Copyright © Colin Hamer 1978, 2000
This article was first published in the Writers' Review (August/September 1978, pp. 19-23).
Being a writer is not everybody's cup of tea. Some people find even signing a cheque painful. And it is not difficult to take my own mind back to the time when filling in an official form has made me feel so uncomfortable that I have given up any attempt to write down all the irksome details, thrown the offending document into my waste-paper basket, and then settled down to some congenial reading to cheer myself up.
Of course, there are also lots of persons who don't like reading either. Some of these may be responsible for the totally unfounded theory that cinema, radio and television have lessened our need of the written word. Even if it is true that the stars and newscasters of these powerful mass media are the priests of the contemporary culture, their priestcraft still relies on the ritual magic of the written word. Just as the clergy make a generous use of prayer-books, hymnals and orders of service, so the denizens of the electronic temples incessantly invite their devotees to have recourse to books of the film, Radio Times, TV Annuals, Open University course books, Star Trek manuals and, not to be forgotten, autographed photos of in media personalities.
I am not advancing any claim that all the books promoted and sold under the ægis of the other media get read. Probably they don't. But at least they are sold, even if they are not always paid for.
I think it is true that some people are reading less. They don't have the time they used to. Life is moving so fast. Half of the day and night is given over to the exciting and stimulating business of being involved in where it's at as it happens; the other half is often an uneasy hiatus. One may get through it somehow, by sleeping, watching the box, generally tidying up the flat, or washing and pressing one's clothes ready for the next hight spot to be reached. Yes. Life is great, man… But reading just isn't my bag!
Nevertheless, ladies and gentlemen, there are people who are reading, reading a lot, and sometimes reading wisely. This means they also ask a lot of questions, some of them difficult. One of them is this - how do you become a writer?
Writers are made, not born. Basically, every writer is self-made. Being a writer is the outcome of a long, gradual and tricky process, which is that of becoming a writer. This means learning to express oneself in words, acquiring vocabulary, growing to appreciate patterns of language, forging a sense of style, developing a perspective in which the written word is felt to be relevant to a whole world of meanings and values. I shall not bore you with too much detail.
What I do want to do just now is to share with you my idea of what it means to be a writer. In a sense, anyone who writes is a writer. And in that sense, I am sorry to have to say, though it is no secret, not every adult in this country is a writer. Illiteracy is still all too common. There is a campaign against it, socially speaking a much needed campaign, and the problem is being tackled. All the same, many adults can neither read nor write, some because they never learned to, others because their childhood learning was too superficial and intermittent to have been remembered. For an illiterate adult to become a writer even in this pedestrian sense can be a truly marvellous experience, as well as being an invaluable social asset. So all honour to the dedicated teachers and other volunteers who are contributing to make such experiences possible.
However, this fundamental use of the term writer was not the one I had mainly in mind in embarking upon this present article. The subject is rather the writer in a professional sense. Even in this more restricted meaning of the word, though the writer may be a bit of a dark horse, he or she is a stallion or filly of one or more of quite a wide range of colours, extending from the unobtrusive and occasionally shady tones of the hack copy-writer to the glossy and much vaunted reds of the best seller.
The copy-writer earns a pittance by coining a few shrewdly chosen words in praise of yet another brand of ultimate toothpaste, chip-proof nail varnish, or pedigree cat food. The best-selling writer may earn £70,000 a year or more as a reward for successfully combining experience in diplomacy and espionage with up-to-the-minute market sense, simplicity of plot, immediacy of language, incredibly credible characters, and the dogged capacity to put down on paper no less than three thousand words a day. And to think that Virgil was poet laureate to the Roman emperor and got away with writing, on average, no more than a single line of verse each day!
Professional writers also include journalists, script-writers, playwrights, poets, compilers of directories and guide-books, translators, novelists, biographers, authors of text-books, producers of dossiers and learned reports, staff writers collating the findings of opinion polls and questionnaires, song-writers, lawyers and apostles of the press, eager all of them to have us believe that the pen is mightier than the sword.
So a writer is not the same as an author. Indeed, it can be claimed that authors have gone out of fashion. An author has something to say and says it. He understands language and knows what words mean. He expects his readers to accept his canons of usage. For the author, correct English, though versatile, is an inherited tradition to be revered, studied, preserved, cautiously augmented, and transmitted faithfully to one's heirs. In other words, the author is a patriarchal figure, a male chauvenist pig who knows his onions and requires us all to watch our p's and q's, learn to talk proper, and admit he knows what we need to learn.
