The limits of my language are the limits of my world

Why language matters so much in times of collapse

News!

• If you’re in or near or passing through Devon in the month of April, do come to Field System gallery in Ashburton. My friend and frequent collaborator

  Thomas Sharp
  is having a show on the themes his work circles: language, consciousness, magick, and romance—themes dear to the hearts of many readers of this Substack, I’m sure. And! As part of this show, you’ll be able to buy the first ever print edition of one of my essays. As we speak, it’s being printed in a snazzy, limited-edition, pocket-sized print run. Perhaps a gift for the deep weirdo in your life, which if you’re reading this Substack written by a deep weirdo, might well be you. Welcome!

Turner, “A Storm”. The forever question is how to capture the storm in words.

A friend of mine tells me he’s weary of all this talk about paradigm shifts. Every second Substack post or podcast seems to point to the historic moment we’re living through, the change in consciousness, the great awakening, the crisis, the collapse. (I suspect he told me this because I’m one of the worst offenders, ha.) To this friend of mine, it’s beginning to feel formulaic. What does it mean, to talk in terms so broad?

This friend is a poet, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. On the whole, poems concern themselves with particulars—first and foremost, the particularity of language. An essay wants to reason out an idea or draw a conclusion; a novel wants to tell a story. In both cases, it’s tempting to neaten or gather threads, which can easily lead to sweeping, generalizing, totalizing statements or sentiments—and when you’ve teetered over into that territory, you’re at risk of being glib or even outright false. (And I say this as an essayist myself. If there’s any shade here, I’m throwing it in my own direction.)

Meanwhile, poems—at their best, anyhow—mostly want to notice. To attend closely. They embrace silence and fragmentation. Right there in the form, there’s the option—the encouragement, even—to avoid drawing simple lines of pseudo-logic, and instead say only what you can truly see, allowing the world itself to speak into the silences. And when you allow the world itself to speak, the world itself invariably surprises you.

And yet (said the essayist)… I can’t help but feel that we are living through a paradigm shift, and that paradoxically, the people to lead us through it are poets—the very people whose art form might make them loath to speak in terms so dangerously vague. Why? The best way I can answer that is to tell you about an experience I had while reading William Blake. (Madly, this isn’t even the same experience I told you about a few months ago, when Blake sent me to the dark side of the moon. It’s a whole other thing, less dramatic but possibly weirder.)

(Before I go any further in these observations about poetry and why language matters so much in times of collapse, I want to honour my teachers Alice Oswald and Valentin Gerlier. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time with them over the past few weeks, discussing King Lear and Blake and other works of literature, and if there’s any insight in what I’m about to write, it starts with them. Similarly, if there’s anything that feels glib or hollow, that starts with me.)

So. Blake trip, mark two. Some of us have been having a grand old time exploring hell with Billy Blake. A dozen or so readers of this Substack have been gathering weekly with Valentin—who’s a Blake scholar—by the soft blue glow of a Zoom screen, to slowly, slowly read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

If you’re not familiar with this book, Blake wrote and illuminated it (i.e. illustrated it with his own unique engraving method) fairly early in his career. It’s partly a response to the Swedish mystic Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, which Blake saw as too morally conventional; too simplistic about good and evil. Though he was a devout Christian, Blake didn’t really believe in “good” and “evil” per se; to him, the things that bore those labels were just elemental energies, and both of these energies were important, both belonged to the fullness of life. He saw his society as calcified, fossilized under moralizing stories about good and evil—stories deadened by centuries of accreted cultural and religious baggage. And he hated it. To him, this was the major mistake underlying the calamities of his culture and his day—namely, in his view, the dry, dire form of religion that posited a distant, punisher god he brilliantly called Nobodaddy, and the Enlightenment philosophy that was severing humans from felt relationship with the world around them, by seeking to understand it all “objectively”, meaning scientifically and through detached, empirical observation.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (and really all his work), Blake didn’t just want to comment on this calcification of the spirit under deadened and deadening stories. He wanted to actively reverse it—or at least begin to. He wanted to reintegrate vital banished energies—to use language as an active medicine that could reawaken people to the astonishing fullness of existence. And as far as I’m concerned, he did a pretty fucking good job of that.

