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Language

Language, redesigned.

German is known for its compound words, the joining of two words that then create a new meaning, some of which have gained enough of a reputation to be understood by readers who primarily speak English. Schadenfreude, joy in other people’s misfortune, might be one such, as is Weltschmerz, the heartache over the world’s woes, or your own, for that matter.

I have different favorites, all connected to my own person, Weichei among them, literally a soft egg, but referring to one decidedly wimpy. Then there is the innere Schweinehund, literally an internal pig dog, which refers to one’s weakness of willpower. (Not to be mistaken for Schweinehund, pig dog, which refers to a particularly mean villain. Deutsche Sprache….) Let’s add the Tagedieb, the day thief, who dawdles away her time, that lazy layabout, and Eselsbrücke, the donkey bridge, a name for mnemonic devices, those memory aides which have become indispensable for this aging brain.

Beware of words

One of the joys of reading poetry in your own language is the discovery of compound words that do not exist in the extant language. There is a real thrill when these inventions make perfect sense or suggest something that is new but obvious, or create a hook for you to think about language as it should be but has never seemingly come about. They are also often creating an uncanny mood for their simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity.

These invented compound words are also a nightmare for the translator, and a struggle for the second-language reader, since they would not know what is established and what is designed vocabulary.

Luckily, one of the masters of German 20th century poetry, Paul Celan, had some of the best translators one could wish for, John Felstiner, and more recently Pierre Joris, who spent 50 years to convey the entirety of Celan’s works. (The newest edition is Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry. And here is a long but informative interview with Joris about his translation work.)

Even they, though, might not quite capture what a native speaker intuits: Take Celan’s creation Sprachgitter, for example, translated as speechgrille. Gitter are primarily used in German to refer to prison bars. Bars keep you in. Bars can also keep others out. A languagebar or speechbar is obviously not a good translation since it would sound like an obstacle. But the sense of language as a force that prevents departure or entry, a separation device, is not exactly embodied in grille, which rather suggests permeability.

These difficulties aside, it is remarkable that a poet who survived the Holocaust (his entire family did not) sticks to the language of the murderers, admittedly also the language of his mother, even though he is fluent in many other languages.

More importantly, the poet was aware of the abuse of the German language by the totalitarian perpetrators. He called it murderous speech.

 “Only one thing remained reachable, close, and secure amid all the losses,” he later said of his experiences in the camps: “language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.” “But,” he added, “it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” (More on this here and here.)

The ideological core message of supremacists, as we discussed earlier, is one of separation: us vs. them, the good against the bad, the nation against the enemy, the White against the Black, the Nazi against the Jew. Celan’s language systematically undermines separation by fusing words together, words that never belonged in a pair, the compounds creating an ambivalence that stands in direct opposition to the absolutist value and expression of murderous speech. His new words allow us, on occasion, to cross the threshold of separation joining something new.

Graffitti on a store for Judaica

What is a memoryrose?

What is breathturn, what is timestead?

What is ashglory in the context of the Holocaust? Have to read the poems!

Here is Celan reading his own work, translation in subtitles.

Music composed for three of his poems, here.

Photographs are from Paris where Celan lived until his suicide at age 50 in 1970.

Bonus: Here is an excerpt from Jewish Currents that analyzes one of my favorite poems (a stanza, really) as the professionals do…. I just liked the imagery placed into my hometown, otherwise had no clue.

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Language as Tool

In 1995 the German publishing house Aufbau-Verlag printed two volumes of diaries, covering the years 1933 to 1945. They were written by Victor Klemperer, a German Jewish professor of Roman languages, who had survived the Holocaust. The diaries won great acclaim both in Germany and later in English translation in the US – Peter Gay, in his review for the New York Times, declared them a collective masterpiece and referred to Klemperer as “one of the greatest diarists—perhaps the greatest—in the German language.” Klemperer had been dead for over 30 years by the time of publication, having spent his post-Holocaust years in his hometown of Dresden, chronicling life in East Germany as well.

