Simple and Quiet: Stifter's Witiko Rides and Stands

Nerves jangling, uneasy for several days, unable to concentrate on my writing, I turn to the Austrian Adalbert Stifter's 1867 historical novel, rumored to be the most boring book ever written. 

This should slow me down, I thought, this ought to order my thoughts and give them weight the way good sentences can.

An armed young man rides through woods on a fine horse: 

"Da der Reiter die Schlucht hinaus rit, sah er weder rechts noch links, noch nach der stadt zurück. Es war eine frühe Stunde eines Tages des Spätsommers, der schon gegen den Herbst neigte. Der Tag war heiter, und die Sonne schien warm hernieder. Das Pferd ging durch die Schlucht in langsamem Schritte. Als es über sie hinausgekommen war, ging es wohl schneller, aber immer nur im Tritte. Es ging einen langen Berg hinan, dann eben, dann einen Berg hinab, eine Lehne empor, eine Lehne hinunter, ein Wäldchen hinein, ein Wäldchen hinaus, bis es beinahe Mittag geworden war."

It's a passage of motion, of riding and walking through a gorge, up a hill, along a flat section, down the hill, up a slope and down, into a wood and out of a wood until it was almost midday.

The rider comes to some houses built on uneven ground:

"Die Häuser lagen in Unordnung zerstreut, und der Grund, auf dem sie standen, war ungleich. Es war hier schon kühler als an der Donau; denn da in Passau viele Obstbäume standen, ragte hier nur der Waldkirschbaum empor, er stand vereinzelt, und stand in einer Gestalt, die in manchen Teilen zerstückt war, und bewies, daß viele harte Stürme in den Wintern an ihm vorübergegangen waren. In sehr schöner Bildung dagegen stand die Eberesche umher, sie stand bei vielen Häusern, und mischte das Grün ihres Laubes und das beginnende Rot ihrer Trauben zu dem Grau der Dächer. Die Herberge war ein Steinhaus, stand auch neben Ebereschen. . . . Auf der Gasse standen mehrere steinerne Tischen. . . . Hinter den Schoppen stand Waldwuchs. . . ."

The rider stops an an inn, eats, drinks, and gives precise orders for how his horse is to be cared for. The conversation with the innkeeper is precise and courteous. A conversation with another man contrasts the young rider's knowledgeable self-assurance with the man's uncertain braggadicio. The care with which the young man performs each action reminds me of the formality of the hunt and meticulous excoriation of the deer in Gottfried's Tristan.

Then the young man rides on, again up a slope and down and into a wood, repeating the motion of the earlier scene:

"Er ritt in der Richtung zwischen Morgen und Mitternacht fort. Er ritt wieder eine Lehne hinan, eine Lehne hinab, ein Wäldchen aus, ein Wäldchen ein, der Boden wurde immer unwirtlicher und war endlich mit Wald bedeckt."

Riding—standing—riding.
Motion—rest—motion.

What could be more simple? The description moves from verbs of movement to verbs of standing. And then continues the movement.

And my mind has slowed down, is more ordered.

A few pages later Witiko meet a girl and the verb "to stand" sprouts like weeds:

"Sie blieben stehen, sahen auf ihn hin, und er stand gleichfalls, und sah auf sie. . . . das andere blieb stehen. . . . 'Was stehst du mit deinen Rosen hier da?' 'Ich stehe hier in meiner Heimat da', antwortete das Mädchen; 'stehst du auch in derselben'?

. . . and so on. If the novel continues this way, with this emphasis on standing, it will explain why some people find it boring (they just stand there?) and it will give me an additional source for my study of the standing metaphor.

Ecstasy

Karl O. Knausgaard

A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven

Translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson

London: Portobello Books, 2008.

Ec-stasy is the subject of this big novel. Standing outside. Standing outside of time, of one's own consciousness, of life itself.

