Number 62
I've been listening to Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan in the car, which is a good way to listen to those classics that you feel you ought to have read but never did. If any of you are students or have students in your sphere of influence, I recommend it as vastly better than buying Cliff Notes. Nevertheless, after three tapes I'm ready to give the Pilgrim a rest, and luckily I won't be tested on the book. I did glean a bit of Parvum Opus material, however, and that is the verb lift, as in, "I lift up my eyes," in which "lift" is the past tense rather than "lifted." I thought the word must come from the same source as "levity" (Latin, "lightness"), but instead it's from or related to various Danish / Icelandic / Swedish words, although perhaps they come from the Latin or from the same place the Latin word does. I was thinking "lift" must follow a pattern like bereave/bereft, give/gift, weave/weft, leave/left, five/fifty, thieve/theft, and maybe it did; I'm only a linguist wannabe. Anyway I liked the form and I think we ought to revive it. (That's the only way I'd tolerate the use of "gift" as a verb.)
You can be the first on your block to use these:
A radio preacher (who sounded black) admonished his congregation not to be "too cute to raise your hands, or too dignified to say amen." "Cute" comes from "acute" and the sense of sharp or clever somehow evolved or devolved to its present meaning of "adorable" somewhere in the nineteenth century. But I think this preacher retained the antique meaning: "Don't think you're so clever that you can't display your faith."
Last week I listed a few down home expressions. A friend in Arkansas has contributed a few from her neck of the woods:
She also recognized a variant of her grandmother's expression, "Look at those bladders under her eyes," meaning she has bags under her eyes. Fred's grandma meant "weeping" by bladders under the eyes.
Fred mentioned hearing the word "rinse" pronounced as "wrench," and sure enough the other day I heard someone talk about "wrenching" the floor after mopping.
Dover Books is a wonderful publisher, not only because of the Thrift Editions, but because their out-of-copyright list makes available many items that would otherwise be overlooked (at least by me). In 2003 Dover published a combined unabridged edition of two 1923-24 books by Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia. I don't read much history, and less politics, but it's always interesting to study disillusionment, that internal necessity to reevaluate one's beliefs against reality. Emma Goldman was a Russian immigrant to the U.S. who was deported for political reasons and returned to Russia for two years. What she saw there, unexpectedly (to her), was repression and violence.
Goldman was an anarchist, the roots of which word mean "without a ruler." I guess the latter-day "anarchist" punks thought it meant "without rules" too. Even the hippies knew that "You who are on the road must have a code that you can live by" (Crosby Stills & Nash). But it's unnatural for human beings to live without either rulers or rules. I suppose "anarchism" as a historical political theory had some other careful definition, but I expect it would only demonstrate further how words don't always mean what they mean. Goldman was what we might call a libertarian now. She wrote of a young follower of Makhno, an anarchist rebel, who said, "He is trying to direct the innate rebellious spirit of the Ukrainian peasant into organized Anarchist channels." In any case, Goldman distinguished between Anarchism, Syndicalism, Revolution, Bolshevism, Leninism, Marxism, and Communism (yes, all capitalized, no pun intended).
She also referred to the political "right" and "left" in unfamiliar ways, as in "the developing tendency of the Bolsheviki toward the right." And no, it won't do to make an analogy between the Bolsheviki and what we call the "right" in the U.S. today. Or the "left." Those terms are obfuscating.
It wasn't just rhetoric that led Goldman to use many religious terms to describe what she saw in Russia in the 1920s. She called Lenin a Puritan as well as a "shrewd Asiatic," who said free speech was a bourgeois notion, and that there can be no free speech in a revolutionary period. The Bolsheviki were "social puritans who sincerely believed that they alone were ordained to save mankind." In describing Russia and the Revolution(s), where "Communism is the State religion," Goldman freely used terms like faith, crucify, spiritual, sacrifice, dogma, zealot, superstition, military and civic priesthood, pope, "Lenin and the other Grand Seigneurs of the Communist Church," Bull, excommunicated, heretic, Holy See (the Third International Communist gathering), the infallibility of their creed, martyr, devout, "the Immaculate Conception of the Communist State which by the aid of the Revolution was to redeem the world," and deity. A young factory worker "reasoned like a nun dedicated to the service of the Church." "The Bolsheviki were the Jesuits of the Socialist Church; they believed in the Jesuitic motto that the end justifies the means." "The country must be forced to be saved by the Communist Party." Oddly enough, Goldman, a Jew, wrote of celebrating Christmas with colleagues in a railroad car; they even decorated a tree and gave each other gifts.
Russia produced a 1984-like Newspeak of contradiction in which thought had to be contorted bizarrely to try to fit conditions. Pledges and responsibilities, value of human life, quality of character, even the importance of revolutionary integrity as the basis of a new social order were considered bourgeois sentimentality, observed Goldman. The laborers who were to be the new rulers had to be forced to work. Lenin said "Rob the robbers," which carried the seeds of contradiction much like the old puzzler, "Everything I say is a lie, including this." A woman named Angelica Balabanov "suffered keenly from the reality which was so unlike her ideal," and finally concluded that it wasn't that the revolution had failed, but that life itself was a failure.
In the end, Goldman saw that the so-called Revolution merely replaced one set of tyrants with another. Manipulation of language could not change the reality. It's a paltry god that's made so crudely in man's image ~ bound to disappoint.
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