June 2, 2006
-
‘Ursprache’ beats ‘weltschmerz’
to win American spelling bee
Weltschmerzand the
Ursprache
From eudaemonist.com,
a quotation from
Paul Zanker’s
The Mask of Socrates:“Zanker describes the photograph [above] as ‘Walter Benjamin looking
out at the viewer, his head propped on his hand, his face filled with
loneliness and weltschmerz.’”Benjamin was a Jewish Marxist. For a Jewish perspective on
spelling, see Log24, Nov. 11, 2005. For a leftist perspective on
Benjamin and last night’s crucial spelling word “Ursprache,” see “Ground Zero, an American Origin,” by Mary Caputi (Poroi, 2, 1, August 2003):The Baroque sensibility of ruin emphasizes a meaninglessness that too
many possibilities deliver. Aimlessness and malaise make life into
exhausting toil in the absence of coherence. In overdetermined
realities, meaning appears arbitrary and erratic, as the world’s
connection to God seems lost or withheld. At the extreme, everyday
life is as full of noise and commotion as it is devoid of intrinsic
meaning. Connections among people wither with the onset of
overabundance and despair. Recognition of this condition induces
acedia, a weariness of life. Here the malaise of modernity and ruins
ties to Benjamin’s interest inTrauerspiel, German tragic drama, and the tragedies of
Shakespeare. All respond to a plague of lost spiritual connections
and a meaningless earthly existence where incessant toil and trouble –
“tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” — contribute to a chronic, wearing
sense of pain.Benjamin’s interest in this form of melancholia,
from suffering a sort
of spiritual exile, is evident in his 1916 essay “On Language as Such and
On the Language of Man.” In this text, he explains that theUrsprache, our “original” language, is “blissful” precisely
because
it lacks the arbitrariness that results from overdetermination.Ur-speech is Adamic language, the linguistic power that God gives
to Adam to confer identity on the material world. It contains no
arbitrary component, but reveals the unity between God’s divine plan and
the world as it exists. Before ruins and fragments, there is no
overdetermination to induce the melancholy of acedia. Instead the
originary language implies a unity of transcendent and immanent
realms. “With the creative omnipotence of language it begins, and
at
the end of language, as it were, assimilates the created, names it.
Language is therefore both the creative and the finished creation; it is
word and nature.”6This blissful state between the world and its creator as expressed in
Adamic language has its end, of course, in the Fall. The “ignorance”
introduced into the world that ultimately drives our melancholic state of
acedia has its inception with the Fall away from the edenic union that
joins God’s plan to the immediacy of the material world. What
ensues, says Benjamin, is an overabundance of conventional languages, a
prattle of meanings now localized hence arbitrary. A former
connection to a defining origin has been lost; and an overdetermined,
plethoric state of melancholia forms. Over-determination stems from
over-naming. “Things have no proper names except in God. . . .
In the language of men, however, they are overnamed.” Overnaming
becomes “the linguistic being of melancholy.”7
6 Walter
Benjamin, “On Language as
Such and On the Languages of Man,” Edmund Jephcott, tr., Walter Benjamin,
Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913-1926,
Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, 1997, p. 68.7 Ibid., p. 73. For a Christian perspective on Adamic language, see Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion.
Float like a butterfly,
sting like a
