(Ir)Responsible Speech

On the erosion of words and why you must protect your ‘creative right.’

‘We are groping at a humbler level in the hierarchy of being.’ – David Jones, “Art and Democracy”

The phrase ‘responsible speech’ comes from Geoffrey Hill, in an essay on Ben Jonson (‘In Marvell, as in Jonson, the perspective requires the utterance of deliberate cliché, but cliché rinsed and restored to function as responsible speech.’) and echoed in an early review of Hill’s poems by Christopher Ricks. In the first paragraph of this essay (from 1964), Ricks notes that a drastic something was happening to the English language: words and idioms were coming into being too fast and (together with age-old ones) were going to rot too soon. ‘Conspicuous consumption and planned obsolescence are the features of the linguistic as well as the social scene.’ Hill, like Jonson, took such dead language and ‘blasted’ them ‘into a new perspective’ (to paraphrase Hill in the same essay). Therefore, to ‘rinse’ and ‘restore’ is more than mere; the word is rinsed and restored to a fresh vital efficacy (‘a new perspective’). More than just courtesy is involved in ‘responsibility’: we are looking at a civic function that is also a dimension of the operation of poetic genius. In fact, this operation of genius—for Hill—is a most honorable civic act.

I have gone to this length to clarify the origin of the phrase because it is necessary, and because I intend to make it work in a slightly different context. Words—the lives of words—are more at risk today than they were in the sixties. The big threat would appear to be AI: how it thins words and robs them of their integrity, their weight, and their connection to a messy human context.

But AI is not the issue for me—not today. A certain irresponsible attitude to words—to the lives of words—is. ‘These words’ (wrote W. S. Graham) ‘are as you see them put | Down on the dead-still page. They have | No ability above their station.’ This idea—that words in some sense are ‘fixed’; that they are like soldiers at their post and when rightly placed they stay and mean what exactly the poet wants them to mean—is true. However, Graham is not being trite. Words have a certain ability but it is activated at—not ‘above,’ a very good word—their ‘station.’

What is this ability that words have? The title of the poem tells us: they can behave.

In other words, while a word cannot be made into something other than itself, it can be made to dance, trip, leap, saunter or twirl, grin or frown, wear a scowl. ‘A word is interesting because of its surroundings’—this was one of Graham’s credos. A word cannot change its meaning, as a man cannot change his face, but it can be interesting (depending on the quality of genius).

As you suspect, by ‘responsible speech’ I mean the kind of speech where words operate right at their station; not speech that is made new by lyrical inventiveness but one that is grounded in the fact of words and what they mean; speech that does not attempt to betray the integrity of words.

Unfortunately—and this is my impetus for making this essay—contemporary speech is becoming more and more irresponsible. It is irresponsible in the fundamental sense that you can be talking English with a person and yet you are speaking two distinct languages. Common speech has become deeply polarized. And this polarization is willed in ways that are dangerous for our cognition of reality and for art (which R. P. Blackmur said ‘adds to the stock of available reality’).

A writer-friend (Justin Clement) has this workable phrase—‘models of reality.’ People carry in their heads different models and each model is a way of apprehending reality and getting at truth. You could call them ‘rationalities’ (as David Gallagher does in this useful essay). In the West (today that includes us here in Nigeria—to a considerable extent), different rationalities contend. None really predominates: or you could you say the relativist rationality does.

The idea that truth is relative—that there is no Truth—has moved now beyond a model carried in the mind. It has started infecting the bricks with which we construct our models. Words.

The prophet’s madness is a form of shock therapy. His is a responsible irresponsibility.

The Christian writer Francis Schaefer told a story that I like to repeat. He was in a room on a campus discussing philosophy with university students. A Hindu (I believe) was in the room. The Hindu student said truth is relative. It is not either this or that; it is both this and that. You can be right and I can be right; one of us does not have to be wrong.

The owner of the room they were in had a kettle of water on the stove. It was steaming. He walked up to the Hindu student and tipped the kettle slightly over his head.

‘What are you trying to do?’

The guy holding a kettle explained that he was simply demonstrating his idea to him. There is no wrong or right. My bathing you in hot water cannot be objectively wrong; it may be wrong to you and right to me.

The Hindu (offended) walked out of the room.

His rationality had been practically stress-tested. But one rarely gets such opportunities. Often, the best way to stress-test an idea, to subject a model to scrutiny, is to do it with words (write an essay, debate a person). However, because of the irresponsible attitude that people have to words, this is becoming impossible.

On YouTube recently, watching a discussion between two people, one person was trying to stress-test the other’s idea and the other person had no idea that this was what was going on. They were offended by the verbal model that the other person was creating to check the viability of their thought.

As I have said, the reason is that the same words are beginning to mean something different to people.

How then are we to talk? How would we correct false models? What happens when a culture is entirely heterodox—even to the point that we cannot define the word ‘woman’? (Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary, took it for granted that it needed defining: ‘Not a man.’)

Since I began with poetry, you may be asking: where does poetry fit in this note?

Poetry is inventive speech. That is what it aims to be. But first it begins as responsible speech (the kind of speech where words operate right at their station, as I said before); that is what it is at bottom, it is upon the base of its responsibility that it dances. A poem where words acts like rogues, where sign signifies nothing, cannot be considered inventive—the same way a mad man is not a prophet.

