2—
Syntax and Horizon of Representation in Classical Chinese and Modern American Poetry
Legend has it that before composer John Cage began to lecture, he would shuffle his stack of notecards and proceed according to the resultant order. It was not exactly his faith in chance-as-order but the special way in which his lecture notes were prepared that made this procedure possible. Each note had to be a self-sufficient unit, free from sequential dependence on other notes. Only with this freedom could he begin with any notecard and always come out with a "coherent" lecture.
Now consider the palindrome poem in Figure 2, written in classical Chinese[1] by Chow Tse-tsung; it is a five-character regulated poem arranged in a circle. We can begin with any character, proceed clockwise or counterclockwise, and always come out with a new poem. There are at least forty versions in this text, and, according to the author, even if we also skip a character as we proceed, each five-character group will still form a perfect line. Clearly, this text cannot be translated into English and still work the same way. In English, as in all Indo-European languages, a sentence is almost always structured in a stipulated direction according to rigid syntactical rules. (For example, a subject leads to a verb to an object; articles govern certain nouns; past actions are to be cast in the past tense; parts of speech are clearly demarcated and determined, all in an act of predication to articulate and specify relationships.) Chow's poem can behave as it does because the classical Chinese language, as it is used in poetry, is free from syntactical rigidities — having no articles, personal pronouns, verb declensions, or connective elements such as prepositions and conjunctions and being indeterminate in parts of speech.
These facts quite often leave the words in a loosely committed
Figure 2
Palindrome poem by Chow Tse-tsung
relationship with the reader, who remains in a sort of middle ground between engaging with and disengaging from them. Although not all Chinese lines can be syntactically as free as the present text, many Chinese poems capitalize upon this flexibility. This syntactic freedom promotes a kind of prepredicative condition wherein words, like objects in the real-life world, are free from predetermined closures of relationship and meaning and offer themselves to us in an open space. Within this open space we can move freely and approach words from various vantage points to achieve different shades of the same aesthetic moment. We are given to witness the acting out of objects and events in cinematic fashion and stand, as it were, at the threshold of various possible meanings.
In the real-life world, before we enter a "place," we cannot talk
about "relationships" between or among objects. Objects have multiple spatial extensions, which remain indeterminate. Take, for example, a moon and a hut. If you look at them on level ground from a distance, the moon may appear beside the hut; but if you look at them from a high mountain, the moon may appear below it. Similarly, if you happen to be looking up at them from a deep valley, the moon may well be above the hut. Before we enter the scene and take up our viewing positions, the spatial relationships of "beside," "below," and "above" do not exist. Indeed, the spatial relationships will change as we move. The syntactic condition of classical Chinese poetic lines can often retain this indeterminate quality of not specifying viewing positions and spatial relationships, whereas English and most other Indo-European languages cannot. The lines
give us objects in a real-life world in their barest, purest forms, as it were, uncontaminated by the author's subjectivity. We know from certain details — the cock's crow, the inn, the moon — that this is early morning and that a trip is involved. These details are given to constitute an atmosphere that strongly suggests the actuality of the situation, but we can never be certain where we should put the cock, the moon, the inn, and the bridge. Are we to visualize these, following the habits of English, in the following manner: (At) cockcrow, the moon (is seen above) the thatched inn; footprints (are seen upon) the frost (covering) the wooden bridge? We need not point out here that there are other possible ways of specifying the relationships between the moon and the inn. The moon, for instance, could be barely above the horizon. Not to determine fixed viewing locations, or not to use syntax to articulate such relationships, is to give back to the reader-viewer the freedom of moving into and about the scene, simultaneously engaging with and disengaging from the objects therein.
We can explain the predicative activities and habits of mind in Indo-European languages by the Western concept of perspective. Perspective refers to the fact that houses in the foreground appear bigger and houses receding into the background appear increasingly smaller until everything ends in an imaginary vanishing point. This is so because these objects are seen from a fixed location by one
individual looking toward a fixed direction. But in almost all Chinese landscape paintings, we see scenes not only from the front but also from the rear; not one moment from one specific perspective but many moments from many viewpoints. In the words of Kuo Hsi of the eleventh century:
A mountain looks this way close by, another way a few miles away, and yet another way from a distance of a dozen miles. Its shapes change at every step, the more the farther one goes. It looks this way from the front, another way from the side, and yet another way from the back. Its aspects change from every angle, as many times as the points of view. Thus, one must realize that a mountain contains in itself the shape of several dozen or a hundred mountains. It looks this way in spring and summer, another way in autumn and winter, the scene changing with the seasons. It looks this way in the morning, another way at sunset, yet another in rain or shine, the manner and appearance changing with morning and night. Thus, one must realize that one mountain contains in itself the manner of several dozen or a hundred mountains.[2]
Unlike Claude Lorrain, who directs the viewer by way of a clearly defined perspective, the Chinese artist proceeds from the belief that art should be in a sort of correspondence with the vital rhythms of nature. Just as we do not know a person by one encounter, we do not know a mountain by one viewing. The artist should, first of all, live with the "total" mountains and "total" rivers to know and feel first-hand their living reality by roaming in them for years, viewing and experiencing them in their different moments of appearance, in their various climatic and temporal conditions, and from all vantage points. After having lived with these experiential moments, the artist re-creates them all in a picture, avoiding one static compositional axis while offering simultaneously many axes to constitute a total environment in which the viewer is invited to roam and to consort with the living moments captured in corresponding vital rhythms. Therefore, the viewer is not restricted to seeing the scene from one static location selected arbitrarily by the painter. The viewer revolves, as it were, with the multiple perspectives available for viewing. In order to preserve this flexibility, the Chinese painter sometimes makes use of an emptiness that is at the same time a space of thingness, such as mists and clouds, to diffuse the distances, or manipulates the curving lines of mountains or other natural objects to camouflage the change of perspectives, subtly returning freedom of mobility to the viewer.
Aside from the diffusion of perspectives, the Chinese painter also avoids the use of a light source and chiaroscuro. Indeed, in the hands of Ni Tsan (1301–1374), the landscape becomes totally transparent.
