More Heat than Light
Inferno chews the matter into a blackened husk.
Caustic cries crack and sizzle through mortal hollows.
Growth engulfs mankind's greatest edifice in shadowy char.
The luster elucidates one fleeting point of this life's plight:
transformation.
“Intense emotion causes patterns to arise in the mind—if the mind is strong enough.”
Ezra Pound
…
Babu seems far too dysphemistic a term for any public plea made to a body as formal as the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Why even bring it into the discussion? However wrongheaded, I think it teases out our author’s poetic nature as well as his agitated state. Let us evaluate his meaning to see if it justifies the burdens he chose to attach to his thought’s direction.
Mr. Upward:
“Ideal, Idealism, Idealist—these words are current in most of the languages of America and Europe, but they are not natives of any. They appear in the same form in Swedish and in English, but they are not of Swedish nor of English growth. They wear a look of ancient Greece, but yet they are not genuine Greek words. Plato never heard of them; the Greek lexicon knows them not.
They belong to a large and increasing class of words which I can best characterize by naming them Babu.
The English in India, whether to make the task of government easier, or in the belief that our civilization must be better for the Hindus than their own, have set up schools to train the natives in our ways, and to begin with, in our speech. There is a large class of natives called Babus who learn very readily up to a certain point, that is to say, they spell our words correctly, and they have some notion of what the words mean; but English has not replaced their native speech, and hence it fits them like a borrowed garment, and they are betrayed into awkward language mistakes in using it, which have given rise to the term Babu English.”1
Perhaps there is no kind way to make such an observation as our author’s. Perhaps his perspective is emblematic of the appellant who pleas to a structure from outside its gates—a difficult vantage laced with disgruntled panic. It is not uncommon to see nomenclatures employed incorrectly, “like a borrowed garment,” in the internet era. I do it myself, often enough. I liken such missteps to growing pains. I consider the awkward consequence more a necessity than a danger. James True tactfully states that, “evolution requires more than success.”
If Upward’s disdain is indeed for the danger inherent in a reach which exceeds its grasp, it reminds me of a similarly elitist angst harbored for my own culture, wherein a great number of peers have used eastern symbols to stab at western idioms. Oftentimes, this has resulted in tattoos that innocently express something unbecoming. Upward’s and my own observed circumstances both result in an embarrassing betrayal of meaning, but my comparison falls short in terms of ‘on the ground’ dynamics. My phenomenon is closer to cultural misappropriation. Allen Upward observed a result of acculturation.
Mr. Upward seemed to sense a long-forgotten conspiracy at work, to boot. He didn’t blame his homeland for the British empire’s strategy in India. He believed that England had been subjected to three centuries of Roman Catholic homogenization before they paid the deed forward to India. Britian’s geopolitical vision was a continuation of Ceasar’s Architecture.
“Our schools are Roman schools set up by missionaries from the Mediterranean in whose minds it was the very aim and end of education to tame the young barbarian of the North
into an obedient provincial of the great Roman Raj.”
Let’s continue with Upward’s etymology:
“Idealist is a Babu formation from the Greek Idea. Idea, my Greek lexicon reports, is the appearance of a thing, as opposed to its reality. And it is unfortunately the case that some such sense as that of opposition to reality does haunt the word Idealist, and discredit it. No one is likely to believe that works of an apparent or unreal tendency are of much benefit to mankind. We must dig deeper.
Idea can be traced to ido, or eido, (for there were more Greeks than those who corrected Demosthenes)—meaning to look or see. It is the Aryan word which has become in English though…The passage from idea to the ideal was not made by the Greeks. But it seems that idea is the Ionian form of the word which meets us in other Greek dialects as eidos, and although the Greeks did not add the important letter I to Idea, they did add it to eidos; and their eidolon spelt by us idol. What is the difference between the ideal and the idol?”2
Answer Upward’s last question, yourself. I will save my breath and let you carry that wind since I don’t have a position to take against any of his assertions. A vacuum voraciously integrates new material, and the fact that his was my first encounter with such information precluded any issues with working off our author’s premise.
