Punning
From: Virginia Eubanks ([email protected])
Subject: Re: signs, all kinds
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Last week I played with conversions of one word to another in the dictionary. Holland, your talk of trailer parks and flashing signs reminded me of my words: catechism (oral instruction) and cataclysm (deluge, flood). Trailer parks remind me of both. Cataclysm is from the Greek kata, meaning down, and a word meaning to wash - so it's deluge, or flood. Also to inundate, to change a [geologic] surface. An upheaval, demolition. Catechism is from kata and a word meaning to sound or ring. So, it's to sound down, to sound amiss, to din in, or instill. kata can also mean under or against. So it can be sound under or sound against, resound, echo.
...
Virginia
If we drew a line between the two words cataclysm and and catechism, we would see a space of possibility opened up by their difference, a difference which you connected so nicely through etymological kinship, or their shared prefix.
In other words.
In other words, you are connecting two words which have not much more than an accidental connection and in that connection hallucinating "real meaning" (or at least you gesture at real meaning in your post). To the Western (and particularly English) ear, this seems like nothing more than idle word play, at best, the stuff of some clever literature.
But can you imagine taking this method, such as it is, as the source of knowledge, important knowledge? Accidents of sound and literation? Mere puns?
I've asked this before: What about adopting the multiple scleroses, the dysfunction of paronomasia, a form of aphasia, a scarred and deficient languaging brain, as the root of a metaphysical episteme?
I've said this before: this madness is a sub-version, the postulation of an alternative episteme that percolates along as a sub-cross-current of Western culture, or better yet an amusing, dangerous alternative that shuttles across the hyphen between Christian and Judeo.
Has Western culture brought itself to a pass through
the operations of its most embedded and dearly-held exercises - exercises
of reason and rationality, known as the sciences and mathematics - where it
finds itself bumping against the limits of those exercises, the self-contradictions
in the belief that pure rationality can really describe the universe?
Reply Two
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Actually, when I said in my last post to Virginia about there being not much more than an accidental connection between two words that shared a prefix, I mis-wrote myself. For two such words share a secret history. As an example, think (read) on the simple pun in Adrienne Rich's luscious poem Origins and History of Consciousness which Adala most generously typed and posted for our delectation (thanks, Adala!):
We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
The pun on "conceived" means both "to think of, imagine" and "to become fertile with."
It takes no great etymology to discover how the two words are connected. Both share a meaning: "to become pregnant with [meaning, thought, child]." But when one discovers - through etymological tracing - that the pun is 2000 years old, at least in Latin, and that the Greeks made the same conflation, then one opens up a vista of our Western romance with the mental, with the mind, as a place set apart, like a womb, for the special cases of life (or not-quite-life). One also then begins to wonder at the implied action (taking it from the static Greek to the dynamic Hebrew) of fertilizing. Who or what does the fertilizing in the mental womb? For the Greeks, Latins, and for most of the Western world, it is Spirit, Genius, or the Ideal, aspects of the same larger conception of some metaphysical Other Place, even if the other place is within us ("You have a genius in you!"). Furthermore, the implication of engendered action is clear: these metaphysical other Agents are male. The mind, penetrated by them, is female, although the action is undeniably mutual. "To hold with and keep" (con-cept = con-kept ... "concept" and "conceive" being etymologically identical).
So ... since the history of Western ideas of "thinking" began, the origin of consciousness has had something to do with the interpenetration of the metaphysical Other (the vous or tu form of the alephtav, say) and the intimate womb of the self-brain. This deeply embedded idea is there, waiting for us, in almost every *conceptio* we have about ideas, thinking, imagining. As we resurrect it, it exposes our nostalgia for a perfect communion between the greater Brain, the noosphere, and our intimate self-mind, of which all relationships with the longed-for "other" become shadows, traces, echoes, enactments. Intimacy itself and all its fertile consequences are defined and measured - are figured - in Rich's poem and I dare say in most of our images, as a form of telepathy, "a rope over the unsearched," a kind of rope dance, to which dreams (in Rich's poetic view and again, I dare say, in most of ours) give us momentary access, and from which we "lower ourselves" into wakefulness, consciousness, and trusting intimacy.
Now one or two more turns and I'm done. Armed with this etymology, we have been reading and can continue to read, really read, Rich's poem, a critique of the Western concept of consciousness, uncovering the nostalgia for, and therefore the metaphysical assumptions we have about, some Original Place or State where the mind was at rest, unsplit, unspilt, at one with itself, both divine and alive in the world, in dream and wakefulness.
That's a pretty good ride out of one little etymology, one pun. Makes one wonder if there isn't some power to this alternate method after all.