The Sting and the Web, an essay by Ricardo Nirenberg

This essay is a rewrite of the one published in PN Review 208, Volume 39 Number 2, November - December 2012: the changes are mostly in the author's thoughts about great poets and musicians.

 

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Long ago, my bouts of fever opened the ivory gates of unsuspected worlds. The flowers in the wallpaper attracted bees; Rahav or Leviathan would float past, open-mouthed, a wrecked galleon on their tongue, eagles and vultures diving and picking in the deep valleys between their teeth, and the scaly monsters ended up hiding, coiled, under my bed. To my nose came by turns the sulfurous smell of the cap gun long lost and the smell of the hot chocolate Mother brewed only for my birthdays; the taste in my mouth was now hard as armor plate, now bland, like bread soaked in tepid water. Then the command, ‘Open! Wide!’ broke this total disarray of the senses. I turned my head and saw another monster with a single huge, bright, round eye on his forehead.

Dr. Mindlin was at my bedside, head mirror in place, spoon ready to press my tongue down. Mother a few paces behind him, looking worried, hands clasped on her lap. With his gold-capped Parker 51, the doctor scribbled something and handed the bit of paper to Mother. She asked, ‘¿Viva Perú?’ And Dr Mindlin replied emphatically, ‘¡Sí, viva Perú!’

Now, even to a seven-year-old kid running a high fever it was clear that the phrase ‘Viva Perú’, or perhaps ‘Viva el Perú’, could not possibly mean, in this situation, an affirmation of support for the Andean nation. Our nation, nuestra patria, was the Argentine Republic, which dwelt, as we were taught at school, in the deepest recesses of each of our hearts, and for which we were supposed to be willing to die. To utter a ‘viva’ on behalf of any other country would have been a blasphemy. So, even though the expression ‘Viva Perú’ kept in my mind a strong Peruvian association, it was linked even more strongly with the milky tea and chicken soup Mother gave me when I was sick, and strongest of all, with the balsamic vapors of the poultices she put on my chest, with the wonderful smell of eucalyptus.

Years later, in a New York drugstore, I came across the brand name ‘Vick VapoRub’, and a sudden new light shone on that small corner of my childhood.

Phonetically, ‘Vick’s VapoRub’ is diabolically contrived to be a torture to any Hispanic tongue, so I cannot blame Mother or Dr. Mindlin for misleading my young ear, for leaving me adrift in the marshes of Babel.

No, I will blame no one; indeed, I’d like to make the point that being adrift among the reeds is our natural condition as zôion lógon ékhon, and that there is nothing to complain about: on the contrary, it would be unspeakably sad and a great loss if an expression like ‘Viva Perú’ or ‘Vick’s VapoRub’ sent me invariably, directly, to a South American country or to a bluish pot sold at drugstores. I prefer the poetic and ambiguous drift, what you might call reverie, though I concede that in certain situations, or for some purposes, dispatch, directness and inerrant reference are of the essence.

The artificial languages are designed with that essence in mind: mathematical symbols, Lull’s and Leibniz’s utopian lingos, formal logic, computer programming languages, all those aspire to be unambiguous, which means that each signifier should point to one signified and only one. Here no paronymy or sound-alike is tolerated: two strings of zeroes and ones differing only on the one-millionth place are considered different; that dark shadow which, according to Max Müller, language throws upon thought, and which goes by the name of mythology, is eliminated.

Nobody in his right mind and in our digitalized day will doubt the practical importance of such logical, mechanical languages; what is amazing is that there are smart people who believe that those are the only languages we should use, all of us, whenever thinking for some purpose, any purpose, or for no purpose.

Smart people, starting perhaps with the formidable Parmenides, have warned us of the dangers of uttering words or thinking thoughts pointing to nothing or to things too vague, too fleeting, or equivocal. Which is, of course, what poets do, whence the old, truceless war between poetry and philosophy. Philosophers, especially those of the analytic tribe (but far from only them), are like wasps: they are conscious and proud of wielding a sting, and their chief concern is not to miss their target, no matter how hidden or how small. The Cerceris wasp preys on the emerald ash borer, the Hairy Ammophila on the grey worm, and the Languedocian Sphex on a grasshopper: all those insects know exactly which nerve center to sting, according as they wish to kill their prey or just to paralyze it and feed it live to their young. The French entomologist Jean H. Fabre thought that such precision is one of the most amazing and inexplicable facts in nature.

