Sheet-Anchors and Landfalls

What I have to say is, as the occasion demands, something to do with the Humanities.  But the way of saying it may be less the manner of grave discourse than a free construction in which certain objets trouvés are disposed in space, the space being rendered the more evocative and plangent by good food and sufficient wine.

As you sit here this evening, of the family of Erasmus, Boccaccio, and Leonardo, inheritors of the active universe of intellect, I think I owe you an apology for the way, as I revolved in my mind what I might say that might be neither tedium nor platitude, my thoughts turned continuously to the Middle Ages and to middle-agedness.  This may be because of a recent and stinging rebuff touching Johann Sebastian Bach that I suffered at a drinking match with some young jazz fans; (I prefer my Bach straight rather than on the rocks).  But whatever the cause, the word Humanities first recalls the past, and the pagan classical literature and the men of the middle ages who, in recovering that pagan literature, provided us with our heritage and placed upon it the stamp of their methods and ideals.  At a touch of the word Humanities, a group of images comes to my mind’s eye, poignantly sharp and a trifle musty – like opening an old trunk of clothes in an attic.  I think of Erasmus, Boccaccio, Petrarch, More; those calm but intense faces a little furrowed with thought, a little baggy-eyed (for I am aware that the eyes may suffer a little under certain definable circumstances ), fur-tippetted against the arthritic rigors of the study.  At a table, such a man sits writing, a few books open before him; like the shadow of some fine-winged insect cast by candle-light upon parchment, the pen moves with dreamlike precision, while the Great Thoughts slip through the capacious brain, like a cat – well-moused, fine-snouted – who slips through his own monkish cat-door in the certain knowledge that there is a silent joy at his arrival.  Here in the Middle Ages of my imagination it seems always to be winter, or at best, late autumn; for although, thinking of Peter Abelard, I can conceive of a spring day of sunlight along a river bank in that short spell when the vines shoot from their black stocks like green thoughts and the sun is not yet punitive, those are holiday thoughts, hallucinatory sketches in the margin of a manuscript, saturated with desire: for those rare moments of undeserved spring are reached along the ascetic’s strenuous road.

For the accuracy of this picture I make only hesitant claim.  Yet any poet or student of poetry knows with what cat-like sure-footedness images will lead where we couldn’t otherwise go – or to places where we were determined not to go if we could avoid it.  To taste life is not enough for a humanist: he must reflect, discriminate, savour, turn upon the gourmet’s tongue and in the connoisseur’s fingers; and that takes time, patience, discipline, sheer knowledge, perhaps half a lifetime.  Erasmus made not only a Greek Testament to supersede the Vulgate, but also wrote a book called Moriae Encomium – a pun: “In Praise of [Thomas] More” and “In Praise of Folly.”  What is there to say that is not already or better said?  Tied to the word, the written word, are the Humanities under condemnation of worthlessness and the treason of old age?  Have they outgrown their uses, become obsolete, serving no modern purposes, drifting suspended in a haze of trivial habit?  I think not, or I shouldn’t be standing here well-lobstered this evening before this distinguished company.

Sheet-anchors and Landfalls: these are two images that come to me when I reflect upon the alleged obsolescence of the Humanities.  Sheet-anchor: (nautical), source – as with so many nautical words – obscure: a large anchor, formerly always the largest anchor, carried in such a way that it may be dropped quickly in an emergency; (figuratively) one’s best, surest, or only hope, refuge, or expedient – that on which we place reliance when all else fails.  Landfall: (nautical) the first sighting of land after a long voyage or flight by dead-reckoning.  The reason for my choice of images is clear enough without any detailed exposition.  A sheet-anchor makes us secure against emergency and is reserved for such occasions; which is well, since almost the only certainty at sea is that sooner or later an emergency will turn up.  A landfall, again, is a crucial moment in a navigational sequence; it provides a silent comment upon the quality of the navigation up to that point, and demands a correct assessment of future courses.  A landfall may, if the navigation is good, be exactly as calculated; the place is immediately recognized and everything falls into its expected and prepared pattern.  But there are other landfalls, perplexing and deceptive – in poor visibility or in the desire-ridden confusion of the exhausted mind – and we persuade ourselves falsely that what we see is what we want to see and so stand into a danger that we have made for ourselves (though the coast may often become a grim accessory).  And there are other landfalls, when course was set for no known land and first we catch the sharp scent of pine or the spice-islands, and the flash and gun-roll of surf, and a strange land lifts and opens slowly before the eyes like a tantalizing mood on the fringes of sleep.

If the navigation is good enough we should never need the sheet-anchor; except that sometimes, in despite of man’s skill and judgment, forces strike us from outside with a most alarming suddenness and a strength that we cannot resist: then we shall be glad of the sheet-anchor.  But the Humanities are in my image peculiar: for they provide us with both the security against disaster and the complex means of interpreting our landfalls.