Authorship thus understood has always been largely an illusion. The words on the printed page in front of you mean what you the reader choose to take them to mean, not what the writer had in mind when he first entrusted them to paper. And what they mean to you tomorrow when you read them again, may be different from what you experienced them as meaning to you today. Language cannot be strait-jacketed. Though the entirely idiosyncratic use of speech has little place in social intercourse, few today would even try to claim that any one set of established patterns of linguistic usage is essentially better or more correct than any other. I am speaking, you will notice, of established patterns. Transient patterns of discourse are just as valid in their own sphere, but it cannot be denied that for many important purposes they have less value.
My use of words is a function of my education and social standing, of the regions in which I have lived, and of my current attitude towards life. It is also conditioned by the nature of the subject to which I am addressing myself, and by the fact that, in the present instance, I am writing rather than simply giving a lecture or holding a conversation.
While the erstwhile author in his ivory tower may have imagined there existed a fixed deposit of good English by the correct use of which important messages could be infallibly transmitted to the receptive minds of his docile readers, the writer starts from the principle that language is a community phenomenon. What language meant yesterday can be explored, but never exhaustively documented; what it will mean tomorrow can be plausibly envisaged, but not exactly predicted; what it means today is to be experienced by us as a living community of discourse, you in your way, me in mine, with each of us contributing in our uniquely different ways to the connective tissue of stated meanings and values that both hold our world together and threaten it with violence and disintegration.
“Mother of mysteries! Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues, who bringest forth no saying yet so dark as ourselves, thy darkest!”
These words by Francis Thompson serve to remind us that the great writers of the past were never authors in the sense in which I have used the word. They knew that language was rich and varied. They did not try to confine it within the narrow limits of their individual thoughts. Instead, they srove to enlarge their own minds and those of their readers by so juxtaposing words as to multiply the pluriversal potentialities of the texts they composed as partial expressions of an ineffable because living ænigma. That is why interpretations of Shakespeare pour fresh from the press each year in an incessant, life-giving stream.
As Roland Barthes says well: “The plural of the Text depends not on the ambiguity of its contents but on the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers.”
Because of this I am delighted to notice that the English language offers us no fewer than four words which sound the same as the verb to write. In addition to the writing we associate with reading, there is the right that is opposed both to the wrong and to what is on the left. There are also the sacred rites or rituals of witches, magicians and priests, as in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Finally, the wheelwright is one who has the skill to shape and wright white hot metal into a perfect and durable circle. It seems to me that all these meanings can contribute to our understanding of what it really means to be a writer.
Obviously, the writer writes words. But though the writer may be wholly engrossed in writing a book, first and foremost he or she is engaged in becoming a writer. The style is the writer, because the writer is his or her style. The pen is mightier than the sword, because the sword is something one has, while the pen, the stylus, is who one is. The pen-is, the penis, merely a slip of the Freudian pen perhaps, but yet a clear pointer to the undoubted power of the word. The stylus-pen was once used commonly to inscribe words in wax, and, thanks to Roneo and Gestetner, is still sometimes so used today. The wax is a symbol of human plasticity. We make ourselves what we become. The writer becomes him or herself by shaping a personality for him or herself and projecting it for others in the versatile self-expression that is language: the warp and woof of the final text looms large in the mind of the apprentice writer learning who he or she is by becoming, hopefully, an all round writer in the hard school of life. Words are white hot, and writing is not always easy; all writing is wrighting.
Lewis Carroll might have said it was writhing. The allusion carries the added advantage of a reference to the serpent, the traditional symbol of feminine wisdom, and writing does call for creative intuition. Language, indeed, being pregnant with meaning, has its own round of fertility rites to be observed, if the writer wishes to ensure a happy outcome. That writing is a ritual was clearer in the days of virgin parchment, quill pens, beeswax candles. Today the ceremonies are much more complex. A person wishing to publish a book typically uses an agent to present an idea to a publisher. Then, author and publisher meet and review the mutual attractions of their possible liaison, whether the author fits the list, whether the human and economic returns will justify the joint effort, and so forth. Stimulated by the ritually prescribed advance on royalties, the writer then retires to incubate and mature his or her idea, while the publisher sets in motion the publicity machinery that will eventually herald the birth of a new literary offspring of the press. In more ways than one, writing a book is like having a baby. Worthwhile, fun, tiring, serious, risky, time-consuming, expensive and very real.
Muslims are said to be the people of the book; Christians and Jews have the bible. On the other hand, it has been said that Jews don't buy many books. Perhaps writers don't either. But any good writer at least acknowledges the value of all books - old or new, large or small, they are sacred, the focus of the world, the Mecca of the publishing trade, the privileged place in which the meaning of human living is enshrined and proclaimed.
I come finally to the right as opposed to the left. Just as there are said to be magicians of both the right-hand and the left-hand path, so there are writers who edify and those who destroy. I am not going to discuss the literary merits of The Story of O, nor to argue the case for and against censorship of the press, nor even to lend my support to the campaign against child pornography. Instead, I propose to state a much more radical principle, and it is this. Writing is and should be from life and for life, not vice versa. Writing is, in my view, very much vice versa, very much oriented towards vice, when money is allowed to be the sole or even the primary motivation behind the composition and publication of any work. This is the besetting temptation of the capitalist system under which we live.
But writing is all right when it expresses and promotes life. When human writing does this, it share in the divine creativity of the Word of G-d. How it may do this is, in a plural and democratic society, both controversial and controverted. My own belief is that I best serve the cause of Truth by striving to redress the wrong, wherever I feel it exists, but always in respect for the personal freedom of the other, without any sense of proprietorship, writing as best I know how, but preserving always an open mind, and reading carefully whatever is well written, wherever I can seek it out.
This calls for a great deal of self-effacement and detachment. That is why I entitled this article: On Being a Writer. Just as the sound “Om” has been used symbolically to express the reality and the meaning of the cosmos for the Eastern meditator, so, I would suggest, ‘On’ is the contemporary mantra for the West. One thing wrong with capitalism is that it has turned people on to LSD - naturally, in both senses of that expression: Cash and acid. It is time to stop turning on, and to allow On to turn us, to be actively passive, open to reeive the inspirations for action that are offered to us in the concrete realities of each passing situation in which we find ourselves. This will make our life-style less individualistic, but more personal. Royalties may drop, because there will be less incentive to boost one's ego by becoming an author, but our writing will achieve a possibly hidden success that will be both more real and more permanent.
A piece of dramatic writing, such as Hamlet, is the responsibility of the author, in this case Shakespeare, yet typically finds its expression on the lips and in the gestures of the actors, such as Garrick, who assist the audience to empathise with one particular interpretation of the text. The audience will contain some critics who will voice an opinion as to the merits or otherwise of the play-wright, the actors, the text itself, its present interpretation, and, consequently, of the suitability or not of the costumes, stage-setting, lighting, etc. And even without witnessing a performance of Hamlet, even perhaps without having ever read the original text of the play, we can be involved in its plot.
Take Hamlet's anguish of mind, for instance, his madness, as some have called it. Saddened by the death of his father, he is angered and confused by his mother's taking a new husband so soon and according him that kingly dignity which would otherwise be directly his by inheritance. He cannot avoid the knowledge that marriage is seldom so sudden. Perhaps the new king was his mother's lover while the old king lived. From this, it is but a step to the thought that the new king might be his own father. Hence, if out of a sense of honour, he avenges his legal father and murders the new king, he may become guilty of the death of his natural father, a crime more heinous than the one he suspects the new king of having committed, in order to secure the throne…
In writing a novel the author, even if he uses a nom-de-plume, takes responsibility for his text. In that text is to be found the working out of a plot, and in that plot, whatever the subsequent response of his readers, the author as a human being is deeply involved. Wuthering Heights, to take but one example, has been seen as an alchemical transformation of Charlotte Brontë's residual guilt about some incestual experiences of her own. In the novel, moreover, the author becomes the actors who interpret and so give expression to his text, because he projects different facets of himself into the characters who carry the plot forward. Indeed, we, his readers, may empathise with him much more in his characters than in his rôle as author. We are the audience of Don Quixote, not Cervantes, or at times it seems so.
The author of a play or novel, then, is responsible for making a text. In this text resides a plot to be uncovered by involving oneself in it more or less deeply - and there seem to be depths to Shakespeare's texts that Shakespeare did not plumb. Thirdly, the interpretation of the text calls for characters or actors to give it life and expression, to improvise, as we say, to make believe. This work of expression can be appreciated by a properly receptive audience, thanks to what is termed empathy or fellow feeling.
Now, it seems to me that what we have in writings like the Diaries of Anäis Nin are superb examples of texts that provide their own interpretation, because the author creating them is involved so fully as to be in her own person not only the main character but also a very receptive audience and discerning critic.
