What would happen if propositions, which are the means we have to make sense of things (“this is this,” “that is that,” “this evening I will finish the paper,” “Liam loves me no more,” etc.), were not formed by words, but by images; or if the words themselves could be said to be images, not so much in the visual as in the acoustic sense of the term: audible images or reflections of other words – hence echoes.(*)
Consider, for example, those apparently unproblematic elements which language, understood as a system of designation, consists in: what we call nouns. Nouns, we say, denote things or else qualities (when it comes to those special types of names we call adjectives), just like verbs denote actions and prepositions denote locality, direction, etc. We tend to view names and adjectives unproblematically because we take both their meaning and their referent for granted: a stone is a solid non-metallic mineral matter with volume, like, say, the one I have in my right hand right now, whereas in my left hand I hold a flower without there being any danger for me of confusing one with the other.
But is the meaning of nouns and adjectives so immediately obvious? And is their referent always self-evident? For example, what does “dark blue” mean? In English, “dark blue,” is a composite adjective, formed by two terms, in fact by two independent adjectives: “dark” and “blue,” that, brought together thus, happen to designate a particular chromatic quality. And we can certainly point to an object (any object) presenting (to our eyes) that specific chromatic quality, which (we would be right to add) is clearly different from, say, the chromatic quality “red.” Yet for an ancient-Greek speaker the two chromatic qualities that we respectively designate as “dark blue” and “dark green” were in fact indistinguishable, as they were both named κυανός (kyanós) in ancient Greek. Hence that speaker might eventually point to an object altogether different from the one we would point to when we say “dark blue.” In other words, there is no necessarily-common referent for expressions that we take to be translatable into one another; a margin must be allowed for indeterminacy.
It is not this we want to stress, though; for it is not our purpose to suggest that, in spite of their semantic proximity, different nouns and adjectives – different because of belonging in different languages – may indeed have different referents, or not necessarily the same referents. Is it not obvious, after all? Every translator is well aware of it.
What we find fascinating is something else, namely, that, regardless of whether κυανός and “dark blue” may refer, or not, to the same thing, their meaning is actually different: κυανός means something which is not what “dark blue” means, and vice versa. And it is here that we return to the question of the echoes we find in any word, no matter how simple it may look to us – lexical echoes, that is: morphologic (relative to the composition of the word) and semantic (relative to the idea inherent in it).
Which is the echo present in “dark blue?” A twofold echo: the echo of something getting “closed” and thus removed from the light, as per the etymology of the adjective “dark,” plus the echo of something “bright” and “clear,” by virtue, in this case, of the adjective “blue,” which, etymologically speaking, goes back to an adjective (bl-) originally used to name the chromatic quality “bright blue” and, probably too, “yellow”
An altogether different echo is present in the adjective κυανός. The ancient Greeks had different adjectives for what we call “bright green” and “bright blue,” but they had one and the same adjective for “dark blue” and “dark green”: κυανός (from which the English “cyan” derives in turn). Why? Because κυανός, possibly an Hittite loanword, carries with it, most likely, the echo of the ambivalent colour, simultaneously blueish and greenish, that copper presents when it is found in minerals.
This means, once more, that κυανός and “dark blue” do not exactly have the same meaning: a different idea resonates in each, the lexical echo varies from one to the other one.
Abstract nouns supply us a further example of this. Take, for instance, the word “truth.” In German, one would say instead Wahrheit, which is similar to the Latin veritas. In Greek, one would say ἀλήθεια. Now, ἀλήθεια, veritas/Wahrheit, and “truth” do not have the same meaning at all. The lexical echo in “truth” conveys the idea of “constancy” and “faithfulness,” whereas the lexical echo in veritas/Wahrheit conveys the idea of “sheltering” or “protecting,” and the lexical echo in ἀλήθεια – in opposition to that behind veritas/Wahrheit! – conveys the idea of “disclosing” or “un-concealing.”
Depending on the circumstances, on the other hand, we may know well what is “true” and what is not, although it is not always easy to tell that which is true from that which is false. But think in other abstract nouns like “love,” which denotes, let’s say, a feeling. If one is asked to define it, though, one will probably have to make recourse to a paraphrasis containing other nouns and come out with something like: “love is a journey,” “love is an intersubjective experience based on affection that requires complete engagement and strict reciprocity,” etc. Here too, then, words (e.g. “love”) inevitably carry with them the echos of other various words (“journey,” “affection,” “engagement,” “reciprocity,” etc.).
Meaning, it could be argued, is produced, and sense made, when the relations between words and their echoes become, if not entirely transparent (for it is always possible to add other further words to previous words so as to nuance their meaning), at least translucent to their implications.
This means that we dwell within language. Permanently. Heidegger: “When we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word ‘well,’ through the word ‘woods,’ even if we do not speak the words and do not think of anything relating to language.”
But it also means there is no outside to it. Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
It is for this reason that poetry, which is the art of figuring out, deepening, complicating, circumventing, eluding, subverting, and thus experimenting with the relation between words and echoes, echoes and words, is not only an art, but language’s fully-achieved self-consciousness.
(*) We are playing here with an idea taken from Roy Wagner’s latest and posthumous book, titled The Logic of Invention (2019). Wagner himself extracts its echo from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. We are just adding a new modulation to it – a new echo.
Raw copper