PAUL MATTHEWS
What
better place to begin than with the letter ‘A’ ? ‘ The beginning of learning and the door of heaven’, is what that
madman Christopher Smart Called it. Its shape comes from the head of an ox,
they say, and ‘ox’, according to my dictionary, is, 1: ‘Any bovine animal.’ 2:
‘ Castrated male of the domestic species’.
It was Smart’s strong conviction that there is life in language, a
generative power. The prevalent view of the matter, however, would go along
with the gelded version, holding that language is a domestic arrangement, an
information technology which in itself is devoid of life and mystery. I suppose
that ever since people began to think about language, instead of simply living
inside the spell of it, a tension has existed between these two views - the
magical and the rational. Perhaps the very act of thinking about words is what
severs the ox from its magic potency. That; or, in encountering some untamed
element of the Aleph, we do indeed stand in jeopardy of being tossed into a madness.
The
French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, suffered this tension within himself. ‘Weak-minded
people’, he wrote, ‘beginning my thinking about the first letter of the
alphabet, would soon rush into madness.’ In the overweening confidence of his
youth when, by his own confession, he considered himself ‘Magus or Angel,
exempt from all morality’, he made the famous sonnet in which he claims that
each vowel has a colour, and that the
sounding of them conjures up images in the mind: ‘ A, Black velvety jacket of
brilliant flies which buzz around cruel smells, gulfs of shadow.’ Following a
deliberate path of poetic initiation, he battered at the conventions imposed on
language by ‘the one-eyed intellect’ until its vowels became for him five
Hallelujahs heralding a change in consciousness. ‘One must be deader than a
fossil,’ he wrote, ‘to begin a dictionary in any language.’ And yet only a
couple of years later, at the point of renouncing poetry altogether, he
dismissed his ‘Alchemy of the Word’ with its ‘rules for the form and movement
of each consonant’ as one of his ‘follies’. I can understand why he did so. He
was, for sure, rushing into madness through his ‘rational disordering of all
the senses’. But I am not prepared to admit that he merely ‘invented’ this
relationship between words and movement, sound and image. Was it ‘folly’ when
he wrote, ‘The first adventure on the path was when a flower told me its name’?
I don’t believe so, even though, in leaving his tormented adolescence behind,
he felt the need to spurn such magic. Such a communion is what I, too, seek
through language, and this is served by attending to
the cadence of each line and sentence and to
the colour of every sound in context (including, of course, the person we are
talking to) until language becomes a substance shared as well as communication
about a subject.
How
could I dismiss it when, in the depth of their craft, some of the poets that I
most admire admit to a sense that the sap of language streams within the veins
of nature and sustains it? The American poet Robert Duncan, for instance, who
says – ‘As I came needing wonder as the new shoots need water / to the letter A
that sounds its mystery in Wave and in Wane / trembling I bent as if there were
a weight in words.’ Or going further back, there is Samuel Taylor Coleridge
with his dream vision of Kubla Kahn’s garden where ‘Alph the sacred river ran /
Through caverns measureless to man’ –
the images, as he claimed, rising up before him as ‘things, with a parallel
production of their correspondent expressions.’ Or I think of William Blake’s description of the innocent poet
who, plucking a reed to use as a ‘rural pen’, dips it into the stream for ink,
as if to allow Nature herself to trace her alphabet.
The
further back we go, in fact, the more we find that the very sounds and rhythms
of the language give voice to the elemental qualities of the landscape in which
they are written or spoken. No doubt Dr. Johnson, in the C18th, felt justified
in his attempt to have the meanings and pronunciations and spellings ‘reduced
to alphabets’ within the confines of his famous Dictionary, for how, with a
‘wild and barbarous jargon’ that refused to lie down in its stall, could the
scientists of his time record the results of their experiments? I, too, love
lexicons. Yet how savourless my measured words seem compared to the Hey Diddle
Diddles and Hopskotch rhymes of childhood, or the rocks and cliffs that utter
themselves through the consonants of those Scops and Gleeman who first forged
our language.
Paul
Matthews is the director of Language Alive, the Creative Writing course at
Emerson College. His publications include Sing
Me
the Creation and The
Ground that Love Seeks.