The Poetic Mind
Perhaps one of the greatest shifts in collective human consciousness which has affected our social, moral, and political development as a species more than any other moment was the transition from oral to written language.
This may sound mythic, perhaps incomprehensible. And anyway you are reading—as I am writing—all these words through that latter sort of language, so already we start with a terrible disability. Every word I write, and every word you read, is immediately and historically limited in its meaning, caged into a static form from which it cannot easily escape.
All words began as sounds in the throat of a human. The earliest ones are thought to have been attempts at mimicry, a kind of childlike play between our ancestors and the world around them. Consider how the rush of wind through trees makes a sound we can hear and recognise. That sound, which we humans can approximate by funneling directed breath through our lips and shape into undulation with our tongues, may have formed the precursors of the sounds we in English signify with the letters ‘h’ and ‘sh.’ The staccato chirp of birds, heard everywhere by our ancestors whether in forest or field, is still approximating in languages with what phoneticists call affricates (Ch in English is one such example, thus chirp.)
These sounds of nature, composing what can fairly be called a relentless symphony, were not just background noise. The crackle of fire and the rush of water, the rumble of thunder across the sky and the howl of a wolf each of have meanings, both on the level of denotation (what it signifies) and connotation (the context of the sound related to the hearer). The “snap” of a twig means a twig has snapped, but the sound itself does not convey to us whether it was a nearby deer or a wolf who caused it to snap.
Language likely was born of the process of humans learning to interpret the sounds around them, to draw from them relevancy and meaning, and to repeat them to others. Just as the sounds made by a mother to an infant sound first foreign and incomprehensible yet later take on clearly codified symbolism, those who came before us first encountered a world of noisy senselessness and soon found within it an endless world of meaning.
The development of language did not come just through our ears, however, since our eyes and skin are always telling us things as well. Gestures are pregnant with meaning, whether it be a hug, a hand wave, a finger pointing, or a solid stare. So too the vision of a stag standing in a forest, a mammoth or an aurochs walking away from or rushing towards us.
Our earliest attempts to make meaning static were images, paintings of animals upon the walls of caves and likely elsewhere (though these did not survive the weathering of time). Indigenous peoples with mostly interrupted oral traditions often speak of animals and plants being their ‘teachers’ or even ancestors, and it is not difficult to see the truth in this. Watching a flock of geese fly south is a thing of deep beauty and a moment of awe, but it is also a word of warning that the snows and freezes are coming. A great elk tearing furiously through bramble is quite the sight and sound, but he also speaks of the predator chasing him. The dog who deigned to live alongside humans speaks medicine and wisdom when he turns his nose up and refuses to eat an animal those humans have just killed, and they would have been best to heed him.
Language is ancient, but writing is much, much more recent. We started out with pictures, images; often clumsy yet efficient lines mimicking the shapes of things in nature. Debates rage on why “civilization” started, whether it was caused by the birth of agriculture or the birth of cities, yet writing is rarely ever named as its culprit despite arising a little just before cities. 5,500 years ago began the very first shift from pictographs (signs directly representing a thing) to cuneiform, logograms, and hieroglyphs (signs representing a part of a thing, or a quantity, or the general “idea” of a thing).
Our way of writing now is a deeply abstracted form, far removed from these earlier attempts at representation. Each word you read of this essay is formed from a combination of a set of 26 symbols which signify an esoteric pattern of sounds which form words. That symbol set, our phonetic alphabet, preserves very little of the ancient symbolic roots of our early attempts to write. Unlike Norse runes, which were likewise phonetic yet bore sacred meanings in themselves, our letters such as A or G are fully disconnected from the natural world and symbolise nothing but a sound.
As such, it’s incredibly easy for us to forget—if we ever knew at all—that language was ever related to the world around us. Thus we can imagine we speak the world into existence, shaping everything around us by mastery of of symbol sets. This, more than anything, is the most limiting legacy of the religions “of the book,” whose singular god is written to have merely said, “let there be light,” and it became so.
Words were the natural world pinned into symbol, yet the Western legacy and all its destructive industry is the manifestation of the “word made flesh.” We speak ideas and they come to rule the world, initiate wars and holocausts, political struggle and self-annihilation, following an unhesitating march without pausing at the commas towards the written language’s final period.
The first transition from pictograph to cuneiform in Mesopotamia was necessitated by accounting. A clay tablet might show to you the image of a goat or a bushel of wheat, but it is inefficient to draw one hundred such images when you could just add a few more scratches to symbolise “you owe me this many.” This transition likewise tied writing to wealth and the lack thereof, and it was the earliest scribes who held within the power of their styluses the fates and destinies of men.
The power of the writer has not changed since then, though there are many more of us. With the stroke of a pen—or more often now the stroke of a key—a bureaucrat or even a mere office clerk can foreclose your house, turn off your electricity, cause a road to be built through a forest, or confine millions to their homes. A policy is written and water is poisoned or a war is started, a book of theory is scribed and suddenly gender is performative.
Mastery of the written word has come to trump mastery of any other skill humans have learned and cherished, yet mastery of the spoken word still persists just beyond it. Powerful propaganda cannot exist without the propagandist’s understanding of how words are heard in our head, how their meanings unfold within the alembics of individual consciousness.
