Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Blaðsíða 209
merely through a cusp of our planet to further stars on the edge of
the universe. The warm breast of Hopkin’s Holy ghost broods over
the “bent world”; Hopkins is thinking not only of the bowed, weary
world of man’s treading, but of the curve of light rising in the East:
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –12
Of course pointing straight is valid when the target is in sight, the
ship on the horizon, the horseman on the hillside, and it is valid
perhaps in the monologic text, the chanting of the poem in the
anglo Saxon hall, where all indexicality lies in the intonation and
demeanour of the performer, gestures towards people and places
the audience knows and remembers. When we point straight, we do
not triangulate, we cannot indicate distance.
When pointing to the unknown, the unseen, when pointing out
beyond our horizon, it is as if we point with bent finger. Our refer-
ences become dialogic: we invoke the unspoken, the third term, tri-
angulating our indexicality in order to steady our slippery lan-
guage. The domain of straight pointing is delimited by the horizon
of the monologic. When we bend our pointing finger, it is drawn
down towards that extraordinary token of our humanity, the thumb.
Just as the thumb allows us to manipulate objects within the small
circle of our immediate environment, so too it partakes in our more
expansive gestures. With the help of our thumb, it is always given
to us to move our horizons further out.
PÉTur KnúTSSOn
209
12 gerard Manley Hopkins, “god’s grandeur”, The Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ware:
Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1994, p. 26.
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