I mean, what have the symbols ever done for us?
I mean, what have the symbols ever done for us?
Like the poor, grammarians are always with us.
Christopher Brennan calls the gaping issue an ‘annoying wobble between’. I like that.
“Heretics of form”… I like that too.
And “Heretics of matter?” They would like me.
My wife Mona went to ante-natal exercises called Pregnastics here in Hobart, and her classmate, an old friend, Anitra, said that it was ‘really just a wobble and a chat’. Our then to-be-born child is now 21 and finishing classics… including Latin. Ulrike likes the grammar. I do not understand.
Kids.
Ulrike says the lack of living speakers is a bonus. No one can correct you “for real”.
Now a couple of pages later Christopher Brennan’s words the following1:
And this is the cause of my notice to blog on the topic of grammarians. Not that Brennan is, I went on to read the whole lecture, its just the ready-made metaphor of language as an illustration of my pet peeve that reminded me of grammarian as a topic.
The wobble of pregnancy is abetter place to start though… —but we will now jump to the end, and then feather stuff out into context for the future posts.
Thus the moral of the lesson comes second today, and it is this2:
If language/grammar is created by babies learning to speak, for the most part, perhaps we should not use grammar/language as a paragon of ontological primacy, as to how things are ‘structured’. At least not as our go-to tool, as a hammer for all seasons.The grammar of this design language… the mytho-poetic grammar of that prayer… in the beginning was the word….
It all very well to say this ‘grammar’ is just used, well, symbolically, because: grammarians.
This is not a new thought.
Without mentioning anything or anyone from the last century, or last millenium, or so, we can go to the Pyrrhonist practitioner Sextus Empiricus, 3rd or 4th century CE, one of whose works is titled in English Against the Grammarians3.
Grammarians, like the poor in spirit and conspiracy theorists, are always with us.
Grammarians are not thinking of natural languages as being baby-made, but think of them as some fine thing a grammarian would approve of. Each grammarian has their own non-baby babbling reasons. Grammarians basically admired the fine skeletons of muscular warriors who died in their prime. So beautiful, so true.
Dead.
And often they boost their language into identity politics flag-waving. “This shininess of form… this is why our language spoken by the speakers is so special”. And why “they are bar-barians”, and not-speakers, the dumb, the not-humans, look at them howling outside at our beautiful dead men.
Grammars are skeletons without muscle. But often grammar is not used consciously when one is fluent, so… —Grammarians are invert animists who strangely think/hope/assume that the skeleton moves the body. [For starters see Terrence Deacon’s The Symboic Species on this.4]
What we forget or fail to notice, is that the grace of "grammar" by which we humanise or domesticate ourselves as special, is a practice by which we seek truth in the bones alone, and so lay waste to the muscles, and even reject the humble pie of our introspection. All in order to honour the glamour of the bones of the dead because we fluent speakers of grammar can understand them…. —and they cannot disagree.
Our only tool is a hammer we have made of a heavy bone ready to hand. A rule of thumb. Many of us still live in the bone age. Which as I suggest is likely to always be available as a pathway, a preference, an inclination for us… —because babies acquire languages and therefore babies ‘structure’ the form of languages in learning them.
Grammarians are a sign of our evolutionary success rashly rushed to serve other ends.
A short cut that has become a pothole.
If it was only restricted to grammarians, it might be easier to move on.
However, there is much of an anthropomorphic skeletal invert animism (in our use of grammar and language) to define or uniform in a grammar and syntax…. —a ready-made metaphor to give form to any ‘structure’ used in explanation, or in design.
Both kinds of structuralism fall prey to this. The ① dreambook (including both the simple version and the flexible floating symbols as a psycho-analytical gloss, the meta-dreambook) and the ② Sassurean co-wearing of parts systemically co-evolving (in a too-often closed or shut-off ecology). The second should be better at not falling prey, i.e. falling down to worship the bones, but modernity, like the future is, here, but just not evenly distributed yet.
Perhaps, to get back the Brennan's lecture on Symbolism for a moment, the elitist symbolist is just using a wobbly pre-Freudian dreambook as an autarkist, a poetic sovereign citizen perhaps, if not a genius… —in order to produce (style-is-the-means-of-production afterall) 'personally coherent' poetry, eschewing the gloss of, say, psycho-analysis to pin down the indiosyncracies (particular to you, or me, or our parents. Und so weiter.)Once we realise babies make those… —structures as they learn a language, the grammarian’s bones can not remain un-rattled.
