LAPSUS LINGUAE

LAPSUS LINGUAE

Recently I ran into a piece of graffiti, a kind of “note to self,” reading “The ability to remain sober and gracious is, indeed, a form of mild insanity.” Walking along I had to ponder this awhile, because it didn’t make much sense. But inside the span of the next hundred yards I managed to figure it out.

I stopped walking and said to myself I wasn’t one to argue. It just reminded me of all those secret corners of my mind which are anything but “sober and gracious,” those neatly tucked away corridors and cracks of the subconscious, always holding the truth captive. Like an overflowing prison population, they’re like faces of the soul seeking release from confinement, eager to betray appearances. Alas, recidivism is high, forced back into hiding due to shows of “mild insanity.”

Language as always is the means of escape, the crowbar and flashlight, and the pathway out, the dark alley unseen by the palace guards. Language is the measure of all things corralled into an orbit of law and order, socialization skills, and mental normalcy. It is the first indicator between two people that rules of perception and behavior are obeyed – or not obeyed. This includes “body” language.

All of which just remind me of what in our consciousness constantly attempts to free itself by means of language, opportunities in communication taken when we’re not paying attention. The guards fall asleep and the lights are accidentally turned off. Words almost deliberately and freely cross themselves, break the rules of grammar and locution, and come out almost comically. The message is dressed up like the harlequin and garbled like the jester speaking through his hat. Not only do words get transposed, the sounds of each word are switched – all in “one swell foop.”

For this reason alone I knew from a very early age that I’d never make it as a public speaker or member of a debate team. My best efforts to meet the standards of consistency would be through the written word only. That way the loss of pronunciation and syntax were not lost to chance – unless it was French or Latin, in which case I’d suffer the same syntactic hangups I still do today.

But then I also realize that the lapsus linguae (and lapsus calami) actually have something real to say. They tap into efforts to communicate which go back to ancient times. Many early languages used words which had double meanings. They saved the person the labor of having to say things in specific ways to convey specific meanings. It says to me that consciousness back then was very different in terms of how one perceived his world. Things were integrated and all-inclusive, deliberately “fused and confused,” which did not confuse but protected clarity.

For example, through my readings I found these derivations: The Latin word for “high” (altus) also means “”deep.” The word for “sacred” (sacer) also means “accursed.” We have the complete antithesis of meaning without any alteration made in the word itself. Where there are alterations, they are slight: “Dry” turns to “juicy” when siccus becomes succus. Outward “crying” turns to “secretly” when clamare turns to clam. In German boden (even today) still means the highest and the lowest thing in a house. Bos (bad) also means bass (good). The same applies in Old Saxon where bat (bad) also means good. The German kleben (to stick) is most compared to the English “to cleave” (or to un-stick) – and so forth.

Then also in ancient languages, like Egyptian, Aryan and Semitic languages, words reverse meanings along with reversed sounds. If a word (in German) like gut means “good,” it not only means “bad” but also gets pronounced tug. Sticking with Germanic languages alone, topf is a pot; boat is a tub; to wait means to tarry (tauwen); hurry (ruhe) means to rest; a beam is a log (balken to klobe); capere in Latin (take) is packen in German (to seize); folium (in Latin) means leaf in English, and so forth. Spellings are either reversed or their meanings are.

In the end, as Freud said, “perhaps even the much derided derivation lucus a non lucendo” (that which is absurd, illogical, paradoxical, or non sequitur) “would have some sense in it.”

Suddenly, I no longer feel embarrassed when I commit the verbal gaffes associated with “tied tongues,” dyslexic responses, antitheses (reversed meanings), and words turned inside-out and backwards (metatheses – reversed sounds). The brain-to-tongue connection harbors thieves within the walls of my subconscious who simply remind me of wholistic meanings to which I’m still neurologically wired. That there is really nothing wrong with me (not crazy after all) , that it was only with the invention of modern languages that such “liberties” became taboo, became a kind of Damascus moment. Freud again: “We remember in this connection how fond children are of playing at reversing the sound of words and how frequently the dream-work makes use of a reversal of the representational material for various purposes.”

