Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 194

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WINDY WORDS: TOWARDS A PNEUMATIC LINGUISTICS
for an audience which had no Latin.4 My point of departure in this
essay is the question of the language in which the word is puffed
– as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, it matters in which language
the question of language matters.5 Our writer peppers his text with
Latin quotations, usually translated for the anchoresses. Here, for
instance, he quotes Gregory the Great, Impius vivit pio velit nolit
(p. 56)6 ‘The impious man lives for (the benefit of) the pious man
whether he will or no,’ explaining that the hostility of the ungodly
is as a wind that should fan the anchoresses’ love of God; and a little
later he quotes St Bernard of Clairvaux: Quid irritaris quid inflam-
maris ad verbi flatum, qui nec carnem vulnerat, nec inquinat mentem (p.
57)7 ‘How come thou art irritated and inflamed at an inflated word,
which neither wounds the flesh nor harms the mind’ – clearly an
early version of ‘Sticks and stones may break thy bones, but words
will never harm thee.’ There can be little doubt that the writer’s
thoughts, at least when his pen was in his hand, ran on his Latin
reading, and we are justified in claiming that any cleric writing a
devotional work in English at this time would have pondered the
Latin expression of the statement ‘Word is but wind.’ The matter
of language in this case is the word, and he could hardly write the
word ‘word’ without remembering that the word was made flesh,
and dwelt amongst us. In the linguistic context of medieval
England the incarnation of the word must surely be a matter of
translation, of uneasy shiftings: is it word, parole, verbum or even logos
which is translated (carried over) from the spiritual to the embodied
state? These terms in these different languages speak in signifi-
cantly dissimilar accents of body and spirit even before they each
and individually become Christ. Further, the other term in our pas-
sage, wind, carries with it (translates) a wide conceptual spectrum,
from the bodily puff of the villainous English expletive that topples
4 Lock (2004: 209, fn. 7 p. 228) discusses suggestions that Ancrene Wisse was originally composed
in Latin. I rely on Lock’s essay for some crucial points in this part of my discussion.
5 ‘On ne devrait jamias passer sous silence la question de la langue dans laquelle se pose la question
de la langue.’ – ‘One should never pass over in silence the question of the tongue in which the
question of the tongue is raised.’ Derrida 1985: 166, 210.
6 Pope Gregory (d. 604), Commentaries on Job (Moralia) in Migne 1815–1875: 168–69.
7 St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Traité de la fuite du monde in Raynaud 1840: 154.
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