On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking

Themes: Friends, Knowledge, Speech

I was emailed this beautiful little essay by the convenor of a workshop I’m participating in next week. It’s on the value of discussing ideas with others rather than trying to work things out alone. The final paragraph on the foolishness of examinations is a particular highlight.

Long-live the reading-group! Death to examinations!!

 

From Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking, in Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, edited and translated by David Constantine, London: J.M. Dent (1997), 405-9.

If there is something you wish to know and by meditation you cannot find it, my advice to you, my ingenious old friend, is: speak about it with the first acquaintance you encounter. He does not need to be especially perspicacious, nor do I mean that you should ask his opinion, not at all. On the contrary, you should yourself tell him at once what it is you wish to know.
…

[Using his sister as an the example of this practice]

[It is not] by skilful questioning she brings me to the crux of the matter, though that might often be the way to do it, I daresay. But because I do have some dim conception at the outset, one distantly related to what I’m looking for, if I boldly make a start with that, my mind, even as my speech proceeds, under the necessity of finding an end for that beginning, will shape my first confused idea into complete clarity so that, to my amazement, understanding is arrived at as the sentence ends. I put in a few unarticulated sounds, dwell lengthily on the conjunctions, perhaps make use of apposition where it is not necessary, and have recourse to other tricks which will spin out my speech, all to gain time for the fabrication of my idea in the workshop of the mind. And in this process nothing helps me more that if my sister makes a move suggesting she wishes to interrupt; for such an attempt from outside to wrest speech from its grasp still further excites my already hard-worked mind and, like a general when circumstances press, its powers are raised to a further degree…

It is a strangely inspiring thing to have a human face before us as we speak; and often a look announcing that a half-expressed thought is already grasped gives us its other half’s expression. [Bold is mine]

…

That a certain excitement of the intelligence is necessary even to revivify ideas we have already had is amply demonstrated whenever open-minded and knowledgeable people are being examined and without any preamble are asked such questions as: What is the state? Or: What is property? Things of that kind. If these young people had been in company and for a while the subject of conversation had been the state or property they would by a process of comparison, discrimination and summary perhaps with ease have arrived at the definition. But being wholly deprived of any such preparation they are seen to falter and only an obtuse examiner will conclude from this that they do not know. For it is not we who know things but pre-eminently a certain condition of ours which knows.

 

Only very commonplace intellects, people who yesterday learned by heart what the state is and today have forgotten it again, will have their answers pat in an examination. Indeed, there may be no worse opportunity in the world for showing oneself to advantage than a public examination. Besides the fact that it offends and wounds our sense of decency and incites us to recalcitrance to have some learned horsedealer looking into how many things we know who then, depending on whether they are five or six, either buys us or dismisses us: it is so difficult to play upon a human mind and induce it to give forth its peculiar music, it so easily under clumsy hands goes out of tune, that even the most practised connoisseeur of human beings, even he, not being acquainted with the one whose labour he is assisting at, may make mistakes. And if such young people, even the most ignorant among them, do most often achieve good marks this is because the minds of the examiners, if the examination is public, are themselves too embarrassed to deliver a true judgement. For not only do they themselves feel the indecency of the whole procedure: we should be ashamed to ask a person to tip out the contents of his purse before us, let alone his soul: but their own intelligences come under dangerous appraisal and they may count themselves lucky if they manage to leave the examination without having revealed more shameful weaknesses than the young finalist himself has whom they have been examining.

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The Bells

Themes: Beauty, creation, Knowledge

We used to live in a little cubical building,
nave’s length from a bell tower.
An aisle’s length, not quite, but every friday night
it was a measured space, although not by paces;
in concussions.

From 6pm to 8pm the Ringers would gather – I imagine from curious little offices in narrow stone buildings, places where they can still sell you insurance over a desk and keep your details in a drawer (with a curly metal key). Then the bells would begin to sound, individual drops at first, like rain on tin, dong, dong, ding, dong. Ringing them up. Hauling on them harder and harder, swinging them out of their slumber (they sleep like flying foxes, clinging to the unders of beams in the belfry). Hauling on them until they stand on their heads. Slipping into the stop position. Awake and ready, above the beam. Just poised there. Um, how to describe: upside down? Not moving, waiting. The largest weighs two tonnes. And some maniac 80 year old is right underneath hauling on its tail.

The sound in our flat was deafening. Most friday nights at 6pm found us weebling away down York St toward China-town, which is also deafening but more intimate. Everyone at home in a foreign land. And it come with bonus spring roll!

But not every Friday night:
Once I climbed the twisty stair to the bells and rang with the ringers.
Stepping into the ringing chamber was a little like  finally discovering that cicada in the grass – the one whose chirping you’ve heard every night of your summer life. You hunt him with your ears, and finally your fingers. You part the grasses. And he goes silent. You look each other, embarrassed, a weight of unexpressed intimacy, each having inhabited t’other’s imaginationing. Ringers and Rung for.

“You rung?”
“Well… [glance aside] … yes… I suppose we did? I didn’t realise we were ringing for anyone.”
“I came though, so I think you must have been. Isn’t that what ringing is about?”