When Antinous Bellori, age 11 and lost in the forest, thinks he has found his father (who must be searching for him!) but finds terrible angels fishing in a river instead, they are creatures who stand in or inhabit interstices:

Gingerly he raises his head and looks over the edge. The sight that meets his eyes petrifies him. Two cloaked men are standing motionless on the river bank staring up at him. . . . The two figures stand as immobile as before. But now they’re looking at the water in front of them. One holds a torch in his hand, the other a spear. Both wear chain mail under their cloaks and each has a sword hanging at his side. . . . All he wants is to be in their presence. Without giving a thought to what he’s doing, he gets up and begins to walk slowly down, all the time concealed by the trees and with his eyes fixed on the two figures, who display no sign of having heard him, but stand there still as ever. Halfway down he notices their wings and thinks what has until then been just a vague inkling: there are two angels standing in the river. The rush of fear and happiness which this sends coursing through him is almost unendurable. (10-11)

And so, standing close together, the light flickering across their faces and the bottom of their cloaks trailing in the water, they stand eating the fish. Antinous stares at them spellbound. The teeth that sink into the fish’s flesh, the scales that cling to their chins, the eyeballs that now and then turn up and make them look white and blind. Then they look like statues standing there, for without the life of the eyes the deadness of their faces is emphasised. Each time he sees it, Antinous recoils in fear. They’re dead, he thinks. They’re dead. But then the eyeballs correct themselves, the faces again fill with life, and what a moment before was loathsome in them is now beautiful again. (12)

The standing emphasized by repetition (and throughout the novel) is a mark of ecstasy, of standing outside or between, of standing at the border between life and death, of pain and pleasure.

Angels are creatures of this psychological space.

And humans who witness them, like Antinous, experience a timeless presence that is the most powerful of all experiences.

Which other humans have experienced such joyful terror? the narrator asks.

Cain and Abel.

Noah.

Lot.

Ezekiel.

Anyone who has sex or who gives birth. Anyone in pain. Anyone in the presence of death.

The novel imagines the Biblical characters and their ecstatic experiences. Their encounters with angels and their experiences with death and pain are, it seems to me, equivalent.

Abel, for instance, who burns to see the cherubim who guard the tree of knowledge, approaches the extreme state they represent in a grim dissection (of a dying man), in viewing the actual flaming cherubim (he suffers fits as a result), while sacrificing lambs, and through an attempted suicide that emphasizes the standing metaphor:

They smiled at one another. Then Abel went to the bank, climbed up the tree, balanced on the branch, stood erect and dived in.

Able doesn’t come up.

‘That’s enough now, Abel!’ he [Cain] called, although he knew that his brother couldn’t hear him. ‘Come on up!’

It seemed when his voice died away as if it was the first time he became aware of himself. That he was standing here, on the river bank, right now, and that Abel was down in that black river water, and had been far too long. (97)

Cain dives in after him, although he is an unwilling swimmer:

He fought his way over, and when he saw the head, the open eyes, the hair billowing in the water, he realised that he must have tied one foot to the tree.

Cain unties the knot, gets him out of the river, and raises him up and down till he vomits and then leaves him there and weeps.

 . . . and turned to see how Abel was getting along.

He was standing in the pale moonlight staring at him. . . . No spark of recognition brightened his eyes. His gaze was as empty as a corpse’s.

Abel begins to dance. Cain awakes in the morning and wonders if it all really happened:

Found Abel tied up, released him and dragged him out on to dry land?

He suddenly imagined it once more, and a shiver went down his spine. He had seemed to be standing in the water. . .

Best not to think about it. (96-101)

Abel will do anything for ecstasy, anything to stand outside himself at the juncture of life and death. Cain continually disrupts Abel's efforts (he crushes the head of the dying man Abel is torturing, he saves Abel from the river, and he finally kills Abel to save him from a final terrible union with the cherubim).

There are examples from each of the Bible stories, each one marked by standing. 


When Rachel, for instance, is giving birth: “she stood roaring into the forest” (326). Pain = ecstasy.


One extraordinary scene puts a reader with the last people on top of the last mountain as the flood rises and kills them while Noah's ark nudges the last bit of earth. Noah's sister Anna stands among them and watches.


