The Cool Web, by Krishnan Venkatesh


You've all got me thinking about language. The worst possible view of language is as structure and words, or grammar and lexicon, which is how it\"s usually taught. No wonder we are so poor at learning other languages. Language in fact cannot be separated from intention and context, and from knowing how to read those; or from bodily and facial movements, postures, gestures, tones, as well as the settings of light and landscape that are such a crucial part of the expressiveness of remembered scenes. Moreover, all of these elements are constantly in motion. Virginia Woolf captures all of this miraculously and with astonishing subtlety, as if modeling for us the art of living with all the pores of our consciousness open, and not just the square tunnel leading into our chambers of reason. Living with such openness, like reading Woolf, can be intense and exhausting, best in small quantities at a time, since one cannot be carried along comfortably on the shoulders of linear narrative. We have to be alert  at every moment, vulnerable to barely perceptible shifts of the heart. 
   I was reminded of the following poem by Robert Graves, in which language, conceived as only logos, ends up as a veil against reality, or as general anaesthesia.  

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.
 
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose\"s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
 
There\"s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
 
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children\"s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.
 
Robert Graves, 1927





 

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