Similarly, the syntactic flexibility found in many classical Chinese lines — indefinite positioning, indeterminate relationships, ambiguous and multiple functions of certain parts of speech, and so forth — allows the reader to retrieve a similar space of freedom for viewing, feeling, and reading, a space in which the reader stays in a middle ground, engaging with and disengaging from the objects appearing on the perceptual horizon. Take the common phrase sung-feng (
These kinds of asyntactical phrases abound in classical Chinese poetry. Here are some examples, all of which have led different translators to provide divergent formations in English:
1. an-hua (
2. ch'iang-yen (
3. lou-hsueh (
4. kung-yün (
5. lou-yün (
6. hu-jih (
7. feng-lin (
8. hsi-wu (
Most of these examples work very much like the examples of "pine / wind" and "cloud / mountain" discussed above. In example 4, should we read it as "clouds surrounding the palace" or "clouds holding the palace"? In example 8, taken from the line "stream / noon / not / hear / bell" (given word for word here), are we to translate it as "beside the stream, at noon, (I? he? we?) do not hear the (monastery) bell"? What is lost here after we have determined the location (such as in "beside the stream") and the time (such as in "at noon")?
Or witness these two lines:
Suppose we read or translate these as
Among the falling flowers, there stands a man.
Through the fine drizzle, swallows, in pairs, fly.
Reading these lines this way seems to have engendered some significant loss. In the Chinese, objects emerge and directly act themselves out before our eyes; they are clear, transparent, and true to their spatial extensions. In the translated lines, very much in the manner of Longfellow's "Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands," the dramatic quality of immediate presence is gone, and the independence of the objects is disturbed, because between the reader-viewer and the scene we now have an interpreter pointing out relationships and explaining things. The reader's perception is now very much guided in certain directions stipulated by the subjective interests of the poet.
Try another two lines by Tu Shen-yen (600–700):
Are we to provide "missing links" according to the habits of English, such as those italicized below?
Clouds and mists move out to sea at dawn.
Plums and willows a cross the river bloom in spring.
There is something quite distorted in this version when compared to the original order of the immediate presencing of things. The word "dawn," for example, can be a noun indicating time, as in "at dawn," or a verb indicating the act of dawning. Similarly, the word "spring" has multiple meanings. The juxtaposition of "plums," "willows," and "spring" easily evokes "bloom," but clearly the word is imposed from outside the Chinese original. Compare the above translated version with the following experimental attempt:
Clouds, mists
out to sea:
Dawn.
Plums, willows
across the river:
Spring.
The difference in perception and reception is clear.
Now let us look at a short poem by the eighth-century Chinese poet Meng Hao-jan, laid out vertically, as it was done in the original, with word-for-word translations for the characters plus some tentative indications of their grammatical functions (using English classifications).
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We can now tackle the question of the absence of personal pronouns. Who moves the boat to moor by the smoke-shore? Shall we assume, as have most translators, that the speaker "I" is always behind a poetic statement or image? What is the difference between putting the "I" into the poem and not putting it there? Just as Chinese painters avoid restricting their paintings to one perspective, the Chinese poet refrains from restricting the poetic state to only one participant. This freedom to begin a sentence without the use of any personal pronoun, a practice that is quite common in Chinese poetry, has the effect of returning to the reader-viewer the freedom to move into the ambience provided by the poet and take part in it directly. Indeed, the absence of the personal pronoun often offers the reader-viewer a doubleness in perception. Take the famous little poem by Li Po (701–762), "Jade Steps Grievance":
The verb that calls for a pronoun as its subject is "let down." If the reader supplies "she" as the subject, then the reader is standing outside looking in objectively , so to speak, at an object (the court lady). But "I" can also be supplied for "let down," in which case the reader
is also subjectively looking out, being identified with the protagonist. In other words, the absence of a personal pronoun allows the reader to approach reality at once objectively and subjectively, simultaneously moving back and forth between the two positions.[4]
The previously considered poem by Meng Hao-jan contains a number of actions as well. Actions, the Westerner knows, take place in time, and yet the classical Chinese language is tenseless . Why tenseless? Shall we cast these actions into the past, as do some of the examples that follow? The fact is that if the Chinese poet has avoided restricting actions to one specific agent, he has also refrained from committing them to finite time — or perhaps the mental horizon of Chinese poets does not lead them to posit an event within a segment of finite time. For what, indeed, is past, present, and future in real time? As soon as I pronounce the word "now," it is already in the past. The concepts of past, present, and future belong to the world of ideas; it is a human invention imposed upon Phenomenon,[5] or the undifferentiated mode of being, which we break into many linear orders as if they were authentic representations of the reality of time. The words of the Taoist Chuang-tzu are instructive here: "There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning."[6] Just as the concepts of "beginning," "middle," and "end" were proposed at the risk of cutting time into sections, those of "past," "present," and "future" are also artificial demarcations that break the undifferentiated mode of being into units and segments for subjective control.
It is obvious that we cannot approach this and most Chinese poems with the arbitrary time categories of the West. The Western ways of territorializing being conceal being rather than exposing it; they turn us away from the appeal of the concreteness of objects and events rather than bringing us into immediate contact with them.
The capacity of the Chinese poem to be free from the arbitrary temporal constructs of the West — to maintain a certain degree of close harmony with the concrete events in reality — can be illustrated by the way cinema handles temporality, for film is a medium that most felicitously approximates the immediacy of experience. Without mulling over the complex use of time and space in the art of film, let us address fundamental issues. For our purpose, a passage from Stephenson and Debrix's introductory book, The Cinema as Art , will make this clear. Cinema has "a natural freedom in temporal construction. . . . The lack of time prepositions and conjunctions, tenses and other indications . . . can leave the film free to reach the spectator
with an immediacy which literature is unable to match."[7] Time prepositions and conjunctions such as "before he came" and "since I have been here" do not exist in a film, nor in the actual events of life. There is no tense in either case. "When we watch a film," say Stephenson and Debrix, "it is just something that is happenning — now."[8]
Let us return for a moment to lines 3 and 4 in Meng Hao-jan's poem. We have already witnessed the doubling or tripling activity in words whose parts of speech remain indeterminate. In this case, the indeterminate relationship between the objects before and after "low" (or "lowers") and "near" (or "nears") opens very intriguing decision-making strategies. Take line 3. Is it the vastness of the wilderness that has lengthened the sky, lowering it to the trees, or is it the breadth of the stretch of the trees that seems to pull the sky to the wilderness? Should the translation be "as the plain is vast, the sky lowers the trees"? It seems that in reading it this way we will lose the immediate cinematic visuality in the original, a visuality that is promoted by a sort of spotlighting activity or mobile point of view offered the spectator. We will lose the acting out of the objects, the now ness and the concreteness of the moment, for, taking "low" as an adjective, the line can well be seen as three visual units — "vast wilderness, sky, low trees" — or, slightly modified but keeping to the visual order of the moment:
Open wilderness.
