When you’ve meant to write something for a long time, over two decades, it’s inevitable you’re going to think you’re going to muff it.
Here goes.
At university, I read George Steiner’s After Babel. First I fell for it, and then I took against it.
The writers Steiner investigated with awe — in this and his other books — became my reading list, and I think he was correct in his worship: Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelštam. These are still all among my loves.
But the idea that stuck, and that I’ve been failing to get around to, was an account of the Hopi people in what is now called America.
As I understood it, and even at university I definitely augmented it, Steiner was saying that the basic Western metaphor for how men and women relate to time has us striding forward into it, eyes open. But this is false, because we see what has happened to us far more distinctly than what is about to happen to us, which in fact we don’t see at all.
The bananaskin or the death five minutes in our future is completely invisible.
The past, as it recedes further into a further off past, becomes less and less detailed, perhaps foggy, perhaps completely occluded, and we begin to invent coverage for the gaps and blanks.
The Hopi people have a different and better basic metaphor.
We humans are walking backwards through time.
This explains our constant tripping over unforeseen hazards. We do not stride like optimistic young pioneers, in full possession of clear views, we shuffle like timid tramps backing away from guard dogs.
Steiner says almost none of this, and neither does Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), upon whose writings, collected in Language, Thought & Reality, these explosions of mine are — it’s he who I am getting wrong, along with the Hopi people Whorf was quite possibly getting wrong.
Both Whorf and Steiner are commonly accused of inaccuracy. Steiner in his Heidegger book, for example — which is widely dissed. Whorf’s theories of language and how it relates to what we’re capable of thinking, individually and tribally, aren’t much respected.
I’ll say more, another time, but in terms of different ways of thinking, this model (Whorf’s) says the language you speak shapes the time and space you inhabit.
I find it convincing. How many of us have ever considered we’re doing anything other than facing our future? But maybe we’ve been existentially wrong all along. Maybe we got it entirely bassackwards.
POP AWAY
At the edges
of the verges
are the margins,
and the surges --
the unseen urges --
the same as music
never heard.
If we listen, stop to wonder,
loveliness though not a thunder
will pop.
© Copyright Edward Mycue