I.E. if the selective bottleneck is someone, usually an infant, learning the language, we are released from the grammarian’s cage of bones (as intention/ as design) and if we let it inform our teaching, we will find the world will remain as it was before. In the beginning was not the word.
Grammarian fear the end of the world lies in the bones getting out of order. Forgetful that the skeleton is dead, they chicken little the splinters into “the sky is falling”.
It is anxiety about the world ending, and symbolicly reading omens into grammatical mistakes that can blind us to the fact that babies make the ‘natural languages’ we speak. Grammarians are just would-be emperors trying to make an empires of safety and security out of our ability, our practice, to speak. Using that outcome of their (grammarian) world-building urge to ‘structure’ things is a mistake (that we can learn from).
Of course, when teaching, it is easier to remember and practise and model & teach what one is teaching, and knows too well, but the grammarian is a bad teacher who learns nothing else along the way. Or has forgotten it because it is too long ago, in infancy. They have forgotten they can learn, & how they learnt.
Or times were such there was not enough time to learn the pitfalls of a short cut, a prejudice, a discrimination.
The above… —
has been re-written at: whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com
Footnote 1 - Structure/bones taphonomy of life
In Divining the… —gap I mentioned St Ciarán and the ruins of a stone church with the gaps of a wooden structure in its walls, possibly indicating a wooden structure it was built against, now rotting away, and its base on the sand falling into the sea.
This ghost building’s footprint, I said, symbolised the taphonomy of life, where not all fossils are bones safely buried and their substance replaced by a harder rock in their form… —that our lived experience compared to the beginning of life, is like that 12th Century church dedicated to the saint on the island where he was born, and the beginning of life is like a whispered pray in that wooden building built and whose ghost is now falling into the sea, and all we have of it is a gap in a stone wall built against it.
Who said the pray? Who to? What for? Why? A baptism? A wedding? A funeral?
So here, further to all this, bones become another symbol of this complexity (and grammarian bashing).
Because bones are fossils even before they are buried, even before the flesh rots away. Bones reflect the development, and activity of the living. At the moment of death they capture the movement of a lifetime, that poetry in motion now deceased, muscles shape the bones, and that is what becomes the fossil we find preserved.
Bones are always, already fossils, but marking life and not death like a fossilised bone.
Grammarians fossilise the bones of their heroes. Babies do not care. Life goes on.
Grammarians exist because babies form languages when they acquire them.
Footnote to Footnote 1 - Columns as bones of trees
Now we are (still) talking churches and architecture, and bone as the fossils of movement, and buildings the as the skeletons to the soft tissues of their use…
—some say Greek columns are trees, symbols in stone imitating that which rots away without rotting, placed to form an entry to holy enclosures and trophy halls, and as porticoes to intimate the sacred groves in offering shade to the people of the polis as they go about their practices and responsibilities.
Or perhaps they are the stoney-bones of symbolic trees, a grammar of the woods built back better, and the structures they inform are designed to suit the emperor-grammarians, polishers of bones and other trophies of success, and not the babies and their worlds making special5.
So, I ask the internet, if one just used trees as trees in buildings… —what would that look like? Why Ethiopian Granaries of course.
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A. R. Chisholm and J. J. Quinn, eds. The Prose of Christopher Brennan. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965. Pages scanned were from 'Symbolism in nineteenth century literature : six lectures June-July 1944. I The Logic of Symbolism.’ pages 48-67
Chater, Nick, and Morten H. Christiansen, ‘Language Acquisition Meets Language Evolution’, Cognitive Science, 34.7 (2010), 1131–57 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01049.x>
Hankey, Wayne, review of Review of: Sextus Empiricus, Against the Grammarians (Adversos Mathematicos I). Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophy, by Empiricus Sextus and David L. Blank, Bryn Mawr Classical Review <https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1999/1999.10.33> [accessed 20 March 2023]
Deacon, T., The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain (London: Penguin, 1997)
Custodero, Lori, ‘Making Sense of “Making Special”: Art and Intimacy In Musical Lives and Educational Practice’, International Journal of Education & the Arts, 6.15 (2005) <http://www.ijea.org/v6n15/>