They were now standing on an island and were surrounded by sea on all sides. . . . Was it strange that all they did was stand and stare and stare? . . . (320)

Anna “thought that what she heard was the voice of God” (320). It is the water rushing in to kill them, and in this moment the ark approaches: 

. . . they had crawled up to this foothold, and stood here now, only hours away from their ultimate end. . . . Crowded together they stood watching the ship move closer. When the moment they had been waiting for arrived, and the keel nudged at the mountain just below them, all they did at first was to stand and watch. . . . Anna stood in the background. (341)

“Bellori says that, as eternal beings, time can have no meaning for the angels” (394). It is the nunc stans, the "now standing" of the Scholastics. It is also the "now standing" of anyone about to die or witnessing death.

After years of searching, both through study of the Bible and through wandering through Europe, Bellori finds angels in the woods in the snow: 

The place was empty, but he stood there, nevertheless, positioning himself roughly where he’d stood then. . . . Even so Antinous felt a shiver run down his spine as he stood there. . . . Antinous quickly stepped over to the nearest tree and stood close into its trunk. The angel flew upwards in ever increasing circles, and had soon disappeared completely. He continued to stand motionless for a while longer. . . and stood there unmoving . . . He stood close to a tree . . . and he might have been standing there half an hour. . . . An angel was standing on one of the lowest branches . . . He had no idea how long he stood there. Because nothing moved, there was nothing for time to latch on to and measure it by. He stood there, the bog lay there, the snow fell, the angel stared (452-454 and ff.).

The experience is beyond any he has known since he was eleven, and it is deadly. If it weren't deadly, it would not be ecstatic.

But who is writing about Bellori and his findings? Who is making up the Bible stories? It's a modern Norwegian narrator who himself is looking for ecstatic experience, conditioned to do so, at least in part, by his father's own extremities.

“Dad got up and took the torch from me. But he made no move to go. Even though he stood in the dark, and I couldn’t see his face properly, I knew he was staring at me. Neither of us spoke. Slowly he turned the torch beam on my face. ‘Are you scared of me?’ he said.” (483).

And it’s a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time to every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.

But if it’s true that events in the past open and close and constantly form new associations with what’s happening in the present, where does the notion that the past is fixed and finished come from? Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear. (483-484)

That quivering and unclear zone, that single standing second, is the obsessive/compulsive narrator's obsession:

Contemplating suicide: “I wasn’t standing on the edge of an abyss, I was standing before yet another argument: shall I take my own life to prove to myself that my despair is genuine? (506).

After struggling to kill a huge fish (and thus right there on that edge between life and death): “I read for a couple of hours. Then I stood in the cellar for a while. . . . I stood there for a long time with the phone in my hand. . . . stood looking down into the clear, green water. . . . pulled off my T-shire and stood in front of the mirror. . . . [he cuts himself, ecstatically, first his chest, later his face] For a while I just stood there. . . . Soaking wet I stood there, for the world is beautiful, it’s so beautiful, and I was there in the midst of it.” (514-515).

“Pain has something to do with eternity, I’ve always thought, not the slight, short pain, but the pain that throbs and churns and keeps on. . . . It was as if holes had opened in the surface of time, I sometimes thought, where the drop in pressure was so great that the surrounding time was somehow drawn in to fill the vacuum” (518).

"Every angel is terrible," Rilke wrote in his Duino Elegies. Knausgaard is sure of that.

ABSTRAKT BILDEN

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild

On a slow Saturday, inspired by flowerville's post on slowness and form, I turned to a poem by Robert Hass we discussed in our "Standing as Metaphor" class Thursday:

Time and Materials

Gerhard Richter: Abstrakt Bilden

1.

To make layers,

As if they were a steadiness of days:

It snowed; I did errands at a desk;

A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue

Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

On this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,

Nothing stirring in the icy air.

On this day a blur of color moving at the gym

Where the heat from bodies

Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

Made love, made curry, talked on the phone

To friends, the one whose brother died

Was crying and thinking alternately,

Like someone falling down and getting up

And running and falling and getting up.

