Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  The usual cybernetic model for language interpretation:

  where each box must be a different kind of circuit, the first four (and, arguably, all six) probably different for each language strikes me as a pretty hard thing to “grow” by ordinary evolutionary means, or to program on a tabula rasa neural net.

  The circuitry I suggest would all be a matter of phonic recognition, phonic storage, and phonic association (short of the storage and associational employment of other sensory information). A great deal of recognition/storage/association would have to be done by the circuitry to achieve language. But nothing else would have to be done, other than what was covered in our original utterance-reproduction circuit.

  Not only would the linguistic bugaboo “semantics” disappear (as experiments indicate that it may have already) but so would morphology; and syntax and phonic analysis would simply absorb one another, so to speak.

  Would this really be so confusing?

  I think not. It is only a rather limited view of grammar that initially causes it to appear so.

  Think of grammar solely as the phonic redundancies that serve to transform a heard utterance from the interpretive field, through the range of associations in the hearer/speaker’s memory that includes “his language,” into the hearer/speaker’s generative field as an utterance.

  In the qui, quae, quo of Latin, for instance, I’m sure the Roman brain (if not the Roman grammarian) considered the redundancy of the initial “qu” sound as grammatically significant (in my sense of “grammar”), as it considered significant, say, the phonic redundancy between the “ae” at the end of “quae” and the “ae” at the end of “pullae.” (We must get rid of the notion of grammar as something that applies only to the ends of the words!) In English, the initial sound of the, this, that, these, those, and there are all grammatically redundant in a similar way. (The “th” sound indicates, as it were, “indication”; the initial “qu” sound, in Latin, indicates “relation,” just as the terminal “ae” sound indicates, in that language, “more than one female.”*) What one can finally say of this “grammar” is: When a phonic redundancy does relate to the way that a sound is employed in conjunction with other sounds/meanings, then that phonic element of the grammar is regular. When a phonic redundancy does not so relate, that element is irregular. (The terminal “s” sound on “these” and “those” is redundant with the terminal “s” of loaves, horses, sleighs—it indicates plurality, and is therefore regular with those words. The terminal “s” on “this” is irregular with them. The terminal “s” at the end of “is,” “wants,” “has,” and “loves” all imply singularity. Should the terminal “s” on “this” be considered regular with these others? I suspect in many people’s version of English it is.) For all we know, in the ordinary English hearer/speaker’s brain, “cream,” “loam,” “foam,” and “spume” are all associated, by that final “m” sound, with the concept of “matter difficult to individuate”—in other words, the “m” is a grammatically regular structure of that particular word group. Such associations with this particular terminal “m” may explain why most people seldom use “ham” in the plural—though nothing empirically or traditionally grammatical prevents it. They may also explain why “cream,” when pluralized, in most people’s minds immediately assumes a different viscosity (i.e., referentially, becomes a different word; what the dictionary indicates by a “second meaning”). I suspect that, in a very real sense, poets are most in touch with the true “deep grammar” of the language. Etymology explains some of the sound-redundancy/meaning-associations that are historical. Others that are accidental, however, may be no less meaningful.

  All speech begins as a response to other speech. (As a child you eventually speak through being spoken to.) Eventually this recomplicates into a response to speech-and-other-stimuli. Eventually, when both speech and other stimuli are stored in memory and reassociated there, this recomplication becomes so complex that it is far more useful to consider certain utterances autonomous—the first utterance in the morning concerning a dream in the night, for example. But even this can be seen as a response to speech-and-other-than-speech, in which the threads of cause, effect, and delay have simply become too intertwined and tangled to follow.

  55. Quine inveighs against propositions, as part of logic, on the justifiable grounds that they cannot be individuated. But since propositions, if they are anything, are particular meanings of sentences, the impossibility of individuating them is only part of a larger problem: the impossibility of individuating meanings in general. What the logician who says (as Quine does at the beginning of at least two books) “To deny the Taj Majal is white is to affirm that it is not white” (in the sense of “nonwhite”) is really saying, is:

  “Even if meanings cannot be individuated, let us, for the duration of the argument, treat them as if they can be. Let us assume that there is some volume of meaning-space that can be called white and be bounded. Therefore, every point in meaning-space, indeed, every volume in meaning-space, can be said to either lie inside this boundary, and be called ‘white,’ or outside this boundary, and be called ‘nonwhite,’ or, for the volumes that lie partially inside and partially outside, we can say that some aspect of them is white.”

  The problem is that, similar to the color itself, the part of meaning-space that can be called “white” fades, on one side and another, into every other possible color. And somehow, packed into this same meaning-space, but at positions distinctly outside this boundary around white, or any other color for that matter, we must also pack “freedom,” “death,” “grief,” “the four-color-map problem,” “the current King of France,” “Pegasus,” “Hitler’s daughter,” “the entire Second World War and all its causes,” as well as “the author of Waverly”—all in the sense, naturally, of “nonwhite.”

