Bojin Zhu

1

We read a poem by Rowan Williams days ago, called Posidonius and the Druid. I had no idea what it meant or who they were when I was reading the poem. Then I was told that Posidonius was a Greek politician; civilised, that means: the child of logos, wielding the power of language. And a Druid, they say, is a member of the ancient Celtic culture. The poem, then, is supposed to be read as a conversation between Posidonius and a Druid, the civilised against the barbaric, logos versus silence.

Your logos is a child, he says, chattering to itself

while it plays on the sand. I am a swimmer.

I am a salmon and a seal.

This is the voice of the Druid. I am a swimmer, he says, I am a salmon and a seal. I don’t trust language, so I don’t use it. I jump off the land and swim against the current, and I’m free. And you, the child of logos, are not. You’re not free to jump into the water, because you’re bound by the land that is your logos. You’re intimidated by the vast roaring ocean, forever beyond the reach of your logos. Playing on the sand is the most you could do.

and I reach out breathless for the shore,

children and sand, the noise and the unsafety,

drift, spars and groundlessness, but still the anchorage

proper to talking beings.

So responds Posidonius. “the anchorage proper to talking beings” — anchorage is safety. To anchor means to be stable. Language is the anchor with its stable meaning, Posidonius seems to say, so that you know what to expect from others. Any slightly sophisticated communication demands language, and we’re so used to it that we seldom really recognise the possibility of communication without language. When she says that she’s in pain, nine times out of ten we know: she is in pain. That is the anchor around which the world turns. 

Such a Lacanian image, M added. When you start using language, you lose something, because language is public; it only contains what is communicable, and thus when you adapt to it you inevitably lose some of the private parts of your thoughts. The thought is there, staring at you, and yet resists to be named. What’s the word? — Jouissance. That’s the word Lacan uses. That’s what language deprives you of. 

But are we then on board with the “Druid team” then? We might be temporarily tempted by it; but we, by nature, defy silence. Silence is a burden, so to speak, that demands to be relieved by words. I guess that is why R was so persistent in saying: we’re on the logos team. By birth. When you think about it, we can even readily accept the “chattering to itself” bit. If to use the language is to be unfree in some way, so be it; that is the price to be paid. 

That is the price to be paid. N echoed. So the ultimate point is: yes, to be a human is not the best thing in the world. To say that, is, surely, to be arrogant. And it is in the nature of humankind to talk. Well then: if you’re a human, just be one, and feel free to talk; but do realise that you’ve lost something that is probably fundamental to existence. So yes, I embrace even noise over silence, but when I do that, what I embrace is really just humanity. 

And yes, language is a Nietzschean tragedy, in that it takes you away from yourself and makes you one among many. But then, so is life, and being, and existence: tragedy is what we have to face, and even more, tragedy is what we have to embrace. Tragedy is what makes life heartbreakingly beautiful. 

2

Last night I had a conversation with J. We were meant to play chess, but somehow she brought up the topic of pain. She said that she was just chatting with a medic about the mechanism of pain. I said, okay, pain, interesting.  In experimenting with rats, she said, it’s hard to know, when they exhibit avoidant behaviour, whether it’s due to the actual  feeling of pain or merely a neural reflex. I said, okay, vanilla mind-body problem, probably have heard too much about it. But then she said something that really provoked my interest: when two people, receiving the same stimulus, report different levels of pain, it’s hard to know whether this difference is due to the difference of genuine feelings or discrepancy in their use of languages. 

That is true, I said, probably we’ll never know. My words were: “language is just too coarse-grained for that.” And that is undeniably true: in vision we have a vast array of shades of colour. Only some are named, and much less belong to the common vocabulary. In pain the land is even more barren: Ouch. Ouuuuuuuuch. It hurts. It really really hurts. Obviously we cannot rely on that to express the full intricacies of feelings. 

Are we going to resolve the problem by science? I said, probably, when we have a mature neuroscience to rely on. I didn’t even know whether I believed it. The entire discussion reminds me of Posidonius and the Druid. To speak is the fundamental situation of a human being; the loss of privateness is the fundamental circumstance of speech. Language is by nature coarse-grained (because it needs to be “just right” for communication), feelings are by nature intricate. Is neuroscience really going to resolve this conundrum? Will neuroscience bypass language and gaze directly into the deepest and most private abyss in the mind?