2.

The object of this poem is not to annihila

To not annih

The object of this poem is to report a theft,

     In progress, of everything

That is not these words

     And their disposition on the page.

The object o     f this poem is to report a theft,

     In progre          ss of everything that exists

That is not th          ese words

     And their d           isposition on the page.

The object     of    his poe     is t     epro     a theft

     In     rogres     f  ever     hing     at     xists

Th     is no     ese     w rds

     And their disp sit on o     the pag

3.

To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,

To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.

“Action paint,” i.e.,

The painter gets to behave like time.

4.

The typo would be “paining.”

(To abrade.)

5.

Or to render time and stand outside

The horizontal rush of it, for a moment

To have the sensation of standing outside

The greenish rush of it.

6.

Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger

Or desire can rip a life apart,

Some wound of color.

In class we talked about the mundanity of the layers with which our days are steadied. Richter paints layers on layers as he "creates abstractly" (abstract bilden). The poet pulls us out of the meanings of the sentences to the form of the words on the page by abstracting. His abstraction in words, like Richter's abstraction in layers of scored and smeared and painfully abraded paint, renders time.

We talked about the word "render," which means both to create and to break down. The painter and poet who render time create a nunc stans, standing outside the greenish rush of time. Hass's sentences are broken out of time. They cease to flow. They stand there, in part 2, with a vertical slash cutting through the one quatrain.

Anger or desire. Some wound of color or of print. And wounded, we fall down and get up and run and fall and get up.

We order it, it falls apart,

We order it again, and fall apart ourselves.

Rilke, 8th Duino Elegy

Or this morning, on the cusp of Spring, Winter still present but fading quickly, walking easily with cat and dog, pulling out my little camera to take pictures of the last snow, of the mats of plants the snow left, of the very first wildflowers, it felt like I was standing outside—poised just before—the greenish rush of time and of the plants that will vault us into the chirping and buzzing and sap-rising Spring.

And as my mind moves, as it will, from thought to thought, I remember Zarko's email about his friend in Cologne, the artist Norbert Arns, who was in Corinna Belz's fine film of Gerhard Richter painting, and who himself had a recent show in Cologne with the title (Quit Hitting Me With My Handke): HÖR AUF, MICH MIT MEINEM HANDKE ZU SCHLAGEN

[for more of Gerhard Richter's work and information about him, click HERE]

Fine Compliment

"He was nearly fifty years old, but he was very fresh; he only colored his mustache and limped a little on one leg."
—from Goncharov's Oblomov


I'll be discussing the standing metaphor in the novel at a new blog on the metaphor of standing, Homo erectus in the culture of Homo sapiens:


http://onstanding.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/oblomov-standing-vs-lying-down/

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 17

The novel's final chapter, Chapter 9, begins with the actor walking through the city in the night, waiting for the appointed time when he will pick up the woman from her night work. He walks constantly, as if he is not allowed to stand still. There is risk here ("Es stand etwas auf dem Spiel. Viel. Alles."), and after the statement of risk that, in German, means literally "There was something standing on the game," or, perhaps a bet had been laid, he lightens the mood by referring to himself as that guy in the film "Mission Impossible."

Over the years, critics, both positive and negative alike, have missed this playful, dialectical aspect of Peter's work. They keep seeing him as earnestly sensitive and metaphysically inclined. This is, as I read him, an anti-metaphysical writer who nevertheless works his ass off to create what meaning there is to be created; and then winks.

Before becoming Peter's traveling companion and translator, Zarko once interviewed him and mentioned what a sensitive writer he was. "Sensitive is a word for condoms," Peter replied.

On this last walk through the city (it's explicitly not "flanieren") the actor comes across a man who is dying on the ground by a subway entrance. The man looks at him and the look means "I recognize or know you (erkennen). You are known!"

Okay, here a break to think about realism.

This is not likely, that the actor is gazed at by a dying man. It's the last chapter and we need a climax or a set of them. So the narrator drags in a dying man. As a reader I think: the narrator just dragged in a dying man. How likely is that?