I want to suggest there should be something of this in every writer, in every storyteller. The Welsh word for ‘story’, cyfarwyddyd also implies ‘guidance, direction, instruction, knowlege, skill, prescription’, since arwydd, from the root ‘to see’ means ‘sign, symbol, manifestation’ and even ‘miracle’. In the Celtic world, therefore, the original storyteller has to be both involved in what he lets be, viz. the real world, and yet at the same time he has to be an actor making himself and us believe in what is imaginary, viz. a possible meaning, an interpretation of the world. Indeed, his task is to guide us skilfully to the crack between the worlds, to the point where fantasy and reality, fact and imagination meet. For a storyteller, cyfarwydd is a ‘seer and teacher who guides the soul of his hearers through the world of mystery’.
In the contemporary world we find two rival schools of interpretation wrestling with the text of life. Scientific psychology strives to reduce the illusion and uncover the unpleasant or boring reality, while religon invites us to make believe, to make ourselves believe, to make others believe. At one extreme, then, as Ricœur noted, interpretation means ‘demystification, a reduction of illusion’, but at the other extreme it becomes the ‘manifestation and restoration of a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message, a proclamation, a kerygma.’
B. Stevens, Don't Push the River (Lafayette, CA: Real People Press 1970).
The writer who can command the commitment, the receptivity, the creativity and the responsibility to be by turns author, actor, audience and critic grows to appreciate that the plot he is cultivating is his own garden, that his garden is the world, and that he lives on the knife-edge between a universe of meaning crying out for understanding and an unconscious violence that would force its claims upon him. Will is needed to find the point of balance between text and interpretation, between meaning as intended and meaning as forced upon one.
Can Shakespeare's Hamlet mean something Will Shakespeare did not mean? Can the Bible mean something G-d does not mean? The point of asking such questions is not to answer them, but rather to uncover the values to either side of the cleavage between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Scientific psychology can purify religious responses of the dross of superstition; free imagination can liberate the scientist's love of creation from the tyranny of blind necessity. The point of writing is the point of a two-edged sword, and it needs a doughty chamption to wield it valiantly.
You may remember the incident that took place in the capital city of a minor Roman province in the Middle East 1960 years ago. The governor had condemned a man to death by crucifixion. “Pilate,” Saint John tells us, “wrote out a notice and had it fixed to the cross; it ran: ‘Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews’. This notice was read by many of the Jews, because the place where Jesus was crucified was not far from the city, and the writing was in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. So the Jewish chief priests said to Pilate, ‘You should not write “King of the Jews”, but “This man said: I am King of the Jews” ’. Pilate answered, ‘What I have written, I have written’.”
To what extent is the writer responsible for the consequences of what and how he writes? Is the writer competent to assess the meaning and value of his words? Does being a writer imply assuming a definite rôle in society? What is the point of becoming a writer at all? These are some of the questions in my mind at present.
As a first step towards answering them allow me to refer to my earlier article, “On Being a Writer”, in which I pointed to the distinction between four different words that sound the same, and that, as I went on to suggest, have related meanings. Here they are again:
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Rite |
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Right |
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Before commenting further, I would like to associate these words with four others I introduced in my more recent article, “Writing to the point”:
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Actor |
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Audience |
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As I see it, writing is the author's task and what is written is the author's responsibility. What is written is a text that has its own objectivity. Involvement in the inner life of this text, involvement in the plot of a novel or play, is an at times tormenting process I have called wrighting - to create a book is also to create an author, to wright oneself, even when it is only to forge oneself, is to make oneself who one is - a sham or, hopefully, the genuine article.
A more detailed diagram may help:
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Distinct from the objective text is its subjective and intersubjective interpretation. The author himself creates the characters (projections of some his own sub-personalities) in a novel, just as he selects which aspects of which historical personages to introduce into his version of history, but in writing a play he must leave it to the actors' talent and imagination to enact the rôles he has assigned them. Equally, he must leave it to his readers, his audience, his reviewers, his critics to judge, from their own varied subjective standpoints, the quality of his text, its social relevance, and the success or otherwise of its dramatic representation.
In the centre of the writer's heart there exists always a certain edginess, and the point of writing is to communicate something of this sense of the precarious balance between the desire to let the one text be and the need to make believe some at least of its many possible interpretations have value. I say some, because between the one and the many stand the few. Even a best-selling author is more attentive to the criticisms of his friends than to the adulation of the masses. On the other hand, because language is a social phenomenon, writing can never be purely solitary.
The dimensions of meaning include not only the writer's sense and style, but equally the use and usage of the reading community:
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Usage |
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Use |
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To a certain extent I made this point in the two earlier articles already mentioned, but it may be useful to draw explicit attention to certain aspects of the written words:
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These aspects of the word, these dimensions of meaning, this view of writing as at once task and torment, trial and totem has clear links with the four psychological functions of the maturing human spirit in its quest for integration:
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Feeling / Psyche+ |
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Understanding* |
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+ In isolation this equates with romantic superstition or magic.
