Carter Ratcliff
Intention, Truth, and Meaning: George Quasha’s Preverbs
“Middle things come first.”
Scorned Beauty Comes Up from Behind (preverbs)
“This vision has no outside, no matter how many times it’s said.”
Speaking Animate (preverbs)
“Let each thing be until its own extinction in fullness (she goes on).
Verbal Paradise (preverbs)[1]
What is going on here, in these selections from George Quasha’s books of preverbs? Or it might be better to ask what is going by or over or under or around or through or back or toward—or choose your own preposition or adverb or adjective, at random, if you like, because these utterances destabilize the linguistic framework that often makes our word choices for us. If we’re trying to say something, there is usually just one or at most a few ways to say it—if, that is, we want to be understood in familiar ways. Quasha, however, wants to be understood in unfamiliar ways. Turning always toward the moment as it turns into the future, the preverbs attain an inexhaustible freshness. Making it new, they make newness new.
Of course, newness has an ancestry, and when Quasha is asked about the preverbs’ origins he usually mentions William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell (1790). This makes sense, for certain preverbs employ the tactic of reversal that shapes many of the earlier poet’s proverbial declarations. In the Ten Commandments and elsewhere in Scripture, we find animadversions against lust, to which Blake replies: “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.” Moreover, “The pride of the peacock” is not a sin but “the glory of God” and “The road of excess leads” not to ruin but “to the palace of wisdom.” Religious dogma tells us that truth demands faith—that is, belief. No, says Blake, truth is the offspring of belief, hence: “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.” [2]
The Proverbs of Hell and much else in Blake’s poetry provided Quasha’s preverbs project with starting points—or, rather, zones rife with possibilities to be realized. Yet this talk of the precedents runs the risk of obscuring more than it reveals. For there are ways in which the preverbs are nothing like The Proverbs. Though both employ the familiar grammar of sentences in English, Blake’s dicta generate their persistent power to surprise not from shifts in the meanings of words but from the audacity with which they reimagine the value, the worth, of that which words signify. Responding to Blake, we say, yes, lust is not a sin but a vital force. Or the imagination is not an escape from truth but a means of attaining it. Flaunting their revaluations, Blake’s Proverbs demand assent or denial. Quasha’s preverbs rarely do.
Like any more or less grammatical utterance, a preverb starts out in a direction that points to a conclusion not predictable so much as confined within a plausible range of options. And yet no preverb ends up within the bounds of plausibility. Quasha subverts the expectations built into standard syntax and semantics, or so one could say, though this interpretation ascribes to the preverbs an antagonism that they never, in my view, display. I don’t see Quasha marching up to our familiar verbal habits and laying into the them with the hammer of the avant-garde convention-buster. Striding forward with hardly a thought for the authority of convention, he takes each preverb to a place—an elusive place, certainly not a conclusion—where the elements of the utterance acquire the power to surprise and to tease from our bafflement a fresh sense of what things might mean.
“It’s my poem when it teaches me to read from scratch.”
Scorned Beauty Comes Up from Behind (preverbs)[3]
Offer the first four words of this preverb as a sentence to be completed and you might get: “It’s my poem when it conveys my authentic voice.” Or a variation having to do with “my authentic feelings” or “my authentic being.” In any case, “it’s my poem when” would usually launch the project of self-definition-through-poetry that culminates in a sense of self-possession: the command of one’s individual being that has been the primary goal of Western literature and art at least since the end of the 18th century. But this preverb does not guide us along the familiar path to that goal or to any goal. It is not clear that it guides us along a path. Rather, its first four words take us from a beginning to an end that is another and more capacious beginning: the wide-open spaces of a realm whose signpost reads “from scratch.”
Blake’s Proverbs of Hell usher us into a heaven of earthly immediacy, a liberated zone through which Quasha also ranges, with less regard for the semantic expectations set up by the syntactical patterns that initiate his preverbs. Getting to the end of a preverb, we often find that meaning has been taken not merely in an unexpected direction but in many directions at once. Nonetheless, the turns and returns—the surprises—of Blakean Proverbs prepare us to respond to the joyous complexities of this preverb.
“Time present and time past present presently.”
Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 33[4]
The affinities that link Blake and Quasha illuminate them both. However, I would like to shed a different light by comparing the preverbs to proverbs of the ordinary kind.
“It is not the function of language to say what is true.”
So says a preverb from The Daimon of the Moment (preverbs) (p. 11). By contrast, a proverb presents itself as an obvious and unquestionable truth. Who could—or would bother—to doubt that “Birds of a feather flock together”? Or that “The early bird gets the worm”? And for those who find earliness uncongenial, there is “Better late than never.” In those moments when “Look before you leap” is not quite right, there is “Strike while the iron is hot.” Cautionary or bossy, proverbial truth is versatile and thus, one might think, dismissible. How can we take seriously a body of wisdom so adept at contradicting itself? Perhaps we can’t and yet something worth noting lurks behind the inconsistency—and the tediousness—of proverbs.
A proverb owes its currency over the years and centuries to a strong assumption: despite the shifting incidentals of our experience, there are underlying realities that do not change. To spout a proverb is to point to some feature of a static substratum and, with the same verbal gesture, to dismiss as insignificant any fleeting contingencies that might obscure this substratum’s deep and reliable stability. Appearances are one thing, realities another—an assumption with a long life. In the fifth century, the Neoplatonist Simplicius noted the sharp distinction that Parmenides drew, nearly a millennium earlier, between “the intelligible world of truth” and “the perceptible realm of appearances and seeming.” [5] A mature and sober mind seeks the truth, in the hope of living in its “intelligible world.” Flighty and undeveloped minds are satisfied with—or enchanted by—“appearances and seeming.”
Versions of the appearance/reality opposition appear in the writings of Plato and Descartes, Aristotle and Locke and Berkeley and Kant and every other writer we call a metaphysician. In our era, an academic philosopher writes, “Metaphysics aspires to understand reality as it is in itself, independently of the conceptual apparatus observers bring to bear on it.” [6] On this view, observation, no matter how conceptually sophisticated, can deliver no more than appearances; therefore, one must set observation aside and think one’s way to “reality as it is in itself.” How one is to do that and remain independent of one’s conceptual apparatus is not clear, but never mind. The point for now is that the long tradition of Western metaphysics rests on the belief that there is a stable reality beneath the flicker of appearances and the further belief that this reality is knowable, if only in principle. Crucial to the metaphysical enterprise, these beliefs supply proverbs with whatever authority they possess. Thus, to utter a proverb is to make a drastically condensed metaphysical argument.
Arguments of this kind employ threadbare metaphors, not coherent strains of thought, and, as we’ve seen, they come in roughly contradictory pairs. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” All right, but what about “Fortune favors the brave”? Fitting readymade formulas to transient moments, the mind given to proverbs makes metaphysical points in a casual, opportunistic manner. The results, of course, are not philosophy but rhetoric, which Aristotle defines as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
Whatever form they may take from one occasion to the next, the devices of rhetoric fall under the broad headings of ethos (the perceived character, hence the credibility, of the speaker or writer), pathos (the audience’s capacity for emotional response), and logos (the argument that the rhetorician presents).[7] Deploying this triad, the rhetorician grounds—or seems to ground—a strain of argument in the bedrock truth that appearances are thought to hide. When Quasha states in a preverb (previously quoted) that “It is not the function of language to say what is true,” he could be understood as taking up a stance of head-on opposition not only to the everyday metaphysics of the proverb but also to the ancient metaphysics that undergirds much contemporary philosophy. But this reading of the preverbs construes them too schematically.
There are two kinds of alternatives to truth: lies and fictions. Nothing in Quasha’s preverbs could count as a lie. Nor do they display the signs of fiction. Must we then conclude that, one of his preverbs to the contrary, they aspire to tell truths? Yes, but just as Quasha loosens and sometime unties the bonds of standard syntax and semantics, so he throws our routine notions of truth off balance. Though they originate in the immediacies of experience, the preverbs do not make observations that are in any ordinary way verifiable. A preverb does not offer truth with the aura of fact. Rather, it follows the impulse to speak truly into regions where truth is not revealed, readymade, but emerges from the effort to find meaning in a preverb’s play of language.
