Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 200

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WINDY WORDS: TOWARDS A PNEUMATIC LINGUISTICS
ingly, this paragraph in the Ayenbite begins with the phrase Yet eft
ine othre manere ‘Yet again in another manner,’ in the same way as
our passage from the Ancrene Wisse – but here avoiding half. This
may of course be coincidental, or a change of usage over time, but
it may also be avoiding half because of its mystical use in the rest
of the discussion.
I fear I have led my reader into a trap. I am not prepared to argue
for a spiritual interpretation of our passage in Ancrene Wisse, even if
I actually rather like the idea. Instead it is precisely the speculative
nature of my discourse which I wish to focus on. Whether or not I
am justified in reading on othere half as an esoteric hint by our
writer, the fact remains that I am dealing with a palpable readerly
construct. I ask my reader to focus not on the cogency of this
construct, but on its existence. It clearly lies there in the text – I
could not have read it into any phrase I chose. It was presented to
me by the words themselves, for if the writer did not mean them,
where else could I have found them? This is not a so-called Freudian
slip, since the words are not mine: if the idea came from my own
subconscious then it was an autonomous (because prior) sleight of
language which gave it expression. And in fact this argument
would also hold if it were a Freudian slip; and for that matter it
would hold if I were simply remarking on the weather or telling
someone I loved them. Language would be there ready for my use,
just as on othere half lies there waiting on the page for me as I read
speculatively into the text.
We may not flinch at this point. We must concede that since we
are dealing with pneuma, our discourse is pneumatological: but how
are we to understand this term in a modern context? It is first used
in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, with the
meaning ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘material.’ The same is true of the
term pneumatic, which in contrast has only recently lost its spiritual
scope, retaining only a material, or rather technological reference.14
It seems the dominant spirit (!) of the age is no longer able to
14 The OED quotes Dr Johnson’s note on Hamlet I.i. “According to the pneumatology of that time,
every element was inhabited by its peculiar order of Spirits.” The same may be said of ‘pneumatics’:
the OED quotes Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1869): “what are called metaphysics or
pneumatics were set in opposition to physics,” and the Contemporary Review of the same year,
referring to “metaphysical pneumatics woven out of scholastic brains.”
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