Wide sky.
A stretch of low trees.
In this case, our perceptual activity almost mimics that of the movie camera, starting with a pan of the vast wilderness, followed by a tilting shot of the wide sky, then lowering and zooming closer to a stretch of low trees.
Now that we have a better sense of the play enhanced by the sparse syntax, the absence of personal pronouns as subjects, the tenseless quality of the Chinese verb elements, and so forth, we can be more adequately critical of most of the English translations of classical Chinese poetry, as the following examples will illustrate.[9] (Italicized words indicate the translator's insertions to supply what he believed to be the missing links; italicized words in parentheses indicate the translator's interpretation or paraphrase of the original images.) In the examples below, the widely divergent renderings of the third line are especially notable.
I steer my boat to anchor
by the mist-clad river
And (mourn) the dying day (that brings me
nearer to my fate .)
Across the woodland wild I see
the sky (lean on) the trees,
While close to hand the (mirror) moon
(floats on) the shining streams.
Giles, 1898
Our boat by the mist-covered islet we tied.
The sorrow of absence the sunset brings back.
(Low breasting the foliage the sky loomed black.)
The river is bright with the moon at our side.
Fletcher, 1919
While my little boat moves on its mooring mist.
And (daylight wanes, old memories begin. . . . )
(How wide the world was, how close the trees to heaven!)
(And how) clear in the water the nearness of the moon!
Bynner, 1920
At dusk I moored my boat on the banks of the river
With the oncoming night (my friend) is depressed
(Heaven itself seems to cover over the gloomy trees of the
wide fields.)
(Only) the moon, shining on the river, is near man.
Christy, 1929
I move my boat and anchor in the mists off an islet;
With the setting sun the traveller's heart grows melancholy
once more.
(On every side is a desolate expanse of water.)
(Somewhere) the sky comes down to the trees
And the clear water (reflects) a neighboring moon.
Jenyns, 1944
I need hardly point out that these translations are secondary elaborations of some primary form of experience, the unfolding of some schemata into separate parts. All the translators, starting with Giles, must have been led by the sparse syntax in the original to believe that the Chinese characters were telegraphic — shorthand signs for a longhand message — and they thus took it as their task to translate
the shorthand into longhand, poetry into prose, and to add commentary all along to aid understanding, not knowing that the characters are "pointers" toward a finer shade of suggestive beauty that the discursive, analytical, longhand "unfolding" destroys completely.
It has been often said that Chinese syntax closely resembles that of English, namely, that they both follow the natural succession of an action, as in "John kicks a ball" (subject–verb–object). This is true to a certain degree, as, for example, in these two lines from a Li Po poem:
These lines should translate easily into English. And yet, in the hands of Giles and Bynner, these lines become
Where blue hills cross the northern sky,
Beyond the moat which girds the town,
'Twas here. . . .
Giles, 1898
With a blue line of mountains north of the wall,
And east of the city a white curve of water,
Here you must. . . .
Bynner, 1920
Whereas in the original we see things working upon us, in the versions of Giles and Bynner we are led to these things by way of intellectual, directive devices ("where," "with," etc.). Clearly, what has happened here is that a different sort of hermeneutical habit of perceiving and reading has intruded upon a rather clear-cut condition or state of being. If distortion of aesthetic horizon can happen even in this "simple" case, namely, a subject–verb–object construction that should lend easily to translation in English, we can see why lines of asyntactical or paratactical construction, which abound in Chinese poetry, invite even greater deviations from the original order of impression. Ultimately, it is perhaps not English or other Indo-European languages per se that are guilty of such distortions but matters of perceptual orientation and priority that enter into such gross misreadings. Or, rather, it is a different sense of authentication we are dealing with.
The question of authenticating experience is a complex one. Clearly, different philosophical orientations and cultural and psychological conditions would lead to divergent modes of authentication. But even on the most rudimentary level, there is this to be noted: Our contact with the world is an event in which things concretely emerge from total phenomena, an active happening that defies containment, that is, at the moment of its unfolding, by concepts and meanings. Upon our contact with phenomena, what arises in our sentient network is not only intellectual or ideational activities but also visual, auditory, tactual, taste, olfactory, or even transsensual experiences. Quite often, we take in this compound moment in full before allowing it to terminate in ideas. One may argue that the reproduction of the sense of vision is the task of the painter, that of the sense of hearing is the task of the musician, and so forth. The forming of ideas is, as the logic goes, the task of the poet, as if to say the express objective of literature is nothing but articulating relationships among things and human beings. The making of meanings and ideas can, no doubt, be the end of a literary work, but it definitely is not its total aim. A literary work would do well to disclose the actuality of the moment of contact, the total sensing horizon. While it is a fact that poetry, as a linguistic artifact, cannot approximate many of the qualities of those reproduced by other media, such as colors, lines, and tones, this should not preclude a user of words from attempting to circumscribe the other sentient activities. Language, under suitable manipulation, can evoke the semblance of the visuality of painting and the tonality of music; in particular, it can approximate the morphology of the sensing process, but one must not allow the ideational activities to overwhelm or even impede the immediate emergence and presencing of things from total phenomena. Take this line from Tu Fu:
Many readers are inclined to see syntactic inversion in this line and thus read it as "The wind-broken (tender) bamboo shoots are dangling green." This reading, or this way of writing (predication), ignores the grammar of experience at work. Imagine the actuality of the situation: the poet, traveling, encounters suddenly a green dangling. At this moment, he cannot tell what it is. It is only later that he finds that it is a young bamboo broken by the wind. "Green / dangle /
wind-broken / bamboo shoots" is the grammar of language following the grammar of experience. "The wind-broken bamboo shoots are dangling green," which adheres to the conventions of language but belies the experiential process, is the conclusion after the fact, not the actuality of the moment.