Living in a fluid present it creates for itself, the preverb neither asserts nor denies the static, underlying truths of metaphysics. Nor do these writings celebrate or deplore the realm of appearances. The preverbs are beyond the reach, the authority, of the appearance/reality opposition and any other binary scheme we might want to bring to bear. As we read a page of preverbs, even the dichotomy of writer/written work begins to wobble and dissolve, only to reform and become, once more, elusive. This is clearest when we look for Quasha’s intention, that seemingly crucial element in the character—the ethos—of a writer or a speaker.
With its obsessive focus on individuality, modernity vexed the matter of the author’s intention so thoroughly that that certain literary critics chose to dismiss it. In judging the meaning and value of a poem, they said, only the text on the page is to be considered. This formalist program is nowhere more clearly set forth than in “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. Their essay still has a bracing force all these decades later—and provides a precedent for the attacks on the traditional idea of authorship made more recently by Roland Barthes and others.[8] The problem with banishing individual intention is the blank spot that appears in its place. A literary work doesn’t simply coalesce, like frost on a window pane. However powerfully writers may be shaped, may be permeated, by language, culture, and society, nothing gets written unless someone intends to write it. Even the arch-formalists Wimsatt and Beardsley acknowledged that, in making sense of a poem, we have no choice but to “impute” its “thoughts and attitudes” to someone with the intention of conveying precisely those “thoughts and attitudes.” They nominated a fictional character: “the dramatic speaker” implied by the poem, to be carefully distinguished from the person who happened to have written it. [9]
But how fictional is George Quasha, the writer whose voice is recognizable in each of the many preverbs? A further question: what would we gain by choosing either Quasha the flesh-and-blood person or a make-believe Quasha on the model of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “dramatic speaker”? Opting for the actual person, we define the preverbs as self-expression and say, in effect, that Quasha with these utterances intends to communicate some thought or feeling. To opt for the “dramatic speaker” is to transpose self-expression to the world of a fictional character.
I suppose it’s impossible to disprove these theories of the preverbs, and yet it would be difficult to herd the following into the exegetical corral where the process of extracting a message takes place.
“Touch tells you one surface is not one mind.”
Glossodelia Attract[10]
Confronted with this preverb, blunt common sense might ask: who needs to be told that “one surface is not one mind”? Of course, it’s not, no one ever said it was. So what’s the point? To get beyond these dead-end questions, we must set aside the idea that touch—or the entire preverb—wants to tell us anything. Or that there is anything else of a sharply focused nature that the preverb wants to do. Using the standard form of a declarative sentence in order to put “touch,” “surface,” “mind” into ambiguous, intersecting orbits, it invites us to understand these words as providing one another with heretofore unimagined contexts. From new contexts, new meanings—or so we are persuaded to imagine. What if this preverb is persuading the mind/body problem to glide into a fresh configuration? Is that possible? In other words, is it imaginable that an utterance might direct its rhetorical energies not at a reader, not at a listener, but at a set of concepts? On what occasion would that make sense?
That every rhetorical situation is inescapably particular brings into play the notion of kairos: the opportune moment. A rhetorician successful by the usual standards knows what to say and when to say it. It may be the case that “great minds think alike” or “fine words butter no parsnips,” yet neither bit of wisdom would be welcome on the occasion of spilt milk. In the world presupposed by the metaphysics of proverbs, kairos is a simple matter: it is time to intone a proverb when some easily recognized aspect of the Real becomes salient. As an irreparable accident prompts talk of spilt milk, so we are told to “fight fire with fire” when the need for a counter-attack is obvious. By contrast, no obvious occasion inspires any of Quasha’s preverbs. Follow the switchbacks and grand leaps of
“Recalling the lost wording reclaims the call of origin.”
The Daimon of the Moment (preverbs)[11]
and you are brought to a place where it becomes intuitable that kairos for Quasha has nothing to do with seizing an opportunity and everything to do with striding verbally beyond any concern for the opportune. Guiding us out of those realms of experience shaped by precedent and expectation, a preverb is not a response to an occasion. It gives birth to its occasion. Or it is the occasion and, if so, all certainty about Quasha’s intention vanishes and we wonder what his connection to this occasion—the preverb—might be.