So here’s what happened for me. Early in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, there’s a passage headed “The Voice of the Devil,” which proclaims all sorts of exciting ideas, like “Energy is eternal delight” and “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” Even for someone like me, raised with no religion, there’s a certain amount of energy required to push through the mental blocks, the moralizing tightness, against reading the purported voice of the devil—and this, of course, is the point. By the time we reached the second and third pages of these pronouncements, in their booming, prophetic, diabolical but also weirdly funny voice, I was sitting in the strange suspended energy that seeps in after certainties have been shattered.

Then we reached the following, where the booming, prophetic, weirdly funny voice gives a whistlestop tour of accounts of the devil, via Milton and the Book of Job and the Gospels. (Don’t click away if you don’t want to read this right now! I know it’s jarring to jump from essay to poetry and back; I know they require different kinds of attention. You can absolutely just keep reading the essay. But I would say, do come back to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell later. It’s more than worth your time.)

Around the time we got to “in Milton, the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum,” I had a strange felt sense of something squirming beneath the words. As my cognition laboured to piece together all these abstract concepts—Destiny, Ratio, five senses, Vacuum—and to keep up with this expert sprint through scripture and literature, an energy bubbled up from underneath the abstractions, and with that energy came the clear certainty that making cognitive sense of it all wasn’t the point. That in fact, the confusion was at least partly the point. That I was being guided to see that all this liturgical litigating is really just pontificating over the top of … and there’s no other way to put this … a sort of infinite pileup of squat, fat, and, weirdly, blue worms, writhing on top of each other, beneath all the words.

(I realize that’s a bit of a side-swipe, so sorry about that. I can’t really explain more than to say that what I saw with my inner vision and felt in my chest was an infinitely receding mass of short, fat, blue worms. Blue worms all the way down, if you will. Why were they blue worms? Who the hell knows? I didn’t *not* take a lot of psychedelics in my youth. Maybe best to leave such questions aside.)

ANYway. Each of these blue worms was an energy, I suddenly felt—an elemental, inconceivably potent energy. And when humans come into contact with such energies (whether they feel like blue worms or, more likely, not)—when humans come into contact with them, we put stories on them. That’s the only way to even begin to understand and work with them. And these stories are where mythology comes from; these stories are mythology. The stories that make up the Bible as well as the Celtic myth cycles, the Greek and Roman pantheons and their shenanigans, the stories of the Hindu gods—every mythological system began with an encounter with elemental energies and the need to put a story on them, to put language on them, in order to make them comprehensible and communicable. Because it’s much easier to talk about and worship an energy if you put a face on it.

But of course, then you have an entity, something more or less stable, where before there was an energy. And this—this!—is the whole problem. “Entities” are necessary; we need to make indeterminate energies determinate and bring them earthside. (I want to honour here that the language of determinacy and indeterminacy is inspired by the brilliant

Revd Jonathan Harris | CoB

and his thinking about the energy of money, on which more in a future post.) Entities are necessary and they’re susceptible to calcification, to eclipsing the originating energy and becoming a dead structure. And when they’ve eclipsed or become abstracted from the sacred and true energies that inspired them, these entities, these ideas, can all too easily be weaponized—just like the ideas of good and evil, Nobodaddy and the devil. This calcification of an energy into a dead entity is what Blake saw playing out all around him, driving the worst kind of small-mindedness, institutionalization, prejudice, and death-in-life.

I don’t need to tell you that that dynamic hasn’t miraculously ended since Blake’s day. That it’s playing out all around us too. Because what underlies fascism if not a delusional certainty about a falsehood, a false story, which has been abstracted over the course of many years from the living, breathing fullness of life?

So what’s the solution? (A question a poet might not be gauche enough to ask, but I’m an essayist so, yolo.) The solution is language itself. It is imagination itself.

I wrote a whole bunch of woolly and yes, essay-glib warbling here about what we need to do and what this moment needs. I could almost hear my poet friend’s eyes rolling. So instead of droning on at you, I’m going to illustrate the suggestion that it’s language itself we need, and end this essay, by turning to perhaps the greatest poet of all. Anything there is to say about the dynamic of language making the world anew when an old order is collapsing, he can say far better than I can.

