Get Lost: A Love Rant

for Rich

Poetry is not a prize. It’s a surprise.

I make no claims to treasure or predictability.

And because you are never too old to set a bad example (as Rochefoucauld so tartly put it), I’m hitting you right up front with prose.

________

During his travels in the late 1740s, the botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus had the opportunity to closely examine several monkeys. In comparing their anatomies to those of men, he found no differences except for speech. So man and monkey both wound up under the same category in his taxonomic scheme: Anthropomorpha.

Oddly enough, the first indignant objections he received were from his own colleagues — natural scientists and scholars whose fastidiousness seems akin to that of today’s crossword specialists. They called illogical his choice to describe a human as being “formed like a human” (anthropomorpha’s literal translation); their protest is a legalistic one my own and testy rules of logophilia would laud.

But here was Linnaeus’s answer to their finicky objection:

It does not please you that I’ve placed man among the Anthropomorpha, because of the [meaning of the] term “with human form,” but man does learn to know himself [italics mine]. Let’s not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name we apply. . . . I seek from you and from the whole world a generic difference between man and simian that follows from the principles of natural science and history. I know of absolutely none. If only someone might tell me of a single such difference! Had I called man a simian ([as] perhaps I ought to have done, by virtue of the law of the discipline), I would have brought together all the theologians against me.

Thus, in one fierce swoop does Linnaeus implicitly propose recursive self-defining as an essentially human trait, correct a language-fiend’s selective myopia, and direct the critical focus back towards the historic implications of his study. Rarely does an observation change a moment this way, into a momentousness.

________

A hundred years thereafter, Darwin would publish The Origin of the Species, and indignations once again would arise (because indignations do not read but only reproduce). And even today, the theologian’s objection springs to mind (and thus to headline) faster than the scientist’s or wordsmith’s.

Theological objections say science is abasing man by threatening his “spiritually higher” position in the “great chain of being.” (This is how creatures made “in the image of God” jealously guard their self-appointment: Charges of affront to deity are brought, it seems, only against those who would never have invented gods at all.)

We are the vainest of creatures, and, having been made in our image, the creator has apparently never been able to withstand the slings and arrows of a skeptic humor. The young man who has not wept, warns Santayana, is a savage; and the elder who won’t laugh, a fool. Yet century after century, some fetters of letter or law would trump what otherwise might flourish in more easygoing natures of concord, where spirit might consort with the letter, brightness with a breath. Perhaps, as bifurcated beasts, we simply can’t relinquish oppositions (nor yet conceive a god without a devil for his playmate).

The strings were always instrumental to the airs, but the euphonious wants more: It wants to be diaphanous. Representation carries on, as if it were equation. (Many sorts of thought, and lots of everyday transactions, attempt to profit from that misidentification.)

But language’s material is at best an approximation, indication, utility of pointer or futility of claim. Whatever transcendent properties we routinely may ascribe to it, language at its most revealing may matter chiefly as matter, where meaning itself is shaped by its sub-lexical, or extra-lexical contexts. Its dynamic fields of tonal coloring and varying vibration can subvert or sharpen, shadow or extend its sways, tuck tensions in and out of all the senses of its sense.

When wise men dare suggest a god is measurably neither good nor true, they may...