Maker.
In ancient Anglo-Saxon, the word for poet was maker, a term that blends the meaning of weaving words with that of building the material world (what the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario called “celestial lightning rods”). Makers shape things into being, granting them their intrinsic identity.
Language, for Döblin*, is a living thing that does not “retell” our past but “represents” it: “it forces reality to manifest itself, its burrows into its depths and brings forth the fundamental situations, big and small, of the human condition.” It lets us know, in fact, why we are together. Most of our human functions are singular: we don’t require others to breathe, walk, eat, or sleep. But we require others to speak and to reflect back to us what we say. Language, Döblin declared, is a form of loving others.
The reality of the world conjured up through language was, paleontologists tell us, first presented to our consciousness as something magically material: in our beginning, words appeared to us as occupying not only time but also space, like water or clouds. The American psychologist Julian Jaynes argued that long after the development of language, when writing was invented some five thousand years ago, the deciphering of written signs produced in the human brain an aural perception of the text, so the the words read entered our consciousness as physical presences. According to Jaynes, “reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.” Language, as we once knew, does not merely name but also brings reality into being: a conjuring act achieved by means of words, and by means of those accounts of reality’s events that we call stories.
Stories, Döblin argued, are our way of recording our experience of the world, of ourselves, and of others. Stories are our memory, libraries are our storerooms of that memory, and reading is the craft by means of which we can recreate that memory by reciting it and glossing it, by translating it back into our own experience, by allowing ourselves to build upon that which previous generations have seen fit to preserve. In the mid-eighteenth century, Rabbi Uri of Strelisk asked: “David was a gifted man, capable of composing psalms. And I? What can I do.” His answer was: “I can read them.” Reading is a task of memory in which stories allow us to enjoy the past experience of others as if it were our own.
Words not only grant us reality; they can also defend it for us. In the Middle Ages, Irish poets were supposed to be able to protect the fields of wheat and barley from vermin by “rhyming rats to death”; that is to say, by reciting verse over the fields in which the rodents had their nests. In the sixteenth century, Tulsi Das, the greatest of Hindu poets, author of a version of Ramayana that includes the epic of Hanuman and his monkey army, the celebrated Ramacaritamanasa or Holy Lake of the Acts of Rama, was sentenced by the king to be locked up in a stone tower. Alone in his cell, Tulsi Das spoke his poem aloud and from recitation rose the monkey hero Hanuman and his army who burst into the tower and freed their maker. In 1940, sixteen years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no discernable fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had long ago and unconsciously stored in her memory. Among the memorized texts was one by Maxim Gorki, “A Man Is Born.” The story tells how the narrator, a young boy, strolling one day somewhere along the shore of the Black Sea, comes upon a peasant woman shrieking in pain. The woman is pregnant; she has fled the famine of her birthplace and now, terrified and alone, she is about to give birth. In spite of her protests, the boy assists her. He bathes the newborn child in the sea, makes a fire, and prepares some tea. At the end of the story, the boy and the new mother follow a group of other peasants: with one arm, the boy supports the mother; in the other, he carries the baby. Gorki’s story became, for Milena’s friend, a sanctuary, a small safe place into which she could retreat from the daily horror. It did not lend meaning to her plight, it didn’t explain or justify it; it didn’t even offer her hope for the future. It simply existed as a point of balance, reminding her of light at a time of dark catastrophe, helping her to survive. Such, I believe, is the power of stories.
ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words
*Alfred Döblin, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz
