If the world is indeterminate, then there is still hope.

This kind of scepticism and awareness of contingency has crept into theology too: some contemporary theologians consider that God’s existence is also haunted by ‘perhaps’; not indicating hesitancy and doubt so much as an openness to risk and the unforeseeable. But as a friend of mine who once studied for the ministry told me, ‘ich habe einige meiner Kommentare gelesen und dann alle diese ‘vielleicht’ gesehen und wußte sofort, daß ich niemals Theolog sein würde’ (I read some of my commentaries [on the Scriptures] and then saw all those perhapses and knew, then and there, that I’d never be a theologian). He had become a philosopher, and I reminded him that Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, had foreseen ‘the advent of a new species of philosophers… – philosophers of the dangerous ‘maybe’ in every sense.’ These were philosophers who were prepared to move beyond antitheses (which device Nietzsche thought was specious) and their dialectically improved products.

And of course there is the accommodating punk theology of François Rabelais, whose attributed last words were ‘Je m’en vais chercher un grand Peut-Être’ [‘I’m off in search of a big Perhaps.’]


Brute events
‘A cry doesn’t call – it exults.’ So writes Gaston Bachelard in his strange little essay on Lautréamont’s Maldoror. This is perhaps the same ecstatic scream embraced by Antonin Artaud, defiantly affirming itself in a kind of self-immolation. An expression that can’t contain itself, according to Socrates in Philebus, where he associated the cacophony of opinions with the sounds of people hollering in the street.

Not the kind of extended totemic exultation Vincent van Gogh heard when he painted, though, or the lucid cruelties Antonin Artaud aspired to produce in the theatre – ‘outside thought’. Max Ernst wrote of his 1930s’ collages, especially ‘Loplop the Bird Superior’: ‘My works from that time were not destined to seduce but to produce howls.’


Underneath your nose
Subodorer: to have a presentiment. To sense a distant event or presence from the faintest premonition or spoor of evidence, as suggested by Littré’s definition. From Latin subodorari, literally to smell below (the level of consciousness). A shift into the regions of what Wordsworth called ‘under-sense’.


Perception is a fish
The Mayan glyph ‘catching a fish with the bare hands’, which has the syllabic value tzak, denotes the act of conjuring. In Scotland, the related activity of trout tickling is called ‘guddling’ or ‘ginniling’.

Metaphorically extended, the glyph also means ‘perceiving’, ‘grasping the occasion’ or even ‘invoking the spirits’. Its stylised logographic depiction conveys the sense of something evanescent, difficult of access or readily slipping from the grasp. The salmon of knowledge, it might be, briefly caressing the palm of a hand. Scots dialect has a term ‘keethin’ sicht’, used in one of his mystical lyrics by Hugh MacDiarmid, to describe the ability to sense the presence of a salmon by the overlying ripples in the water.

The novelist Iain Banks recalled in an interview that he had once wanted to invent a Scottish version of Google called Guddle.


A lack of knowledge
Those great appeals for childish spontaneity, simplicity, unselfconsciousness and even pure ignorance, as we find them in the poems, philosophy and novels of Blake, Rousseau and Lawrence, show that their authors were singularly ignorant themselves, either as parents or diagnosticians, of the real nature of children and their impulsive, deep craving for order – allied to their thoughtless dispensing of cruelty. Innocence is a very dangerous word to use as a synonym for ‘inexperience.’

Contemporary childhood has been idealised in a not always healthy manner. Middle-class children are now reined in and sedated with technology. Adults have become squeamishly intolerant of childish bullying and violence. Such behaviour used to be accepted because that was how children learned to stand up for themselves and deal with bruises – and bruised feelings. And now we have a generation of students who are so ‘fragile’ they cannot be exposed to upsetting topics at university.

St Augustine wrote that the innocence of children lay in the weakness of their limbs, not their intentions – but the phenomenon of boy soldiers might have checked him.