But then I think, as I have before: this isn't a realistic novel. It's a novel about what makes our lives more or less real, more or less authentic, more or less governed by the idiocies and wisdoms of our cultures. It's not a Dutch realist painting. The point here is simply that the actor needs the eyes of another person looking into his eyes, he needs face-to-face relationships to give him meaning. This is psychologically realistic, not a realist plot.

Finally, we're not alone in wondering. The narrator knows readers may be asking how the actor knew the man was dying: "He knew it, he still knew such things."

Back to the playful dialectic. The actor hears children laughing and thinks he has lost the ability to be drawn into such laughter: "Permeated by seriousness, he longed to laugh."

More children, these two swinging in a lit-up park.

Apples begin to appear, first in a display window, next in a phrase a passing man says to the woman he's holding close: "My apple,"and finally after thinking he will ram his head into a wall, the actor instead becomes a juggler with two apples."

If the Great Fall is coming, there have to be apples.

In the book the actor was reading in the morning, the man who ran amok, the man so troubled by things like the lemon seed, came to an understanding with things as the evening came. The man who runs amok in the film is almost speechless. The actor who keeps threatening to run amok thinks about the two fictional cases as he has his own experiences. And I as a reader ........ yes, I've written this already.

Two distraught people, a young man who drops everything as he leaves his house and stands on the sidewalk without picking up the things, just stands there, and a young woman who is crying because, the actor surmises, she has been jilted, she has lost her job, and she has no savings. The actor picks up the young man's things and gives him a hug. He can't think of how to help the woman and that impotence turns to anger at her.

Headed for the Bar of Destiny (not the Bar of Hope) where the woman will be waiting for him. She is waiting there, and he can tell from the back of her head that she, unlike he, has a mission. He can tell she has thirst and he thinks that she, like the others sitting there, is one of the latter-day saints, a different sort from the normal ones (that must be my ones, the ones I belong to and the ones I left, otherwise known as Mormons). What makes these people saintly is hunger and thirst and thirst and hunger -- for food and drink. Then comes the second hunger, for sex with the woman (remember the desire-filled mass the actor celebrates while the priest celebrates the more normal mass). Finally comes the third hunger, the great hunger, but only after he hears the heavy slow steps of a mother climbing a wooden staircase up to the abandoned room of the lost son and then the murmur of the inconsolable: "Grant that . . ."

"He stood, and stood, and stood. Third hunger, the great one. Time for the second Gentle Course/Path (Lauf). Instead, the Great Fall."

When the three hungers were introduced just before the actor entered the church, the third hunger, for Geist/Spirit/Mind, the actor thought of Goethe, not the Goethe of "Faust," which didn't much concern the actor, but the Goethe of the saying about the "'Oberen Leitenden', welches den Geist meinte," the 'guiding spirits' (or high leading ones?) that meant Geist. 

The phrase is from Goethe's "Westoestlicher Divan: Der höchste Charakter orientalischer Dichtkunst ist, was wir Deutsche Geist nennen, das Vorwaltende des oberen Leitenden. . . .

And it's the actor's third hunger. How to satisfy it? By a second walk, a gentle walk through the day, the next day. For that he needs time.

He has no time.

And that's it.

A few final thoughts.

First the standing image I've been following throughout. Having read the entire novel, I see at least three different kinds of standing, although they are closely connected by the fact that they are the same image. First is the standing that opposes falling, the standing that works against entropy. Second is the standing that is a kind of threatening power, the standing of the policemen or of the actor himself in the subway. The actor's standing, standing, and standing at the end may entail both of those, but it is also the third kind of standing, the one that is stasis. There's life in the gentle moving on. It's a mobile standing, dialectical erection.

Second, the actor leaves the woman's house and travels toward her over the course of the entire day. He finally reaches her (although he remains at a distance). A second gentle walk would repeat that course, from woman to woman. The last image of the novel is the mother lamenting her lost son. Although the actor has set Faust aside, how can we not hear echoes of Faust here? 

