Bucolic hiatus

When Antonio was nine, talking perhaps about something his brother had made, he said it wasn’t terribly robust — jabbed his finger in my direction, as he was wont to do, and exclaimed delightedly, “You gave me that word!” Indeed, several days before, it had come up, and needed explaining.

We must acquire all our words from others in that way, with the possible exception of idiosyncratic coinages, but in so doing, make them our own; their pedigree is lost to history, but that history lent them substance. We, as the individuals we feel ourselves to be, subsist in the relationships that have made up our lives.

Those lives are also lived in books, to a greater or lesser extent.

Consider this beautiful scrap, from the first story of J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands:

… and here the rising air above the sand-reefs was topped by swan-like clumps of fair-weather cumulus

The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D

That made me think of Ballard as a boy in Singapore, first encountering the expression “fair-weather friend”. Our knowledge of our native tongue has a richness the foreign learner can never recuperate, because it contains within it a lifetime’s experience, from the vernacular to the sublime. Only a writer would transmute the cliche into that expressive collocation, but he can do so only with the weight of the language’s history as counterpoise, both the literary lexicon, and shapes of sentences that dance, leaving the well-trodden ground behind.

This live weight is congruent with the discovery of comparative philology that languages embrace their ancestry. On the most concrete level, it can be seen in an irregular plural, like ‘men’, betraying the original presence of an -i ending that dropped off before the word was ever written down, but having shifted the vowel before it, that remained as its trace. Taking these results together, we can deduce with varying degrees of certainty that our iron age ancestors kept cattle, because of the relationship between the vocabulary of bucolic husbandry in the child languages, or that they must have lived in certain Caucasian steppes because of their words for trees and other flora with, collectively, a confined geographical distribution; that they had a myth of Prometheus, who stole from the gods; the structure of their families and marriage practices, from kinship terms; and so on.

The generic insight is also contained in the discovery of deep time in rocks: fossils, and sedimentary strata rotated through ninety degrees with igneous rock above them. Even the natural world is the domain of history.