An honest thought
In an interview with the elderly Leszek Kołakowski, Danny Postel quoted his own lines back to him: ‘The opening line of Metaphysical Horror reads: “A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading”.’ ‘Have you ever suspected yourself of being a charlatan?’ Kołakowski: ‘Certainly. Many times.’ Which I take to mean that Kołakowski was dignified enough as a philosopher to despise himself for using tricks of reasoning to get the better of sceptics and opponents.

He was perhaps unknowingly echoing Robert Burton, who said: ‘I count no man a Philosopher who hath not, be it before the court of his Conscience or at the assizes of his Intellect, accused himself of a scurrilous Invention, and stood condemned by his own Judgement a brazen Charlatan.’ Burton had seen that there were people after the Puritan Revolution who thought sincerity a matter of intensity, of really meaning it, and went in willed ignorance of the kind of masked stand-ins variously recruited to do service as persons philosophical: the fool, the cynic, the sceptic, the courtier, the libertine… even the melancholic. Socially deceitful persons, in short. By contrast, openly suspecting yourself of being a charlatan was a way of proofing yourself against it.

Kołakowski was obviously a genuine charlatan, which is also the fine distinction made by Isaiah Berlin to describe George Steiner after having been accused of suggesting that he was an ordinary kind of charlatan.

In France, the many who make a profession out of offering insights based on the uniquely penetrating power of their intelligence should really be known as charlacans – bien évidemment.


The One
A fine anecdote about receptivity is told by Porphyry regarding his master Plotinus who, deciding to study philosophy at the age of twenty-seven, made his way to Alexandria. He was dissatisfied with every teacher he came across until he heard Ammonius Saccas lecture. ‘This is the man I was looking for,’ he told his companion, and embarked upon an intensive course of instruction under his new mentor that would last over a decade and inspire him to join the army of Gordian III in its march eastwards: Plotinus wanted to know more about Persian and Indian philosophy. Six hundred years later the Sunni Abassid philosophers would return the compliment by absorbing his doctrines into their speculations on the nature of the godhead.


In utrumque partes
Simon Hoggart’s ‘law of the ridiculous reverse’ states that if the obverse of a statement is self-evidently absurd then the affirmative version wasn’t worth making in the first place. This ploy was well known to classical rhetoricians: they would have said that such a statement lacked a dirimens copulatio – the balancing or opposing fact to prevent the assertion from being lopsided.

In our PR era the law of the ridiculous reverse can be found almost anywhere you look or listen. Example: imagine a hospital or a university department coming out with its mission statement – ‘We are committed to the lowest standards’ or ‘Our private hospital aims for disappointing rates of patient satisfaction’…

And there’s a related phenomenon in titles such as ‘The Institute for Human Values in Medicine’, where the word human gives pause for thought: isn’t that a tiny bit reminiscent of democratic as in the former German Democratic Republic, or scientific as in ‘scientific Marxism’?


Smiling on by
Boccaccio writes that the ordinary citizens of Verona gossiped about Dante. ‘You see that man?’ one of them said to her friend. ‘He goes down to hell when he wants, and comes back with news of those who’re down there.’ And another would say: ‘It must be true: so that’s why his beard is frizzy and his skin tanned.’ And Alighieri would walk past them with a little smile on his face – ‘sorridendo alquanto’.


Surveillance techniques
The presiding presence of the contemporary world must be the mischievous cambion Asmodeus, who lifted the roofs off houses in all the districts of Madrid in Luis Velez de Guevara’s fantastic novel El Diablo cojuelo (1641) so that its rascal student hero – as a reward for loosing the devil – could capture humans in the secret recesses of their private lives. When the blind John Milton introduced the ‘Aerie Microscope’, that new-fangled optical device, into Paradise Regained thirty years later, he seemed to think its principal function was to peer into houses. Satan in his poem speaks of the device that allows him to see ‘Outside and inside both, pillars and roofs / Carv’d work, the hand of famed Artificers, / In Cedar, Marble, Ivory or Gold.’