It does not seem a coincidence, then, that J subsequently  brought up the “controversial argument” of whether modern science reduces philosophy to a secondary or even useless status. I said I used to really believe that while doing philosophy for like two years, but then I changed my mind. The reason, I said, is that philosophy is actually  a different kind of business from science. It does not search for absolute truths. It is, instead, therapeutic. Therapeutic, she asked, for what? It’s really hard to pin down with words. I might have said something  then, but I no longer remember now. 

3

If philosophy aims at therapy, poetry is more ambitious. It attempts to transcend. If a metaphor is appropriate here: philosophers point to the edge of the land, bounded by our logos. They shout: thus far, and no further. Poets, instead, jump off the edge and plunge into the water. The water’s surely dangerous: it could drown them. It could swallow them. It could befuddle them and they may be lost, ended up “chattering with themselves”. But they swim on, like a swimmer, a salmon, a seal. They might finally discover a new land, where they stand on, returning to the logos while transcending it. They still use language, for sure; but they don’t use language as it is intended to be used. They have stepped out of the boundary, and are free from the rules.

To tell more examples on this point, allow me to return to Schmilosophy, where we read Posidonius and the Druid, and many more poems in the past two months. Among the examples I will offer two. 

I’ve always loved sunset. I’ve always loved that special shade of light which brings out the tender texture of everything: the sky, the clouds, the laughter, the entire existence. I dare not set the scene down on paper myself. Maybe I did when I was much younger, but then I lost the courage — or recklessness? — to do so. To do it badly is an unforgivable sin. And then one day I came across Kathleen Jamie, who writes:

How can we bear it? A fire-streaked sky, a firth

decked in gold, the grey clouds passing

like peasant folk

                          lured away by a prophecy. 

A peasant folk. Lured away by a prophecy. I almost had the image before me when I read this line. There is this cloud, dark at the bottom, huge and lumpy with irregular and coarse edges. Now there is the sun, on the edge of disappearing, giving off the last beam of light, round (oval probably) and tender. And then imagine the cloud floating towards the sun, “lured away” by it. Like a peasant-folk lured away by a prophecy. Bear with me for all these words that attempt to bring out the metaphor, which is already perfectly there in the lines of the poem. But what I want to say is: this line almost changed my entire experience of sunset. My perception of the scene was never the same after reading it. 

And the second one, from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. This is not, strictly speaking, a piece of poetry, but its fragmented form got it the classification. Throughout the entire book she talks about her fondness for the colour blue. Then in the last forty-or-so sections she talks about love, and when she does so she constantly puts love and blue in parallel. She begins with: 

...seeing a particular astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it (203). 

First juxtaposition between blue and love (sex). One section later: 

This man [a former lover] had one tattoo, a navy blue snake, which I liked to watch dance against the white of his wrist when the rest of his hand had disappeared inside me (205).

I am notoriously afraid of snakes. I cannot even stand the picture of a snake. [In fact, there was a time when the mere presence of a tender and harmless snake in a movie scene threw me into such violent panic that I hurled my iPad, along with the snake on its screen, to the corner of my room. It now carries a dent – a symbol of my morbid fear for the sinister, crawling creature.] Yet this passage, and the story Maggie tells about her snake-loving lover, invokes not just fear, but also arousal: I was aroused while I tried to imagine the slightly creepy scene depicted by it. The feeling is too weird to be pinned down by the words – well, my words. I cannot yet transcend the bounds of language. So let’s move on: 

If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth (212). 

The second juxtaposition. And finally, they are no longer just juxtaposed: 

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world (238).

When I finished at the end I was imbibed with the feeling that love is blue. But not just any shade of blue: a slightly deep one, though not sufficiently deep to be called dark, which love is anything but; it resembles purple in a way such that it borrows its mysteriousness and coquettishness; but it’s still blue at the heart of it.

And that blue was almost right in front of me when I finished the book and closed my eyes. Then I turned to see her, my lover, lying in bed, and for one instant I saw her glowing with this exact shade of blue. I almost sang to her, delightfully, with words from the end of Bluets: “Love is not consolation. It is light.” And: “When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”

4

When people start to analyse words, they become philosophers. When philosophers stop analysing the words and start to play with them, they become poets.