* In isolation this equates with organisation as a collective protection racket, personality cult, bad faith, scientific reductionism - the problem is never the problem!
Writing is like sword-dancing; it means dancing on the knife-edge between facticity and illusion. The cross I have drawn in each of the diagrams is also a mandala, a layrinth or maze in which the writer has to seek out the minotaur of his or her own hidden self and be transformed by being consumed freely by the passion that self arouses in her alternative manifestation as Ariadne, Lady of the Lake, Lord of the Dance, holder of that red, serpentine thread which serves Theseus as his one clue in the labyrinth, the umbilical cord linking man's passion for understanding to the creative will of his wise, maternal imagination. Writings, as I have said, is writhing.
Pushkin also emphasised the primacy of passionate experience - “If I do not burn, if you do not burn, if we do not burn, how can the shadows become light?”
This article is meant to raise questions; I cannot always solve them. Instead of a conclusion, let me leave you with a schematic overview of the dynamic structure of the writing process and of its social counterpoise:
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(4) Joint Decision to Publish FOUNDATIONS Agreement via Dialectic |
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(2) Shared Understanding SYSTEMS Balancing of Interpretations |
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Here, between the lines, the rest is silence…
The first letter of our alphabet is A. In the Greek alphabet it is Alpha, in Semitic tongues, such as Hebrew, Aleph. Primarily a simplified picture of the male human standing erect, it at the same time represents his nose, his tongue, his penis in erection, his strong right arm, his spear, the plough with which he opens up the earth to make it fertile, the ox or tamed bull that pulls the plough for him, the high-flying hawk that symbolises his near-divine power of conquest over Nature, and yet the welcoming wide-spread legs of the woman who has captured him in her loving embrace:
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The second letter is B, in Greek Beta, in Semitic forms Beth, meaning house, the sheltering womb of the woman, her bending and balancing legs, the burden she carries, the breasts with which she nurtures it, her lips that kiss and embrace:
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Our third letter is C, a curved one corresponding to the more angular K, but in Greek the third letter is Gamma, more obviously matching our G, the Hebrew equivalents being Kaph and Gimel. C and K picture the cavity of the mouth in which speech is born, the cavity of the womb of life, and caves generally, as well as whatever is curved, bent or split open. G originally was represented by the same symbols, but its distinct representation in our alphabet pictures woman's womb or secret cave being split open and penetrated by the thrusting male penis in view of the procreation of new life:
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As B shows the lips in profile, and C the cavity of both mouth and womb, D portrays the swollen belly of the pregnant mother to be; the Greek form is Delta, in Hebrew Daleth. Its basic meanings demonstrate its close affinities with both B and C:
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In letter E we see the exist of the child from the womb in childbirth. In the Greek name of this letter, Epsilon, ‘psilon’ means ‘bare, simple, without aspiration’:
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Letter F, the Greek Digamma or double Gamma, pictures the independent child standing safely under mother's protecting shadow. Some earlier forms of the letter with multiple cross-strokes indicate the plurality of children in the family. E is the child emerging into life; F the child in its individual freedom. F therefore also signifies luck, life, success and fulfilment:
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Our letter H, corresponding in part to the Greek long E or Eta, completes the first part of the alphabet, and shows man, as happy father, holding his hands high to heaven in an Halleluiah of gratitude for the gift of offspring in his family. Not by accident, then, did the adjudication panel of the Humanists select the H of the happy man sign as their international symbol, when considering the various entries in their 1965 competition:
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Thus, primitive man meets woman (A), pays attention to her lips and breasts (B), as well as to her womb (C), which he penetrates (G), so making her pregnant (D), leading to eventual childbirth (E), for which gift of offspring (F), both joyfully raise their hands to heaven in gratitude and praise (H).
This initial microcosmic sequence in our alphabet is balanced by the closing macrocosmic cycle O-Z.
Like H, the letter O can mean prayer, spiritual uplift. Whether circular or oval in form, its multiple meanings include eye, sky, sun, mouth, ear, anus, navel, house, all, nothing, womb, door, Earth, horizon, island, enclosure:
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The unity and harmony of cosmic O is disrupted, put in question, rendered ambiguous, and acknowledged as mysterious, possibly even odd or false by that simple stroke that makes it Q: the human being in a quandary confronted by questions that make her or him quiver and quake:
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Some Q forms suggest the questioning serpent breaking into the Garden of Eden. The uncertainty regarding the still unborn child is, of course, the leading question:
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Between O and Q there occurs the latter's almost mirror image P (q-p), which is also related visually and audibly to the softer labial B, as well as to F, e.g., in the Greek ø. Whereas O signifies a totality that is indifferently male or female, or both conjointly, P points home the differentiation, opposition and relationship of the two sexes and their procreative functions: poke, pocket, pouch, pit, pool, push, press, prick, penetrate, pole, pipe, plenty. The letter stands on a single leg in some forms, but sometimes on both:
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R, the only letter never really voiced singly, contains the basic idea of multiplication, and hence motion, life, energy, knowledge and power, particularly the flow of speech.