Literally speaking, the preverbs appear when he writes them down. But who or what is he? Displaying no interest in setting himself up as a sender of messages, a fount of wisdom, or a purveyor of insights, the “George Quasha” we acknowledge as the author of the preverbs puts neither Authenticity with a capital “A” nor Truth with a capital “T” at stake. So there is no need to locate and certify an Authentic and True Quasha as the source of the preverbs, which emerge from a region to which we may well have as much access as he does. They take their sometimes ungraspable form in the space between him and language. Or between him and us, a space alive with any number of voices.
There need be no end to these speculations, as there need be no end to the meanings we find in the vicinity of a preverb. Slipping the bonds of expectation and habit, the preverbs neither demand that we plunge into their unchartable currents nor reproach us if we can’t manage to do so. No utterances could be less prescriptive than the preverbs. Most poems pressure us with the assumption that we will, at the very least, acknowledge its coherence. By contrast, a preverb makes no claim to hang together semantically or syntactically. It invites us to grapple with its openness, as gracefully as possible. If something like a meaning emerges, that is all to the good.
[1] George Quasha, Scorned Beauty Comes Up from Behind (preverbs) p. 14, Speaking Animate (preverbs) p. 11, Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 27.
[2] William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell (1790), The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, Anchor Books, 1997, pp. 35-38
[3] George Quasha, Scorned Beauty Comes Up from Behind (preverbs), p. 21.
[4] George Quasha, Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 33.
[5] George Quasha, Parmenides, “The Way of Opinion,” quoted by Simplicius, Early Greek Philosophy, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Penguin Books,1987, p. 137
[6] Stephen Yablo, “Identity, Essence, and Indiscernibility (1987), Metaphysics, ed. Jaegwon Kim and Earnest Sosa, Blackwell Publishing, 1997, p. 122
[7] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1355b, 1356a
[8] Cf., e.g., Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 1967.
[9] W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, The University Press of Kentucky, 1954, p. 5.
[10] George Quasha, Glossodelia Attract (preverbs), p. 83.
[11] George Quasha, The Daimon of the Moment (preverbs), p. 71
“Middle things come first.”
Scorned Beauty Comes Up from Behind (preverbs)
“This vision has no outside, no matter how many times it’s said.”
Speaking Animate (preverbs)
“Let each thing be until its own extinction in fullness (she goes on).
Verbal Paradise (preverbs)[1]
What is going on here, in these selections from George Quasha’s books of preverbs? Or it might be better to ask what is going by or over or under or around or through or back or toward—or choose your own preposition or adverb or adjective, at random, if you like, because these utterances destabilize the linguistic framework that often makes our word choices for us. If we’re trying to say something, there is usually just one or at most a few ways to say it—if, that is, we want to be understood in familiar ways. Quasha, however, wants to be understood in unfamiliar ways. Turning always toward the moment as it turns into the future, the preverbs attain an inexhaustible freshness. Making it new, they make newness new.
Of course, newness has an ancestry, and when Quasha is asked about the preverbs’ origins he usually mentions William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell (1790). This makes sense, for certain preverbs employ the tactic of reversal that shapes many of the earlier poet’s proverbial declarations. In the Ten Commandments and elsewhere in Scripture, we find animadversions against lust, to which Blake replies: “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.” Moreover, “The pride of the peacock” is not a sin but “the glory of God” and “The road of excess leads” not to ruin but “to the palace of wisdom.” Religious dogma tells us that truth demands faith—that is, belief. No, says Blake, truth is the offspring of belief, hence: “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.” [2]
The Proverbs of Hell and much else in Blake’s poetry provided Quasha’s preverbs project with starting points—or, rather, zones rife with possibilities to be realized. Yet this talk of the precedents runs the risk of obscuring more than it reveals. For there are ways in which the preverbs are nothing like The Proverbs. Though both employ the familiar grammar of sentences in English, Blake’s dicta generate their persistent power to surprise not from shifts in the meanings of words but from the audacity with which they reimagine the value, the worth, of that which words signify. Responding to Blake, we say, yes, lust is not a sin but a vital force. Or the imagination is not an escape from truth but a means of attaining it. Flaunting their revaluations, Blake’s Proverbs demand assent or denial. Quasha’s preverbs rarely do.
