On Goya — Chapman Caddell

Hannah Arendt, after Cratylus, was attached to etymology. She arrived in America at its nadir, and the practice needed revival—in New York classrooms, in the suburbs of Southern California. She did her part. Empirical lows for etymology were reached in 1944 and 1942, for reasons yet unknown. 

Socrates directs us to things as they are, against his friend—to the source, to wise originators. 

Send back the ships. On to beginnings. Smoke collects down chimneys, and steamers land in English ports. London salons are alive with etymology in much the form we have it now. Kings and a queen, some epochs die. Salons are salons. Then bright eyes dim in musty flats as logicians retreat from philologists’ quarters. They back from doorways and race into uniforms fit to students of Latin. Noses are picked, slumbers are had. Enthusiasm for the future blossoms as healthy regard for method, and method gets more scrutable, after the Roman style. Scientists are restored to youth, and with time to original principles. No . . . gone in a flash! Scribbles against the moderns are lifted from parchment sheaves with care. Now dominion is restored to Latin over syntax, style, the word. Milton gets his sight back. From ash, residue of future smog, London is reconstructed, and English itself begins its split down to constituent parts. The smooth, synthetic shell falls off, and scholars find new casques. Saxon creaks against Romance tongues in Chaucer and the Green Knight’s suit, until the tension is released in fallback to continental forebears. Gerald of Wales rides about his island erasing in Latin, swallowing French. It’s Normans who re-erect etymology—to etimologie, or ethimologie, until the planks in seaside hovels are faded and restored to ships that wait to sail aristocrats to apposite shores, with truer talk. Sails are furled, at last . . . we have France! Still a long path to the civilized world. A millennium of fetid darkness follows, or some hundreds of years, Charlemagne aside. Charlemagne who called himself Karl, until he learned not to speak. Better luck in the draft of a hurried Legion, wisely decided to permit the Gauls to part from truth on native terms with the ruck in the Celtic wood. Even as Gallic populations explode and Rome pullulates as it did before with its scooters, bishops, sculptors—the world is less full than it was years back. Fewer people now . . . less chance for error. Error happens anyway, at the zenith of etymologia, when it is spoken as well as written. Latin has risen from the page, first in the foreign rumor then ex nihilo in a native roar, which peals through fora that erupt fully bricked from fathoms of dust and pottery shards, some of which are now assembled, some heated and wet and returned to earth. Cicero, on a modernizing kick, tries to muffle its resonant undertones, to fit a substitute to new markets, but veriloquium is a dead-end. It dies when he speaks it last, first, before the local senatus, and from the brief flower of a golden age we divert again to the course of truth. The stream that confers legitimate origin, wastes the barnacles from verities’ keels. Again to the ships! More vases are melted to dust. Merchants and scholars, goods and talks, are propelled to Syracuse, to Rhodes, to Athens by galley slaves whose burden lightens as they near the final goods’ unloading and their delivery, when the charge is fulfilled, from Roman chains. Low words and gold pass to Greeks on the docks, but the final business is transacted by scholars in academies, libraries, in the margins of reedy scrolls. Refreshed to youth, they bequeath to the Greeks a stronger, more vital etymologia when they depart. It has tone and dimension—a sharpedged, musical quality, with vowels and consonants fuller both. Up from Piraeus and through the city center, where new song emanates from the marble hall, to which Hermogenes and Cratylus came back from Philopappos. They lie on their sides just now on a square of divans with Socrates and a silent observer, and together they unspool implications from a word they deign almost not to pronounce. It is obscured by process. They lie and unspool the process. In an unaccustomed fit of wisdom, Socrates says it, ETYMOLOGIA, but they pay more heed to the thing in itself. Socrates anticipates Hermogenes’ questions and spins genealogy from ancient observations remembered and solved. (Hannah Arendt searched up beginnings in their ends.) Goodnatured Cratylus relaxes his pout. Hermogenes’ rapture becomes curiosity. Socrates, by agreement hideous and grizzled, shrinks at a steady rate the circles he traces habitually in air, until they resolve to a point, his toad’s eyes drawn to his index finger fixed on the faraway ceiling. He draws yellow flecks from the vapor that surrounds him and beats the wet off his lips with snaps of his tongue. An eccentric, an imbecile . . . for the West, a foundation. The reserved witness is sleeping now. He recalls to me ancient Boswell, who could only keep awake for talk. The other three leave him to doze—Socrates, then Hermogenes, then Cratylus deep in the night—more placid than when they assembled before. ETYMOLOGIA bounces out and off other tongues, the ductile instrument of sophists, and soars past the heads of admiring crowds and recedes as the age of heroes nears. Homer gets his sight back, then—an epoch of deed, less talk. Logia disappears first of course. With no good use for etymon, etymos, only eteos survives. Some start! Words belong to other words and later belong . . . what, to the dark? They are lost in a tangle of linear transmission. No, look—where have they gone? They founder on reefs, obscured by spume. 

Well—chin up. Out with the SONAR. Modern methods enable clearer sight than that of the ignorant and slothful deformed. SONAR, telescopes, satellite eyes. Fiat currency to maintain a network of pliant informants in all lands. To the bridge, Mr. Beekes! Past Aegean isles, past Trojan walls, down the Bosporus . . . lay anchor in the Sea of Marmora. Beekes looks afield to stoyg and söd and satya as the chain slips under the winedark surface—no, it’s fathomless blue—until from behind a protrusion of rock to the north shows a raft with shelter that cradles a family of four upcoast, through the mist that hangs heavy off the land. I wrench the scope from Beekes’s cold paws and lean out long over the prow with it raised to my left eye, to get a look at our quarry before they are taken in the fog. I watch the lips of the pilot, the father, as he presents some subject to his two young sons, preaching, pestering, and—there it is. “Eteos,” I speak on the father’s behalf. “Beekes! To the instruments!” He goes and I play lookout. We follow their course from a distance, close enough only to observe conversation through the spyglass, from my position astern. For weeks our barque trails the settlers as they wend north, sleeping in protected coves and pausing ashore by mudhut villages an hour at a time to leave their provisions. We come to know this family. The boys wrestle the entire journey on the wet, matted reeds that make up the deck. On their lips I descry, in steady evolution, eteos between grunts and indistinct calls. The boys grow clumsy as they near the destination. Their feints and hooks diminish in grace as their parents summon the energy to discipline them as never before, though harsh words seem always to set off a fight. Each takes a turn above the other, shouting ETEOS, but its refinement dissolves with the crispness of the boys’ maneuvers. It promotes the sibilant and drops the old ending. When they wash up to the beach at the southern extent of the Scythian plains, eteos has been reduced to set. The raft is disassembled to beam, to trunk, and the trunk grows small with the language. 

In sight of the huts that massed along half a mile of coast, Beekes and I stopped to observe. We dropped our anchor. We came with rations to last us millennia, and through the millennia we watched. Modern methods enabled us to keep good health through the many generations that rose from urns, rolled from flames, grew young, and fell up canals. The surface of the language was sometimes varied, but the roots remained as before, as later. We whiled the days swimming in the Zalpa and filling our logbooks up. Quiet months passed without much to note, and we spent them between the clear cool waters of the Zalpa and the smooth pine surface of the deck, hot with sun by morning’s end. Never in my life had I seen so many birds as from that deck on the Zalpa. Summers it hardly rained. Small clusters of cypress rose dark like palisades against otherwise unbroken skies. We saw palisades rise across the water too, and then over centuries we watched their retreat to the shore even as they gained in numbers. The other incursion of size in the blue was fire, fire from which new settlements, each more rustic than the old—though the old by then had always rotted to ash and soilblack heap—were assembled by the male inhabitants, who rode horses away to the north when their work was complete. New populations from flames stepped out to take their place without any thanks. After one fire, the builders walked to the north with their horses beside them. No man ever rode horses again. Beekes and I watched through matching pairs of binoculars, with a tape recorder set between us from which we made thousands of tapes that we spent long hours in the cold dark winter belowdecks parsing, listening through our headphones for the sound of subtle variants above the whoops and the crackle. We found them and heard them in many different voices. Accents evolved, devolved. We diligently waited on a change of substance that did not come. Huts turned to movable shelters, which became fewer, and Beekes grew visibly weary with the passage of so many years. A season after the village had dwindled to the last tent, we watched a final hairy Scythian roll it and decamp northeast. Beekes announced his intention to leave. “Words,” he said, the following morning, “must only begin in words.” He shrugged and left his powdered eggs to cool untouched on the table, then made for the hatch, lumbering, resigned with the Scythian to draw our anchor. The years had worn against him as they had not worn against me, I saw, as he dragged his bad leg behind. I pled with him to stay a bit longer, to make sure, but he had grown old. The trail was lost, or it had no end. Set, to set. His left cheek was cloven in halves by a crease that ran from the jaw to the eye’s far corner. I could not impose on him any longer, not with my conscience intact. The old man was blinking tears away as we made our goodbyes. Then we shook hands and I leapt off the side, and as I waded from the sea to take my first steps on that foreign shore, heaving my dry sack up on the sand, I turned and saw our ship diminishing fast to the south. He could not stand to see me leave. I beat my way north through the tall grass and between the groves of cypress that called my home to mind . . . the little I recalled of it then, after such long years abroad. For days I heard nothing but birdsong and grass.

