SNC

A Clanging Cymbal

What makes a good Lenten fast? Since my last Lent, which was my first, I have had some time to mull over the criteria. A fast, in my opinion, is not about giving up something which is intrinsically bad—at least, not a religious fast. While the concept of fasting for health and self-improvement is quite widespread at the moment, a religious fast, I think, ought not to be so self-centred. A good Lenten fast involves self-mortification, which involves giving up something which we usually treat as good, as a means of learning, in the lead-up to the Cross, that at times loss is the road to gain. Sometimes what we treat as good is, in fact, bad, but sometimes, like food or water, it is necessary and life-giving. A habit of faith is required to trust that, in the absence of these things, we are still held by God, and so are not forsaken. Many people have contrasted Lent to self-improvement, but I picked up this train of thought from Leah Libresco, a quite traditional Catholic convert and intellectual. May God grant that I never understate how much I owe to those with whom I differ.

I am vegan, underweight, and don’t eat enough as it is. Restricting my food intake is not something I feel I need to learn right now. But I think I am deeply gluttonous in a different aspect: I am gluttonous with words. Maybe you are too; it’s a common problem in this epoch. Every day I spend hours upon hours gobbling up words: throwaway fragments on social media or instant messaging apps, articles on Wikipedia or other sites, long LLM responses. Part of the problem is technological but part is also internal—I spend so much time mulling things over, writing aimlessly, rambling aimlessly, thinking aimlessly. Most of the time, when I feel dissatisfied, I just assume I need better words: to write or read something which can soothe my melancholia, or to solve a problem by thought and disputation. I often fail even to imagine courses of action not based in finding better words. I act as though, when my language is at an end, so too is my life.

Language is not evil. In the Genesis account, God has created us to speak. But God has created us for speech of a specific kind, not the kind of speech we know after Babel where our faculty for language shattered into myriads of languages. Once, our language was naming language: our languages were not the languages of nations, of borders drawn between ethnicities or countries, but instead the languages of creation. As Walter Benjamin theorizes in “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” all things have a language because all things have an activity. Whatever is, God has made by some word, and whatever God has said does not hang emptily in the past but plays itself out through the creature of that word, the word finding in the creature a grammar, a vocabulary, a life, a language. The language which shines forth in humans is language as such, a language which must gather up creatures into names to speak anything at all. This is a reverent language, a language which makes God its audience. It is not the language I usually find myself speaking.

What does it mean to speak a naming language? What does it mean to give anything a name, as Adam is commanded to do in the Garden? A name is never defined by the one who gives the name; a name is defined by the one who bears it. A baby, named by their parents, receives a name as a gift from others, but what people come to understand that name to mean develops out of the activity of the growing child. Definitions are lines, but names are hollow spaces—vast spaces, able to contain actions not at all imagined by the one who gives the name. They are like the host or the patent, the chalice or the wine, in which some numinous and hallowed transfiguration occurs: zones of creativity, clay pots for the hand of God. Humans have a call, as image-bearers of God, to give these gifts of names, for without them we cannot speak. We must give names, and then must borrow them back. They are not only our vocabularies, but also our grammars, our cadences, our tones. Through names a mute activity is turned into a flow which one can follow in speech, such that we speak openly what a gust of wind, or a falling leaf, or a star, or a locust implies with its activity. The name is a conduit between creation and the Creator through the image of God in human beings, an unfathomable reservoir of sacred onomatopoeias. Creation is gifted to us by God and every created thing lends us what God has gifted it. We speak with dependent tongues, reliant at all moments on all things.

Edenic language is a loving language. It conveys each creature into a name vast enough for its activity, and borrows these names back with tenderness, treating them as lovingly as a good parent treats the body of their child. The end of this way of speaking is the eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Good and evil is a definition, a dichotomy which abides in human grammar. What God has created is good, but not a good which is caught in any dichotomy; neither is life as created by God in a dichotomy with death. Seeking to know the binary, good and evil and the line between them, we cease to name and force ourselves to define, and in so doing naming language turns into kingdoms of ash. As Paul teaches, love does not insist on its own way—but to define by negatives, that evil is not good and good is not evil, to know death as outside life and life as outside death, is always an insistence on a certain way. It is no wonder that these dichotomies lead into the national languages of Babel, languages of in-group and out-group, of fellow citizens and barbarians; to one you communicate love, to the other, nothing but a violent divide.