 Das Unbeschreibliche,

Hier ist's getan;

Das Ewig-Weibliche

Zieht uns hinan.

The eternal womanly draws us, draws the actor as she draws Faust. And let's make no mistake here, the heaven into which Faust is raised is a heaven carefully composed/constructed out of Renaissance paintings and is thus a re-entry into the very constructed world Faust has longed to transcend (see  Neil Flax, "The Presence of the Sign in Goethe's 'Faust,'" PMLA 98 (1983): 183-203).

I wanted to end this series with an appropriate image, a visual equivalent of sorts to the thoughts Peter's novel has evoked.

Last night I took a hundred photos of Utah Valley during a sunset. These three may share something with the powerful novel that undermines its own power, with the simple story that is so complex, with the coming darkness of the Great Fall still illuminated by the already absent sun.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 9

What a beautiful evening it was! Utah Valley, as seen from our deck over the course of several slow and swiftly changing hours.

Up at the crack of dawn this morning. Chapter 4 of Peter’s book eases me into the morning.

The actor is leaving the clearing while walking backwards. "I had often noticed that about him," the narrator writes, inserting himself into the story again. The actor, the narrator says later, “expressed all of that only with his walking, as his walking was in general a variety [Spielart] of speaking. His walking, it spoke, it narrated.”

I finished the chapter and then headed up the mountain on my bike, trying to beat the heat. Just as I left the house the first rays of light slipped up from the notch in the mountain to the east.

The first 20 minutes are on the asphalt streets of the town that lies up against the mountain, nothing technical, just a steep set of streets that finally lead me to the tangled trees still down after the avalanche of several years ago. From here the switchbacking trail is dirt, cut by the rains of many years. There are sometimes walkers on the trail, and once or twice a year a motorcycle or an all-terrain vehicle, and in the winter people on snowshoes. The only other mountain bike I’ve ever seen here was ridden by my son Ben. He made the ride look effortless. I ride this trail; but the years are adding up (or perhaps it’s simply the geological upthrust that makes the trail a little harder each year).

There’s a first climb to the first switchback, not too hard. Around that switchback is one of the toughest stretches, hard because it climbs quickly and is steep for a long time. I ride it carefully, paying attention to the one place where I can ease off for ten seconds and get my breath back, making sure I don’t hit a root or rock that will stop my momentum.

But today, before I even note that I’ve started that climb, I’m past it and breathing harder than usual. What happened?

What happened is that I had Peter’s book in my head. I was thinking about the backwards-walking actor and the man he comes across. He has seen the man before in these woods. He counts him among the homeless woods dwellers, although he has always worn bright white shirts and creased pants. On this day the man is sitting at the edge of the woods next to an exercise path [Trimmstrecke]. He looks terrible, so ragged and bedraggled that it seems clear that “he would never stand up again by himself.” Besides that, he stinks to high heaven.

The “actor crouched down to the man who had been his friend, let himself fall down next to him, took on his posture. . . .” As this man succumbs to entropy, as he falls from an ordered life, the actor joins him in solidarity, acting as if he is falling as well.

The man, it turns out, is responding to every noise – human noise, machine noise, even the noises of nature – with shouts of “shut up!” The narrator says he is shouting in his native language and late in the description alternates the French “Ta gueule!” with the German “Halt’s Maul!” As far as I remember, this is the first reference to the fact that the city must be in France. All along, I’ve seen the actor walking through the woods outside Paris, the same woods feature in “Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht,” so this is no surprise.

The actor understands, after a while, that the man is trying to scream himself to death. He tries to be an audience for the man (Der Schauspieler neben ihm gab den Zuschauer.”). The man doesn’t notice him.

I think the following: 0) Peter Handke is writing a story about 1) the narrator who is writing this story, 2) the actor is the story’s hero and performs/acts the thoughts and actions of the story, 3) the shouting man is performing his own thoughts, 4) the actor is acting like an audience for the shouting man, 5) I’m reading, as a kind of audience, this story.

To say that this story is about an actor who wanders through the woods having some experiences misses the point entirely. This is a story about the narrator, about narration, about the construction of a story that in turns reconstructs the narrator.