I then remind myself that the ordinary slip of the tongue, the frequent malapropism and palindrome, could be (probably are) messages being sent (via mental courier) up to my conscious mind (illicitly, secretly) from the dream-world, from my youth, and from memories of times long past. Though it’s nonsense to the casual listener today (and quite humorous), it makes perfect sense to the thief-prisoner locked away in the crevasses of the past. It’s he to whom I look for a deeper wisdom and intelligence.

But the thirsty brigand doesn’t stop there. He reminds me constantly of the linear and rigid constraints of “more words pointing to less and less,” to the dilution of meaning altogether. Today we say that normal words and phrases point to clarity and freedom from ambiguity. We praise ourselves for verbal honesty. But look around and you see the opposite. What has taken the place of the looseness of meaning is a parade of deceit and self-deception.

How can this be? How did it happen? Perhaps because the more words we’ve been forced to invent for more and more subtle and partial meanings, the more abstruse, convoluted and abstract they became – to the point of words having almost no meaning at all. Rather than allowing language to cover a broad paradigmatic range of realities recorded by the senses, and “relaxing into it” as it were, we use it to fuel a neurosis of control which can’t be controlled. Every subtlety and nuance needs a specific taxonomy and definition. Today, more means less – more than ever.

Two things have happened with modern communication skills. First, our senses have developed giving us more detailed data of the outside world. The second thing is that the information we receive in the mind gets distorted and biased according to our “chosen” perceptions – by how we wish to see the world. We must lie to others to keep up appearances. But in order to lie to others we must first lie to ourselves. We hide the details of our deception to ourselves and selectively recall information which validates what we want to know. This covers the whole gamut of human interaction – parenting and childhood, group dynamics, academics, the arts, history, public relations and government, sexual relations, and religion. Nothing escapes the politics of self-deception – false internal narratives which lead to false theories and self-inflation.

All of which begin to disintegrate again once the control factor is set aside and the mind is allowed to free associate and imagine “actively.” An entirely new and strange process of associative meaning begins. The world deconstructs from a categorically deductive, Euclidean one to a non-categorically inductive one. The world continues to expand (just as science says it does according to its method) but in a diametrically opposite direction. Taxonomy is set aside and things are allowed to once again become “fused and confused.”

This is what the thief in the night steals deep in the recesses of human neurology and memory. He hides in those crevasses and deliberately slips us their “lapses” of sound like banana peels preparing us for our most embarrassing pratfalls. We’re belly-up and prostrate on the ground, and when we sit up we somehow get reoriented back to a primordial belonging. – What’s also interesting is that when I manage to succeed at this in even the smallest way, animals (wild and domestic) respond to me. It’s as if they’re saying “welcome back.”

At that moment I understand the virtues of losing my mind. I also think of Dostoevsky”s Underground Man, that hidden voice no one ever sees but only hears through the cracks of floorboards. A voice which has heard it all and knows “us” better than we know ourselves. He gives voice to the “dialectic” of isolated consciousness. He is nameless “because ‘I’ is all of us.” Through the cracks he says:

“Man is really stupid, phenomenally stupid…. [H]e’s so ungrateful that it would be hard to find the likes of him…. [W]hat is offensive is that he’s sure to find followers; that’s how man is arranged. And all this for the emptiest of reasons, which would seem not even worth mentioning: namely, that man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere liked to act as he wants, and not at all as reason and profit dictate; and one can want even against one’s own profit…. One’s own free and voluntary wanting, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, though chafed sometimes to the point of madness – all this is that same most profitable profit, the omitted one, which does not fit into any classification, and because of which all systems and theories are constantly blown to the devil.”

I also recall the very last words in a now obscure and almost forgotten little essay by R,D. Laing, published in 1967, entitled The Politics of Experience:

“There is really nothing more to say when we come back to that beginning of all beginnings that is nothing at all. Only when you begin to lose that Alpha or Omega do you want to start to talk and to write, and then there is no end to it, words, words, words….

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you, I would let you know.”

Now I understand that graffiti I read on the wall that day. Words and meanings trying to break through (and out) of preassigned words and meanings. It turns “mild insanity” on its ear and the inquisitor into the accused. J’Accuse! – It’s high time this happened.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt