Education, Zen and the art of correspondence

Chris Arthur

ONE of the characters in Brian Friel's play Translations, makes the following observation: 'It can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact.' Whatever the historical accuracy of this remark (the play examines the struggle for dominance between English and Irish in nineteenth-century Ireland), the image of language as a contour map, a network of intricate lines capable of expressing every nuance of undulation in the underlying landscape of reality is, I think, an appealing one. Despite the inevitable shortcomings of such a simplification, it pinpoints some of the most important functions and dysfunctions of language.

Obviously some degree of mismatch between utterance and reality is inevitable. After all, a name is no more the thing named than a map is the territory it represents. One of Swift's deft imaginings in Gulliver's Travels shows how unmanageable communication would become if it attempted too close a correspondence with the things we want to talk about. Thus the sages of Balnibarbi were crushed under the sheer weight of the objects they had to carry in order to conduct communication without relying on the shorthand of signs. Likewise in the Universal History of Infamy, Jorge Luis Borges provides a metaphor for the absurdity of a point-for-point correspondence between words and things by ridiculing the notion of a map drawn on the same scale as, and coinciding exactly with, the ground it covers. Clearly a map or a language would be rendered useless if mere replication replaced representation. Borges' map was of such unwieldy magnitude that it was soon abandoned by the inhabitants of the fictional world in which he placed it, though it has remained a frequent point of reference for others interested in mapping the relationship between representation and reality. (Jean Baudrillard refers to it in his essay 'Simulacra and Simulation' and Umberto Eco uses it to good effect in his 'On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1' in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.)

So, no 'linguistic contour' should ever be expected to map 'the landscape of fact' exactly. Quite apart from the absurdity of such intimate correspondence (as per Borges' map), such contours themselves surely help to determine the landscapes we perceive rather than just describing what is already there. To propose otherwise would imply that language is little more than a straightforward system of reportage--rather than something we think with. Such objections notwithstanding, I think we can usefully identify the poles of match and mismatch between what we say and the landscapes of fact we inhabit. Stretched out between these poles is a continuum of correspondence. This ranges from the most intimate consonance, where words seem to fit things like a glove, to such radical dissonance that misrepresentation replaces any mapping.

Without wishing to advance the absurdity of a landscape of fact mapped with perfect verisimilitude by the contours of our utterance, I want to argue that one of the key responsibilities of education is to police the correspondence between 'linguistic contour' and 'landscape of fact' and warn us when things get out of synch between our feelings, thoughts, intentions, the world in which they're set, and the words we use to bridge the space between them.

Is an ordinarily accurate choice of words as close as we can come to a verbal contouring of the landscapes in which we live? In his classic study of religious experience, Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, first published in 1917, English translation 1923), Rudolf Otto suggests that a much closer mapping can sometimes occur. The examples he gives could stand emblematically at the pole of closest possible match. Certain names of deity, according to Otto, started off simply as automatic cries (what he termed 'original numinous sounds'). These utterances were forced from the throat in the supposed presence of God. One of his key points of reference here is the Indian deity Ascarya, whose name, literally translated, means 'that before which we go 'Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!' Otto made the fascinating suggestion that much religious language may have evolved from such primal screams of sacral immediacy.

'Ascarya' seems as close as we could come to a 1:1 correspondence between expression and experience. Such a cry does not qualify as language as such, it is more a proto-word than a fully developed word, but it does show how, under certain conditions, a contour of utterance and the landscape of fact it seeks to represent might be aligned as closely as feeling and facial expression. In such an instance, few if any interstices of inaccuracy would be left open; perception would issue automatically in sounds that fitted it perfectly. The trajectory of experience would be tracked in a precisely shadowing arc of exclamation. But the closeness of such tracking would be bought at a terrible price. However much emotional catharsis such slavish mirroring might afford, it would confine us to a very primitive level of engagement with the world. It allows only automatic reaction, not the interpretation that enables us to edge towards understanding.

At the other extreme of correlation between utterance and actuality is the sort of deliberate misfit between word and landscape found in the diction of the Nazis. By constructing misleading word-maps they attempted to lull people into thinking that entirely different landscapes were taking shape beneath what they said. They sought to camouflage even the sheerest summits of evil by marking them only as gentle and unremarkable verbal inclines. Thus all official correspondence referring to the slaughter of the Jews was subject to special language rules so that, for example, words like 'extermination', 'liquidation' or 'killing' were almost never used. Instead we read of 'special treatment', 'evacuation' and the now infamous 'final solution'. Treblinka, Auschwitz and other camps were referred to, grotesquely, as 'charitable foundations for institutional care.' Far from the kind of 1:1 correspondence that marks the pole of tight (too tight) fit represented by Otto's original numinous sounds, the opposite pole on this continuum of expression offers no correspondence at all. (Though the odious mismatch of expression and actuality perpetrated by the Nazis may seem safely located in the past, one only has to think of 'collateral damage' to realise that examples of such lethal non-correspondence are far from uncommon in some of the realms of discourse we still encounter today.)