Like any more or less grammatical utterance, a preverb starts out in a direction that points to a conclusion not predictable so much as confined within a plausible range of options. And yet no preverb ends up within the bounds of plausibility. Quasha subverts the expectations built into standard syntax and semantics, or so one could say, though this interpretation ascribes to the preverbs an antagonism that they never, in my view, display. I don’t see Quasha marching up to our familiar verbal habits and laying into the them with the hammer of the avant-garde convention-buster. Striding forward with hardly a thought for the authority of convention, he takes each preverb to a place—an elusive place, certainly not a conclusion—where the elements of the utterance acquire the power to surprise and to tease from our bafflement a fresh sense of what things might mean.
“It’s my poem when it teaches me to read from scratch.”
Scorned Beauty Comes Up from Behind (preverbs)[3]
Offer the first four words of this preverb as a sentence to be completed and you might get: “It’s my poem when it conveys my authentic voice.” Or a variation having to do with “my authentic feelings” or “my authentic being.” In any case, “it’s my poem when” would usually launch the project of self-definition-through-poetry that culminates in a sense of self-possession: the command of one’s individual being that has been the primary goal of Western literature and art at least since the end of the 18th century. But this preverb does not guide us along the familiar path to that goal or to any goal. It is not clear that it guides us along a path. Rather, its first four words take us from a beginning to an end that is another and more capacious beginning: the wide-open spaces of a realm whose signpost reads “from scratch.”
Blake’s Proverbs of Hell usher us into a heaven of earthly immediacy, a liberated zone through which Quasha also ranges, with less regard for the semantic expectations set up by the syntactical patterns that initiate his preverbs. Getting to the end of a preverb, we often find that meaning has been taken not merely in an unexpected direction but in many directions at once. Nonetheless, the turns and returns—the surprises—of Blakean Proverbs prepare us to respond to the joyous complexities of this preverb.
“Time present and time past present presently.”
Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 33[4]
The affinities that link Blake and Quasha illuminate them both. However, I would like to shed a different light by comparing the preverbs to proverbs of the ordinary kind.
“It is not the function of language to say what is true.”
So says a preverb from The Daimon of the Moment (preverbs) (p. 11). By contrast, a proverb presents itself as an obvious and unquestionable truth. Who could—or would bother—to doubt that “Birds of a feather flock together”? Or that “The early bird gets the worm”? And for those who find earliness uncongenial, there is “Better late than never.” In those moments when “Look before you leap” is not quite right, there is “Strike while the iron is hot.” Cautionary or bossy, proverbial truth is versatile and thus, one might think, dismissible. How can we take seriously a body of wisdom so adept at contradicting itself? Perhaps we can’t and yet something worth noting lurks behind the inconsistency—and the tediousness—of proverbs.
A proverb owes its currency over the years and centuries to a strong assumption: despite the shifting incidentals of our experience, there are underlying realities that do not change. To spout a proverb is to point to some feature of a static substratum and, with the same verbal gesture, to dismiss as insignificant any fleeting contingencies that might obscure this substratum’s deep and reliable stability. Appearances are one thing, realities another—an assumption with a long life. In the fifth century, the Neoplatonist Simplicius noted the sharp distinction that Parmenides drew, nearly a millennium earlier, between “the intelligible world of truth” and “the perceptible realm of appearances and seeming.” [5] A mature and sober mind seeks the truth, in the hope of living in its “intelligible world.” Flighty and undeveloped minds are satisfied with—or enchanted by—“appearances and seeming.”
Versions of the appearance/reality opposition appear in the writings of Plato and Descartes, Aristotle and Locke and Berkeley and Kant and every other writer we call a metaphysician. In our era, an academic philosopher writes, “Metaphysics aspires to understand reality as it is in itself, independently of the conceptual apparatus observers bring to bear on it.” [6] On this view, observation, no matter how conceptually sophisticated, can deliver no more than appearances; therefore, one must set observation aside and think one’s way to “reality as it is in itself.” How one is to do that and remain independent of one’s conceptual apparatus is not clear, but never mind. The point for now is that the long tradition of Western metaphysics rests on the belief that there is a stable reality beneath the flicker of appearances and the further belief that this reality is knowable, if only in principle. Crucial to the metaphysical enterprise, these beliefs supply proverbs with whatever authority they possess. Thus, to utter a proverb is to make a drastically condensed metaphysical argument.