Immediately after the war, Klemperer published a small book, a lexicon of what he called Lingua tertii imperii (“the language of the Third Reich”), in which he noted and analyzed the rhetorical giveaways of the regime in painstaking detail. Equal part linguistic analysis and survivor’s memoir, the book describes many of the rhetorical tools that we see in abominal revival in our current political landscape. (It is a hard read, on many levels.)

On the Eerie Prescience of a Nazi-Era Diarist

Some contemporary authors, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny comes to mind, pick up on Klemperer’s analysis of the language of fascism and pre-facism and draw out the parallels to our time in more accessible form. Tools of supremacist language range from distorting the meaning of words, lulling people into a collective trance, erasing boundaries between fact and fiction, making it impossible to hold on to truth. Importantly, the rhetoric establishes an infinite repeat of an “us vs them,” uniting your followers against a common enemy.

Klemperer describes numerous ways in which truth is thrown out of the window. For one, leaders ignore it and supplant it with numerous small lies. Secondly, they do so by relentlessly repeating phrases and ideas, making the concepts or slogans familiar, familiarity that builds an emotional connection between them and their followers. Thirdly, they consciously use contradictory logic, forcing us to abandon rational reasoning. And lastly, they demand unlimited faith and loyalty, establishing faith over reason. When you put loyalty and emotion before reason, you will not be able to be persuaded by rational argument, becoming a true follower buying into any lie delivered by the leader.

All this came to mind when I was confronted with anti-Semitic language and symbols displayed in the media images of the people storming the Capitol last week. The rioters came from many different backgrounds, but were fused by shared “enemies,” using language (displayed on t-shirts and sweatshirts, or symbolized by hand gestures or types of flags and banners) that identified the enemy as “the Jew.”

Some of the language is easily (and horridly) accessible, like Camp Auschwitz printed on a sweatshirt. Other parts are more available to the initiated – or do you know what “6MWE” on a t-shirt means? It is an acronym common among white supremacists standing for “6 Million Wasn’t Enough.” Or have you noticed how certain names appear in triple parentheses? They stand for “the Jew,” or Jewish, a linguistic marker that fascist Germans used to employ: Forced to repeat “the Jew Klemperer” enough times, one thinks of that person not as Victor Klemperer but as “The Jew.” The Jews were in effect deprived of their name, and in turn of their humanity.

The New Synagoge

The Anti-Defamation League has a website that compiles and explains these various hate symbols, a great educational tool. Here are some examples.

I have been unable to stop thinking about the rhetoric used by the GOP and these words found in The American Interest, (not exactly a hotbed of progressivism, but I do try to read all sides…) by the very smart Elisabeth Draw:

“Demagogues and authoritarians need enemies. They use language to distort, manipulate, and corrupt discourse; to direct, control, and oppress…..In Hitler’s Germany linguistic habits shaped attitude and culture, and eventually acquiescence to a system of segregation and dehumanization. The language of the Third Reich was corrosive, and contagious.”

Someone here, and now, surely has learned and re-implemented that lesson. We saw the consequences on January 6th.

Photographs are from Dresden, Klemperer’s hometown.

Music is presenting Victor Klemperer’s cousin, Otto Klemperer, a world-renowned conductor. I chose Egmont because it is a tragedy, written by the quintessential German poet Goethe, about the downfall of a man who trusts in the goodness of those around him.

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The function(s) of silence

The dictionary Merriam-Webster gives us a few definitions of silence as a noun:

1: forbearance from speech or noise : MUTENESS 

2: absence of sound or noise : STILLNESS in the silence of the night

3: absence of mention:a: OBLIVION, OBSCURITY – b: SECRECY weapons research was conducted in silence

or as a verb:


1: to compel or reduce to silence : STILL//silenced the crowd

2: SUPPRESS //silence dissent

3: to cause to cease hostile firing or criticism// silence the opposition

Silence, in other words, is not just a desirable state to enable contemplation or soothe our stretched nerves. It can also be used to achieve certain communicative goals: keeping a secret (which can be good or bad,) signaling who belongs to certain groups or serving as a means of exclusion, or as manipulation in the service of power. You can be silent because you have nothing to say, or you don’t want to say something or you are not allowed to say something.