In a sense, it is the consideration of this kind of authenticating attempt in Chinese poetics that has led Chinese poets to bypass many of the syntactic restraints from which the Chinese language is not totally free, even though it is true that a large degree of syntactic flexibility in the Chinese language, as that demonstrated in the palindrome poem, has greatly enhanced the possibility of authentication. Thus, the prevalence of asyntactical or paratactical lines in Chinese poetry can be understood precisely as an attempt to readjust language (which is, by definition, restrictive) to fit in better with the moment of contact (by definition, open to multiple sensing channels and perspectives). Some examples are in order:
Compare this line with "While the stars are twinkling above the ten thousand households," or "When the stars come, ten thousand houses move," or "The stars cause ten thousand houses (to) move." These readings have changed the visual events into statements about the events, which the Chinese presents to our consciousness as two cinematic shots. As a result, the English readings have restricted the interplay between them.
Central to this perceptual orientation is the attempt to promote the visuality of objects — to preserve the spatial tensions and counterpoints between them and to mimic the order of appearance of events by spotlighting phases of perception. Thus, to translate the lines
into either of the following[10]
The stars lean down from open space
And the moon comes running up the river.
Bynner
Stars drawn low by the vastness of the plain
The moon rushing forward in the river's flow.
Birch
is to ignore the spatial coexistence and the dramatic presence of these events. Although one finds great beauty in the translated lines, it is a beauty of impressions that are different from those of the original. We can now understand why one wants to resist the introduction of analytical elements among visual units in the following lines:
Poems or even lines that emphasize the miming of the activities of the perceiving act and focus on visual events in their various gradations of color and light suffer the most in English translation. Let us look at one such violation:
becomes, in Bynner's hand,[11]
There seems to be no one on the empty mountain.
The analytical or explanatory "There seems to be" is, of course, the translator's interference in the direct contact between the "empty mountain" and the viewer-reader. To put "no one" ahead of "empty mountain" violates the life of the moment: We should notice the emptiness, the openness, before we are aware of the other state of being.
Let us look at a few more examples from Wang Wei, who is prized for his ability to turn language into gestures miming the perceiving act:
There are changing perspectives in each line: "White clouds" (shot one), from a distance; "looking back" (shot two), viewer coming out of the mountain from the opposite direction, turning his head back; "close up" (shot three), viewer returning to same position as for shot one. The visual events are accentuated the way a mime, in order to suggest an event that is not visible, highlights gestures and movements to suggest the energy flow that originally supports that event. Arne Zaslove, in a demonstration-lecture in the Project for Music Experiment at the University of California, San Diego, in January 1973, gave an example that articulates most clearly the energy flow of the moment: "Supposing you are carrying a heavy suitcase with both hands." Zaslove proceeded to place both of his hands on the imaginary handle and lift the imaginary heavy suitcase. "You will find," he said, "that your whole body has to bend sideways toward your right to balance off the weight. If at this point you should bend toward the left, the miming act is false and becomes unrecognizable."
As signs, words function best when they capture the life mechanism of the moment of experience in ways similar to those described by Zaslove. Let us examine two more examples — the first from Wang Wei — that suggest the articulation of visual curves and movements:
"Vast desert," a panoramic view; "lone smoke" from possibly one single household, a single object in the midst of an immense expanse of emptiness; "straight," a windless condition true to the actuality of a desert. The line has the appeal of a painting; with the word "straight," it is almost sculptural.
Consider this line by Li Po from his poem "To See Meng Hao-jan off to Yangchou":
Here we witness the progression of the boat moving slowly from the foreground and disappearing in the distance, suggesting both the duration of time Li Po has been standing by the Yangtze River watching his friend's boat move away and, indirectly, the deep bond of their friendship.
Now let us consider a few complete poems:
Dried vines, an old tree, evening crows;
A small bridge, flowing water, men's homes;
An ancient road, west winds, a lean horse;
Sun slants west:
A heart-torn man at sky's end.
Ma Chih-yüan, ca. 1260–1341
In this poem, which operates pictorially rather than semantically, the successive shots do not constitute a linear development (such as how this leads to that). Rather, the objects coexist as in a painting, and yet the mobile point of view has made it possible to temporalize the spatial units.
And witness this poem:
A thousand mountains — no bird's flight.
A million paths — no man's trace.
Single boat. Bamboo-leaved cape. An old man.
Fishing alone. Ice-river. Snow.
Liu Tsung-yüan, 733–819
The camera first gives us a bird's-eye view with which we can at once take possession of the totality of the scene, as in all the classical Chinese landscape paintings, and then zooms in on one single object, an old man in the midst of the vast frozen river surrounded by snow. Unlike film, however, which often focuses on events to be strung together with a story line, the cinematic movement here reproduces the activities of the perceiving act of an intense moment, the total consciousness of which is not completed until all the visual moments have been presented — again, as in a classical Chinese painting. The spatial tensions here put us into the center of Phenomenon, allowing us to reach out to a larger circumference.
I once conducted a session on the structure of Chinese characters in an American grade school. After I had finished explaining how some of the Chinese characters are pictorially based, the signs matching the actual objects, a boy proceeded, naively, to pose a sagacious question: "All these are nouns — how are they to form ideas?" It seems legitimate to pose the same question about many of the Chinese lines above. I believe the question is answered, in part, in my earlier analysis of Liu Tsung-yüan's poem, in which the spatial tensions and relationships between the immeasurable cosmic scene and a speck of human existence (in the figure of an old man fishing) project, without comment, a picture of the condition of humanity in nature.