The mad man has no idea he is mad. To him, he is perfectly sane. It is them that are mad. On the other hand, the prophet’s madness is a demonstration of a fact; he embodies the disorder at work in the core nerve of his society so that seeing him and being repulsed by him the true madmen among whom he is the sanity may judge themselves and judging themselves may be condemned; only after that process can they recover who they were before or seek out who they might become. The prophet’s madness is a form of shock therapy. His is a responsible irresponsibility. (Celan’s poetry falls here. So, too, does T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Hill’s King Log. None of these poets wrote irresponsibly.)

If poetry, as I’ve said, must be responsible, then poets have a responsibility (in these precarious times) to guard the integrity of words; to keep words sane. But a poet must also invent. What he does has no value unless he invents. Now we are back to Hill’s sense of the phrase: the poet must perform this civic function (of keeping words sane) by operating his genius for innovation.

But we may have a problem, and this goes beyond poetry but rebounds upon it.

‘The outstanding fact for Modern Man, in whichever continent he finds himself, is that any twentieth-century domination-struggle demands the subordination of many individual ‘rights’ to group ‘rights,’ irrespective of the aims and ideologies, ends and means, of the groups concerned.’

David Jones already established in this essay (the one from which I took my epigraph) what those ‘rights’ are. Primarily, for Jones, my main right as Man is the right to creatively express my Humanness. This ‘creativity’ is not the sophisticated one that an artist such as a writer or a painter performs. It is something fundamental, more essential. It is my right to dance when I am happy; to hum when I am sad; to skip when I am in love; my write to write poetry and not fiction, be a policeman and not a doctor. For Jones, Man is Artist; he makes things and is made by the things he makes (this is what we mean when we say he is a creature of culture).

When Jones speaks of ‘the subordination of many individual ‘rights’ . . .,’ he is speaking of the subordination of each individual’s creative ability to the aims or goals of a particular group. This is happening. But this is happening in a radically different way from how Jones thought it would (though in a footnote he caught a glimpse of it). The erosion of words that we are currently witnessing is an expression of creativity. Take the word ‘woman’—when a person says ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘woman’ they are employing their creative ability. It is very simple. That kind of eccentricity (however strange I find it) is in keeping with what it means to be human.

But Jones (in that footnote) cautions that the appearance of that kind eccentricity in a particular individual must not be considered normal to human nature. ‘If the art [the creative expression of being] of some is abnormal it is because most men have been made so sub-normal as to have no art to practice. No blame to them, it is the nature of our times, only it is well that this deprivation should be understood to be eccentric and not concentric in Man. We may be forced to accept the situation in the world of fact, but to accept it as normal is the final capitulation.’ (My italics.)

The militant eccentricity that is taking place now will be the death of eccentricity itself.

So many wild eccentricities now exist in the society that each one adds up to a herd, and the herd grows and grows colossal. Heterodoxy, which only makes sense because of orthodoxy, is no longer itself. It wants to enshrine itself as the New Orthodoxy: as the Great Beast (as Simone Weil understood it to be). Your creative wright (especially if you are black or belong to the so-called minority) has to be subordinated to the ‘right’ of the group (even if you did not register to join).

The danger of this to those who constitute the New Orthodoxy should be obvious as its danger to those who do not should be to them. Writing ‘right’ as ‘wright’ or ‘write’ (as I did in two places earlier in this essay) is not a creative expression of my humanity unless I know and you know or we both suspect what the correct spelling of the word is. The militant eccentricity that is taking place now will be the death of eccentricity itself.

To return to words and poetry. The very material that a poet innovates with (‘a poem is made out of words’: Graham) is being rendered useless. And if this process continues, one thing we can be assured of is that people will no longer be able to appreciate art, especially poetry. Poetry has been losing serious audience for almost a century but in our day and in the future, things may be at their worst ever.

I ask you: If the children of the future do not know that a man is not a woman, if they assume that ‘man’ is interchangeable with ‘woman,’ how will they manage to access the intrigue of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (since the genius of the poems owes a lot to the creative vagueness—darkness—that Shakespeare innovates within)? This ‘situation’ that has excited and bothered scholars for centuries might suddenly be lost—and it would be like losing a whole art.

Let me state clearly—I am with Jones that a man saying they are a woman is an expression of their creative right. Just as writing ‘right’ as ‘wright’ is my creative right. But both are eccentricities—(one more serious than the other, no doubt). Nevertheless, just as I cannot ‘force’ my eccentricity upon another person (I cannot tell students in a class that ‘right’ is spelt ‘wright’ and fail them if they refuse to spell it my way); in the same way, the eccentricity of another individual (which, again, I respect as a creative expression of their being) cannot be ‘forced upon me’ as a fact that I must submit my own rights to.

Jones again: ‘We may be forced to accept the situation in the world of fact, but to accept it as normal is the final capitulation.’

One must refuse that ‘final capitulation’ as a protection of one’s own creative right as a human being and as a protection of the other person’s creative right. And because I must invent: to do that I must never lose my sense of the strange. To lose my sense of the strange is to also lose my sense of the normal. If I lose that—that clear distinction between what is normal and not—I can neither be responsible nor irresponsible as a poet. Both words become meaningless terms.

For those reasons, the strange must stay strange.

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Want something else to read? Check out other essays from the Archive:

· “The Deceptiveness of Strength”

· “Notes toward a Definition of Culture”

· “The Poetry of Sentiment: On ‘The Origin of Bastards’”

· “Rebecca’s Absence”

· “A Meditation on Time, Memory, with Some Thoughts on Thomas Hardy”

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