There are controlled, calculating silences: The majority of Republican politicians, until yesterday, were silent on the wearing of masks even though all scientific evidence pointed to them as effective in slowing the pandemic. Being silent on the numbers of infected people seems to be a magical tool to make the disease disappear, whether we are talking the President’s proposals regarding testing, or the disappearance of hospital admittance statistics across red states.

Then there are resigned, powerless silences – children who are undergoing traumatic experiences often cease to speak. People who have never been listened to don’t want to waste energy by futilely raising their voices.

Silence is often socially and culturally regulated: who gets to speak first or who does not get to speak at all tells volumes about power hierarchies. There are not many languages who do not have proverbs that allude to the desire to silence chattering women folk, for example. And we can finally put a myth about gossiping women to silent rest: new research shows they don’t do any more of that than men.

Many terms in both German and English connote a critical or negative perspective rather than a positive one: “Shut Up!, wall of silence, I’m lost for words, under the cloak of silence, speechlessness, the silence treatment, shocked into silence, hushing something up. (The German translation for the last one, by the way, is literally “killing with silence,” totschweigen, wanting to make something disappear for good.)

Silence, then, can be political. Some years back, for example, a famous German author, Martin Walser, talked in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade about the “instrumentalization of the Holocaust” and the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz as a “moral bludgeon.” Let’s no longer talk about it, we feel bombarded! He recommended that Germans withdraw to their own conscience, to a place of “profound inward solitude” and engage in “the withdrawal into themselves.”

All hell broke loose. The solution to return to the individual conscience in order to avoid the public remembering, silencing it, in effect, was not something that sat easily with many people who had worked hard to educate about the Holocaust particularly in light of the rising neo-fascist tendencies in younger generations as well. The Jewish community was mortified, with its then-leader Ignaz Bubis decrying the re-establishment of a scenario which has nourished anti-Semitism for hundreds of years: the revengeful Jew, who doesn’t want to make peace and the poor Christian victim who seeks salvation through his quiet lonely suffering. (Ref.)

Closer to home we have a great many examples of silence in politics to choose from – beginning with Richard Nixon’s invocation of the silent majority in 1969. Or think of the current debate around the persistence of racism in all of its ugly forms. Pence, for example, has not allowed the words Black Lives Matter to cross his lips even if directly asked in interviews. Police departments around the country are silent on crimes committed against Black citizens, until public pressure boils over. The current failure of the Senate to pass pending legislation – The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill – is another example of silence on the part of the American state. No federal law was EVER passed to criminalize the practice of lynching.

The moment of silence that is invoked like clockwork in our age of mass shootings is a tool as well: we do not wish to acknowledge that gun suicides claim more than 20,000 lives in the United States annually; that American women are 11 times more likely to be shot and killed than their counterparts in other high-income countries; that black men account for 6 percent of the U.S. population but half of its gun homicide victims. With its roots in religious practice the gesture seems to indicate that we are helpless to prevent something we’d like to think of as an act of G-d, rather than the outcome of profit motives for the weapons industry combined with structurally racist policies.

Back to the word itself: silence has its etymological root in the latin verb desinere: to cease, stop, desist, abandon. Silence across history has been responsible for abandoning those who needed a voice, their own being stopped. Silence, if you want to reverse the letters, gave license to the abuse of power. Let’s desist.

Photographs today found on a walk along NE 22nd and surrounds.

Music by Sir John Tavener, composed to capture his escape from a near-death experience.

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Yiddish Lesson

I had said no talk of the virus this week. But that doesn’t mean I can’t talk politics…. or more precisely a certain assessment of politicians.

Let’s try it in an educational context. How about learning a few Yiddish words? Words that perfectly grasp the range of human behavior and/or certain personality types? The poster below is a decent memory aide for the yiddish words you might be interested to learn. Just think of the person and the word will come to mind! (It first appeared on twitter in 2019 which also explains why Jeffrey Epstein is still on there.)

I collected some translations from different sources since the poster itself did not provide any, wherever I could find them on the internet, in order of left to right.

