Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 214

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WINDY WORDS: TOWARDS A PNEUMATIC LINGUISTICS
This can only be mediated by poetic language; but poetry is also
built up of words, materialised in breath, in ink on the paper. The
material existence of the words enables their spiritual existence.
Knowledge of the existence of another person erases scepticism; yet
it weakens no bastions of logic, and undoes no science: it translates
them all.
In a sense – not the sense of this essay, and hardly the sense of
any who have troubled to read so far – I am misrepresenting here,
for I have suppressed the final stanza, which after the transcendent
promise of the first two flattens the thought again into a typically
Gravesian commonplace.28 But the poem is out of Graves’s hands
now, and indeed out of mine. Like the barber’s whisper in the tale
of King Midas, its language is blowing in the wind, and will seed
itself at its own pleasure, quite independently of any human
attempt to control it.
This is, of course, personification, one of the besetting sins, we
are told today, of Romanticism; and I suppose I can hardly expect
many generative linguists to accept the idea that language can have
a will of its own. As I have hinted, this is a little strange, for many
of them – though by no means all – would accept the idea that
individual humans can have a will of their own. Accepting “will” as
a real something is one thing, but limiting it to being a property of
humans seems to me to be another. If man speaks language, then
attributing will to language is indeed personification; and if lan-
guage speaks man, then attributing will to man is linguistification.
I am not sure I see any difference between these two.
28 The last stanza reads: “Theft is theft and raid is raid / Though reciprocally made. / Lovers, the
conclusion is, / Doubled sighs and jealousies / In a single heart that grieves / For lost honour
among thieves.”
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