I answered the boy's question by bringing out another category of
Chinese characters. The three characters I chose were
The point is that the copulation . . . of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object , to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept . From separate hieroglyphs has been fused — the ideogram. By the combination of two "depictables" is achieved the representation of something that is graphically unpredictable. . . . Yes, it is exactly what we do in the cinema.[12]
The same structural principle continues to be at work in Chinese poetry. One line from a Li Po poem (discussed in great detail in my Ezra Pound's "Cathay ") is
There, I asked whether the line meant that the clouds are or are like a wanderer's mood and decided that although no one would miss the resemblance of a wanderer's drifting to that of the clouds, "there is a flash of interest in the syntactically uncommitted resemblance" that would be lost by adding any words. Rather, I argued, Li Po has provided the simultaneous presence of two objects, the juxtaposition of
two separate camera shots, resembling what Eisenstein called "not so much a simple sum of one shot plus another . . . as it does a creation. It resembles a creation — rather than the sum of its parts — from the circumstances that in every such juxtaposition the result is qualitatively distinguishable from each component element viewed separately."[13]
Here is another line that by the sheer fact of montage, by using independent but juxtaposed visual events, points to an idea without allowing the rhetoric of commentary to interfere:
The reader feels, without being told, the contrast and tension in the scenery presented. Explanatory elaboration can only destroy the immediate contact between the viewer and the scene, as it does in this translation by Bynner[14] and in those by many others:
Though a country be sundered, hills and rivers endure.
Whether by using montage or a mobile point of view, the Chinese poets give paramount importance to the acting out of visual objects and events, letting those objects and events explain themselves by their coexisting, coextensive emergence from nature, letting the spatial tensions reflect conditions and situations rather than coercing these objects and events into some preconceived artificial order by sheer human interpretive elaboration. In a line like Li Po's,
do we need any more words to explain the vicissitudes of time versus the permanence of nature?
The success of the Chinese poets in authenticating the fluctuation of concrete events in Phenomenon, their ability to preserve the multiple relationships in a kind of penumbra of indeterminateness, depends to a great extent on the sparseness of syntactic demands. This freedom allows the poet to highlight independent visual events, leaving them in coextensive spatial relationships. And this language, this medium for poetry, would not have become what it is without the support of a unique aesthetic horizon — the Chinese concept of the loss of self in undifferentiated existence — ordained by centuries of art and poetry.
There is an inseparability of medium and poetics, of language and world view. How, then, can a language of rigid syntactical rules such as English successfully approximate a mode of presentation whose success depends on freedom from syntax? And how can an epistemological world view developed from Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, which emphasize the ego in search of the nonego and attempt to classify being in concepts, propositions, and ordered structures — how can such a world view turn around to endorse a medium that belies the function and process of epistemological elaboration?
The answer is that it cannot, that such a turn is impossible so long as the Platonic dichotomy of the phenomenal and the noumenal (appearance and reality) and the Aristotelian "universal logical structures" persist without adjustment. Nor can any attempt to turn the English language into one of broken, unsyntactical units as a medium for poetry succeed so long as no attempt is made to widen the possibilities of the Western aesthetic horizon to include the other world view, the Chinese mode of perception, at least coextensively with the Western world view. It is at this juncture that the discussion of convergence becomes most cogent and significant.
The adjustment of Western world views in modern times is the subject for a book in itself. Without going into the complicated history of this adjustment, it is sufficient to say one thing, namely, that all modern thought and art from the phenomenologists to as late as Jean Dubuffet's Anticultural Positions began with a rejection of abstract systems (particularly those of Plato and Aristotle) in order to return to concrete existence. Almost all the phenomenologists posed this problem, and Heidegger's request to return to the appeal of being gathered momentum in many later philosophers and artists.[15] Meanwhile, Bergson, who was, in essence, still an epistemological philosopher, pointed a way toward the "liquidation of the romantic self."[16]
For my purpose here, I will focus on a few statements by Anglo-American critics and poets at the turn of the century, statements that, as we will see later, have led to a subtle adjustment of the poetic language to the degree that it literally violates traditional syntactical structures. My central interest in this section is with some of the potentialities of this process of change in the English language.
Let us begin with Pater's famous statement in his book The Renaissance ; there he says that it is "not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, [which] is the end, . . . to burn always with this gem-like flame."[17] While ancient thought sought "to arrest every
object in an eternal outline," the modern spirit asserts that "nothing is or can be rightly known except relatively and under conditions. . . . [Modern man becomes] so receptive, all the influences of nature and of society ceaselessly playing upon him, so that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a stray word, or glance, or touch. It is the truth of these relations that experience gives us, not the truth of eternal outlines ascertained once for all, but a world of gradations."[18]
"Experience itself" is the key; "a world of gradations," not "the eternal outlines ascertained once for all" of the Platonic ideas. Echoing Pater but developing ideas from Bergson, T. E. Hulme writes:
The ancients were perfectly aware of the fluidity of the world and of its impermanence . . . but while they recognized it, they feared it and endeavoured to evade it, to construct things of permanence which would stand fast in this universal flux which frightened them. They had the disease, the passion, for immortality. They wished to construct things which should be proud boasts that they, men, were immortal. We see it in a thousand different forms. Materially in the pyramids, spiritually in the dogmas of religion and in the hypostatized ideas of Plato.[19]
Instead of consisting of "hypostatized ideas" and relying on the arrogant self, Hulme asks that poetry be "not a counter language, but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise of a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continually see a physical thing, to prevent you from gliding through an abstract process."[20] One of the methods to achieve this is through a process of selection: "Say the poet is moved by a certain landscape, he selects from that certain images which, put into juxtaposition in separate lines, serve to suggest and to evoke the state he feels. . . . Two visual images form what one may call a visual chord. They unite to suggest an image which is different to both."[21]
This is montage: juxtaposition of two visual events to create a third that is different from both. The method is, to Hulme, an alternative to the process of explanation in which syntax plays an important role. Syntax unfolds the intensive manifold, the vital reality, into extensive manifold, a mechanical complexity.[22]
In 1911, before he came into contact with Chinese poetry, Pound argued, "The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment."[23] After his contact with Chinese poetry, he wrote, "It is because certain Chinese poets have been content to set forth their matter without moralizing and without comment that one
labors to make a translation."[24] Early in 1901, Pound advised William Carlos Williams in similar terms, and in 1916 he wrote emphatically to Iris Barry about "the necessity for creating or constructing something; of presenting an image, or enough images of concrete things arranged to stir the reader. . . . I think there must be more, predominantly more, objects than statements and conclusions, which latter are purely optional, not essential, often superfluous and therefore bad."[25] Pound was practicing a form of montage at the end of his early poem "Cino,"[26] without, I am sure, being fully aware of its permanence in his poetry as well as in the works of those after him. His contact with the Japanese haiku, Chinese poetry, and Chinese characters turned the technique into a central one in the Cantos . He began to use this technique consciously with his famous poem "In a Station of the Metro." Later, in the Cantos , the juxtaposition of images or objects was expanded into the idea that cultural moments acted as "luminous details," leading to the increased use of the Chinese ideogram as an amassing vortex.
