Language

Language has very much to do with Paradigms. Language and paradigms are on one level a unity. (See Benjamin Whorf and socio-linguistics, and Thomas Kuhn and paradigms.)

Whilst obviously complex and intricate, and symbolically patterning and encoding a huge wealth of stuff, human languages are a corruption of true speaking and hearing of person.

There is proto-language which is inside, behind the veil. This is the true speaking and hearing, where Christ is received as the personal and eternal Word, as a soil hears seed.

Love is the ultimate true speaking and hearing, and poetry is perhaps the closest we get to a glimpse of true language with the written and spoken word.

Jacobsen once wrote that Rilke had confided

... that he had not not liked calling that remarkable story of his that takes place by the Salzach 'Two Worlds' - again and again he had felt impelled to say 'Two World': thus one often finds oneself at variance with the external behaviour of a language and intent on its innermost life, or on an innermost language, without terminations, if possible, - a language of word-kernels, a language that's not gathered, up above, on stalks, but grasped in the speech-seed.

Would it not be in this language that the perfect Hymn to the Sun would have to be composed, and isn't the pure silence of love like heart-soil around such speech seeds? Oh, how often one longs to speak a few degrees more deeply! My prose in the 'Suggested Experiment' lies deeper, a shade further in the ground, than that of Malte, but one gets only a minimal layer further down; one's left with a mere intimation of the kind of speech that may be possible there, where silence reigns.

Contact

Andrew Moore

moorea@ozemail.com.au