Waspish thinkers – take, for modern instances, Frege, Carnap, or Quine – think of themselves and us not as zôion lógon ékhon but rather as zôion kéntron ékhon: not as an animal possessing logos but as an animal possessing kentron, a sting.  For them, the logos is a sting, precise and fatal. Poets, on the other hand, are frequently spiderish: they spin their webs, their texts, from the silk issued from their gut, and they make it sticky, in the hope that we will be caught and stuck, forever spinning and re-spinning their sticky texts in our hearts. The greatest poets, however, like the greatest musicians, deploy a waspish precision together with a spiderish architecture of the whole.

 

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On page 9 of Language and Myth, Ernst Cassirer quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt: ‘Man lives with his objects chiefly – in fact, since his feelings and acting depend on his perceptions, one may say exclusively – as language presents them to him. By the same process whereby he spins language out of his own being, he ensnares himself in it; and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another.’

In the two centuries that followed and in different hands, Humboldt’s magic circles hardened into steel cages of necessity. For a whole crowd of simplifiers, politically from left and right, collective entities like language, race, gender and social class determine the individual mind once and for all: no more stepping or jumping out of those was allowed, no more trespassing, and Humboldt’s liberal wisdom was dismissively labelled ‘bourgeois cosmopolitanism’. Indeed, according to Humboldt we are complicated monsters – talk of the serpent Typho! We are at once spider and wasp, weaver and stinger. Spider, in that we spin language out of our own being; wasp, since we get caught in it, ensnared.

We are simultaneously Clytemnestra, who envelops her husband in a net to stab him in his bath, and haughty Agamemnon, the waspish spear-wielder who has killed his daughter and comes home to be murdered. The war between spiders and wasps, to which the battles between poetry and philosophy belong, rages within most of us, who are neither great poets nor great musicians.

There are those, however, who pretend that things – meaningful things at least – are clear, objective, distinct, and not subject to the whims of language. One day, back in the late 60s, when I already lived in the USA, I listened on the radio to an interview with Claude Lévi-Strauss. He was asked about the meaning of ‘meaning’, and he replied that a word or a phrase is meaningful only when one can translate it into another language. Did he mean any other language, or only translation between relatively close languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese? I don’t know. In any case, Lévi-Strauss’s notion of ‘meaningful’ is that of a true Structuralist, which is to say, mathematical. For instance: to say that a natural number is even or odd, prime or composite, a multiple of 7 or not, is mathematically meaningful; eleven will be prime whether you write it as the Babylonians did, or the Egyptians, or the ancient Peruvians; but to say, for example, that a number is palindromic, that it reads the same from left to right and from right to left, is not mathematically meaningful, because this property depends on the language we use – for instance, on the base we use for writing numbers. In our usual base ten, eleven is palindromic, but in base two, we write eleven as 1011, which is not palindromic; nor was XI palindromic for the ancient Romans: ‘palindromic number’ doesn’t translate, it is not a language-invariant expression, so it is not mathematically meaningful.

Still and all, when I was a kid and I got a bus ticket with a palindromic number on it, I felt like the gods were smiling on me, that all was going to be well. If that’s not meaningful, I can’t imagine what would be. And now that the 1960s and Lévi-Strauss seem so far gone, I find it impossible to translate the concepts current in those days, the ones that were thought most meaningful – such as liberating consumer goods (by stealing them from a store) – into an idiom that could be understandable to my grandchildren. We are here talking about the ‘same’ language, English, but meanwhile much water has flowed under the bridges.

 

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Whenever I think of the late 60s, I become more convinced that those concepts and those words, that way of speaking, should not be remembered apart from the hellish circle of concepts and words that filled the air and the minds back then and for two decades before: balance of terror, mutually assured destruction, getting more bang for our buck, neutron bombs, fall-out shelters, napalm, domino theory and body counts. Many young people managed to step out of that hellish circle, but they could only do so, as Humboldt had seen, by plunging into another circle, another lingo radically different, superficially as irrational as the previous one was superficially rational: right on! – turn on, tune in, drop out – far fucking out! That jump out of hell was called ‘consciousness-raising’.

 

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My mother had never heard of Wittgenstein; however, un-philosophically and in exasperation, she would ask, ‘Do you know the meaning of the word no?’ And if I wanted to stay out of trouble, I had to answer, ‘Yes.’ Even though, now that I think of it, I never truly understood the meaning of the word ‘no’.