The Humanities are so much an affair of words and language, and of the modes and patterns of language in which we can cast and catch the finest subtleties of meaning and intention, that we seem to begin and end with language, with the discrimination of the minute distinctions of sound and meaning, and the deliberative conduct of rhythm.  Moria for Erasmus (when he does not mean Thomas More) is “folly” since – as those who are versed “in all true study and humanity” will know – moros in Greek is “an arrant fool” and moria is “silliness”; yet morion, perhaps from the same root, may mean either deadly nightshade or a male mandrake.  And beyond the semantic limits and margins of single words and phrases there is the whole question of style.  My son Christopher spotted an interesting example of this in the Globe and Mail for 8 June in a “story” about South Africans taking “Courses in Art of Killing”: fastidious whites, it reported, no longer allow themselves to go unarmed, and bearing arms have taken instruction in the use of them.  “It is not uncommon,” the report read, “especially in Johannesburg, to see a pistol in a man’s waistband or a small-calibre gnu nestling in a woman’s handbag as she rummages for change.”  The simple linotype inversion of gun to gnu would not delay an epigrapher or a post-Hinman Shakespeare scholar for longer than is needed to make in the margin the squiggle for “reverse the characters” and perhaps to add some monosyllabic expletive.  But a sentence like this is a real test of character.  The American Press release (it was also signed) is so heavily over-written in the narcotic sub-editorial style of Time (which all ambitious newspapermen now cultivate, and even disc-jockeys) that there is less force in the matter allegedly being reported than in the two sad stereotypes about women’s behaviour and the contents of their handbags.  With the prescience that poets are sometimes guilty of, Auden has already written –

                                                But all the clocks in the city

                                                            Began to whirr and chime:

                                                “Oh let not Time deceive you,

                                                            You cannot conquer Time.

                                                In the burrows of the Nightmare

                                                            Where Justice naked is

                                                Time watches from the shadow

                                                            And coughs when you would kiss.”

Yet in this case, if it were not for the appalling fake eloquence of the Time style the miracle could never have occurred: and what has actually occurred – which in writing is the only thing that matters – is what should teach a writer humility – even a philosophical writer.  We might even formulate as a law of expression “the Emperor’s Syndrome”: the more imperial the writer feels, the more likely he is to walk naked.  A simple inversion of letters in an appropriate context has produced a miracle that no journalist could have intended, and which no scholar should have the indelicacy to emend according to the canons of consistency to its banal original.  This is the sort of accident that makes a poet’s heart leap up: it might set in motion an epic; it might precipitate a sonnet sequence, or a crying jag.

The inference is that there is some connexion between humanist and artist: and so there is.  I do not mean that humanists necessarily produce, or exist to produce, works of art, though some do: humanists, one thinks, are learned, apt in judgment.  But from the nature and content of their work they seem to align themselves, traditionally and always, with the values that art proclaims; their duty and delight is to secure and preserve the integrity of whatever embodies those values, in any form or mode, to illuminate them and make them accessible, to place them in intelligible contexts, to show how to sustain our attention appropriately: for whatever is well done or well made, falls in some sense within the compass of art.  Some humanists are artists, some are scholars, some are both.  The ambience of the humanities is the full ambience of thought and sensibility refined, clarified, energetic, living, casting and catching the shifting lights and the substantial but inscrutable existences that are the works of imagination.  The Humanities are to do with life, and with human life in all its most highly developed kinds.  For this the broadest and most sensitive faculties are desirable.  In order to be a scholar it is not necessary to be a pedant; in order to be a critic it is not necessary not to be an artist.  And the prime values of the Humanities are to be seen, I think, in the two terms “knowing” and “order.”

A humanist tends to have a peculiar concern for “knowing” as a process, a quality, a value, a dynamic structuring activity that discloses itself through its relations and discloses its relations through its own identity.  Vigorous “knowing” seems also to depend upon sound “knowledge.”  But the word “knowledge,” an abstract noun, seems too easily to imply things possessed rather than an activity suffered, as though an accumulation of things known – “facts,” propositions, details – could be or become in the end and definitively “Knowledge.”  No humanist in his right mind disparages or neglects factual detail; and he is moreover much preoccupied with emotional, aesthetic, and psychological facts which are no less factual for not being demonstrable.  But his dominant concern is with the patterns of relation into which the facts fall, and since patterning is an incorrigible habit of the human mind anyway, he has to judge the value of the patterns by the structure and quality of his own “knowing”: for the structure of the knowing determines and discloses the value of the knowing and of what is known.  There is, we may say, much that must be seen to be disbelieved.