Although he assumed the man would never again stand up, suddenly the opposite is shown to be true: “What, the actor’s visual acquaintance would never again stand up from his place in the middle of the exercise path? He was already standing, and that was no standing up but a snapping up.” The man has stood up, it turns out, to attempt to destroy the exercise device next to him on the path. It is the peeled trunk of a tree that rests on supporting posts and meant to act as a balance beam. The man has no chance of doing it any harm whatsoever, especially, the actor thinks, because he is in no way a violent man. But the act of attacking the device results in a change in the man’s face. The actor sees a child’s face. The narrator writes: “There he stood and let himself be seen.”

There’s something odd about trying to topple a tree trunk that is lying horizontal. But the earlier tree trunk that turned out to be a man (p. 66), and the fact that men and trees stand erect against the falling, felling forces of entropy, makes this, I think, an attempt to do what has been done to the man: to bring him low.

So that’s why I suddenly found myself at the top of this section of the trail breathing harder than I usually am at this point. I was thinking about the book and didn’t slow down where I might have.

Riding this trail is a variety of speaking. My riding, it spoke (and has spokes), it narrated.

*sta- Understanding the Standing Metaphor

Early in our class on "Language, most dangerous of possessions" (Hölderlin), we read Rousseau and Herder, two eighteenth-century writers who were disgusted with what they saw as the arbitrary and abstracted conventions of French and German civilization. One of their contentions was that civilized and civilizing language develops in its citizens increasing distance from the body. 

Writing in the early twentieth century, the German poet Rilke said that he wanted to read the entire historical dictionary started a century earlier by the Grimm brothers (of fairy tale fame). That would take him back to the origins of words, to the "word kernels," to the metaphorical roots that are lost with time and use.

There are advantages to abstraction, I guess, to shifting meanings and new contexts, to abstract thinking.

But every time I want to understand an idea better, I turn first to the underlying metaphors, reach for the Grimm's dictionary or to the OED, and more often than I would have ever thought possible, the root of an important word comes from our sense for ourselves as upright, standing beings. For years I've been trying to sort out this one root, and here's a bit of what I've come up with:

It is at least as old as the Sphinx’s riddle:

 

What being, with only one voice, has sometimes two feet, sometimes three, sometimes four, and is weakest when it has the most?

Man, Oedipus answered, because he crawls on all fours as an infant, stands firmly on his two feet in his youth, and leans upon a staff in his old age. [Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955) 10.]

 

We call ourselves wise (homo sapiens) and argue that our language differentiates us from other species of animals. But even more substantially, we define ourselves by our ancestors’ revolutionary achievement of a standing posture (homo erectus). We became human, in one sense, because we stood up. In another sense, we are who we are because of what that physical act has been made to stand for. Reflecting the substantial nature of that original erection, our languages and cultures constantly, insistently, even obstinately establish superstitions and understandings related to the constituative circumstances of our existence by systematic reference to our station and stature as standing beings, as static and ecstatic beings whose destiny is to cause things to stand. As these words based on the *stā root illustrate, metaphors of standing determine our conceptions of time and space; they shape our understanding of existence and ecstacy; they are the tools and the subject of philosophy and painting, poetry and fiction, sculpture and law, history and psychology, anthropology and linguistics, archaelogy and teleology.  Wherever, in short, humans have payed scientific or artistic attention to our status as human beings, we have done so through metaphors of standing.

And what is reflected and/or established in language is equally the case visually. Take this ancient Greek statue of a powerfully standing woman/goddess, her erect strength heightened by wings:

Or think about depictions of the crucifixion of Christ, which emphasize the destruction of his ability to stand (and about pictures of the resurrection, which show him upright again, no longer tied to the earth; the German word for resurrection, "Auferstehung," means "standing up again).

Or smile at Niki de St. Phalle's sculpture, with it's evocation of paradoxical lightness.

Homo erectus, indeed. In fact and metaphorically. Imagine our vocabulary if we were four-legged beings.