In the Sermon on the Mount, according to Matthew 5:37, Jesus exhorted his followers never to take oaths, but simply to say ‘naì naí’, ‘où oú’. That is, in Greek, ‘yes yes’ and ‘no no’. Simply? Did Jesus himself understand the meaning of those words? And why did he double them? The same doubling occurs in James 5:12, so we may assume that it was not fortuitous or due to poor translations from the Aramaic. On another sermon on a different mount (Morningside Heights), the Oxford tea-and-crumpets philosopher J.L. Austin declared that while in many languages a double negative amounts to a positive, never does a double positive amount to a negative. From the audience, the nasal voice of Sidney Morgenbesser uttered a dismissive, ‘Yeah, yeah’. There must have been some Sidney Morgenbessers in Jesus’ times, in Galilee, but their nasal utterances were expunged from the Gospels.

Old Hölderlin, who was said to be crazy and lived in a yellow tower by the Neckar, invented a word, ‘pallaksch’, which meant sometimes ‘yes’, sometimes ‘no’, depending on the context.

 

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Nietzsche’s apostle in terris Anglorum infidelium, Walter Kaufmann, in his 1959 book, From Shakespeare to Existentialism, page 307: ‘But it is not less tragic that not a single German interpreter of stature should have liberated Nietzsche’s timely, sorely needed message from the iridescent webs of myth and metaphor, that no one should have mastered his abandoned bow to drive his well-fashioned arrows into the unworthy suitors of his people.’

Is this possible? Could Kaufmann, generally a careful writer, have written that ‘the iridescent webs of myth and metaphor’ are something bad from which we, as well as Nietzsche’s message, ought to be liberated, and then sell us wholesale and in the same breath the myth and metaphors of bow and arrows – the noble sting – of Nietzsche/Odysseus? Plus, extra metaphoric bonus, he identifies Germany with a woman, Penelope, and the Nazis with her suitors. Or did he do it on purpose and for the sake of paradox? Whatever the case, Kaufmann was, or tried to be, faithful to Nietzsche’s spirit. The theme of bows, arrows, spiders and webs in Nietzsche is inexhaustible. The tension of the bow, taken as a metaphor for the tension of the human soul, is for him a major part of the summum bonum, which is to say, of the ennobled man, while the spider in its web is compared to his chief enemy, God. In that sense the author of The Birth of Tragedy rejoined Aeschylus, in whose Oresteia we find a similarly inexhaustible arachnophobia and horror of the web, together with the enthroning of the sting, the warrior’s spear or sword. (I lectured to freshmen on Aeschylus's horror of webs.)

 For I have been talking not only about insects, not just about an entomologically inspired epistemology, but about ourselves too. In Aeschylus as in Nietzsche, the horror of the web is also a dread of woman and the womb, in whose enclosure of darkness and contingency our tissues are woven, to the dismay of all waspish philosophers.

The Dionysian and the Apollonian: those polar opposites were said by Nietzsche to come together, to be aufgehoben or synthesized in Greek tragedy and in Wagner’s operas. But neither Aeschylus, nor Hegel, nor Wagner, nor Nietzsche, succeeded in synthesizing the web and the bow, the distaff and the spear.

The epic poet knew better. The Ithacan suitors, the ill-starred, preying crowd invoked by Walter Kaufmann, were defeated by a combination of both: Penelope’s patient weaving and unweaving, and Odysseus’s well-fashioned arrows and bow. Neither could have prevailed by itself. Nor should we forget that in the Thirteenth Book of the Odyssey, line 386, right before Odysseus begins his campaign against the suitors, the hero begs the goddess Athena to contrive for him the measures and schemes whereby he will be victorious: in the original Odysseus says, ‘all’ áge, mêtin húphenon…’, meaning literally, ‘but come, weave for me a contrivance…’

 

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Many of us find some words pleasant, even sexually exciting; some words sound to us funny, some sad; usually we are hard put to explain why that is so. In a few cases we know or think we do. When my sister or I had provoked the anger of father or mother and were given a spanking or a slew of slaps, often the other parent would intercede for us, but never in Spanish. I guess this was because they wanted to present a united front. They said something in Yiddish, always the same phrase, which turned the whole thing into a farce after its meaning had become clear to us. It sounded something like loh-sih-moop, and the word soon acquired for us the power of evoking mercy, refuge and release, a power much like that of the Semitic stem r-kh-m, which produces mercy, merciful and womb. This vaguely defined word, loh-sih-moop, was so pleasant that we used it to name our favorite game: we were waging guerilla war against a Russian army that had invaded our Argentine fatherland, and we sang war songs borrowed from the patriotic marches taught at school.  When I was learning German (I learned this in Yiddish only much later), I realized that what my parents said to each other was roughly ‘lass ihn/ihr ab’, leave him/her be. But by then we had long since abandoned our war game, and the word loh-sih-moop had lost much of its charm.