(tRump) Chazer:

Pig khazer (khazeyrim) kha’∙zer (kha∙zey’∙rim) (m.) חזיר


(Mnuchin) Ganef:

Thief ganef (ganovim) ∙ (m.) גנבֿ

(Conway) Ligner:

Liar ligner ∙ (m.) ליגנער

(Epstein) Mahmzer:

Bastard   mahm’∙zer  (m.)  ממזר

(Kushner) Neb·bish: a person, especially a man, who is regarded as pitifully ineffectual, timid, or submissive.”He’s a nebbish. No money, no prestige, no future”

(Ivanka tRump) Nokhshleper: The verb nokhshlepn means “to drag after”; a nokhshleper is a follower whom you have no desire to lead.

(Eric tRump) Pish·er: an insignificant or contemptible person.

(Donald tRump) Putz: a stupid or worthless person.

(Bannon) Schlub: a talentless, unattractive, or boorish person.”the poor dumb shlub just didn’t get it”

(Nunes) Shmegegge: (שמעגעגע) baloney; hot air; nonsense. shmegegge. hokum, meaninglessness, nonsense, nonsensicality, bunk – a message that seems to convey no meaning

(McConnell) Schmuck:

jerk, fool, idiot, contemptible person; naive person, person easy to deceive; (vulg. penis, dick, asshole) (American Jewish) shmok shmok (.) שמאָק

(de Vos) Schnorrer: beggar; sponger, moocher, parasite shnorer shnor’∙er (m.) שנאָרער

(Miller) Shande: shame  (f.) שאַנדע

(Guliani) Shleger: Bully, violent person.

Yiddish שלעגער ‘shleger’ from the verb שלאָגן ‘shlogn,’ meaning hit or strike.

(Putin) Shtarker: a man of great strength, a strong, stout fellow

Yiddish שטאַרק shtark ‘strong,’ declined for masculine, שטאַרקער shtarker

(Pence) Tsvuak:

hypocrite(m.)tsvuakצבֿעק

Many of the descriptions fit, I do take exception, though, for Steve Bannon…. I’d say he is a geferlekh mensch (געפערלעך מענטש) – a dangerous person. And Guliani could also be considered meschuggene….

Photographs today are all of plants that you would also see at this time of year in Northern or Eastern Europe where Yiddish was spoken – although I photographed them last Sunday on my walk.

Here is moving music from the Yiddish Glory project:

A tremendous discovery was made in Kiev, Ukraine. In the manuscript department of the Ukrainian National Library, archivists found a number of sealed boxes. They contained hand-written Yiddish documents dating back to 1947. Upon examination, it turned out that the pages contained thousands of songs, written by Yiddish-speaking Jews in Ukraine during World War II. Leading Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologists and linguists, including the legendary Moisei Beregovsky, had archived this music by Jewish refugees, Jewish soldiers in the Red Army and Holocaust survivors, who had defied Hitler in song. Stalin’s authorities arrested Beregovsky and his colleagues in 1950, and the documents were sealed. Scholars believed them to have been destroyed forever. University of Toronto professor Anna Shternshis learned of these songs buried deep in the archive. None has been performed in nearly 70 years. Until now. Shtershis worked with Psoy Korolenko, a poet, philologist, and performer of Yiddish music, reconstruct the tunes for these songs. The process was similar to that of archaeological digs, as they analyzed scarce supplementary notes, contextualized the lyrics, and took a leap of imagination.

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Distracting, if Useless Beauty

For fear that you’ll all desert me if I don’t loosen up, here is a mid-week respite before I return to issues of philosophy-in-the-times-of-a-pandemic.

As always, Merriam Webster delivered perfect distraction, offering a thread of words that I was mostly unfamiliar with, in this, my second language. Beautiful, obscure, and often quite useless words. Let’s see if they can be illustrated with the appropriate visuals, describing a typical Heuer Wednesday morning in the time of crisis.

My Matutinal ( of, relating to, or occurring in the morning) preoccupation, other than leaving exercise to others,

is to ignore my Deipnosophist (a person skilled in table talk) Beloved

because he distracts me from putting the finishing touches on all things Jentacular (pertaining to breakfast.)

and should not see me Catillate (to licke dishes.)

(Come on. You didn’t expect a photo for that, did you?)