  Starting with just the colors: In what sort of space could you pack all possible colors so that each one was adjacent to every other one, which would allow the proper fading (and bounding*) to occur? It is not as hard as it looks. Besides the ordinary three coordinates for volume, if you had two more ordinates, both for color, I suspect it could be rather easily accomplished. You might even do it with only two spatial and two color axes. Four coordinates, at any rate, is certainly the minimum number you need. Conceivably, getting the entire Second World War and all its causes in might require a few more.

  56. One of the great difficulties of formal grammars is that they are all grammars of written language, including the attempts at “transformational” grammars (Syntactic Structures: “. . . we will not consider, for our purposes, vocal inflections . . .”). For insight into how verbal signals will produce information once they fall into an interpretive field, it is a good idea to return to the mechanics of those signals’ generation.

  Speech signals, or sentences, are formed from two simultaneous information (or signal) streams: Speech is an interface of these two streams.

  The voiced breath-line is a perfectly coherent information stream, all by itself. It varies in pitch and volume and shrillness. It is perfectly possible (as I have done and watched done in some encounter groups) for two or more people to have an astonishingly satisfying conversation, consisting of recognizable questions, answers, assurances, hesitations, pooh-poohings, affirmations, scepticisms, and insistences—a whole range of emotional information, as well as the range Quine refers to as “propositional attitudes”—purely with a series of unstopped, voiced breaths. (Consider the information communicated by the sudden devoicing of all the phonemes in an utterance, i.e., whispering.)

  The various stops and momentary devoicings imposed by the tongue, teeth, lips, and vocal chords on top of this breath-line is another coherent information string that, interfaced with the breath-line information, produces “speech.” But by and large this second string is the only part that is ever written down. This is the only part that any “grammar” we have had till now deals with. But it is arguable that this information-string, when
taken without the breath-line, is as vastly impoverished as the breath-line eventually seems, after ten or fifteen minutes, when taken by itself.

  The way written speech gets by is by positing a “standard breath-line,” the most common breath-line employed with a given set of vowels and stops. (The only breath-line indicators we have are the six ordinary marks of punctuation, plus quotation marks [which mean, literally, pay closer attention to the breath-line for the enclosed stretch of words], plus dashes, ellipses, and italic type. One thing that makes writing in general, and poetry in particular, an art is the implying of nonstandard breath-lines by the strong association of vocal sounds—pace Charles Olson.) But since the vast majority of writing uses only this standard breath-line (and all writing uses an artificial one), producing a grammar of a spoken language from written examples is rather like trying to produce a formal grammar of, say, Latin when the only available texts have had all the ablative endings, dative endings, accusative- plural endings, and second-person-singular verb endings in future, imperfect, and preterite whited out; and you have agreed, for your purpose, not to consider them anyway.

  What is fascinating about language is not that it criticizes, as well as contributes to, the growth of the empirical world, but that it can criticize its relation to that world, treating itself, for the duration, empirically. The same self-reflective property is what writers use to make beautiful, resonant verbal objects, however referential or abstract. But by the same argument, it is the writers’ responsibility to utilize this reflective property to show, again and again, that easy language—whether it is the short, punchy banality or the rolling jargonistic period—lies.

  The lie is not a property of easy words. It is a property of how the words are used, the context that generates, and the context that interprets.

  57. I have the artist’s traditional distrust of separating facts too far from the landscape that generated them. (And I have the science-fiction writer’s delight over inserting new facts into unfamiliar landscapes. “Do I contradict myself? Very well . . .”)

  Language, Myth, Science Fiction:

  First contacts:

  I did not have a happy childhood.

  Nobody does.

  I did, however, have a privileged one.

  I discovered myths with a set of beautifully produced and illustrated books called My Book House, edited by Olive Burpré Miller and illustrated, for the most part, by Donald P. Crane. An older cousin of mine had owned them as a child. My aunt passed them on to me when her daughter went off to Vassar. The volumes bound in gray and mottled green dealt with history, starting with cavemen and working, lushly illustrated volume after lushly illustrated volume, through the Renaissance. Those bound in maroon and gold recounted, for children, great works of literature, fairy tales, and myths—Greek, Egyptian, Norse . . .

  At five, I left kindergarten (the building, its bricks red as the Book House volumes, under a spray of city grime, is today a public school in the midst of a city housing project just above Columbia University) for a private, progressive, and extremely eccentric elementary school. I have one memory of my first day there, fragmented and incomplete:

  Along one side of our room were tall, wide windows covered with wire grills. A window seat ran the length of the wall; the seat back went up and joined the wide windowsill—a squared grate, brown and painted, chipped here and there to the metal, through which you could see, checked with light, the dusty, iron radiators, and hear brass valves jiggle and hiss.

  On that first morning, our teacher had to leave the shy dozen of us alone for some few minutes.

  What occurs now, exactly, I’m not sure. But the memory clears when she comes rushing back, stops short and, fists clutching her blue smock (below which I can see the hem of her navy jumper), shrieks: “Stop it! Oh, my God! Stop it!”

  One blond boy stood on the radiator grate, gripping the window grill, flattened against it, staring back at us, mouth wide and drooling, eyes closed and streaming.