I’m talking about Shakespeare and King Lear, a story in which the old certainties about sovereignty and authority and the cosmic order are being shattered, leaving language terrifyingly untethered from meaning. We see this untethering in the famous first scene, when the aging Lear—figurehead of the old order—demands that his daughters win their share of his kingdom by telling him how much they love him. Goneril and Regan give it a shot, wittering on emptily about loving him more than their own husbands. But when she’s called on to speak, Lear’s favourite, Cordelia, can’t. Though she dotes on her father, when she’s asked what she has to say in response to this absurd and unwise question, she repeats, “Nothing… Nothing,” then adds: “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.” Her refusal to be glib, her insistence on honest words rather than easy ones, gets her banished, while the spillers of empty nonsense are rewarded with half each of the kingdom. Spoiler alert: things don’t go well for anyone after this.

This untethering of language from meaning sets off a spiral that leads the play to a storm on a blasted heath, where Lear has been brought to his knees and lost all sense, dragging his entourage behind him. On this heath, he meets Edgar, a nobleman also driven from the court by lies and language twisted against him, who is now reduced to playing the part of a madman, Tom O’Bedlam, in order to escape death at the hands of his own father.

Edgar as Tom O’Bedlam seems to speak in nothing but nonsense. His words are strings of broken nursery rhymes, of proverbs, of garbled half-rhymes and a voice that shifts from singing to hectoring to maudlin warbling. And yet—as my brilliant teachers Alice and Valentin have helped me to see over the past few weeks—what he’s actually doing is creating the tiniest chink of possibility for a new world to come through. He is sitting out on a blasted heath, exposed to the elements, and refusing to speak in glib certainties about what the world is now. He is, in fact, fracturing those certainties and letting his language leap into the unknown and uncontrolled, so that the world itself can speak through in his silences.

When Lear asks him who he is and what he has been, Edgar-as-Tom-O’Bedlam says:

Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly; and, in woman, out-paramoured the Turk: false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes, nor the rustling of silks, betray thy poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders’ books, and defy the foul fiend. Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind, says suum, mun, nonny, Dauphin my boy, my boy, cessez! Let him trot by.

And fuck me if that line “Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind” (where Tom’s repeating himself from a few moments earlier) doesn’t blow through me like the wind in the hawthorn itself. From the whole play, this is the line that stays with me, that sends a forever shiver through me. By piling up platitudes, the “Keep thy foot out of brothels” and the like, and allowing them to tumble over and through him losing all sense (instead of clinging to their glibness, as others in the play have done), he frees himself to say something true that cuts through the crap. It might not seem like much, this line, this “Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind,” but it’s a rare moment in this play of words being unfailingly, feelingly tethered to meaning. And it’s no coincidence that Edgar is the character who ties the play’s plots together, and ultimately seems to carry whatever tomorrow there might be.

This is what poetry, what language, does at its best. It creates the possibility of a new world, even in the midst of ruin. It has the courage to take up residence in the place of uncertainty, listen very carefully, and try to find the right words, the true words, even if they don’t seem like much at the time. It sits at the place of the border dream where the indeterminate is forever becoming determinate, a place before and beyond stale certainties, and stakes everything on finding new words, even as the storm is howling.

Like us, and like Lear and Tom O’Bedlam, Shakespeare lived in a moment of shattering certainties. The Middle Ages, with their hierarchy and their tradition and their long-unquestioned cosmic order, were crumbling, as up soared the new order, modernity, the condition we still live under today (just about). Shakespeare’s lasting genius comes at least in part from his ability to speak in the tongues of both times, the old and the new, so that the stage is held in a kind of turbulent, forever-suspended energy of change—and in his ability to speak another tongue altogether, too. The tongue of the blasted heath. The tongue that only grows when you have the courage to sit out in the elements and listen, and listen, and listen, until something new swims up and asks to be plucked and put on the page. Sometimes, Shakespeare knew, those words won’t seem like much, won’t seem to make much sense. All the better. If you live in nonsense times, a nonsense to that nonsense might just contain some sense, some oak-tree truth.

The limits of my language are the limits of my world, and right now, I’m off to find some better words to put on my squirming blue worms.

Love,

xx Eleanor

PS. I need to thank David Jennings for reminding me of the Wittgenstein quote that gives this post its title. Thank you, David, for being such a fount.