While A indicates directly man's animal prowess and only indirectly his spiritual faculties, the letters P - R emphasise man's higher potential and barely mention, as it were, his more down to earth possibilities.
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The sibilant is the most complex of phonemes, and S is the great sibilant, its sound imitating friction with solid, liquid or gaseous substances, so that S-initialled names are given to materials and instruments causing friction, or to those who handle them: shuffle, sift, swish, silk, saw, sieve, smith. Like P and R, S is a forceful sound. Principally, of course, as any child will agree, S is the snake or serpent - including the water serpent, but also fish, and the water in which it lives. F and S can be similar in form:
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T is the hard dental and, like B, P, C, G, K, O, R and M, frequently figures in words referring to the oral cavity. Specifically T refers to the teeth and the tip of the tongue, and so that primal touch which is experienced as tongue and teeth touch. It also means whatever is tapering or pointed, the teaching that points out the nature of life to others, the sexual power of the male in initiating new life, tallness of stature, status, authority, the Chinese Tao or Way of the Heavens, the Sanskrit Stars (Tara) which are the highest dwelling-places of the gods.
T, the final letter in Semitich alphabets, is in the Greek alphabet as in our own still the letter in which the alphabet achieves its climax. It is a picture of thunder and lightning as well as of the tree it strikes - of the high tension that links Heaven and Earth, of the tree-god and the hollow drum that placates the gods or marks the death of one or more human beings.
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V, U, W and Y are variants of the same design. V portrays two human arms raised to heaven in prayer for the victory of spiritual energies in life. More recently seen in the fingered gestures of Winston Churchill and several famous pop-stars, as well as in the upraised arms of Charles de Gaulle and various Popes, this meaning of V is well documented. V also indicates eye, mouth, hymen, vagina, womb, entrance, exist, life, water and tree. Y is simply a more complete form of V, and a pictorial variant of T. W is, of course, double V, U being obviously the same as V:
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X is a man or woman standing legs astride making the V prayer; it is therefore a variant of T and H. X also derives from S, and shows twin serpents intertwined: one healing, the other poisonous, in witness to that sense of the ambiguities of life which all human beings share:
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The last letter of our alphabet is Z, Greek Zeta, Semitic Zayin, a portrait of that symbol of life, the tailed serpent, with its intimations of eternity and immortality, what Rilke called magic at the cross-way of your senses: Zauberkraft am Kreuzweg deiner Sinne.
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The central section of our alphabet comprises two sets of three letters: I - J - K and L - M - N.
I (which combines with C to make up its alternative form K) is the first person, number one, the human being, particularly the male adult, standing upright. Since I represents man, and K, like C, at least the possibility of a child, it is no surprise that J, like B, refers to woman, though also to man's praying hand, the highest reaching part of his body.
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L has mainly infant and feminine associations: feeding, loving, the horizontal position of the bed or water surface, the shelter of the home, being little. Certainly it sometimes also occurs in masculine words, such as lord, lion, lance, though in ‘aleph’ the male bull referred to is one that has been tamed and castrated.
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N indicates water and all connected with it: snow, mist, moisture, smells, serpents, fish, what is inside or underneath, woman's undulating movement and her capacity to bend, birth and death, the beginning of things and their ending. Noah, Nile, Neptune, Nymph, Narcissus, nipples, nuptial, nude:
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Another allied meaning of N, which it shares with M, is inferiority, negation, failure, what is null and void, mean and minus. M also features in many words associated with or referring to water: Moses, mere, marine. But M, like B, also refers to mountains and the mouth, as well as to woman generally, maid, matron and miss. Nevertheless, M also has its male side: masculine, manage, mandate, mast.
In other words, in letter M man and woman meet and mix in the middle of the alphabet. In several languages the middle day of the week also begins with M. This mixing and balancing gives to all things, whether Yin or Yang, their essential harmony and measure; it is the secret of cosmic homeostasis, the quintessential music of the spheres, the meaning of the mystery of humankind's many changing moods.
