Esperanto Studied Here

One of my esteemed colleagues quite a number of years ago gave me a little book entitled Esperanto. It is by J. Cresswell and J. Hartley and issued by Teach Yourself Books. It’s not the kind of book you read, but one that produces delight at intervals. For that reason it occupies a “busy” shelf I tend to look at two, three times a week.

Perhaps the most wonderful creations in life are those that requires enormous, complex, and transcending efforts that—viewed from an ordinary, main-street, realistic view—are entirely unlikely to reach their goal. Esperanto was the creation of a Polish eye-doctor, Dr. L.L. Zamenhof (1859-1917). He felt that before humanity was ready to tackle the grave problems that confront it, the “language problem” had to be overcome—and so he set to work. Ah, the psychic airs of the nineteenth century West. Zamenhof was “one who hopes”—the name of his language in English. Now, of course, this creative tour de force didn’t entirely vanish. Books have been written in it. It is the native language of 1,000 people; 10,000 speak it fluently; and I am one of 10 million who have studied it “to some extent at some time.” These are the sorts of minorities to which I tend to belong—never more than, at best, 10 million. Zamenhof died as World War I was raging. The first grammar of the language had been published in 1887—not time enough, evidently, to conquer the globe. Ho ve! Meaning “Alas!” in Esperanto. The roots of that? Probably the Yiddish Oy vey. Word-roots in Esperanto derive from Western languages. Asia did not as yet throw the sort of shadow over the world that it does today.

A man much better known as a creator of so-called constructed languages is J.R.R. Tolkien. He created more than  twenty Elvish languages; the full list is still being counted as his unpublished papers are studied. With Tolkien we’re yet another step upward, as it were, in the transcending direction, because his linguistic creations served art. And such efforts also have their parallels in other fields. In the realm of architecture, the monuments I admire most are the Watts Towers constructed by Sabato Rodia. The image I show is from Wikipedia (link).

Sometimes when I pass that shelf and see my copy of Esperanto, I’ve just been reading the news or, as happened yesterday, anticipated a medical day that came today—one of the less pleasant kind. Then my mind tends to produce the word Desperanto—the language I ought to learn instead. Original with me, that word—but I discovered today that others have used it too. There is even a song by that title, written by Marianne Faithful. It’s opening lines:

Desperanto spoken here, today I hear it everywhere
It is the language of despair, it's in your nails and it's in your hair
It's in your mouth instead of air, it's in your house, it's in your heart
It's in your mind, it's everywhere, it's in your heart, it's in your heart.

And then there are days that begin in Desperanto but, after the bad thing is over, my mind has switched to Esperanto again—and I am filled with energy enough to start my own Watts Towers.

An Old Raj Quartet Note

Pondering yesterday Yeat’s dark view of the Second Coming brought some additional associations, most notably memories of reading for the second time Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. I had a post on that here back a couple of years. Something, something was there, a memory. Well, it surfaced finally. I had written a note on the subject of cultural despair—the same kind I now first noted in Yeats. It was a private diary entry. I dug it out, and it follows here. Apologies to those who do not know the story—and haven’t seen the television series (The Jewel in the Crown).

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Nothing like entering a subject fully. One of the truly dark chapters in this opus, at least when read, is Sarah’s seduction by Major Jimmy Clark or, rather, the Major’s disquisition as they pause between two musical events in a fancy private Calcutta club. Now that harangue is mild, “lite,” almost inconsequential in comparison with, let us say, Hari Kumar’s interrogation by Nigel Rowan. But what Jimmy’s discourse shows is a despairing view of civilization even though it is presented with a cynical aggression by a young man from a very privileged position in society.

In this vignette as everywhere else Paul Scott is devastatingly honest. He is one of the very few twentieth century authors able to depict that time realistically yet without phony saving graces, thus without a gloss of idealism. That sheen is usually based, by others, on humanism or progressivism; in the first case, still-present traces of religious thought tend to be exploited with careful finesses—thus the emotional tonalities of it are borrowed without the cosmological structure on which they rest; in the second, collectivist idealism about “the people” provides a signal of hope, at least in novels; the people are seen as somehow embodying something greater than a person does. In Scott’s novel we never really penetrate the cloud bank above and the outcome,consequently, is an existentialist stance: there are those who know; but their knowledge cannot save them. The heroic figures are Aunt Mabel, Lady Manners, Sarah; but all three live without genuine light or hope.

I find this fascinating. This dark view of humanity is already present in Shakespeare, I would submit; but it is rarely put so honestly, exhaustively, so plainly as by Scott. His version at least is honest; but it doesn’t break the clouds. The taste, smell, texture of this culture explains why I’ve maintained a cultural distance from the Anglo-Saxon world, despite spending a lifetime living in its midst. The Celtic—and the culture that it has inspired—now that’s another matter. It has always had a transcending dimension. There is Paul Scott. And there is also Tolkien.

Two—At Least

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust,
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
One wills to part, to rid itself, to cleave;
One would hold fast with savage love-lust
To the world with gripping hard organic force;
The other hoists itself by power from the dust
To the domains of higher ancestors.
    Goethe, Faust, Act I.

In my generation certainly—and I assume continuing to this day—that first sentence from this part of Goethe’s Faust—has served as a kind of marker in the lives of most thoughtful people who grew up in a German culture. The two souls within our breast are a matter of experience. Then as the years roll on and different ranges of experience mold us, we become aware of even more layering within. We discover more personae within ourselves, each the product of structures of experience that can be differentiated.