Underlying the expediencies that too often dictate what academics write, when we stop to consider principles rather than politics, a key task of such writing is surely to prevent utterance gravitating towards the extremes of emotionalism or diabolism. It is only in the middle ground between them that inquiry can flourish. Checking the correspondence between representation and reality is the educational responsibility par excellence. Failure to attend to it often stems not from any Machiavellian wish to sanction some totalitarian outlook, but from too close attention to the blinkering particularities of specialised investigations. As Marshall McLuhan once quipped, 'the specialist is someone who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy'. What grander fallacy than allowing linguistic contours to stand which fail to map the landscape of fact with an acceptable level of accuracy or humanity (one thinks especially of certain political and religious utterances)?

In his Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language, Gerhard Ebeling suggests that: 'Since language is so intimately connected with life, something of the necessary reverence for life should be carried over to the way we use language.' Ebeling's plea is reminiscent of the Confucian idea that we can only hope to live in harmony if we name things correctly. Something similar lies behind Jacques Ellul's dictum (put forward in The Humiliation of the Word) that 'anyone wishing to save humanity today', rather than trying to save the world, 'must first of all save the word'. Such reverent use, such correct naming, such saving of the word, lies close to the heart of what should inspire the learning process, whether at school or university. Underlying all the specialisms of the different disciplines, there should surely be a concern about the extent to which our various word-maps correspond with and cast light upon the 'landscapes of fact' that constitute our world--not in any unworkable 1:1 way, but in those more complex correspondences that allow insight to develop.

Poets can help us name things correctly in the Confucian sense, help us save the word and make our language fit for the tasks entrusted to it. 'Poetry,' as George Steiner reminds us (in Real Presences) is 'thought at its most intense'. Such intensity ought to be able to pare to the bone of insight and flense away whatever threatens to obscure the landscapes of fact we inhabit, whether this is the laziness of everyday diction, the subterfuges of political vocabulary, or the pieties of uncritical faith. A poetic vision may, of course, challenge our assumptions in a highly uncomfortable way. (Indeed if it does not we would do well to ask if it possesses the requisite level of intensity to satisfy Steiner's criterion for this genre.) Consider, for example, how the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas views things (in the poem 'Rough,' from his 1975 Collection Laboratories of the Spirit):

                God looked at the eagle that looked at
                the wolf that watched the jack-rabbit
                cropping the grass, green and curling
                as God's beard. He stepped back;
                it was perfect, a self-regulating machine
                of blood and faeces.

This is scarcely a comfortable picture of our world, and many might flinch at the thought of allowing the landscape of fact to wear the description 'a self-regulating machine of blood and faeces'. But if education is to move beyond the level of the fatuously factual, the mere acquisition of information, it needs to equip those in its charge to grapple intelligently with precisely this kind of account, carefully testing it for correspondence with the world of our experience.

Establishing match and mismatch between representation and reality certainly seems more complicated today (if also more exhilarating) than it was in the past. We live at a time in history when we have access to a hugely expanded range of possibilities in terms of political, scientific, religious and artistic thinking. The ideas we take on to clothe and explain ourselves and help us understand the weathers of existence may be drawn from a far wider and more diverse range of sources than ever before. An individual may now view life through a frame that has been moulded by Buddhist, Christian, secular-scientific, native American, communist and democratic values. We have moved from the 'one-size-fits-all' milieu of our ancestors to our current pluralistic exuberance. Never has it been more important to ensure that the correspondences we cleave to are, in fact, securely founded. It is easy to introduce a false contrast here, of course, to say that previous generations were born into whatever worldview they had, that for them establishing correspondence was a matter of inheritance rather than individual reflection, that they were locked into their ideas and customs, whereas our world is one of freedom and choice. The fact is that we are born into our milieu as surely as any previous generation was born into theirs and, as a result, we have no choice but to be faced with choices. As Hugh Brody has so eloquently shown (in Maps and Dreams, his lyrical exploration of tribal peoples' senses of place in British Columbia), different people make different maps, feel the fit of the landscapes they inhabit in sometimes radically different ways. An awareness of the sheer range of representations now available to us can act to undermine the credibility of each one, but it can also act to enrich the descriptive and explanatory resources at our disposal.