The art of change ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations. When he speaks of the music of his bells, he does not mean musician’s music – still less what the ordinary man calls music. To the ordinary man, in fact, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association. The change-ringer does, indeed, distinguish musical differences between one method of producing his permutations and another; he avers, for instance, that where the hinder bells run 7,5,6, or 5,6,7, or , 5,7,6, the music is always prettier, and can detect and approve, where they occur, the consecutive fifths of Tittums and the cascading thirds of the Queen’s change. But what he really means is, that by the English method of ringing with rope and wheel, each several bell gives forth her fullest and noblest note. His passion – and it gives a passion – find its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.

(Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors, 25).

The Ringers showed me something they were working on: a special peal to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. [The bridge lives just up the road; its on-ramps, like arms, embrace the Bell tower.] Weeks later I was at home while they rung it. It went for hours, maybe 5? There was nothing even remotely resembling a melody. But I knew its genius: the written notation for the changes. The bell ‘music’, as manifested on the page, was shaped like a coat-hanger, or a Harbour Bridge…
Are you marvelling?
And maybe 9 people in the world knew this?
Everyone else just had to put up with the insane racket.

The bells were worshipping the Bridge.
It’s just that the language of bells is inscrutable.
As is the language of cicadas.
Except to lady cicadas
(I assume).

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims the work of His hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they communicate knowledge. There is no speech; there are no words; their voice is not heard. Their message has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.

(Psalms 19:1–4 HCSB)

Plays the strange music of the world:
in the plenitude of its intelligibility, found inscrutable.
Heard and not heard. Seen and unseen.
Or rather, heard and not understood, seen and unrecognised.
Hence, the slow-shaking incomprehension of the Universe
when addressed with that fundamental human question:

Why?

Image by DeusXFlorida

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Seasonal Variations

Themes: Knowledge, Selections

Have you ever noticed that Doubt can sometimes move in waves? Lots of people I know are currently doubting – what to do, what to believe, who to listen to, where to go, who to love? In The Curly Pyjama Letters Mr Curly writes to Vasco Pyjama:

Dear Vasco,
swirling season has come to Curly Flat and there is much whirling and twirling.
Wish you were here.
Love, Mr Curly
(Michael Leunig, 2001)

It seems that swirling season has come to our part of Curly Flat…
Having said that, I’m not really sure what swirling season is, perhaps a heightened sense of the ephemeral, or of interconnectedness, maybe of finitude? It is definitely Autumnal.
The city tries to shield itself from these seasonal variations, but, all around, the world is falling asleep, the annuals in the garden are dying, the summer leaves are losing their grip. If ever there was a season for Doubt, it is now.

It’s not an easy season to appreciate though. If Spring is a season of change holding out the promise of a future, then Autumn is a season of change holding out the reminder that all things have an end. Winter will be upon us soon. And in the face of that reminder it’s hard not to feel a sense of rootlessness, to wonder if too many of our projects have been frivolous distractions from the one pre-eminent task of preparing to die.

Are we being set adrift in an ocean that has never been sailed, in a world whose globularity is still an open question? Will we sail on forever? Will we fall over the edge of everything into the Abyss? Will we eventually find that we have come back home, creeping up on ourselves from behind?

It would be a mistake to think that we can combat doubt through the acquisition of greater stores of knowledge. The only satisfying response to doubt is trust. No amount of knowledge can ever bridge the gulf between our finite capacity as humans, and the infinitely searching questions that living in the world throws up for us. We can increase in knowledge, we can grow in wisdom, and we should seek to do so. We can learn from each other and build upon the knowledge and wisdom of those who have gone before. But really, if you think that there will ever be genuine comfort in mere knowledge, you haven’t even begun to grasp the scope of the universe in which we live. You haven’t even really come to grips with the inescapable newness and particularity of every human life and decision.

Anselm of Canterbury spoke of a fides quaerens intellectum – a ‘faith seeking understanding’. I take it that this ‘faith’ is not a set point of view, a set of philosophical/theological foundations which cannot be questioned but only verified. No. The real faith that enables understanding consists in this: no matter how far we sail, even if we sail off the edge of the world and into death, there is one who can reach us there and bring us back. There is no doubt so strong, no knowledge so deadly, that he cannot call, ‘Lazarus, Come Out’, and bring to us the Resurrection.
I don’t think you will be a genuine lover of truth, a real scholar, a real knower, if you do not have this faith. Where will you find the courage to pursue the truth all the way to the bitter end? How will you steel yourself to that resolve in the face of death and dissolution? You won’t. You will shrink back, the final premiss of your syllogism will be a fairy tale, anything, to save you from the wound of death.
But the one who trusts in the God of the Resurrection will follow the truth into the jaws of death, will doubt all things, will dare to know anything, can conduct research in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, because you have this trust: God can raise the dead.
Even when your doubts have smashed you into pieces. Even if you’re not sure that there is anything left of you. He can bring you back. Don’t fear doubt, don’t be afraid of the season of swirling. Don’t try to wall yourself off from it, or build for yourself a foundation that can withstand all assailants. Eventually the waves from the sea of doubt will pound your defences into sand.

What is your only comfort in life and death?

That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.
(Question 1, Heidelberg Catechism , 1563)

The only source of comfort in the face of doubt, and the real source of the ability to seek the truth in the face of doubt, is not secured by what you know but by being known.

I keep the Lord in mind always.
Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my spirit rejoices;
my body also rests securely.
For You will not abandon me to Sheol;
You will not allow Your Faithful One to see the Pit.
(Psalms 16:8-10 HCSB)

photo by ferran

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