Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
- T S Eliot, Burnt Norton
From Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment loc 1257:
But, and here the idealism enters, our getting it right also transforms it. The world as we know it is fallen, out of shape, in some sense broken. The world is a kind of language, but lacunary and distorted. What we have to get right is the original, of which it is a damaged and unfaithful rendition. And our discovery of this proper original version helps to reinstate it, to make the world once more a faithful expression of it. This transformative power is the “magical” dimension of Novalis’ thought. The world responds to the recognition of its true nature by coming closer to this true nature.
From loc 772:
As I mentioned earlier, there are uses / forms of language which can serve to objectify and also on occasion manipulate the things around us. But this is the dead, uncreative side of language. Then there are the forms which are the sites of epiphanies. These constitute language as living, revivifying. Epiphanies in this sense don’t just add to our knowledge, they inspire us; catching a glimpse of these connections powerfully moves us; the current between us and Nature flows once more.
Can we sustain a sense of language as recovery in the absence of the romantic faith referred to by Taylor above? I think we can and that it rests upon the willingness to make what Eliot, elsewhere in the Four Quartets, refers to as ‘raids on the inarticulate’: to see the strain of words, their propensity to crack and break, as an existential (rather than simply an aesthetic) challenge. This is exactly what I worry that conversational agents, as engines of literacy and articulation, will be liable to undercut.
(How to Enjoy Writing: Generative AI and the Challenge of Scholarship has become a deeply strange book, that I suspect no one will read. But I’m finding writing it a deeply formative experience)
Mark Carrigan 