Both writers were probably familiar with the second-century satirist Lucian’s dialogue ‘Icaro-Menippus: An Aerial Expedition’, in which the character of that name recounts a journey to the moon and Jupiter on wings ‘borrowed’ from an eagle and a vulture. On the moon, he initially has difficulty seeing the Earth; then he spots the Colossus of Rhodes and the tower of Pharos (two of the seven wonders of the ancient world) and in no time he can see ‘everything as clear as possible: looking down to Earth, I beheld distinctly cities and men, and everything that passed amongst them; not only what they did openly, but whatever was going on at home, and in their own houses, where they thought to conceal it.’

When his interlocutor asks him how it was possible for him to see into houses, Menippus replies that the philosopher Empedocles (who just happened to be living on the moon) told him to take off his vulture’s wings and wear only eagle’s wings: this gave him a vision of the private sphere that was both sharp and cold. Being above (and privy) to the private life of others it seems only natural that a social critique should follow.

Asmodeus isn’t just the patron saint of paparazzi and journalists, and Menippus their literary model; they are the forebears of the secret services worldwide. The remit of the professional detective seems to have originated with this legend, which became even better known in the eighteenth century through Alain-René Lesage’s French adaptation: ‘detect’ derives from the past participle of the Latin detegere, which means to expose or disclose, or more literally ‘to unroof’.


Not on his lips
In How to Kill a Dragon, the linguist Calvert Watkins notes, citing scholarly sources, that some words in the lexicon have always been avoided by classical poets as ‘unpoetic’. He gives as an example the Greek term emporos or ‘merchant’, reference to which is not found once in Homer’s work although mercantile cities and routes – and not just Phoenician ones – are known to have flourished in the eastern Mediterranean from the early Bronze age onwards.

Adam Smith (a thinker of surprising depth and insight) suggests why, in his Lectures on Jurisprudence: ‘These are the disadvantages of a commercial spirit. The minds of men are contracted and rendered incapable of elevation, education is despised or at least neglected, and heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished.’ That was while he was laying the statutes in his Glasgow lectures for a future where ‘every man… becomes in some measure a merchant.’


Social confidence
‘Avoir l’air emprunté’ goes the French expression: to appear awkward, embarrassed or ill-at-ease means to have a borrowed look: it applies to the person rather than the clothes. I often have this look. Madame de Sévigné speaks of a character about whom nothing is false or simulated (‘Rien n’est faux ni emprunté chez elle’), and Saint-Simon, by way of contrast, has the Duchess of Chartres feeling ‘empruntée’ (clumsy and gauche) on a visit to St Cloud as if it ‘were an unknown land’. In other words, the authentic person will be original, graceful and witty, knowing just what to do in any given situation, and never giving the impression of having taken her lines from anyone else (not even from Littré).

This presence of mind surely has something in common with the ‘panache’ recommended by Edmond Rostand in his play Cyrano de Bergerac – a popular success from its Paris premiere in 1897 onwards and one of Gérard Depardieu’s best film roles – as a philosophy for life: ‘the kind of courage which, at ease in situations, frames and defines them with wit. If renunciation or sacrifice is involved, a consolation of attitude is what one adopts.’


Tongue-tied
Paul Valéry met Joseph Conrad in London in 1922 and had tea with him in Canterbury the following year: he wrote that Conrad had a fine Occitan twang (he had embarked on his first coaster under a captain who came from Valéry’s natal town of Sète) but a horribly thick accent when he spoke in his adopted English. This amused him no end. ‘To be a great writer in a language which one speaks so badly is a rare and eminently original thing’, he wrote in Sujet d’une conversation avec Conrad. Valéry would not have known that Conrad had first learned his English in the port of Lowestoft.

A related moment occurred when in September 1884 Nietzsche paid a courtesy visit to the Swiss writer Gott­fried Keller, whom he greatly admired, and was appalled by the great man’s ‘terrible German’ and the laborious way he expressed himself in conversation. The pianist Robert Freund, who reported this meeting (Memoiren eines Pianisten), says that Keller for his part confided to him at their next encounter that he thought the visiting ex-professor from Basle completely batty – ‘ich glaube, dä Kerl ischt verruckt’.