Williams, in turn, wrote "no ideas but in things."[27] He went further to say that "a life that is here and now is timeless, . . . a new world that is always 'real,'" and that "no symbolism is acceptable."[28] The emphasis on the "here and now," the "real," and the "nonsymbolic" can be considered a true beginning to break away from the Platonic system, to become, in Kenneth Burke's words, a poet of contact.[29] Williams wanted to see "the thing itself without forethought or afterthought but with great intensity of perception."[30]
And Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, in step with Pound and Williams, postulated, "The objects which occur at any given moment of composition . . . are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any idea or preoccupations from outside the poem . . . must be handled as a series of objects in field . . . a series of tensions . . . space-tensions of a poem . . . the acting-on-you of the poem."[31]
Hulme was arguing for a poetic ideal before which the English language, with all its rigid syntax for elaboration and clarification, becomes helpless. Hulme called for the destruction of syntax to achieve the concrete. The earliest attempt, however, was made by Mallarmé. In order to arrive at a pure state of the poetry of essences, to freely transpose objects and words for his construction of a world so absolute that it has no strings attached to physical reality,[32] he dislocates syntax and, in his later sonnets, withdraws all the links that originally riveted the poem together.[33]
This absolutism of art, as well as his syntactical innovation, prepared the way for Pound and others to realize the poetic ideal that Hulme and Pound, each in his own way, postulated. The adjustment of conventional English made by Pound to approximate the curves of experience was a continuing process. Compare the two stanzas below, stanza (a) being the rearrangement of (b) — Pound's "The Coming of War: Actaeon" — back to traditional line format.
(a) An image of Lethe, and the fields
Full of faint light, but golden gray cliffs
And beneath them, a sea, harsher than granite.
(b) An image of Lethe,
and the fields
Full of faint light
but golden,
Gray cliffs,
and beneath them
A sea
Harsher than granite.
Breaking the traditional lines into small units graphically arranged serves to promote the visuality of the images, to isolate them as independent visual events, to force the reader-viewer to perceive the poem as consisting of spatial counterpoints, to enhance the physicality of objects (e.g., "sea" is literally and visually beneath the "gray cliffs," which protrude out from above), and to activate the poem through phases of perception (as does spotlighting or the use of a mobile point of view). These effects, modified and refined, dominate the entire Cantos .
In "The Coming of War: Actaeon," Pound used a space break to occasion a time break; he had not yet dealt actively with syntactical breaks. The latter aspect started with "In a Station of the Metro," and the discussion of the superpository technique in his 1914 essay "Vorticism" (by now too famous to need repetition here) launched him into more daring innovation.
"In a Station of the Metro" was modeled after the Japanese haiku, an example of which Pound examined in the same essay:
The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:
are like the plum blossoms
As Pound explained, "the words 'are like' would not occur in the
original."[34] He precisely followed the example of that original in his "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
To take away the words "are like" or "is like" is to disrupt syntax, giving prominence and independence to the two visual events, letting them coexist to define one another.[35] This poem's earlier version, which had appeared in Poetry in 1913, brings out Pound's obsession with the visual order and importance of the perceiving act. It runs:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Here we find both the space break and the syntactic break that Pound was later to employ in the Cantos .
In Pound's "South-Folk in Cold Country," which Pound mistranslated from the crippled Fenollosa notes,[36] we find:
Surprised. Desert turmoil. Sea sun.
Here what we are interested in is the resemblance of this line, syntactically speaking, to some of the Chinese lines we have seen: syntactic break, superposition of one impression of bewilderment and disorder upon another, as well as synchronous images. More lines of this kind were to come in the Cantos , some lines of which I will simply quote without much comment:
Rain; empty river, a voyage
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Autumn moon; hills rose above lakes
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Broad water; geese line out with the autumn.
from Canto 49
Prayer: hands uplifted
Solitude: a person, a Nurse.
from Canto 54
Moon, cloud, tower, a patch of the battistero
all of whiteness.
from Canto 79
Pound constructed Canto 49 out of a series of Chinese poems that were written by a Japanese in an album of paintings modeled after the Chinese art-motif of "Eight Views of Hsiao-hsiang." Here, Pound,
using a crib[37] done by a Chinese in Italy, kept close to the Chinese syntax. One may perhaps say that with this poem Pound finally ordained his innovation not only for himself but for many others to come, including Gary Snyder.
At this point, it would be helpful to draw attention to one aspect of my conclusion in Ezra Pound's "Cathay ." I argued that instead of simply pointing out the mistakes of the Fenollosa-Pound interpretation of the Chinese character, we should consider what aesthetic horizon they found in the structure of the Chinese character that excited them and how it helped them to reaffirm their own obsession with simultaneity and visual perspicuity.