This is the language I speak more often. I get caught in what De Saussure refers to as language’s negative definitions, in which the signifier seems independent of the signified, and is defined not by any positive content but by negation of each other signifier. But we are not actually free from our responsibility to that which we have named by means of this lack of tenderness. We still rely on the basis of naming language in order to have a language animated by any kind of force or any motive desire. Were it not for creation, we would have nothing worth saying. Yet we dedicate our speech to so much vanity, getting lost in the ways we imagine for ourselves by betraying the names we have borrowed and have not returned. When I am gorging myself on language, whether with the endless scroll of the web or by loose lips or my unquiet thoughts, it is this vain net of distinctions I am caught in. I am not eating the bread I need to live, but stuffing myself until I get sick so I can vomit and do it all again. I am not participating in naming language; I am betraying it.

In a letter on the resurrection of Hebrew, the Kabbalist Gershom Scholem wrote certain prophesies stemming from the profane use of speech which have been ringing in my head all the time, warnings against me personally and also against this time. “Language is name. The power of language is enclosed in the name; the abyss of language is sealed within it. Now that we have invoked the ancient names day after day, we can no longer hold off the forces they contain.” We cannot avoid having pronounced the names which God has filled by his words, and we cannot avoid giving account for the way which we have used them. “The day will come when the language will turn against those who speak it.” Looking to the horizon of the great speaking machine we have created in the internet, in its algorithms, in its LLMs, I have no doubt, even on secular terms, that our reckoning will come. But I don’t presume I can stave this off, or avoid my complicity within it. What I hope for this Lent is much smaller: just to have a hint of what it is like to speak and to hear more carefully, more reverently, more lovingly. By this I want to know the charges I have laid up against myself in my ordinary mode of speaking, and likewise, the language I hope to rediscover by the absolution of those charges, when death is swallowed up in victory.

I am starting to sound somber. This is not really an issue: it is fine to sound somber in Lent, or even in Shrovetide, the season preparing for Lent. But I do not mean to condemn the speaking and the hearing of my species as much as it seems. It is no ill thing that we speak, at times, with lightness, or flippancy, or irony, or sarcasm. To swim in a sea of words can be a life-giving experience—or else the concept of Scripture itself would be corrupt. To think at length, to speak freely, to write prolifically, to read a great deal: all of these are joys of being human. But Lent is not about pruning away what is bad to leave only what is good, the way a person fasts to burn off fat they desire to lose, but to become intimate with loss in order to understand what we have gained by loss. I hope, from a narrowed repertoire of speech, to sift out a still small voice, the remainder of that speech which God has taught me. And then, having gotten slightly closer to the language of Eden, bring it back, on Easter, to the plenitude that I otherwise enjoy.

So what is my plan, practically speaking? The general rule is simple. In a context where I can choose between speaking and listening, I will choose to listen. In a context where I can choose to seek the written word, I will choose to leave it be instead. In a context where I can choose between thought and experience, I will choose experience. But on its own, this is no good. In part, it is no good because it is not practical; I am a student, so I must read and think somewhat. But beyond that, it would be a dereliction of duty to a language of names, a language of love. When given the choice between handling a name with tenderness or not handling it at all, I should choose to be tender. When encountering that which cries out for a name, I would be heartless not to name. So whenever I discern that there is something worth speaking, thinking, writing, reading, or hearing at length, I will cross my mouth, or my head, or my hand, or my eye, or my ear, and specify in my soul for what intention I am acting and for what period I intend to act. At the end of the day, I will assess whether I kept to these intentions and these periods and whether they were worthwhile. My rubric will be the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—and also hope. When these are the qualities my language would inherit, my fast must then become a fast from silence.

What is important is that, when I take in a word, I realize that I am holding, in my mind, an unfathomable gift. This gift is known to you, dear reader—you yourself are such a gift. I cannot fathom just how much your life contains, how deeply it runs, how broad it goes. I cannot presume to judge it, to instrumentalize it, to speak ill of it. It is written in chapter three of the Zhuangzi as Brook Ziporyn translates it, “When what has no thickness enters into an empty space, it is vast and open, with more than enough room for the play of the blade.” The Word of God is sharp as such a blade; creation is a welter and waste which God finds not to be useless, but to be an expanse in which anything can happen. Whatever I speak of is treated by God with this vast dignity; you yourself are this vast, filled with uncountable qualities of light. What God has treated so lovingly I must cherish, and as human beings, we cherish through the name. My promise is to try my best not to forget what I borrow in speaking of you, and so not to define you, and insist on my way for you. Better that I should be like a stone than think that way! But instead I will rejoice for you always, pray for you always, give thanks for you always. Insofar as I love you always, I will never shut up.