  We crowded the window seat, jeering and railing up at him: “Jump! Go ahead, jump!” I was holding the shoulder of the person in front of me, pressed forward by the person behind. “Jump!” I shouted, looked back at the teacher and laughed (you’ve seen how much fun five-year-olds have when they laugh), then shouted again: “Jump out! Jump out!” and could hear neither my own shouts nor my own laughter for the laughter and shouting of the other ten.

  We were eight stories up.

  The teacher yanked us, still jeering, one after another, away, lifted down the hysterical boy, and comforted him. His name was Robert. He was stocky, nervous, shrill. He had some slight motor difficulty. (I can still remember him, sitting at a green nursery table, holding his pencil in both hands to draw his letters, while the rest of us, who could, of course, hold our pencils in one, exchanged looks, glanced at him, glanced away, and giggled.) He was a stammerer, an appalling nail biter, very bright; and, by Christmas vacation, my best friend.

  With occasional lapses, sometimes a few months long, Robert remained my best friend till we left for other schools after the eighth grade. Some of those lapses, however, I engineered quite blatantly—when I was tired of having the class odd-ball as constant companion. I would steal things from him, pencils, protractors, small toys—I remember pilfering a Donald Duck ring he had sent away for from a cereal box-top offer. With a small magnet (decaled to look like a tiny corn-flakes box), you could make the yellow plastic beak open and close, the blue plastic eye roll up and down. My parents caught me on that one, made me promise to return it, and tell him I’d stolen it. I did, quite convinced it would be the end of our friendship—apprehensive, but a bit relieved.

  Robert took the ring back and stammered that it was all right if I had stolen it, because, after all (his expression was that of someone totally betrayed) I was his friend. That was when I realized he had no others.

  During my attendance at Dalton, I lived one street from what, in the 1953 City Census, was declared the most populous tenement block in New York: It housed over eighteen thousand people, in buildings all under six stories. A block away, my sister and I had three floors and sixteen rooms, over my father’s Harlem funeral parlor, in which to lose ourselves from our parents and the maid. But the buildings on both sides of us were a cluster of tiny two- and three-room apartments, housing five, seven, sometimes over ten people each. The friends I played with in the afternoon in front of the iron gates of Mr. Lockely’s Hosiery and Housepaint Store to our left, or the sagging green vegetable boxes in front of the red-framed plate-glass window of Mr. Onley’s Groceries to our right, were the son of a widowed hospital orderly on welfare, the daughter and two sons of a frequently laid-off maintenance man who worked in the New York subway system, the two sons of a New York taxi driver, the niece of the woman who ran the funeral parlor at the corner of the same block.

  And in the morning, my father—or, occasionally, one of his employees—would drive me, in my father’s very large, very black Cadillac, down to the ten-story, red and white brick building on Eighty-ninth Street off Park Avenue: I would line up with all the other children in the gray-tiled lobby, waiting to march around, next to the wall, and show my tongue to the school nurse, Miss Hedges, who, for the first years, in her white uniform with a gray sweater around her shoulders, would actually make an attempt to peer into each five-to-twelve-year-old mouth, but, as I grew older, simply stood, at last, in the corner by the gooseneck lamp as we filed by (perhaps one in five of us actually even bothered to look up) staring at a vague spot on the far wall, somewhere between the twenties- style, uplifting mural of Mothers Working in the Fields and the display cabinets where student sculpture was exhibited by our various art teachers. In class (ten students was considered the ideal number; should we somehow reach fourteen, Something Was Done to Relieve the Impossible Teaching Load), my friends were the son of a vice president of CBS Television, the daughter of a large New York publisher, the son of a small New York publisher, the grandson of the governor of
the state, the son of the drama critic for Time magazine, the daughter of a psychiatrist and philanthropist, the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist.

  Black Harlem speech and white Park Avenue speech are very different things. I became aware of language as an intriguing and infinitely malleable modeling tool very early.

  I always felt myself to be living in several worlds with rather tenuous connections between them, but I never remember it causing me much anxiety. (Of the, perhaps, ten blacks among the three-hundred-odd students in Dalton’s elementary school, five were my relatives.) Rather, it gave me a sense of modest (and sometimes not so modest) superiority.

  A few years later, I was given still another world to play in. I spent summer at a new summer camp. I tell only one incident here from that pleasantest of summers in my life: One hot afternoon, I wandered into a neighboring tent where the older boys slept. On the foot of the nearest iron-frame bed lay a large, ragged-edged magazine, with a shiny cover gone matte with handling—I think its muddy, out-of-register colors showed a man and a woman on a hill, gazing in terrified astonishment at a round, metal thing swooping through the air. From the lettering on the cover, the lead story in this issue was something called—I picked it up and turned to the first page—The Man Who Sold the Moon. My first reaction was: “What an odd combination of words! What do they mean . . .?” While I was puzzling through the opening sentences, one of the bunk- seven twelve-year-olds came in and shooed me out. Back in my own tent, I returned to the book I was reading, Lincoln Barnett’s The Universe and Dr. Einstein. And our twenty-three-year-old counsellor, Roy, was reading something called One, Two, Three . . . Infinity that I had said looked interesting and he had said I could read when he was finished.