Fabergé design
The most accurate observation about the young Nabokov? ‘He can write, but he’s got nothing to say.’ The writer who was about to become ‘the master of the genre of silence’ judges the young harlequin whose precision was of a different kind. Isaac Babel made the above remark to Ilya Ehrenburg.

Certainly, Nabokov made sure later in life that he was never caught in public without being dressed up as V. V. Nabokov, author. He was a good chess player, but too fastidiously controlling to risk defeat by playing living opponents (so he worked self-vyingly on chess problems). He disliked television, but was persuaded to appear for a ‘live’ interview, on Bernard Pivot’s television show Apostrophes (May 30, 1975): Pivot plied him with questions, and Nabokov read prepared answers, in French, from his famous 3 x 5 inch index cards while attempting to hide them behind a pile of his books in French translation. He spoke for an hour while Pivot, now and again, offered him some more ‘tea’, and our author looked very pleased at being able to give Pivot all the right answers to his questions. This is what the French would readily have recognised as an ‘oralisation de l’écrit’. It suggested to me that Babel saw something in the young Nabokov that I hadn’t spotted until then: he is a taxidermist.

Nabokov would surely have known that his contemporary Charles Van Doren had to resign from his post as a teacher of English at Columbia when it emerged that his apparently spontaneous replies to questions on a TV quiz show in 1957 had been prepared in advance.


Fremd
My six-year-old daughter, on hearing me make a gender slip in German – corrected by her mother as we talked at table – piped up in my defence with the following pledge: ‘Er kann nichts dafür, er kommt nicht aus unsrem Land’ [He can’t help it, he doesn’t come from our country]. She had established my credentials as her alien father, who was accordingly to be cherished.


A projected body
I used to think, as a young anatomist, that the larynx –that triangular assemblage of cartilages under exquisite muscle control commonly referred to as the voice box – ought to be regarded as the body’s revenge on the mind.

Asked about what he remembered of his attendance at Lacan’s famously shamanic seminaries, Philippe Sollers said ‘it would have been wonderful to have had a video recording of the seminary in order to experience the body emerging from the voice and not the other way around.’ (This could be described as a modern take on the ancient Platonic doctrine that ‘the soul is older than the body’, its attributes being prior to any notions of weight and solidity, whereas the modern assumption is that the mind is an epiphenomenon coming ‘after’ the physical procession.)

The master’s utterance could only take shape inside the resonant hollow bodies of the audience once it had slithered into their ears, this being the organ that relays the intimate to the public. But his would have been no real body, just the phantom one of structuralism.


Love wind kiss
The commingling of human life and divine breath goes back to the dawn of civilisation in Mesopotamia. ‘Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the earth, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ This was the primordial inspiration; and the breath which gives life is thereafter bindingly associated with the word which gives life: the mouth is the font and egress of the spirit. It is also the case that in early cultures – in which intimate and implicating modern forms of tongue-kissing seem to be unknown, or at least are not commented upon – there is a direct affinity between breathing and kissing. In his book The Mystic Rose: A Study of Primitive Marriage, the anthropologist Ernest Crawley writes: ‘The typical primitive kiss is contact of the nose and cheek; the Khoyoungtha, for instance, apply mouth and nose to the cheek, and then inhale.’

Remarkably, the seventh article of the papal bull Ad nostrum, which was drawn up at the Council of Vienne in 1312 in order to counter the growing heresy of the ‘free spirit’ adopted by lay Christians in the German-speaking lands (Beghards and Beguines), asserts that while sexual intercourse is not a sin insofar as men and women are prompted to it by natural impulses ‘especially in time of temptation’, kissing is because nature has not inclined us to it. In that troubled century, the Brethren of the Free Spirit – who believed themselves to be perfect (and therefore impeccable) were alleged, besides dispensing with the ministrations of the Church, to indulge in osculation. For the Church, this was proof of their moral turpitude.

As Juliet tells Romeo in Shakespeare’s tragedy, ‘Then have my lips the sin that they have took.’ To which he responds, ‘Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.’