The reading of the Gospel extract during the celebration of Mass is in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church usually introducted by the ritual formula: In illo tempore, i.e., ‘in (or at) that time’…
Speaking during a General Audience in St. Peter's basilica in April 1980 Pope John-Paul II referred to some of Christ's own words in chapter 19 of Matthew's Gospel: “Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like that in the beginning.”
Jesus had been reminding his Jewish hearers of the very first words of the first of the five books of the Torah, which are usually translated today, as they were understood to mean then: “In the beginning G-d created the heavens and the Earth.”
[However. when the initial Aleph (missing since the time of the Jews' Babylonian captivity) is restored to Gn 1:1, it translates: “The Lord of Beginning created the Elohim, the heavens and the Earth” - a much more comprehensive and incisive opening!]
These words find their clear echo in the opening words of John's Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word.”
Pope John-Paul II teaches that when Jesus Christ appealed to the situation that prevailed “in the beginning”, he did so precisely in order to contrast the prevailing religious and civil law with true morality. Since, however, I agree with J.D. Solomon that the term ‘morality’ nowadays tends to be used in too general and abstract a way to be of much practical use to persons faced with any actual decision, I prefer to speak instead of an authentic aesthetic sense.
In differentiating what had merely been customarily required from the genuinely primordial Tradition, Jesus was inviting his hearers to transcend the conventional limits of their particular social environment and to open their hearts to the inner voice of their natural conscience - that instinctive drive towards a more perfect condition which, as St. Augustine of Hippo later noted, makes the hears of all men (whether female or male) restless until they find rest in G-d.
Hence, Pope John-Paul II understands the text “in the beginning” as referring us, not to some remote and possibly imaginary past, but to a timeless, trans-historical or meta-historical, quintessentially human and divine situation which, far from being tied to any particular set of social or cultural conditions, is everybody's ideally imperative Absolute Future.
Comparative religion, scriptural exegesis, speculative theology and the history of the development of Christian doctrine are all relevant disciplines, but they are not the focus of the metaphysician's concern. Although many specialists have commented on the sacred texts just quoted, few have considered the meaning and importance of the opening monosyllabic word, In, which, I believe not without some degree of inspiration, so clearly sets the tone for all that follows.
This same word, moreover, again significantly, focuses the at least apparent contrast that exists between the Earthly and the heavenly, the temporal and the eternal life of the Word. As G-d, he is in the beginning, and as “the Word made flesh”?
Read chapter 2 of Luke's Gospel: “She wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”
The two most frequently recited formulations of the Christian Creed commence: “I believe in G-d”, and “I believe in one G-d.”
In Catholic dogma the Most Holy Trinity is that of “Three Persons in One G-d.”
What are we to make of the word: in?
As already mention, the Greek name of the letter, Epsilon, ‘psilon’, means ‘bare, simple, without aspiration’. Interestingly, it is the first letter of both Greek words that correspond to the Latin and English in, viz.: Ev and Eis. (The traditionally received Hebrew text of the Old Testament, moreover, is entirely “without aspiration”, since it has no written vowels in it at all - the now familiar pointings were only added to it some time in the 2nd century A.D. to serve as memory-aids to help preserve the fidelity of its thitherto exclusively aural-oral traditional reading.)
Now, since “J” is not found before the Middle Ages, the twin components of “in”, “I” and “N” are also in the Latin language long familar among his followers the personal initials of Jesus of Nazareth. Nothing is ever entirely accidental. Since “I” represents man, and “N” indicates water and all connected with it, including fish, birth and death, woman, the beginning of things and their ending, the river Nile, nuptial, inferiority, negation and failure, it must, I feel, be admiited that these two letters together both capture and express many important symbolic aspects in Jesus Christ's life and work.
In the Semitic, Greek and Latin alphabets alike, the five letters I - K - L - M - N occupy the tenth to the fourteenth places. In many scripts the smallest two-figure Arabic numeral, ‘10’, is identical with ‘IO’ - the union (like, in its own different way, ‘Q’) of ‘I’ (which, as indicated above, recapitulates the microcosmic story of A - H) and ‘O’ (which both introduces and contains within itself the macrocosmic drama.
The word in, the first word in our English Bible, like the letter ‘M’ - and like the inituals of the pre-mediæval name: Iesus of Nazareth - visually associates and combines ‘I’ and ‘N’, the first and last letters of the alphabet's central mesocratic portion, which comprises the twinned triads: I - J - K and L - M - N (lumen = limen: daylight is the threshold at the dawn of each night of fresh creation…).