The fact is that even if the Pound-Fenollosa explanation of the ideogram were correct, as for instance in the case of EAST
and DAWN, there is no way for the English language to reproduce them literally or physically . For if we try to reproduce the Chinese character(sun behind tree or, as Pound has it, "sun rising, showing through tree's branches"), we cannot write the word "sun" literally on top of the word "tree," for one word will be crossed out by the other, whereas the Chinese character for sunon top of the character for treeeasily forms a new Chinese character, EAST. In the case of the Chinese character for dawn(Pound's "sun above line of horizon"), we cannot reproduce it merely by writing:
SUN
HORIZON
This arrangement is still different from the Chinese which comes from the pictorial
. Any English reproduction of the elements in the two characters will involve the insertion of logical, directional links. Hence, the simultaneous presence of "sun" and "tree" in one picture is rendered into "sun behind tree" or "sun rising, showing through tree's branches." The insertion of logical, directional links between the objects immediately destroys the simultaneity of the elements in the Chinese characters and allows them to fall back upon the logic of succession. Why, then, was Pound so excited over the structure of the Chinese character?[38]
Clearly, as we look back on it, it was the compositional qualities of the Chinese character that helped to define the developing goals of Pound's project: simultaneity, montage, and visual perspicuity. That is why he considered Fenollosa's essay a piece of poetics rather than a treatise on the Chinese character as such. Pound seemed to be fully aware of the fact that to be true to the aesthetic ideal as proposed by
the ideogram and by Chinese poetry, an ideal that he finds compatible with the compositional ideals of his poetry, he must relinquish logical and directional links. The examples given above attest to this attempt. Indeed, in his Cantos Pound progressively tried to take away these "links" to achieve what I call "leaps of logic" on an extensive scale, leading to a nonmatrixed presentation, a simultaneous "happening" or acting out of luminous cultural moments as patterned energies in montage or polyphonic orchestration. Recognizing later how the physical existence of the Chinese character can give forth an expressiveness of which English is incapable, he used actual Chinese characters as vortices, or even emblems, into which and out of which impressions and events constant rush.
Similar to Pound's graphic and syntactical innovation was the practice of his close friend William Carlos Williams, who was partially influenced by Pound and to an even greater degree inspired by Gertrude Stein's language experiments and by the Armory Show of 1913.[39] Stein's theory and practice had an incalculable influence on Williams and on poets and artists after him — Black Mountain poets, John Cage, Jerome Rothenberg, John Ashbery, to name just a few.
Stein's motto "Composition [as in Cézanne and as in Beethoven] as Explanation"[40] has taken several leads in the "revolution" of language in modern and postmodern times. Words, like colors and forms in painting, like notes in music, she argued, are not limited to being vehicles for meanings or ideas. They should perform exactly like colors, forms, and tones to form a composition. Just as colors (in painting) and sounds (in music) are given equal value, words should be allowed to fully express themselves. From Cézanne, Stein took the idea that
in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole. . . . To me one human being is as important as another human being, and you may say that the landscape has the same values, a blade of grass has the same value as a tree. . . . Just as everybody has the vote, including the women, I think children should, because as soon as a child is conscious of itself, then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens. . . . I became gradually more conscious of . . . a need for evenness. At this time I threw away punctuation. My real objection to it was that it threw away this balance that I was trying to get, this evenness of everybody having a vote. . . . Then in about the middle of [Making of Americans ] words began to be for the first time more important
than the sentence structure or the paragraphs. Something happened. . . . I felt a need . . . of breaking it down and forcing it into little pieces. I felt that I had lost contact with the words in building up these Beethovian passages. . . . I began to play with words then. I was a little obsessed by words of equal value. . . . I had to recapture the value of the individual words. . . . I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word, and at the same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense.[41]
We can now understand why Sherwood Anderson once said, "For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entire new recasting of life, in the city of words."[42] A revolution in language is also a revolution in consciousness. First and foremost for Stein, words must be emancipated from closed meanings, in particular, the way words are subordinated to the tyrannical system of grammar in a kind of master–slave relationship. Her Tender Buttons (1914) can be seen as a direct challenge to the conventional, hegemonic uses of language. Following the habits of English grammar, we often balk at her choices of words, because many of them appear at the most unexpected positions: for example, where the dictates of English grammar lead us to expect a noun, we find a verb or a verb-like word, and so on. Or, in almost all the pieces in Tender Buttons , we do not know how to break the sentence into groups of meaningful phrases: There seem to be many possible ways of regrouping them. These facts point to multiple readings. Consider this example:
ORANGE
Why is a feel oyster an egg stir. Why is it orange centre.
A show at tick and loosen loosen it so to speak sat.
It was an extra leaker with a sea spoon, it was an extra licker
with a see spoon.[43]
First, in an effort to grasp "meaning" we might try grouping or rephrasing this sequence of words: Should we read it in short phrases like the following?
Why is a feel
oyster
an egg
stir.
Why is it orange
centre.
A show at tick
and loosen
loosen it
so to speak
sat.
It was an extra leaker
with a sea spoon,
it was an extra licker
with a see spoon.
This exercise by no means claims to be the only plausible reading. In fact, this piece invites other possible readings. This is the point of Stein's experiment. One thing is clear, however: We are forced to redivide the lines, not once, but many times, and each time we do it we are giving to each word a new, added dimension. In the process, a series of queries surges in our minds:
ORANGE
Why is a feel [verb or adjective?] oyster an egg stir. [Why no "?" Is this a statement? Can it be a statement?] Why is it orange [noun or adjective?] centre. A show at tick [internal rhyme?] and loosen loosen [imperative mood? sound play?] it [antecedent?] so to speak [internal rhyme or echo?] sat. [What or who sat?] It was an extra leaker [playful sound echo?] with a sea spoon [playful sound echo?], it was an extra licker [playful sound echo?] with a see spoon [playful sound echo?].