My Scripturient (having a strong urge to write) nature

later has me send him a text, since he still can’t decipher my Cacography (bad handwriting) on a piece of paper. (38 years and counting…)

My message: I’ll be Solivagant (rambling alone, marked by solitary wandering)

And keep the 6 feet social distance, if need be, by means of being Filipendulous (suspended by or strung upon a thread.)

Not. I might be climbing the walls, but I will not be climbing rocks, knowing it would be a Bêtise (an act of foolishness or stupidity.) No solitary ramblings either, as it turns out, still too much under the weather.

Then again…..

Who knows, I might be fit again tomorrow.

And here are some more words set to music.

For REAL storytelling, listen to this. Your soul will get a good airing.

‘

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Go, Stella

Maybe my brain is certifiably going downhill, but I watched this video of Stella, the dog, jumping over and over and over and over into leaf piles yesterday with such fascination and abandon that I actually forgot to worry for the entire 3 minutes of its duration.

I have, as you’ll know if you have followed me for the last years, never posted an animal video, I believe, outside of some scientific demonstrations of the intelligence of crows or some such. But this was what I needed. Joy, pure. Go ahead, roll your eyes already….

It mattered, because I was thinking about animals in two very different, but related contexts: For one, the horrific use of racist language – the Chinese virus, the Kung flu – by people working in our government is just one step removed from the language that comes next: dehumanizing terms that compare people to animals, humans to what is conceived of as subhumans. From a previous blog entry:

Psychological research, originally looking into Nazi use of dehumanizing language in preparation for the Holocaust, has shown that merely listening to it increases the willingness to use violence; some international agencies even consider that kind of naming a precursor to genocide. Once a class of people is dehumanized, the usual compassion and empathy that we extend to fellow human beings is weakened. The part of your brain that controls social relations becomes less active, a physiologically measurable effect when you are exposed to this kind of language. The door to systematic mistreatment is then wide open.

And secondly, I learned about the (differing) roles animals played in the Third Reich, from a by all reports fabulously researched and described new German book by Jan Mohnhaupt, Tiere im Nationalsozialismus. Here is my summary of the book review (not yet in English translation, alas):

The book looks at animals as the daily companions of Nazis, as means of propaganda, as depictions of the enemy and as pest. Horses were seen as heroic, trained to find landmines and boiled to save soldiers from starvation. Potato beetles were intended to be used as a biological weapon to induce starvation in nations at the Eastern front. Brown bear cubs were kept as a source of entertainment for concentration camp wardens, in a “zoo” on site built by inmates. Dogs were seen as part of the master race, cats as Jewish. German Shepherds in particular, represented the purest of German dogs, the idealization of the populist-national race ideologies. Apex animals like lions and wolves (Hitler’s code name was Wolf ) ranked net to ………pigs! Pigs scored high in their fanatical phylogenetic universe, setting a contrast to Jewish custom that declares pigs unclean for consumption.

Jews were soon not allow to keep pets and had to euthanize the ones they already owned, because the Gestapo did not want to deal with them after their owners were deported. Nazi scientists applied knowledge and methodological approaches extrapolated from animal research to humans once the moral borders had shifted toward labeling our own kind as subhumans or human animals. The racial fanaticism managed to elevate some animals above humans, in other words. But it also allowed to engage in plans for genetic “purification,” just like farmers attempted to perfect the breed and purge the coarser element.

This becomes particularly evident if you look at Nazi legislation. (Here is an essay in English that delivers the details.) To summarize, by 1933 laws for the protection of animals and the regulation of slaughter and hunting were passed. Herman Goering announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments” and threatened to “commit to concentration camps those who still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property.” Between Nazi leaders’ affection for animals (Hitler was a committed vegetarian) and enmity towards humans, and the political and ideological purpose served by abolishing the moral distinctions between animals and people the systematic extinction of whole groups of subhumans was just a matter of time.

How is that for downward comparison? Did I make you forget about our own situation for a minute? If not, just watch Stella again!