It could be argued that the landscape of fact is simply too horrific to look at directly without the blinkers variously supplied by those realms of discourse that subvert the truth, making what we must face appear more palatable. Attempts to import illicit levels of non-correspondence into our outlooks may gain credence from the fact that looking at reality directly may sometimes seem to be almost lethal (rather like the reported impact of glimpsing God's face). Ernest Becker, for example, urges that 'It cannot be over-stressed that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying'. For Becker, a 'full apprehension' of our condition would drive us insane. He believes that a terrible anxiety is bound to result from 'the perception of the truth of one's condition'. In The Denial of Death he poses the question of what it means to be a self-conscious animal. His answer is simple: 'It means that one is food for worms'. According to Becker,

     This is the terror: to have emerged from nothingness, to have a
     name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating
     yearning for life and self-expression--and with all this yet to
     die.

Or, as that most acute of self-chroniclers, Henri-Frederic Amiel, put it, 'the universe seriously studied rouses one's terror'. He and Becker have both glimpsed R.S. Thomas's 'self-regulating machine of blood and faeces' operating beyond the deceptively simple terms of our ordinary descriptive vocabulary. Though there are, naturally, less grim outlooks, the way in which serious study is likely to result in something profoundly unsettling, if not terrifying, seems too often lost sight of in the teaching now offered by schools and universities. Education should be unnerving.

In The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde talks about the way in which beauty can be 'dimmed by the mist of familiarity'. Familiarity's mist can seep so deeply into our lives that the accounts it offers seem to fit things perfectly. In the assumption of unproblematic correspondence that familiarity propagates, much that is important, not only beauty, risks being lost. If a root concern of education is to ensure that our 'linguistic contours' map the 'landscape of fact' in a way that furthers our understanding of it, then we need to be able to disperse familiarity's mist so that we can see beyond the constraints both of ordinary discourse and of whatever political, religious or educational orthodoxy happens to be in favour.

The Russian formalists, particularly Victor Shklovsky, are associated with the idea of ostranenie, or strategies for making strange. Shklovsky saw the fundamental task of all art as providing such strategies, acting to estrange the familiar so as we can see things in all the disturbing incandescence of their raw nature, throw off the anaesthetic of custom and let the world stand before us afresh, uncovered by any of the customary contours with which we clad it. Such making strange would seem an essential preliminary to our educational endeavours--but how often is it effectively put into play? Yet, if students do not feel at least some element of Amiel's terror as they study the universe, is the seriousness of our teaching (and their learning) not called into question?

Zen is a mode of ostranenie that can boast a far more ancient provenance than anything Shklovsky's aesthetic could claim. It is imbued with the urge to see the world as it is, to wake up to the incredible nature of things beneath the mist of the familiar, to learn to see things come into focus in the arresting light of their astonishing existence. Too often, academic writing seems like a kind of anti-Zen, geared not to promoting any flash of insight-giving satori. Instead it acts as a heavy non-koan of conformity offering answers as potently soporific as the unnerving questions Zen poses are awakening.

The chasm between reality and representation is one we cross so often that this most astonishing of mental operations becomes routine. We forget how vital it is that whatever bridges we use correspond to what lies beneath them in a way that fosters humane inquiry and understanding rather than the (potentially deadly) inertia of uncritical acceptance. At our best, we can construct word-maps dense with correspondences of breathtaking elegance and fluency. But to suppose we could ever fill the chasm between reality and representation would be to drastically underestimate the depth and dimensions of the real, or to similarly overestimate the reach of our words, images and other media. Were something to seem like a perfect match, offering a complete 1:1 correspondence, it could surely only be due to a failure of vision, not to any triumph of intelligence or eloquence. But perhaps a well honed awareness of the inevitable mismatch between the linguistic contours we construct and the landscapes of fact they are intended to map is, in the end, the best guarantee that their correspondences will provide some insight--but at the same time keep us mindful of the essential nature of the incredible topography to which our sentience gives access. As one of Japan's great Zen-poets, Issa, puts it:

                What a strange thing
                to be thus alive
                beneath the cherry blossoms.

If we ever forget what a truly strange and thought-provoking thing it is we need urgently to import a Zen-like sense of ostranenie into education's cartography.

Dr Chris Arthur is Admissions Tutor and Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Lampeter, University of Wales.

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