Arguments of this kind employ threadbare metaphors, not coherent strains of thought, and, as we’ve seen, they come in roughly contradictory pairs. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” All right, but what about “Fortune favors the brave”? Fitting readymade formulas to transient moments, the mind given to proverbs makes metaphysical points in a casual, opportunistic manner. The results, of course, are not philosophy but rhetoric, which Aristotle defines as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
Whatever form they may take from one occasion to the next, the devices of rhetoric fall under the broad headings of ethos (the perceived character, hence the credibility, of the speaker or writer), pathos (the audience’s capacity for emotional response), and logos (the argument that the rhetorician presents).[7] Deploying this triad, the rhetorician grounds—or seems to ground—a strain of argument in the bedrock truth that appearances are thought to hide. When Quasha states in a preverb (previously quoted) that “It is not the function of language to say what is true,” he could be understood as taking up a stance of head-on opposition not only to the everyday metaphysics of the proverb but also to the ancient metaphysics that undergirds much contemporary philosophy. But this reading of the preverbs construes them too schematically.
There are two kinds of alternatives to truth: lies and fictions. Nothing in Quasha’s preverbs could count as a lie. Nor do they display the signs of fiction. Must we then conclude that, one of his preverbs to the contrary, they aspire to tell truths? Yes, but just as Quasha loosens and sometime unties the bonds of standard syntax and semantics, so he throws our routine notions of truth off balance. Though they originate in the immediacies of experience, the preverbs do not make observations that are in any ordinary way verifiable. A preverb does not offer truth with the aura of fact. Rather, it follows the impulse to speak truly into regions where truth is not revealed, readymade, but emerges from the effort to find meaning in a preverb’s play of language.
Living in a fluid present it creates for itself, the preverb neither asserts nor denies the static, underlying truths of metaphysics. Nor do these writings celebrate or deplore the realm of appearances. The preverbs are beyond the reach, the authority, of the appearance/reality opposition and any other binary scheme we might want to bring to bear. As we read a page of preverbs, even the dichotomy of writer/written work begins to wobble and dissolve, only to reform and become, once more, elusive. This is clearest when we look for Quasha’s intention, that seemingly crucial element in the character—the ethos—of a writer or a speaker.
With its obsessive focus on individuality, modernity vexed the matter of the author’s intention so thoroughly that that certain literary critics chose to dismiss it. In judging the meaning and value of a poem, they said, only the text on the page is to be considered. This formalist program is nowhere more clearly set forth than in “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. Their essay still has a bracing force all these decades later—and provides a precedent for the attacks on the traditional idea of authorship made more recently by Roland Barthes and others.[8] The problem with banishing individual intention is the blank spot that appears in its place. A literary work doesn’t simply coalesce, like frost on a window pane. However powerfully writers may be shaped, may be permeated, by language, culture, and society, nothing gets written unless someone intends to write it. Even the arch-formalists Wimsatt and Beardsley acknowledged that, in making sense of a poem, we have no choice but to “impute” its “thoughts and attitudes” to someone with the intention of conveying precisely those “thoughts and attitudes.” They nominated a fictional character: “the dramatic speaker” implied by the poem, to be carefully distinguished from the person who happened to have written it. [9]
But how fictional is George Quasha, the writer whose voice is recognizable in each of the many preverbs? A further question: what would we gain by choosing either Quasha the flesh-and-blood person or a make-believe Quasha on the model of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “dramatic speaker”? Opting for the actual person, we define the preverbs as self-expression and say, in effect, that Quasha with these utterances intends to communicate some thought or feeling. To opt for the “dramatic speaker” is to transpose self-expression to the world of a fictional character.
I suppose it’s impossible to disprove these theories of the preverbs, and yet it would be difficult to herd the following into the exegetical corral where the process of extracting a message takes place.
“Touch tells you one surface is not one mind.”