Certainly, there must be other queries as well in our minds. The indeterminateness of the grammatical functions of the words (or, rather, the nullifying of these functions) helps to liberate the words from normative demands for focused meaning. The feeling conveyed by such passages, according to William Carlos Williams, "is of words themselves, a curious immediate quality quite apart from their meaning, much as in music different notes are dropped, so to speak, into repeated chords one at a time, one after another — for themselves alone."[44]
If we consider the graphic and syntactical innovations of William Carlos Williams, we find a combination of strategies from Pound's Chinese examples and from those found Stein's language experiments. First, compare the line structure of the following sentence with Williams's graphic arrangement:
so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow
glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
In Williams's graphic treatment, the line breaks and spacing enhance the visuality of different phases of the perception of the object as words gain independence and liberation from the linearity of the normal line structures. As a result, these independent visual events or moments provide changing perspectives of the object as the reader-viewer is transposed into the midst of a scene to witness the object's various spatial extensions. The same is true of Williams's "Nantucket":
Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow
Changed by white curtains —
Smell of cleanliness —
Sunshine of late afternoon —
On the glass tray
a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which
a key is lying — And the
immaculate white bed
This technique of combining line breaks and spacing with syntactic breaks forces the reader to focus attention at all times — this is the lesson that Olson and Creeley learned — on the urgency of every moment as it occurs in the process of perceiving. Williams happily approved the essay "Projective Verse" by Olson and Creeley as an extension and clarification of his technique. The following passage by Olson can indeed be considered a footnote to Williams's ideas about the perceiving process:
ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points . . . get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perception, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a
poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always, one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER![45]
Williams's use of single words or short phrases as lines is most intriguing in the poem "The Locust Tree in Flower."[46] A comparison between the early version (1933, on the left) and the later one (on the right) will bring out most clearly the protean functions of space and syntactic breaks in Williams's poetry:
|
Like many of Williams's other poems, the early version, by dint of the space break, accentuates the different phases of the act of perceiving. But, like those poems, the early version also has a continuity (of syntax). The revised version is something else. First of all, "Among" — among what? "Of" — of what? These prepositions have
become position words of another sort, putting us in the midst of ("Among") something that then changes in both perspective and in spatial relationship ("of"). The perspective changes again as we notice color ("green," a color so strong that it takes full possession of the viewer) and then again as we see age ("old") — as we notice, in other words, the qualities (and their growth and change) that mime the life process of the locust tree. This is a language that approximates the morphology of feelings: "Bright," "broken," "branch," with its rough progression of vowels, reflect the inner struggle of growth until "come," with its open vowel.
Williams's revised version matches Zaslove's description of how gestures and movements have to reflect the life mechanism of the moment in order to authenticate it. In this poem, too, as in the flexibility of Chinese syntax, as in the ambiguous ways in which Stein's words work, the usual allotment of grammatical function to each word is erased. Indeed, if one views Williams's poem from the standpoint of normative English grammar, one is bound to say, No, it's not English at all, it doesn't fulfill the syntactic requirements of the language. And yet, supported by a tensional distribution of energy reflecting the activities of the perceiving moment, these words serve quite adequately as a medium for poetic expression.
Robert Creeley fully understands this miming of "energy-discharge," as he puts it. He says that
if one thinks of the literal root of the word verse , "a line, furrow, turning — vertere , to turn . . . ," he will come to a sense of "free verse" as that instance of writing in poetry which "turns" upon an occasion intimate with, in fact, the issue of, its own nature rather than to an abstract decision of "form" taken from a prior instance.
The point is, simply enough, why does the "line" thus "turn" and what does inform it in that movement?[47]
Creeley, unlike Williams, is a subjective poet who writes about intimate moments he once "stumbled into" — "warmth for a night perhaps, the misdirected intention came right . . . a sudden instance of love"[48] — and as such, he very seldom emphasizes the visual events as Williams does. But he has the same obsession with promoting the physical presence of an experience (even though a subjective one), an obsession that has driven him to use in his poems — I think to his advantage — the kind of space breaks and syntactic breaks endorsed by Pound and Williams.[49]
For our purpose, one example from Creeley is adequate:
In the court-
yard at midnight, at
midnight. The moon is
locked in itself, to
a man a
familiar thing
— "La Noche"
This is a poem that would not work if cast in a "normal" line structure. The repetition of "at midnight" would become rhetorical and superfluous, but when it is graphically separated as Creeley has done, leaving "midnight" and "the moon" in the center of the poem, "locked in" the arms of the poet's awareness, as it were, we can feel (physically feel) the "turning" from the outside world into the inner familiar moment in which the poet finds himself.
Space and syntactic breaks abound in contemporary poetry after Pound and Williams. Indeed, most of the poets in Donald Allen and George F. Butterick's The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised (1982) have incorporated these strategies in their poetry. Obviously, this is no place for a thorough examination of the various ways in which each of these poets receives and makes use of these strategies. For our conclusion, let us look at some examples from Gary Snyder, a statement from Michael McClure, and a palindrome attempt by Robert Duncan.
It is a well-known fact that Gary Snyder has inherited the traditions of Han Shan and Wang Wei and has incorporated Pound's and Williams's language. The convergence of these influences is most clearly expressed in his translation of Wang Wei, done while a student at the University of California, Berkeley.[50]
Empty, the mountain —
not a man,
Yet sounds, echoes
as of men talking
Shadows swing into the forest.
Swift light flashes
On dark moss, above.
It is, therefore, not surprising that many of his lines come very close to the working dynamics of the Chinese line. Here, without further comment, are some examples:
Burning the small dead
branches
broke from beneath
Thick spreading white pine
a hundred summers
snowmelt rock and air
hiss in a twisted bough
sierra granite;
mt Ritter —
black rock twice as old
Deneb, Altair
Windy fire.
"Burning the Small Dead"
First day of the world
white rock ridges
new born
Jay chatters the first time
Rolling a smoke by the campfire
New! never before.
bitter coffee, cold
dawn wind, sun of the cliffs.
from "Hunting No. 15"
In the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
from "Pine Tree Tops"
In his Scratching the Beat Surface (1982), Michael McClure quotes a poem of Su Tung-p'o (1036–1101) in its word-for-word layout from
my Chinese Poetry (1976). Then, McClure comments: "Professor Yip then versifies this way — it is not as good — but clearer" before he quotes my English rendering.[51] As if to echo Stein's statement that "there is no such thing as putting [words] together without sense," McClure goes so far as to accept the word-for-word format as more than adequate a medium for poetry, believing as he does with Stein that each word radiates more connections than conventional syntactical structures can handle.
Lastly, a palindrome attempt by Robert Duncan from his Bending the Bow :
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This poem reappears a few pages later, reading backwards and vertically:
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This chapter intends to be both radical, in the sense of being a root introduction to the aesthetic ground of the Chinese poetic line, and exploratory, in the sense of looking toward an ideal convergence of two languages and two poetics. The adjustment of language (in particular, the use of paratactical structures — space breaks and syntactic breaks — in Pound, Williams, and the postmodernists) can perhaps be seen as a strategy to force us to question the ways in which language forms our perceptions and, in doing so, to open ways for us once again to achieve the correspondence between word and thing, between language and being.