‘N’, as we have noticed, is among other things a contraction of the corresponding Ancient Egyptian phonogram, which is also the hieroglyph for the primordial Water - the universal divine source: Nun, and it is no accident that ‘N’ by its shape evokes a dynamic image of ripples, waves, undulations, or that in many languages several ancient words associated with water begin with ‘N’. Christianity is not alone in using immersion into or sprinkling with water to symbolise spiritual birth - the sacramental connection of the person (I) with the life-enhancing energies of the Natural Divine Source (N). The Epsilon-E instead of I in the Greek serves to place additional emphasis on the moment of birth, the moment before breathing (inspiration) has actually commenced.
Similarly, the primary meaning of the Hebrew word for ‘create’ is ‘beget’. Interestingly, water is mentioned as issuing from the pierced side of the crucified Christ; because of the sacramental unity of all the Christian mysteries, his dying words: “consummatum est”, as well as expressing his Nuptial Union with his Virgin Mother, mystically coincide with his burial before birth in the life-giving womb of Mary Assumed into Heaven…
As a splinter of blue glass from a bomb-wrecked cathedral could hardly be expected to convey any adequate impression of that building's pristine beauty, so this fragmented presentation of a few of the hidden undercurrents of language, as exemplified in the word: in, can offer no more than a remote hint of their meaning and value within the total context of Tradition…
Consider the part played by Mary of Nazareth in what was also a divine ritual, the brutal murder by crucifixion of her son, Jesus, on the hill of Calvary. She was not a detached observer, but a strong-willed, clear-sighted and deeply sensitive woman, still quite young, whose life centred on her intimate and all-embracing relationship with Jesus, the man whose aims and purpose she had made entirely her own as well.
As a sensitive lover, she was fully attuned to every nuance of her son's sufferings, both physical and mental - but she was, if anything, even more attuned to his own passionate desire consciously to experience all of this suffering unabated, uncomplainingly and even, in a sense, loving it (not, of course, for its own sake, but because it was part of that mysterious life-package that Jesus so consistently identified as his one and only objective in life: the working out of “his Father's will“).
Hence, as John the Evangelists makes quite clear, Mary “stood” by the side of the cross of Jesus throughout the hours of his final agony; she did not swoon, she did not complain or remonstrate, not even silently or in her own mind. Indeed, mystically speaking, she can be said to have rejoiced in his sufferings.
The actual moment of the physical death of the man Jesus is, mystically and theologically, the ecstatic consummation of Jesus' and Mary's joint purpose in their life together on Earth. It is, as the writings of the great Franciscan Mariologist, Father Balic, first taught me to appreciate, also the celebration of their mystical marriage.
Because of the intrinsic unity of the different mysteries of the Faith, it is also, in a sense, Heaven (which may be why at least one Easter liturgical text refers to Christ's death as “glory”), Pentecost (“He sent out his Spirit.”) and the fullness of the Incarnation, the moment when Mary becomes Mother not only of G-d, not only of Jesus the Israelite, but also of the Cosmic Christ (She rose on his cross, as he Rose in her womb.
In my own personal Faith, the moment when Jesus of Nazareth died is also the moment in which I come closest to all my relatives and friends, to Nature, to Love, to all who are suffering and in need. His crucifixion is, indeed, the play that re-creates us all, the supreme ritual - something very simple and entirely ordinary.
To the uninitiated symbol systems may seem trivial, yet it is by the loving and patient use of such apparently inadequate tools that we have over a growth period of a several hundred thousand years (at least) nurtured and preserved our interior life, shaped and defined our personalities, brought into being and directed the history of human society. Divine revelation does not, according to the Book of Genesis, consist in any secret disclosure of hidden knowledge; it is simply G-d's manifest and friendly guidance of us human beings as we pick our way towards an ever fuller realisation of our own participation in the Divine Nature, to use St. Peter's inspired way of putting things.
I have suggested that the unobtrusive word in, when related to its more ample context, expresses the inner unity and rhythmic resonance of Nature, the mutual dependence of human beings and Nature, the primacy of ineffable Natural Law as the basis of human law, the value of meditative and contemplative prayer, of silence, of spontaneously symbolic rites, of artistic harmony -s and of a finely attuned use of our hard won individual and community freedom, all values that contemporary society too much neglects.
We urgently need to harmonise the ecologically relevant portions of mathematics, science and technology with this traditional appreciation of the livingness of planet Earth, of the continuous dynamic interflow between Nature and ourselves and, most of all, of the deeply sacred character of that indivisible Oneness which ought to Be the Living Heart of both our inner and our outer environment
- Shalom & Welcome! - 
© The Neith Network Library 2003
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Updated 10:34 18/3/2003.