It seems to me that Wittgenstein is the best philosopher in the first sense. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is the best poet in the second sense. Wittgenstein says: look at the ways in which we use language! It’s like a massive tool box, and the function is really diverse. It’s wrong to think that language is somehow unified, but it is easy to be deceived by its uniform grammatical appearance. Nietzsche does not even bother to say that. He just grabs the tools and makes great things out of it. Just pay attention to his language:

We are forced to gaze into the terrors of individual existence – and yet we are not to freeze in horror: its metaphysical solace tears us momentarily out of the turmoil of changing figures. For brief moments we are truly the primordial being itself and we feel its unbounded greed and lust for being…

This reminds me of a discussion I had with F, who supervised me earlier on Nietzsche. I said that some parts of Nietzsche’s argument on morality might be slightly fallacious. F replies: Nietzsche doesn’t give a shit about that. (That should be his exact words.) If a fallacious reasoning helps him to convince the readers, provided that he writes it powerfully and even seductively, he would be more than happy to do so. What he cares about is not really truth: when you’re able to bring about a paradigm shift to people, then all the arguments and evidence that were previously counted against you will now be in your favour. Truth is perspectival and relative; power is absolute and eternal. 

F added: this is not an easy thing to do at all. It requires the combination of two abilities, both of which are extremely rare: the insight to see through things, and the literary talent to write seductively. Nietzsche is probably the only person in history that really combines these two abilities. His followers, most prominently Foucault, might have learnt something from him; but they’re not quite there yet. 

To explore the Wittgensteinian idea further may help illustrate this. Several days ago L, our head of department, delivered a lecture to us on feminism and pornography, an area in which she is perhaps one of the most prominent experts in the world. She said: I brought Austin’s theory of speech act to bear on the topic of pornography (by the way, Austin is heavily influenced by Wittgenstein). In the famous paper How to do things with words, Austin points out that words do not only express things, they can also be used to do things. Take the sentence “I promise to give you five dollars.” By uttering the sentence, you have thereby performed the act of promising. It’s not that your words caused or described the act of promising; they constituted it. They are it.

She went on to apply that theory in political philosophy in various ways. “If Austin knew that we brought his theory to bear on the topic of pornography, he would be rolling in his grave.” She joked, laughing with slight awkwardness. Free speech, she said, is not only about being able to utter certain words. Since speech is often about doing things with words, free speech must protect the ability to do the right thing with the right word. A woman’s “no” means no, and in pornographic patriarchy that speech act is often rendered moot.

But we will not pursue her argument further. Returning to my discussion with J: there are two ideals, I believe, in philosophy. I call them the Wittgensteinian ideal and the Nietzschean ideal. The Wittgensteinian ideal is calm, distanced, analytic. It is the kind of therapeutic philosophy that I mentioned to J. It reminds and alerts us that we do not simply use language to describe or represent; we use it to do a wide range of things. Speech is act. It is therapeutic in the sense that it cleans away the bad ways of thinking, which are sometimes the result of common sense, but more often the result of bad philosophy. And there’s the Nietzschean ideal that is passionate, strong, overwhelming, seductive, that aims to make a philosophical poet or a poetic philosopher. It recognises that our language is diverse, but does not say so directly. It shows its knowledge on this point by really using the language and releasing the full power of it.

Simply: most of us don’t control the language but are controlled by it. Wittgenstein is not controlled by the language, nor controls it. Nietzsche (and maybe Nietzsche alone) controls the language but is not controlled by it. Posidonius and the Druid need not oppose each other, after all: if (surely a distant if) only we could realise the Nietzschean ideal!

5

To name is to bestow a fate. To listen is to comply. Says Andres Barba in A Luminous Republic. This is the best concluding remark I could think of. But strictly speaking that is not true: it is actually the inspiration and origin from which this piece develops. Just this time, the title of the essay precedes the content. But then: if to name is to bestow a fate, the fate of this essay is already preordained from the very moment I thought of the title. When, exactly? The moment when I first encountered the sentences last night, lying on bed, book in my hand, in the dim lamplight.

I realised it after all: that sentence is precisely the name that bestowed my fate. This entire essay, then, is my effort to comply. 

Read again: 

To name is to bestow a fate. 

To listen is to comply.

[This essay was originally published in Offshore Literary, Issue no.2.]