Yesterday’s walk – you guessed it, Oaks Bottom – served as the background for composing today’s blog. It’s a miracle that so many birds hung out, given that the place was filled with young, noisy families trying to escape cabin fever…

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19 words for the Cranky and Disagreeable

If you want to learn about all of them, you’ll need to go to the Merriam-Webster website and click here.

I selected a few, mostly to be able to show some photographs from a regular walk that cheers me up should I be cantankerous (difficult or irritating to deal with.) As you might suspect I walk that walk often.

It is a promenade that starts off Macadam Av, at Willamette park. It winds its way along the river, with views over small sailboat harbors, sandbars, center islands where herons and bald eagles nest. You get to see some bridges, and the skyline of downtown, if you go far enough North instead of turning around because you are hangry (irritable or angry because of hunger.)

I walked here for 30 plus years, in the beginning with the baby stroller, since it was easy to navigate on the asphalt and the boys would get a kick out of seeing all the birds. That is before they started to walk, talk and become eristic (characterized by disputatious and often subtle and specious reasoning) in their desire to minimize physical exercise.

A defining feature is a small sculpture of a beaver. For the life of me I can’t remember if it was already there when the kids were little. My own inner child’s soul starts to radiate, whenever I pass by, because someone with a sense of delight puts it into seasonally appropriate costumes. Captious (marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections) people might object to disgracing art – I thrive on the fact that it makes me laugh.

The walk is not for the faint of heart, though. Even the most stoic among us can become choleric (easily moved to often unreasonable or excessive anger : hot-tempered) when almost hit by a speeding biker for the umpteenth time.

It is also not for lovers of expensive footwear, who are guaranteed to be fumish (tending to fume, choleric) when they step into the geese droppings that cover the path. And speaking of the all-perversive geese: walking there with your dog on leash will make you splenetic (marked by bad temper, malevolence, or spite) because your arm is dangling by a thread from your shoulder socket after being tugged once too often towards the gaggle of Canadians.

Yet on a day like this, where I am surly (irritably sullen and churlish in mood or manner) because my external hard drive crashed and I have no access to my iphoto library until it is repaired, the walk is just the ticket. All photos posted today were taken by an iPhone across the last years (thank you, iCloud), and so will be the one this afternoon.

Let’s hear it for irascible geese:

And here is something about parachuting beavers:

Tell me this didn’t cheer you up…..

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From word to image

Earlier this week I wrote about metaphors as a subtle way of manipulating people into supporting or refusing certain actions. Today, for our last bit on language, I want to look at metaphors that appear in poems, directly or indirectly influencing how you appreciate a text – IF you understand the metaphors, that is.

The reason I am interested in this is, in some ways, selfish. I use a lot of metaphors in my own visual art, and am often called on to explain what I mean. I always wonder if the images themselves are not strong enough for appreciation, but need spelling out – and if and how that will alter the way people perceive them. I also worry that all my esoteric bits of knowledge just need a space to play, completely confusing the hell out of an image, never mind the people who view it. (Which reminds me: My calendar for next year, using the metaphor of whaling as a warning of the consequences of ruthless environmental exploitation, can still be ordered. All proceeds ($30) go to Street Roots. It might not arrive in time for the holidays, but definitely in time for January 1st.)

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I am sure, there is a whole literature on metaphoric use in poetry; I have not read it. I realize, however, that for most poems I read, I do NOT get the myriad clues of higher learning or meaning strewn about. It is almost like they are messages for a group of the initiated, who pride themselves of being clever enough to get all the hints. The rest of us can just enjoy the language or a general mood. Here is an example (the link gets you to the original German version. I offer my translation below – the original is in rhyme which I could not capture in English.)

The Game is over

The poem was published in 1956 by Ingeborg Bachmann, a darling of the post-war literary scene, who tragically died in her late 40s when, while smoking and falling asleep in bed, she accidentally set herself on fire. She was the young token female poetess in the German-speaking landscape, coming to early fame with her poetry, even though her 2 prose books were substantively stronger.