I will note that his tendency to segregate Ionian and Grecian culture is consistent with academic orthodoxy as I understand it. I want to say it is the same distinction that exists between Phoenician and Greek, but my gut tells me l still lack the discernment to recognize the true nuance. Experts once suggested, “It was in Ionia that the first completely rationalistic attempts to describe the nature of the world took place. There, material prosperity and special opportunities for contact with other cultures—with Sardis for example, by land, and with the Pontus and Egypt by sea—were allied, for a time at least, with a strong cultural and literary tradition dating from the age of Homer. Within the space of a century, Miletus produced Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, each dominated by the assumption of a single primary material, the isolation of which was the most important step in any systematic account of reality.”3
There is something that excites me as I consider Upward’s etymological estimation. I hinted at it in last month’s issue of On the Shoulders of Giants. Perhaps I should say it plainly. Aides is an anagram for ideas. You know Aides as Hades. I bring it up in relation to the Mediterranean aspect. I say up front that it is an insight he may well have judged a dilletante’s fancy. It doesn’t really speak to the problem Upward sees with an ill-appropriated cognate like idealism, but it does have to do with the ideas abstract place in the English speaker’s mind. This notion feels important to me. I will build on it.
My fascination with the realm of Hades developed during my study of ancient Greece. Moreso, an interesting dissociation between Hades and Hell developed. That nuance grows still. Let’s begin this pertinent tangent from something akin to common ground. We first work backward, past leagues of fathomless human depth—transformation; succession; schism; cataclysm—in the turning of time. We stop. Check the clock, as a portrayal emerges. I’ve chosen the time: c 212.
“Lucifer has fallen from heaven, after rising up in the morning! He has been crushed to the earth, he who once dispatched great armies to the nations! Once you boasted to yourself, “I will go to the higher heavens, I will establish my throne above the stars of heaven. I will be seated on a great mountain, on the mountain range of the north...But now you will fall down to the realm of Hades, down to the fundament of the earth.” I carried this story for a number of years at face value before I began to sense something at work, underneath.
As a long-thriving pagan mindset spiraled from its stoic apex, a song of salvation emerged, simultaneously. Origen of Alexandria affirms the modern Christian perspective by his account of the Dawn-bringer’s hubristic fall from grace. Origen is a figure operating at the precipice of two ages—Aries and Pisces. He skillfully contrives to spread the germ of a new age on the old stock of paganism. He has flipped the polarity of Venus’s wandering procession as well as its perceived relationship with the sun by prudent and poetic refrain. Within the Christian metaphor, Lucifer is changed from friend to foe as a new church rises. The images of Jupiter and Venus henceforth lose the honor now due to Christ.
As it happened, by the time I encountered Origen, I had already invested time and effort into how someone might rationally accept that Venus, not the Sun, was responsible for the day. My interest in ancient Greece had been of a historic nature, when I began to entertain the thought that such an idea had once been feasible. This was before I associated the wandering star with anything other than the mythological Aphrodite. I wish to credit Kirk & Raven for the notion behind my thought exercise, but I’ve yet to rediscover the source I seek. Perhaps the memory is misplaced.
One ancillary consequence of this process was a new ability to recognize in my family bible that God, also, said “Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness Night…”4 without a need to bring the Sun into the equation. Still, what I’d long taken for granted—that the sun was obviously responsible for the day and that people had always seen this plain truth—persisted as a matter of fact. If it helps you rest easier, know that it still does.
Next came Whitman who helped me to realize I was as ruled by my idea of the devil as I was by my idea of God. Only then, did Lucifer and Vesper (Latin) as well as Hesperus and Phosphorus (Greek) become the heavenly Venus of the morning and evening, respectively. Only then did the mindset that viewed Satan and Lucifer as strictly synonymous become too confining.
And this black portrait—this head, huge, frowning,
sorrowful—is Lucifer’s portrait—the denied God’s
portrait,
(But I do not deny him—though cast out and rebellious,
he is my God as much as any;)5
Author Gwendolyn Taunton found it, “noteworthy that Lucifer, like Satan, is in exile in Hades, and that Hades is mentioned by its correct name, and not as ‘Hell’. Origen’s conception of Hades is much closer to the original descriptions of the Hellenic Hades as a place of formlessness and shadow, rather than the contemporary depiction of a hot, fiery pit…Rather, Hades is shown to be an incorporeal, fathomless empty void, occupying a chthonic metaphysical level of being, and not a tangible physical plane of existence.”6
The narrative web grows.
When I said I’ve regularly encountered Hades spelled Aides, I misled you about the regularity. In fact, I don’t find alternate spellings of Hades, typically. Mainline literature from mainline publishers is impressively consistent with their consumer line of literature. It is only with the outliers that I have noticed such anomalies.