Glossodelia Attract[10]
Confronted with this preverb, blunt common sense might ask: who needs to be told that “one surface is not one mind”? Of course, it’s not, no one ever said it was. So what’s the point? To get beyond these dead-end questions, we must set aside the idea that touch—or the entire preverb—wants to tell us anything. Or that there is anything else of a sharply focused nature that the preverb wants to do. Using the standard form of a declarative sentence in order to put “touch,” “surface,” “mind” into ambiguous, intersecting orbits, it invites us to understand these words as providing one another with heretofore unimagined contexts. From new contexts, new meanings—or so we are persuaded to imagine. What if this preverb is persuading the mind/body problem to glide into a fresh configuration? Is that possible? In other words, is it imaginable that an utterance might direct its rhetorical energies not at a reader, not at a listener, but at a set of concepts? On what occasion would that make sense?
That every rhetorical situation is inescapably particular brings into play the notion of kairos: the opportune moment. A rhetorician successful by the usual standards knows what to say and when to say it. It may be the case that “great minds think alike” or “fine words butter no parsnips,” yet neither bit of wisdom would be welcome on the occasion of spilt milk. In the world presupposed by the metaphysics of proverbs, kairos is a simple matter: it is time to intone a proverb when some easily recognized aspect of the Real becomes salient. As an irreparable accident prompts talk of spilt milk, so we are told to “fight fire with fire” when the need for a counter-attack is obvious. By contrast, no obvious occasion inspires any of Quasha’s preverbs. Follow the switchbacks and grand leaps of
“Recalling the lost wording reclaims the call of origin.”
The Daimon of the Moment (preverbs)[11]
and you are brought to a place where it becomes intuitable that kairos for Quasha has nothing to do with seizing an opportunity and everything to do with striding verbally beyond any concern for the opportune. Guiding us out of those realms of experience shaped by precedent and expectation, a preverb is not a response to an occasion. It gives birth to its occasion. Or it is the occasion and, if so, all certainty about Quasha’s intention vanishes and we wonder what his connection to this occasion—the preverb—might be.
Literally speaking, the preverbs appear when he writes them down. But who or what is he? Displaying no interest in setting himself up as a sender of messages, a fount of wisdom, or a purveyor of insights, the “George Quasha” we acknowledge as the author of the preverbs puts neither Authenticity with a capital “A” nor Truth with a capital “T” at stake. So there is no need to locate and certify an Authentic and True Quasha as the source of the preverbs, which emerge from a region to which we may well have as much access as he does. They take their sometimes ungraspable form in the space between him and language. Or between him and us, a space alive with any number of voices.
There need be no end to these speculations, as there need be no end to the meanings we find in the vicinity of a preverb. Slipping the bonds of expectation and habit, the preverbs neither demand that we plunge into their unchartable currents nor reproach us if we can’t manage to do so. No utterances could be less prescriptive than the preverbs. Most poems pressure us with the assumption that we will, at the very least, acknowledge its coherence. By contrast, a preverb makes no claim to hang together semantically or syntactically. It invites us to grapple with its openness, as gracefully as possible. If something like a meaning emerges, that is all to the good.
[1] George Quasha, Scorned Beauty Comes Up from Behind (preverbs) p. 14, Speaking Animate (preverbs) p. 11, Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 27.
[2] William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell (1790), The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, Anchor Books, 1997, pp. 35-38
[3] George Quasha, Scorned Beauty Comes Up from Behind (preverbs), p. 21.
[4] George Quasha, Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 33.
[5] George Quasha, Parmenides, “The Way of Opinion,” quoted by Simplicius, Early Greek Philosophy, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Penguin Books,1987, p. 137
[6] Stephen Yablo, “Identity, Essence, and Indiscernibility (1987), Metaphysics, ed. Jaegwon Kim and Earnest Sosa, Blackwell Publishing, 1997, p. 122
[7] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1355b, 1356a
[8] Cf., e.g., Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 1967.
[9] W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, The University Press of Kentucky, 1954, p. 5.
[10] George Quasha, Glossodelia Attract (preverbs), p. 83.
[11] George Quasha, The Daimon of the Moment (preverbs), p. 71