So what do I get out of the poem? A sister speaking to her brother, conjuring up childhood games and enchantments, images and memories of times at play. For every positive thing, there is a warning of impending loss or doom. No choice, either, we “have to go to sleep, the game is over -” childhood ends. Glimpses of joy soon turning to a sense of sadness. Fond elicitation of how we all used to play, back there in the 1950s before we had to grow up. A bitter taste in your mouth that dangers abound and magic childhood words will be forgotten.

And what did I miss? Man, about everything of importance. The floating on a raft through the sky bit turns out to be a reference to the Isis and Osiris myth, the ancient narrative of sibling incest and undying love. The tents in the desert, the sand in your hair refer back to both, Bachman’s own figment of a novel, Franza, that deals with secretive sibling love, ending badly in Egypt, and also to Paul Celan’s poetry – he was her lover on and off, with the doomed affair not able to bridge the chasm between her parent’s Nazi past and his parents death in the camps. Never mind his marriage, and his desperation, leading to early suicide.

The petal alighting on her seal? Turns out the seal (Siegel) is a different name for a word describing the female sexual organs of plants – I leave the rest to your imagination, and your attention drawn to the fact that darling brother becomes Darling in the last stanza, with the parents aghast. Don’t have to be a psychoanalyst for that one.

Does this added knowledge enhance your reading of the piece? Or complicate it? Does our lack of the relevant education which would unlock the metaphors mean we’ll never “get” poetry? Is it enough to just look at the “pictures” presented by the metaphors?

Well, someone made pictures out of them (which is where I got to thinking about this poem in the first place and then spending hours as a detective trying to get the bits and pieces of the puzzles from various sources.) Anselm Kiefer created a whole cycle of paintings, dedicated to Bachman, some including snippets from her poems, in our case the lines “your and my age, the age of the world” written next to or on the depicted pyramids. If you had never heard of the poem you would not get the hints in the painting either…..

In the end it comes down to this, I think: if you want to communicate with everyone, use the words and the images that are common good. Enough of them around. If you want to impress the learned set, go right ahead and make it complicated. Leave clues that only the initiated know how to decipher, upon which they feel victorious and in turn judge you to be a precious artist. And now let me go to make a really straightforward montage. How about an apple and a snake?

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Photographs are from THE coolest exhibit of a model train set at the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma. As a sister without brothers I never had the pleasure of that toy. Then again, the boys I knew were really not allowed to play much with them either – an honor reserved for their fathers…..

Music today is a childhood favorite – Ravel’s fairy tales for children….

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Liar, liar….

Now why do you immediately assume I refer to a certain politician who shall remain nameless? Am I that predictable?

No, I want to discuss today yet another effect language can have on our interactions with the world. Over the last days I described how language can direct our attention to certain things, shaping our experiences with our environment.

I also described how language can establish certain frames which will influence how we all make our decisions (beast/virus), often through the use of metaphors. And last but not least I reported on how specific use of language can affect our emotions which in turn will lead to different actions we are willing to take (verb/noun form.)

Today I thought we’ll look at how language triggers beliefs which in turn lead you to (mis)perceive what’s out in the real world despite the facts in front of your very eyes.

Here is a straightforward example: I tell you that you will observe someone in a conversation and, by the way, we know this person to be a liar. After you have watched him or her, I ask you to estimate how often that person behaved in ways assumed typical of liars. Turns out you will tell me that that person quite frequently averted their gaze (a habit associated with liars in our belief system.) Problem #1: that belief is actually mistaken! Liars do not avert their gaze more often than non-liars….) Problem #2: the person who you watched converse with someone else did in no way avert their gaze as often as you swear you saw them do. (We have the videotape: we can count….)

The language suggested a concept – liar! – which in turn triggered a false belief – gaze aversion alert! – and you end up “observing” what you expected to see. Except the observation is in no way supported by what actually took place. No shifty eyes anywhere! (You can read a scholarly piece on many of our misconceptions about liars here.)

Here is a similar example, except this time language affects memory rather than perception. If you see a videotaped car accident and I probe your memory for it weeks later, asking how fast the cars were going when they bumped into each other (or, alternatively, when they crashed into each other) your estimate of the speed you observed will systematically vary. More striking, though, people in the “crashed” condition also remember vividly seeing broken glass, when there was none in the original tape. Just think about the implications for eyewitness reports in response to police questioning.

