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PARTISAN REVIEW
of Utopia. When I think how much policing I would need to be suit–
able for a Utopia, when I think further how much
policingyou
would
need, I throw up my hands .
Language parallels the operations of force and politics because
it is a social matter . Sensible discourse begins with clarity of vision
and is based on courtesy based, in turn, on further clarity of vision
having to do with honesty and the ability to admit defeat, always
temporary, on a great many levels. Far and away the greatest enemy
of humankind is any- any- assertion of omniscience.
Events grow from events and especially from the events of dis–
course in the zigs and zags of the consequences of argument . In our
world such events zag with despairing completeness into evil. This
calls for a grammar of political discourse, for yet another form of
grammar, the very premises of which remain unestablished although
we all feel the reality of their truth. Pure, unselfconscious actions and
statements are of the greatest uselessness and are, in the real world,
actually crimes. Language propels responsibility, and responsibility
is inseparable from language. Frivolity as itself or .masked in the
pretense of serious purpose shows in inadequate and often wrong
language. I am not proposing any sort of perfection. I am saying that
language, and language as action, is never fully responsible, it can
never be unarguably responsible, but it must attempt to be it .
By our right to claim that whoever is talking to us is talking
nonsense, we, as listeners , unwittingly define lawfulness in speech as
a precedent and as an example . To study and assert the just claims
and rights of speech is an act of peace , and a major one. Comprehensi–
ble grammar can always be attacked as incoherent or as unsuitable or
as uneducated or as educated hypocrisy, as lawless statement, mean–
ingless, as bourgeois or as propagandistic the other way, whatever.
What determines sense? Economics? Politics? Birth? Coercion?
Emily Dickinson writes in units separated by dashes. Repunctuate
Emily Dickinson , and you alter her meaning- go and see for your–
selves-you harm and, in many cases , so mutilate the poem as to
make it be without sense. To learn and know what meaning is , and
meanings are, and how they are political- and
not
timeless - is what
education is meant to be about and is why we admire and study cer–
tain writers and certain performers. My sense of grammar and of
expression was influenced by Billie Holiday more than by Wallace
Stevens.
