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Next to my bed is a huge pile of books. Comics, poetry, things I'm reading for research, things I'm reading for fun. And like any group of strangers thrown together, these books start having unexpected conversations between themselves. The most recent one began with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle , which to me is one of quantum physics' many conceptual beauties. It states that in the quantum mechanical world, you cannot know for certain a particle's position and momentum, because anything you do to measure it disturbs the system, and thus moves the particle. Even shining a light on the particle - bouncing a photon off it - changes its position and/or momentum.
Then along came Auden. I had finally bought a decent copy of THE SEA AND THE MIRROR to replace the few tattered pages of Prospero's farewell to Ariel I had photocopied from a university library over a decade ago and carried with me ever since. Excited to renew my old acquaintance, I picked up the book, and it fell open to this: "Man can never know his 'nature' because knowing is itself a spiritual and historical act; his physical sensations are always accompanied by conscious emotions." And now to Lacan , who I have been slowly wading through for several months: "...the real can never be completely absorbed into the symbolic, into social reality. No matter how often we try to put our pain and suffering into language, to symbolize it, there is always something left over." In other words, there is always an element of uncertainty to our selves, our identities, because by trying to express it through the filter of language we change it.
Lacan is fascinating on the development of identity. We are born, he says, and we develop our sense of self through two things. The first is our distorted reflections on the curved surfaces of our parents' eyes (and later, the eyes of our friends, our relatives, the people we pass in the street). The second is via language and social order. How do babies think before they are taught language? They obviously do think, but thoughts as we remember them do not exist in our conscious memory before we are taught language - as the occultist Colin Wilson writes, yet a fourth voice joining the conversation - "a delicate and intuitive business, not at all a matter of trial and error, of learning 'object words' and building them up into sentences, but something as complex as the faculty with which birds build nests". A nest for our conscious self to live in for all its days on Earth. As we grow, before we have any choice in the matter, our "self" is imposed on us, is structured, by the language and habits of those around us.
Yet there is this stubborn kernel that can't learn, won't learn. The part that is left over from before. The thing that moves when you shine light on it. Alan Moore in a recent interview talks about becoming interested in the occult due to fears about a tinge of madness and suspicions as to the true power of language. This made me wonder if you could turn Lacan's process on its head. What if, instead of being the prisoner of language, this truculent ur-self could rise up and own the structure imposed upon it? As they say, if you owe $2000, the bank owns you, but if you owe $20bn, you own the bank. If you take everything the system has, can you own it?
It's not such a strange idea as it seems. Language is imperfect, otherwise it could accommodate all of the self and there would be nothing left unexpressed. The measurement systems are imperfect, otherwise we would know where the particle is with certainty. And writers are, by nature, beasts who are always chasing this ephemeral thing, this last, inexpressible lacuna. Always travelling, as Yeats describes, "back to where the ladders start".
Language is imperfect, but also language is power. It is so inextricably tied up with our identities that those people who have a high comfort level with it naturally have an advantage over those who handle it clumsily. This can be something as simple as having an easier course through the social structure - better grades, better jobs - due to a skill with expression through language. Or it can be what Alan Moore hints at, that the un-assimilated self can work a sort of magic by infiltrating this structure, using language to shoot out photons aimed dead at the shadowy, suppressed selves of others, the better to change their position and/or momentum.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I hate bad grammar.
[Primrose Hill, London, March 2005]