On the other hand, there is the Greek itself [Gr. Αιδης, αδης]—Alpha, iota, delta, eta, sigma. I don’t know how the English spelling came to be what it is. Maybe it is not important. If it is then I would likely find the reason agreeable if I were properly educated. It wouldn’t serve this work to make a mountain out of a molehill, but I feel independently privy to something. I want to keep going. Let’s unpack the place of H in the English rendition of this Greek concept, by looking at the utility and etymology of the letter, itself:
“H is classed with consonants, although its sound is now generally considered by phoneticians to be mainly a breath glide formed with the oral organs in the same position as for the preceding or the following sound. Its power is that of a simple aspiration or breathing, with only enough narrowing of the glottis to produce audibility…its form is from the Latin, and this from the Greek H, which was used as the sign of the spiritus asper (rough breathing) before it came to represent the long vowel, Gr. η. The Greek H is from Phoenician, the ultimate origin perhaps being Egyptian…”7
What that helpful? Or does the overgrowth I use as kindling simply frustrate a cooling fire? The air moves the smoke Allen’s direction. He wafts it aside and turns away his furrowed brow. My etymological source material has been derived from his time. It could represent the very position he is fighting against—the position of the stodgy philologist dinosaur who’s left the living word all but extinct.
“As soon as the English get away from their Latin colleges into some wild land that Caesar never knew, their own words bubble up like a natural spring, and the Aryan root is found budding and blossoming again. Because the old-new blossoms are not in his specimen book, the philologist calls them weeds.”8 Mr. Upward resents a feature of his world that is still understood today. It speaks to the dearth of awareness around the role of Nordic and Norse culture on the English Language.
Modern linguists agree. “As with the Celtic influence on English, we must deduce what the Vikings did to English. No one was on-site chronicling how the language was changing decade by decade. Orm Gamalson might record that a minster was ‘tobrokan & tofalan’—broken and fallen down—but kings, monks, bureaucrats, and scribes in ancient England, to whom writing is scripture rather than scribbling, hadn’t the slightest inclination to get down on paper for posterity observations of the likes of ‘Yon Vikinges Enlisc is most tobrocan & tofalan’!”9
Upward is not bothered by his miscegenated language. He sees the life of it “bubbling up like a natural spring.” He bemoans an overbearing Latin vein that moves to choke out all chaos from the unbound interval between reader and writer. He saw something in the Gothic language, preserved in Iceland, that was as conservative as Latin, Greek, and Russian, with its grammar. He lamented wanton linguicide as he watched a wave of intellectual fodder whose objective was to bury the rationale that existed before it, in the mind of the public.
Rationales come and go. Rationality persists.
Another feature of Mr. Upward’s effort is that he sets himself against an idea of the world that is often explicitly defined by William Gladstone in his then popular book, “The Creation Story.” When Upward derides the philologist, he refers to Gladstone’s, ilk. While I see how this might have worked against a serious scientific body’s ability to lend credibility to his treatise, Gladstone’s portrayal of the atom and other burgeoning scientific ideas still aptly describes what most of my peers have taken from their public education.
We will explore this further, in next month’s issue of On the Shoulders of Giants. We will also reconnoiter the space for fluency that terms like element and molecule have afforded us, for better or worse, as we have now done with the term idea.
To be continued, July 21st…
Upward, Allen. The New Word: An Open Letter Addressed to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the Meaning of the Word Idealist (New York, Mitchell Kennerley, 1910) pg. 48
Upward, Allen. The New Word: An Open Letter Addressed to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the Meaning of the Word Idealist (New York, Mitchell Kennerley, 1910) pg. 55
Kirk, G.S. & Raven, J.E. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1966) pg. 73
Coogan, Michael D. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (New York, Oxford University Press, Inc. 2001) pg. 11
Abrams, Sam. The Neglected Walt Whitman: Vital Texts (New York, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993) pg. 120
Taunton, Gwendolyn. The Path of Shadows: Chthonic Gods, Oneiromancy, & Necromancy in Ancient Greece (Australia, Manticore Press, 2018) pg. 43
Harris, W.T., PH.D., LL.D. & Allen F. Websters New International Dictionary of the English Language (Massachusetts, G. & C. Merriam Company, 1922) pg. 966
Upward, Allen. The New Word: An Open Letter Addressed to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the Meaning of the Word Idealist (New York, Mitchell Kennerley, 1910) pg. 40
McWhorter, John. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (New York, Gotham Books, 2008) pg. 122