Photographs today show words I picked up on the street, often triggering certain concepts. From suggestions to commands…

Music was chosen for the fit with the concept, but also to stretch ourselves a little bit into the more contemporary realm. Stick with it!

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Give those verbs a rest!

Yesterday I tried to spell out that language does influence thought, although not in the direct, unchangeable way that anthropologists like Sapir and Whorf suggested. Language can guide attention and what you attend to ultimately shapes your thinking.

People who want to influence what you are thinking are perfectly aware of these mechanisms. I can frame something as a positive outcome – this experimental medication has a 50% success rate! – or as a negative one – this experimental medication shows a 50% failure rate… – and lo and behold, people choose the treatment in scenario one and decide to forgo it in scenario two, even though there is no objective difference in the information – the medication works half of the time in both scenarios. The language use of failure vs. success makes all the difference.

Politicians know how to grab your attention – incessant repetitive messages, for example, that constantly force you to attend to a claim, have an impact. (This is one of the reasons why you should avoid repeating your adversaries’ claims with your added criticism – it increases people’s exposure to those claims.)

Politicians also know that the values of their constituencies and those of the other side often vary. In our own polarized environment, Republicans overwhelmingly value in-group loyalty, respect for authority and purity, while Democrats pay attention to fairness, harm-avoidance and reciprocity in social interaction. You can trigger these values and consequently increase the support for your political programs by using language that is associated with those concepts. If you want Republicans to support environmental measures, for example, you will be more successful pointing to the purity of our water and forests, than to how pollution will harm those most likely exposed to it. (Long versions of this argument can be found in a book by linguist George Lakoff, Don’t think of an Elephant! which should be on the nightstand of every Democratic presidential campaign advisor…)

In more insidious ways, metaphors do the work for you just fine, when you try to manipulate people into a certain direction. Scientists at USC, for example, asked people for solving a typical social problem like crime. Half of the group learned about a city wrecked by crime that preyed like a beast on the people. The other half learned that crime was a virus infecting the city. Independent of political affiliation, people increased their support for punitive measures when exposed to the beast metaphor, and opted for supportive measures when thinking about a virus. (A current textbook example of this can be found in the British press after the London Bridge stabbing. Look at the language used for the perpetrator and the proposed counter measures by Tories vs. Labour….)

It’s not just apt metaphors, though, that trigger reactions. In a fascinating recent study, a team of Israeli scientists found that how we use language will influence our emotions, particularly anger, which in turn will shape policy preferences. The researchers explain:

One of the most central and prevalent emotions in the Israeli-Palestinian inter-group conflict context is anger. Anger stems from the perception that other people are carrying out an action that is unjust, unfair, or contrary to acceptable societal norms and is associated with the goal of actively challenging the injustice and confronting the agents responsible, both at the interpersonal level and intergroup level. Importantly, in the context of intergroup conflict, anger has largely been found to decrease support for concessions and increase support for aggressive policies toward adversaries

In the most subtle manipulation, using the same word as either a noun or a verb, the researchers were able to manipulate the degree to which anger was felt. Presenting a policy as “the division of Jerusalem” vs. “dividing Jerusalem,” for example, affected participants’ subsequent evaluation of the policies. “Phrasing support for concessions as well as retaliatory policies toward the out-group in noun form (vs. verb form) reduced levels of anger. Subsequently willingness to compromise went up, and support for retaliation was diminished.

Put simply: the less angry you are the more willing you are to compromise. Verbs pull your attention towards the agency of the adversaries (e.g., dividing Jerusalem) which incites anger since you deem them responsible for the crisis. They are also more vivid in our minds, since we can imagine the activity. Nouns, on the other hand, are more abstract, creating a larger psychological distance, not triggering as much anger.

Let’s use nouns then: Conflict Resolution! Anger Reduction! Concession! Compromise! Peace. (And no, I am not naive to suggest it’s this simple. I just firmly believe that every bit that might help is worth a try.)

Here are peaceful winter landscapes – first snow on the mountains – from last week.

Haydn‘s Missa in tempore belli (Mass at a Time of War) describes alternatives.

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