In education, humanists are concerned ideally (I believe) not with conveying “knowledge”, (as items of information, ideas, and the like) from one place to another (which incidentally a computer can under appropriate conditions do much more quickly and accurately) but in defining, clarifying, encouraging, training, intensifying our ways of knowing, and helping us to discriminate between different orders or modes of knowing, and between the different values of those different orders.  Technical and medical disciplines are to their surprise discovering – rediscovering – this method as a very up-to-date way of preparing people for technical work and for lives of action: I am surprised only that they should be surprised.  But I refer here not to a “kind of knowing” that excludes, supersedes, or is superior to “scientific” or factual knowledge: I refer to an activity of mind and feeling that in all acts of genuine knowing – whether within the traditional field of humanities or not – supervenes upon, integrates, and unifies a mental activity into action or thought, or restraint from action or thought.  Potentially all people are capable of knowing, but not all people are actually capable of sustained knowing beyond the range of accident or impulse.  In the same way that an artist is endowed with – or must learn – some way of sustaining accurately his states of complex feeling, so a humanist must learn – and teach – how to set the mind working in fruitful patterns and sustain that activity.  The difference between a good scholar and a poor one is a difference in the quality of his knowing, not a difference in the quantity of his knowledge: it is not that the good scholar knows more, but that he knows better – though we recognise also that anybody who knows betters tends also, incidentally, by capacity and habit, to know more.

I believe that the most important function of humane studies is to teach people how to tell the difference between different forms of saying and doing, and from this to discriminate between the different reasons for saying and doing.  This is the one security – the sheet-anchor when we fall into superstition, systematic falsehood, the murderous addiction of power, the haggard emptiness of achievement.  This is what Socrates, in submission to the law of his own city, drank hemlock for.  You tell the truth (in both senses) not by the formula but by the style; a witness is known as truthful from the way he speaks and behaves, as much as for the triangulated reliability of the facts he evinces.  What we want to know constantly is not “What does he know?” but “How – with what quality – does he know?” and even more searchingly “Why does he know?”  There is stylish knowing and uncouth knowing; and some uncouth knowing, like some ugly people and plain speakers, has a special style and eloquence of its own: for the mellifluous and obviously harmonious is always and rightly suspect to a critical intelligence.  The rhythm is the life, and rhythm is often angular and by its nature does not repeat itself.  The rhythm shows beyond any concealment from what order of life the work proceeds; and the way the words go betrays why the words were made.  The Emperor’s Syndrome returns in its first inversion: the less imperial the writer feels, the more likely it is that his nakedness will be virtuous.

Erasmus wrote Moriae Encomium in praise of crack-pots.  It is said also: “If you must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd.”  And again, Hannah Arendt has written in The Human Condition, that “the artist is the only ‘worker’ left in a ‘labouring’ society.”  Yet I have said that the Humanities are central and sane, single and strong, a protection against superstition and self-deception, and against the disastrous deceptions of what, being parodies of virtue, is fashionable and influential.

We defy one kind of order so that we may establish another more valuable or radical order.  Order is the framework of Law within which Freedom finds its active identity and within which the identity of single words, images, symbols become both most concentrated and most energetic.  It is the traditional and continuing duty of the Humanists to secure, preserve, and illuminate the forms and inner dynamic of all things well made.  Poems are a favourite example of things well put together which may disclose very complex and subtle networks of unified interrelation.  We never know exactly how they got that way, or how they could be made that way; all we know is that they do sometimes get that way; and we know that we can recognize them, with luck or by grace, as though our own being reverberated sympathetically to the quality of certain forms; and we know them (whatever that means) in our bones and nerves as certainly as you know the sound of a lover’s voice or the acrid stench of malice that hangs in the air when somebody wants to murder you.

Consider.  Peter Abelard, after a lecture, is disputing with students; a student stands up and begins to speak, picking up the threads of the argument.  He begins to weave them into an unexpected pattern, beautiful, unimpeachable.  And the master, at first perhaps amused and a little patronizing, then dumb-founded – like a chess player check-mated when he thought he was winning – watches the inevitable and irreversible stride of the new argument as each element falls into place; and sweats and tingles with dismay and sorrow: not that he has been defeated, not envious to have missed his triumph, or ashamed to have been outfaced in public, but because he has watched a strange youngster whose being was before closed and alien to him, swiftly and before his very eyes disclose a power of the same nature as his own, as he puts together out of the same simple elements that were before them all a tough and elegant action that Abelard or anybody else would have given his eyes to have made himself.  Abelard will never forget this moment: he will wake in the night going through it in a dream.  It is like this often when a person is any sort of an artist – this mixture of exhilaration, sorrow, and self-accusation.  Not that he is accused of personal failure, but that he is reminded of human capacity and human imperfection, and that if he set his hazardous and oblique course with an eye wary and devil-may-care enough he may sometime – as likely at the beginning as at the end – pay tribute not to himself in his work, but to the life he celebrates, and to the art that is so large a part of that life that it can give it its form and substance, paying tribute to the order that is at once the government of himself, his life, and his art.  Those two old Chinese men, scholars perhaps, cut in semi-precious stone in Yeats’s poem, after climbing the hill with their servant-musician look out upon the mountain and the sky, and “on all the tragic scene.”