Consider ‘double-speak’ and ‘dog-whistles,’ two terms we use to describe the manipulation of meaning with the orally-constructed consciousness of the hearer. A politician can say one thing and another thing both at the same time, and like the twig snap in the forest his meaning depends entirely on subjective context.
Most famous of these examples in recent memory is perhaps Donald Trump’s recorded statement, “grab her by the pussy,” which enraged liberals yet merely made conservatives shrug and wonder why liberals were so upset. Both sides heard the same words, yet heard them in fully-different contexts. Liberals heard in this statement a man speaking about sexually assaulting a woman, while conservatives merely heard the feminization of a popular lower class phrase derived from sales lingo, “grab him by the balls.”
Such mastery is the essential condition for successfully wielding political power within democracies. You must at all times convince those who support you that you are speaking to their contexts, while veiling your meaning enough that those of different contexts are confounded and look to be fools. Thus Obama could convince so many on each side that he represented real “change” of the political system, drawing both progressives and conservatives into a social struggle against each other about that change while he fundamentally altered nothing of the US imperialist and capitalist system. Thus George W. Bush could speak of bombing people to bring them freedom and democracy and his opponents soon outdid themselves trying to prove to his supporters they were also for freedom and democracy, too. Thus Bill Clinton could famously argue before the public, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing.”
To rule, you must know something about words that otherwise only poets understand. Words rarely if every correspond to only one thing, as they are all mere abstractions of things themselves, shoddy constructions that cannot hold, as in the words of T.S. Eliot:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
Words can be used to obscure meaning just as often as they reveal it, and the key to knowing the difference is remembering their original relationship to the natural world. The further from these relationships the words become, the more obfuscated their meaning gets, closing out understanding except for the initiated.
Thus lingo and jargon, specialized language meant to occult what is actually being said except for those who already subscribe to the social and epistemological codes which produce such speech. The legalese of consent forms and contracts obscures meaning from those over which such documents have power, while the contorted strings of ill-defined concepts in academic texts prevent the unwashed masses who might otherwise challenge its meaning.
Consider the infamous passage which won the inaugural award of the yearly “Bad Writing Contest” by Judith Butler:
The move from the structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Such writing is only possible when speaking of ideas fully abstracted from the world of the Real. That isn’t to say that there is nothing being said in such passages, but what is being said isn’t for the masses. And regardless their obscurity—or perhaps because of their obscurity—they nevertheless wield significant power to shape the world and manifest new realities.
“The word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” was said of the Christ, and is this not also the arcane art after which renaissance magicians strove and cloistered academics struggle? To claim power over the word is to claim power over the world, to shift the “structures” of consciousness to make manifest the visions of an elite few. Whether we like those elites or fear them, their power is undeniable and almost inescapable.
Almost inescapable, but not quite. Plato consigned poets to their death in his utopian fantasies for the same reason bookstores consign their works to dusty, unmarked corners. The power of the poet is the power of death, which is also the province of the mystic, the witch living beyond the hedges, and the fool in the royal court.
The poet’s power is the power of negation, the magic of disenchantment. The poet knows words are both words and not-words, holding meaning and no meaning all at the same time. Words for the poet are as colors and shadows for the painter, not mere tools but also substances from which worlds can be depicted or destroyed.
The poet knows that the word is not ever only the word. Words have meaning, but meanings mean many things, dance together, conflict, war against each other like divine lovers. The poet knows this dance, knows this war, knows this love, and teaches us to know this too.
Only to the poet’s mind can the multiple and opposite truths of a statement be held simultaneously, because the poet listens not just to words but their echoes. To be a poet you must live not just in your own mind but in the minds of others, hear what they hear and understand why they hear it.
This is ultimately the nature of the poetic mind, the mind which first translated the meaning of bird song and wolf howl into the realm of humans. The wolf speaks for itself, but its voice conveys other meanings to those who might hear it. The bird is not singing to us, yet in its song is wisdom we can learn to understand. The world is always singing, chanting, speaking, arguing, discussing, and most of all meaning, but the meaning we come upon will always only be translation.
Machines speak literally in binaries, in ons and offs. It is no wonder then we humans—who speak through and with machines—have privileged literalism over mythic and poetic meaning. Words in such a limited world can only have one meaning, symbols linking only ever once to the things symbolised. What was “truly meant” must always have only one answer, just as how you should “truly feel” about a thing is now only ever singular.
Thus we now have only left and right to choose from, but also only the true way things really are or “fake news.” To the poetic mind, however, it’s all both fake and true, just as a human has both a left hand and a right. It is not that truth is relative but that instead we are relative, or rather constantly relating, clumsy translators of a world of voiced meaning spoken in languages we can never fully learn.
What the poet teaches most of all is to hear the world and its words as he and she does. The shock of a poem is never in its content, but rather in the processes it unlocks in the mind of its audience. The poet plays with words and juggles their meaning like a carnival actor. But it is all spectacle—the real prestige is what we did not notice until the show is over, the magician-theif slipping from the cluttered storehouses of our minds all our certainty that we can fully understand the world.
To read poetry—and always better to hear it—is to let the mind again be opened, to hear not just as others hear but hear how it is we ourselves hear. And more—to hear beyond all the poets’ words and our own how the world itself has always been speaking in sounds and with voices our words can never truly close in nor capture.