I was into something else. I was eighteen, at the university, and I had discovered math. Or rather, I had discovered math plus a group of fellows my age who also had discovered math and were aware of the immense superiority they had thereby acquired over the profane crowds. We were made, to use a trite topos, proud and humble – proud by the possession of the most elementary terms of this ancient but ever-growing language, and humble by the adumbration of vast oceans we knew nothing about. Like Isaac Newton, we were children playing at the seashore, and it happened to be a beach with very few bathers. In Argentina, back in 1957, who but a young fool or an heir to great wealth would have thought of becoming a mathematician? Yet foolish or rich kids, for some reason, didn’t think of it either: if they attended the university at all, they became mostly lawyers.

 

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Humboldt’s principle is at work here too. The only way of escaping the swamps of patriotic lyrics where ‘glory’ rhymes with ‘victory’ and with ‘history’, the moving sands of ambiguous expressions such as ‘viva Perú’ or ‘loh-sih-moop’, the molasses of boleros, tangos and commercials, the iridescent, sticky language webs of childhood and adolescence – is by jumping off to the realm of pure ideas, from whose lofty heights we may regard all those other things as mere enfantillages. Math is the language of eternal being, while the vulgar tongues reflect nothing but fleeting appearances: my friends and I were convinced of that before any of us had read a page of Plato.

If someone had asked us, ‘Tell me in few words what makes math so special,’ we would have replied, ‘Math is rigorous, more so than any other language.’ But did we understand the meaning of that word, ‘rigorous’? We are reminded of Wittgenstein’s footnote on page 53 of Philosophical Investigations: ‘Don’t I also sometimes imagine myself to understand a word (as I may imagine I understand a kind of calculation) and then realize that I didn’t understand it?’ My belief, today, is that we did not understand it, just as Wittgenstein once thought he understood what ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ motion meant, but later realized that he did not.

Probably the words ‘rigorous language’ meant for us something like ‘a language that conveys reality accurately’. This is quite in the spirit of Plato, whom we had not read, and also in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, a writer we all read assiduously. ‘Rigorous’ was a favorite word with Borges, and so far as I remember, always used in a positive sense. For instance, he lauds Cansinos Assens’ Spanish translation of The Arabian Nights by saying that it is rigorous (rigurosa), while some previous translations of the same work are licentious (licenciosas). We should have asked how a translation of a literary work could be rigorous, how one could step out of A, the magic circle of Arabic, into S, the magic circle of Spanish, in a rigorous fashion – accurately conveying which reality? If different magic circles confine us to different Weltansichten, different ways of perceiving and constructing the world, which reality are we talking about: that of Arabic, of Spanish, or, with unjustified optimism, that of both?

Borges is not alone in using the word ‘rigorous’ in less than rigorous ways: he, like many others, invokes the prestige of Leonardo da Vinci to back up his own infatuation with rigor. Leonardo had spoken of ‘ostinato rigore’ as something necessary, but he thought it necessary for what? For writing technical reports, let’s say about the building of a bridge or a flying machine, that is, about things pertaining to applied mathematics – not for painting the Virgin of the Rocks. But the two words, ostinato rigore, are usually taken from Leonardo’s notebooks out of context. In mathematics the notion of a rigorous translation makes perfect sense: we can translate theorems from one math dialect or theory into another, and convey the whole reality of the definitions and theorems accurately (for example, from the dialect of category theory into the dialect of set theory, or, as we saw above in §3, from one notation or base for numbers to another). But The Arabian Nights is something else entirely.

So, what makes math a special language? And if it is rigor, what might be the meaning of that word? I think that indeed it is rigor, and that the meaning of ‘rigor’ in the phrase ‘math is rigorous’ lies close to its etymology, which is the same as that of ‘rigid’: stiff, unbending, unyielding, not pliant or flexible, firm, hard – originally, made so by cold, like ice. It is remarkable that Borges, who held ‘rigor’ in high regard, thought poorly of ‘rigid’, a word he uses to characterize and chastise the decadent Spanish poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet the two words are intimately related.

 

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The stiff, unbending nature of logico-mathematical thought is inscribed over the Platonic portal: I mean, it is prescribed by the rules of the propositional calculus and the axioms of set theory. The thoughts we have when reading The Arabian Nights, on the other hand, are not of that sort: they tend to be yielding, flexible, sticky like spider webs and easily altered by other thoughts. This is also true of our thoughts when we read any literary work, when we listen to music, when we look at the passers-by from a pavement café, until we have to pay and then our mind naturally turns to number. But why privilege the stiff, rigid or rigorous sort of thought over the yielding and flexible? Why the absurdity of aspiring to a heavily starched universe?