                                                Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

                                                Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

And well they might be.  For when a right conduct of knowing guides and shapes the mind, and all is made energetic in its order of freedom and law, necessity and nothingness, an activity may occur which, like all true art, is “disenchanting and disintoxicating.”

Out of the paradisal state of order which is the precinct of art, we learn that though the end of knowledge is power, the end of knowing is awareness.  One of the great duties of the humanist is to govern well, providing for himself and his community the order that is the order of human life, respectful, compassionate, and life-giving.  In his inner life, as in his public life, one of his great duties is the renunciation of power, to discover ways of drawing upon the power of what exists without wanting to possess it or to use it for himself.  It is the duty of a teacher to encourage knowing, not to establish dogma or to collect disciples.  Only in the scientific context is it correct to say that “to know is to have power over”; the statement is fully valid only for things; it is partly valid for living organisms; for persons it is not only invalid but immoral even to attempt by knowledge to have power over persons.

The humanist’s work is human, humane, springing from and nourishing itself upon whatever man is and does.  But it is not a way to power; it is a way to clear seeing.  At the centre of whatever we do and of whatever is most valuable in what we do, stands the figure of the individual person, unique, vulnerable, susceptible, solitary, desiring.  So it is that so much poetry, even when uttering delight, strikes us with intolerable anguish in the way it repeats in an infinite litany the solitude and impermanence, and the precious singularity of an individual person.  Some years ago George Orwell wrote a book called 1984 which for its topicality and menace has gained some notoriety; now that the doom-date is only twenty years away the book looks like a Utopia turned inside out like a dirty old glove.  Closer to home I find a poem of Thomas Hardy’s entitled 1967, written at “16 Westbourne Villas, 1867,” in which he looks forward into our time along a line of sight that reduces somewhat the political and sociological scale.

                                                In five-score summers! All new eyes,

                                                New minds, new modes, new fools, new wise;

                                                New woes to weep, new joys to prize;

                                                With nothing left of me and you

                                                In that live century’s vivid view

                                                Beyond a pinch of dust or two;

                                                A century which, if not sublime,

                                                Will show, I doubt not, at its prime

                                                A scope above this blinkered time.

                                                – Yet what to me how far above?

                                                For I would only ask thereof

                                                That thy worm should be my worm, Love!

Boethius wrote his Consolations of Philosophy in prison under sentence of death; and Sir Thomas More, in whose honour Erasmus had written, when he was imprisoned for high treason, and knowing perhaps that he would be beheaded and his head impaled at Tower Bridge for an example, wrote in those first days a Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and treatises on Christ’s passion.  But it is not as consolation merely that the Humanities will serve us so much as for their way of bringing ourselves into sharp focus to ourselves in a space cleaned, as though by rain, of the squalor of what is merely personal and merely desired.  A young man, outraged at death and numb with sorrow at the death of a friend, stands in the theatre at Epidaurus “where / Greek speech lives cupped in the worn marble’s care,” and sets “these stones speaking to each other” with the epitaph he imagines for his friend: and his voice picks up the stern domestic simplicity of the memorial for the men who fell at Thermopylae. 

                        ‘I am Ron Wyn, promising philosopher,

                        I pledged myself to music, calculus

                        And Greek, but mastered none, since my last promise,

                        To death, was the one I fulfilled first.’

I cannot myself think of the Humanities any more as a cold science and mechanically impersonal than I can imagine that the Humanities would ever cease to be the sheet-anchor of civilization and of our individual lives.  If we are to be more learned, it is so that we may be more knowing.  For the centre of our gaze and of our most intense critical inquiry is the indefinable universe that each person is, founded upon order and dread, prey as much to himself as to circumstance.  Nothing matters as much as what happens between persons; and because of our imperfections and blindness, our poetry has much sorrow in it, being haunted by regret and the recognition of inhumanity.

                                                For the present stalks abroad

                                                Like the past, and its wronged again

                                                Whimper and are ignored,

                                                And the truth cannot be hid;

                                                Somebody chose their pain,

                                                What needn’t have happened did.

If we see our work extending even a little beyond the book and lectern, the class-room and the university, into those patterned relations and forces that respect no physical boundaries, we should think much more than we do about government, perhaps in ways as strictly divorced as possible from the wilful and deliberate activity of political action; for our work is full of the patterns of knowing and the analogies of order, and at every landfall we search the dazzling or baffling patterns where the self and the world intersect, and find (if we can) the consort of necessity and choice, freedom and law, and the mocking intransigence of images and words that, having no substantial existence except in the way they go, remind us both of our poignant impermanence, our habit of knowing, and our flair for order.