Beekes had supplied me with two weeks’ provisions, but when I reached the river on the eleventh day and found the shallows thick with sturgeon, I entered to the waist and tried with my hands to snap some out. It felt less lonely with all those fish, even if, come night, I planned to fillet and roast them to stretch the last rations. I spent the afternoon there and had no luck, but as golden hour fell and I began to wade to the shore to pin up my lean-to in a near pine copse, I imagined I heard above the current and my knees, hitting the waves, a human voice not far off. I halted and listened and though it did not sound again, not to my ear, I decided to leave my effects on the bank and swim to the river’s other side." Millennia had made my shoulders very broad. It would not take long to establish what I heard, if I heard. I followed the east bank not half a mile north, until I espied, at the top of a hill—small against the high steep mountains that loomed with sparse vegetation over the scene, from farther to the east—the figure of a boy with a batlike instrument extended before him, a form of club or cudgel. He was shabbily dressed, though I scarcely looked better. Even from a distance I could see him move his jaw, but distinguishing a word in that muddle of lip and cheek and light, from below, was beyond me. There are languages in which the lips do not move. There are nonlabials. Over the wind in the grass I heard nothing. I crept up the slope through that grass with my head held below the top of the stalks, to evade detection, and stopped only when I could hear every utterance unstrained. He was producing a sequence of sounds as fluent as any I heard in my life, however little meaning I made of them. He swayed, and while he swayed he loosed a torrent of vowels and consonants that only by chance seemed ever to coalesce, and when they coalesced and the boy made apparent effort to repeat them, whether pleased for the sound or for their sense, they came out altered. Vowels lengthened into diphthongs, and plosives shaded into heavier plosives, while amid them mixed freely sounds of pure feeling that could not belong to any word, moans and grunts of unchecked expressions of pain, of physical exhaustion, and a kind of—I thought I detected—tempered exaltation, of which I could only explain the tempering. In its way his performance captivated me, but when I heard it begin to loop into itself I made to retreat down the slope, thinking that I stood more to lose than gain from holding my position any longer. I slid through the dirt on my front the same way I climbed, only back, until a familiar syllable escaped from undifferentiable noise. SET, I heard—SET. I put my retreat on hold. I looked up, and as I watched he repeated the word again and again—set, set—with marked unease, not once again with the precision of the first, but I could not mistake him to mean another word.

I still find myself unable to look away from what follows, long as the years have been. I find myself almost extinguished by it. The boy swings his club in the grass and lifts it with another boy attached by his head to its end. The second boy clutches an identical club and, wavering, backs away from the first. Their faces cannot be seen sharply for the light, and they look, impossibly, to fight without legs. The grass, the light, and the slope conspire to give both boys the appearance of torsos hovering over the earth, opposed, as if unfinished. They swing at each other with their cudgels, and the cracks and thumps mingle with indistinct gurgles and shouts while, sinking from meaning to animal sound, my essential syllable weakens. They swing at each other and shout less exactly the word as they swing, and as they gain in strength and energy and the wounds close on their arms, the word, if it is a word, diminishes to breath. It becomes an imitation of the cudgels cutting the air, or less . . . slight exhalation. They continue until they restore each other and then hold still, but for the flutter of the ragged clothes in a gentle breeze off the river. Each one glowers at the other, speechless and unspoken, eyes locked across a small space of grass now waving too slowly to rustle. Soon the sun should set in the east. For some unknown wrong, an irrecoverable, wordless slight, the two boys stand or hover ready to release themselves into language, and however many times, eyes open or closed, I repeat this scene, I cannot trace back beyond any form but this, the originating silence.

***

Chapman Caddell is a writer in Madrid.