LYING ABOUT THE WOLF by David Solway

When I was at the U of Chicago Div School, there were two authors who defeated my attempts to understand. I had planned to figure them out when I retired and here I am, but I haven’t really addressed the task yet. One author was Stephen Toulmin, who is probably only understood by twenty other people on the planet, and the other is Paul Ricoeur, who is said to be understood by ten, some of whom are in poor health. When Clyde sent me Lying about the Wolf, by David Solway (a Canadian poet, educator and polemicist) I had no idea I’d be adding Solway’s name to this little list. For one thing, Clyde loved him so much that he’d added sticky markers thick as leaves, though I noticed half of them were in the notes rather than the text (only 182 pages of text in a book of 313 pages). MANY quotes and references, often familiar.

So I headed for Google to see what insights I could collect. There’s a useful interview (with equally telling photo) at this url: http://www.danforthreview.com/features/interviews/solway/david_solway.htm
If you are a prairie person, you might enjoy the ghazal at this url: http://www.danforthreview.com/features/interviews/solway/redeye_ghazal.htm
A ghazal is not a new kind of animal or one of those winds with names, but rather a specific poetic pattern. No need, really, to understand ghazals though that might be a good use of time and brain. Better at first to go for the images. (I have to say, I’ve never seen any dogwoods up there between Regina and Saskatoon, though I’ve driven that highway a few times! But Solway’s insistence on erudition doesn’t seem to apply to botany.)

For me, Solway is even more frustrating to try to read when I finally manage to decode something -- because I usually agree with it. I just don’t understand why it can’t be in ordinary plain English, since that is what he purports to be demanding. I have to say that he’s rather an intense example of what I call “Canadian compensatory arrogance.” Much depends upon the person’s self-image, which can never be female and ought to index Mediterranean sojourns along with a strong dose of life-threatening illnesses and a preoccupation with sex -- all of which combine in a formidable vocabulary and arcane reading habits. The first example I ran across in Saskatchewan was Sean Virgo. Wiebe might also be an example though he’s Plymouth Brethren rather than the obligatory French, Irish or Jewish. (Which reminds me -- I was going to try to read Proust and Joyce in retirement.)

Here’s a quote from Solway: “Analogously, but at levels of pretty well insoluble complexity, the ways in which the disparate items of our experience -- perceptual, mental, and affective -- are cognitively integrated and related to the external context must be treated from the standpoint of education as reciprocally implicated with the grammatical and syntactic shaping of that experience. The relation, as it now well understood by the various semiotic disciplines (linguistics, structuralism, psycholinguistics) is not one that holds between a pre-existent mental substance and an incidental or extraneous structuring medium, so that in the absence, impairment, or incompleteness of the former, the latter can nevertheless be competently inculcated or applied.”

I think what he’s trying to say is what I learned from Dean Barnlund in a “Language and Thought” class at NU in 1959 or so. The ways you know to say things (vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar indicators about time, number, gender and so on) shape what you think -- even what you see in the world. But the world in which you live also shapes what grammar, vocabulary, metaphorical references and so on are useful to you. To teach conventional grammar, one must deal with the underlying thought process and even sensory world.

He may be creeping up on the idea that trying to teach Bonehead Comp to underachieving college freshmen is hopeless. But what he doesn’t want to face is that the systems that so well served his own generation are not even of interest to young people. He doesn’t want to go where they are -- he wants them to come where he is, because his assumption is that what HE has is THE proper education for civilization. Otherwise, there’s a hole in the bag and all that has come before is falling out the bottom.

For those of us who teach Blackfeet kids and are interested in their historical language, these issues are very relevant. Their language was oral and described (often with poetic metaphor) things in the pre-contact world of the prairie. Sentences don’t hinge on subject-verb relationships buttressed by adverbs and adjectives. Rather, they address relationships, modifying concepts with add-on particles as well as gesture, tone-of-voice, pointing to examples, and other signs -- it’s a face-to-face language, not one to be read years later in a library.

At a profound level, and evidently the level Solway wants to address, it is impossible for any modern person -- Blackfeet or not -- to understand this language in the way the old-timers did, simply because our lives don’t contain the experiences that are referenced. Perhaps the reason Adolf Hungry-Wolf has been able to learn the language so well is because he lives (most of the time) the life of a 19th century Blackfeet.

The big brainstorm key essay is by Benjamin Whorf (I read it in Barnlund’s class) about the Hopi, in which he suggested that the language is entirely verb-based and approximates nouns only through action, like “sitting” for a chair or “blowing” for a wind. He thought that it would be a good language in which to express quantum mechanics, which is all process-based and assumes that all objects are simply whirling atomic energy at source. So Hopi and quantum physicists speak in gerunds and participles. We entertained ourselves at the Div School by considering what changes it made in our understanding if we spoke of “Godding” instead of “the God.”

Recently I ran across a little squib suggesting that an advantage English has over French (what heresy!) is that any noun in English can be converted to a verb. We’re accustomed to this: “Chairing a meeting,” shotgunning versus rifling, etc. Ivan Doig does this all the time. (I should go look up an example, but YOU do it!) In French one must add an explanatory noun-based prepositional phrase “spoke in the scattered way of a shotgun rather than than like a rifle”).

There are a few forces in this discussion that Solway does not address. The Chomsky faction argues that basic grammar is inborn and that there are constants of structure among ALL human language, though it’s still a bit unclear what they are. And then there are the people trying to figure out the actual brain mechanisms that make speech possible and after that the further coding of speech into writing. They are right down to the level of which gene formulas create the structures of the brain and the historical evidence for specific times when the new mutations occurred. (Much of the thought comes from people who never got those genes or at least the brain structures don't quite work. For instance, Charlie Russell was both dyslexic and dysgraphic: his brain did not process print as well as it handled image.)

There is also a body of thought about the “unspeakable,” about concepts one has no way to verbally describe. Maybe this is what Solway means by “noetic.” I’ve long been interested in this because I think it is related to play, art, and religion, in all of which a person tries to find structures to express things that have sensory existence and float in dreams -- “felt meanings.” There are many things in our modern lives calling for new words, and those words do come -- in many languages.

Clyde has a super advantage here because he is a Photoshop mandarin, one of the few people who understands that particular language and structure. If there is anything the kids today know, it’s images. But they don’t know WHAT they know and can’t organize their images enough to express what they feel. If Clyde can decode image, rather than just transmitting all that impressive heritage of civilization as it was taught to him, maybe he can really make contact, go to where they are.

Is teaching a matter of shoving things into the student or calling things out of the student? All I know so far is that the latter is a whole lot harder than the former. And now the crux of the matter: is it worth wading through Solway’s book in order to find out what I already have known for quite a while? After all, I’m not male, romantically ill, fond of tricking people or putting them down, and so on. My compensatory mechanisms are mostly verbal.

(Incidentally, I suspect Solway-- which is a local name among the Blackfeet -- is the same as the French Salois, which is also a local name.)