This came to mind today when, troubled by an article in the New York Times, I let myself comment on it without the usual restraints. To be sure, awareness of our various persons is better than ignorance. Attempts to force the self to express itself in a single mode is a kind of violence to nature. I’m well aware that I’m quite attached to many things that, from another perspective, I can view with equanimity—and that that attachment in itself, if it is permitted expression, can serve as a kind of teacher. But my own awareness of these differences causes me to put my thoughts on three different blogs, each with its own boundaries.

Needless to say, multiple personalities suggest a lack of integration. Here I turn to another great poet and storyteller for an appropriate image to sum up how to handle many selves each having its domain, its passions and its interests. I turn to Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings:

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.

If we change the context here from the Darkness to the Light, the solution to the problem comes. There is one Ring that rules, and being aware of it—and its relation to the others—produces integration in the whole while leaving each other ring to rule in its own realm.

The translation of Goethe’s verse is mine.

The Inklings

Almost everyone knows what The Lord of the Rings is all about, and many know that its author was J.R.R. Tolkien. Certainly in the English-speaking world, many people would also recognize the name C.S. Lewis and might even spontaneous come up with his best-known work, The Screwtape Letters, an elderly devil coaching a younger one (Wormwood), the latter charged with corrupting a single “patient,” a man in war-torn England. The book was published in 1942. Children—or parents with children—will also know of Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.

One Ring

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

[J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring]

It seems to me that with increasing complexity, reality, as it were, becomes more dense, substantial, and therefore meaningful. The corollary? As a system declines, it breaks apart and loses its complexity. Its parts no longer talk; in consequence something is lost. One of the interesting phenomena observable in the centuries since the French Revolution (to pick a date more or less at random—thus to mark the passage from one state to another) has been the rise of “single-minded” explanations of everything conceivable, in and beyond philosophy.

To document this with a gesture or two, consider George Berkeley’s Perception (a radical idealism) and Karl Marx’s Materialism, Schopenhauer’s Will and Sigmund Freud’s Libido. In the political arena we have Patrick Henry’s slogan, “Give me liberty or give me death,” vulgarized into freedom as the only value. And then we have Friedrich Hayek, beloved of right-wing propagandists. He associated the rise of civilization with private property and gave the price mechanism the same exalted role as language. These two concepts, fused together, give us the one ring that’s supposed to rule us all, the Free Market.

I can’t help but contrast our stark, monistic world with that of the organically interwoven character of the medieval, with its great estates, its hierarchical arrangements, is complex balances of obligations, sophisticated philosophies, beautiful architecture, intricate morality, and its infinite, vertical vector.

Now I’m not stupid enough to think that the balance of evil has shifted. One needs but study those times to know medieval talent for mischief, its brazen embrace of hypocrisy, its depth of cruelty. We didn’t invent torture to deal with Al Qaida. But in that time, when physical life was a great deal harder, it was easier to find life’s meaning. In that system the One remained transcendent; in ours it has sunk into the fogs and mists; in its descent it has lost all virtues except power; and here it serves dark lords who cynically rule in secret.

Tolkien—as great poets sometimes succeed in doing—wonderfully diagnosed the sickness of his age. He also knew the solution. The power of that ring must be resisted. We must recover our gift to think and feel comprehensively. The least, it seems, must lead—the Hobbits among us, the stout, the brave. Frodo is everyman. In fear and trembling he climbed the steep sides of Mount Doom and tossed the cursed ring into lava.

A good start might be reading The Lord of the Rings rather than just seeing the movie. Good Lord! Three books? Look at all those pages, pages, pages….

Shades of Mordor

We were talking long-distance with Michelle in Paris. These conversations go on for an hour or so. Along the way we talked about her problems in commenting on blogs. Brigitte then let slip the fact that I operate three blogs, not just one, and that one of those has a French name, La Marotte. Michelle’s reaction to that name deserves a special posting by itself, but today I’ll stick with another. In the course of this conversation I felt obliged to explain the reasons for these blogs, and I did so, pointing to the main thematics of the other two. But Ghulf Genes, I said, is kind of different because it was the first and no restrictions of subject matter apply. Michelle said: “Oh, I see. One blog to rule them all.” This produced a good deal laughter, and I thought I’d share her spontaneous reaction. Her mind works like mine. Pictures flash up...

And, of course, there is the fact that, still in her teens, Michelle persuaded me to read Lord of the Rings, which I resisted for the longest time—only to become a devoted follower of Tolkien’s myths. Our daughters have been active in introducing us to the new and splendid in music and in literature. Monique introduced me to Gabriel Garcia Márquez (A Hundred Years of Solitude) and to Richard Neuhaus (The Naked Public Square). Michelle is now working on me (a decade and counting?) to read the Harry Potter series, or at least to accept J.K. Rowling. I understand that The Tales of Beedle the Bard will be making it across the Atlantic for me to read, and I agreed to do so. Is that the sound of someone undermining the massive stone walls of my castle?

In the meantime I’ve been enriched by the thought that three blogs are like three magic rings. And there is one that rules them all. How many more blogs must I start to reach fullness of measure. Let me grab a slip of paper and calculate this out. Let’s see, 9 - 3 = 6. Well. Miles to go before I sleep.