TALKING TO BRICK WALLS 1 Text

Staffordshire Moorlands Find

PREFACE

By accident, rather than design, this contribution offers a minor footnote to the themes of displacement and condensation presented by Paul Melia last month in his exposition of Hockney’s  Chair and Shirt dating from1972.

This presentation was originally entitled, talking to brick walls, but instead of the plural "walls" a singular "wall" was substituted. Also omitted from the flier was my subtitle namely, the joys and necessities of not hearing and misunderstanding. 

However these substitutions, alterations, or misplacements may have occurred, the notion that they do so inevitably is my theme. 

After completion I discovered that another unconscious title was guiding me: namely delusions about my empathy!!

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The Berlin Wall, which fell in November of 1989, was not just a wall. It was a gigantic symbolic structure pregnant with meanings,  aspirations, and agendas of international, cultural, and political dimensions. Likewise it’s fall, or rather spontaneous demolition, became a historic event well-deserving a myriad of interpretations and significations. When the wall fell I was working at a drugs detoxification unit and involved in an infectious diseases ward offering treatment to dozens of young women and a few young men. They had in common bleak prognoses because of HIV/Aids.  So long ago may be; yet after the corona virus pandemic and contemporary events in Ukraine, the current devastations felt to me like “more of the same”

On the ward I was asked to see a young man in his early twenties, whom staff believed would die soon. The conversation suddenly turned to the Berlin wall, political events in Europe, and a controversial AIDS campaign launched by Mrs Thatcher’s government. The young man linked the events surrounding the Berlin wall with deep anxieties about his own life. I asked him one question. Was he worried whether vast amounts of refugees  from behind “the iron curtain” might flood Britain and decimate scarce health resources? After that I returned home. A few days later, several nursing staff greeted me like a hero!! Immediately after my visit the young man took a shower, demanded to return home, and became eager to live. Reflecting on this, I decided my miraculous powers of empathy had contributed greatly to his dramatic reversal of mood and behaviour….. as if I had somehow "facilitated" a liberation from his own entrapping walls of sickness, treatment, and reversal!!

Signifiers

A signifier is a word used by a speaker or writer. The signifier/word does not necessarily refer to any real thing, internal state, or even a personal thought. If a signifying word refers to anything, it refers to another word or set of words. Hence “wall” can signify a Berlin wall, loneliness, or the impenetrability of another's discourse. As Oscar Wilde acknowledged having one’s own linguistic walls can be both fun and protective.

One problem with signifiers is that their interpretation, expansion, contraction and general usage completely depends on others.  For instance "wall" might suggest some other person’s lack of response, their inability to understand. Alternatively I could say how addressing a benefits adjudicator a was like “banging my head against a brick wall”; indicating thereby how s/he failed to understand adequately and how annoyingly aggressive it was.

The issue then is this: signifiers can never easily become fixed by fundamentalisms. When I express my annoyance at not being understood, it might well be due to the fact that I have no control how anOther -or group of Others- use the same words I utter.

During the previous seminar Paul Melia talked about Hockney's  chair and shirt . It was an apparently empty chair in an empty room. “Apparently empty” because resting on the chair is an item of clothing belonging to Hockney’s previous partner. The chair’s “emptiness” might now signify  -or be associated with “loss” “grief” "emptiness" “gap”. The more Paul examined this painting,  its significations became all the more rich and expansive, embracing classical madonnas, a bird that brings babies, a parrot, and inspiration by some deity.  So the painting becomes a treasure house of signifiers as soon as we begin to talk about it carefully.

In relation to words and discourse, then, you have little control over how your signifiers become used by others. They will certainly multiply or modify (ie. bring their own associations)  one’s original words and symbols. 

Signifiers -and the process of signification- inevitably involves loss and misunderstanding. For example “follow the science” was a snappy phrase associated with the recent pandemic. But which science? How much is medicine a science anyway, and how much an art? Could the science in question be virology,? Equally important  for pandemics is epidemiology. Moreover, what does “follow” and who organises the followers.

What I am attempting to convey is this. As well as enriching language, signifiers also kill, cancel, and change your original choice of words and your meanings... without your permission or even consultation. Whoever invented the pithy saying about “following the science”, for example, may not have expected it to become common property ridiculed and eventually annihilated by thoughtful journalists.

Military Baths at Vindolanda public domain

Really psychoanalysis is a very silly method. Its customers are encouraged to speak whatever comes to their attention. If one is lucky or daft enough, one produces sequences of signifiers and thereby constructs a few links of a signifying chain. Nevertheless spontaneously producing a procession of signifiers is also be scary. It is as if your verbal associations are starting to control you and your meanings.

Metaphors

I am attempting to convince you how  signification just happens -whether you want it or not. Some words or associations to which I give voice, may be well be embarrassing, unpleasant, envious, rude, desiring. In themselves it is obvious that associations and signifiers are not ethical entities, but  often become so for users. So when customers began analysis, Freud encouraged them to speak out their words  boldly: without censorship, avoidance, or rephrasing. A golden rule which it is far easier to recommend than to use.

There are different sorts of metaphors in English, but to make things simple for I rely on a definition from BBC English education:

A metaphor is a way of describing something by saying it is something else

For example: you are my sunshine. Or the Hebrew bible testifies:

“He will cover you with His pinions,
And under His wings you may take refuge;
His faithfulness is a shield and wall”

If there is a God, s/he/it, may or may not have wings: but how come faithfulness  is “a wall”? Evidently this wall-faithfulness of believers is very different from the inhabitants of Jericho whose “walls came a-tumbling down”. Just one sex worker survived the onslaught.

The metaphorical value of the supposed impenetrability and strength of walls is illustrated brilliantly in Mohja Khaf’s collection My lover feeds me Grapefruit

Your heart is a wall on which I knocked
looking for a door, a latch
a windowsill, a flowerpot
Everything I brought to the wall dried up
and blew away for lack of answer:
tulip bulbs, my worry for you, some children
Sometimes I pounded it with my fists
smashed my forehead on it
blamed myself for not having the passcode
hated myself
hated hating myself—started over
willed patience, got advice
cried in a heap against its brick
without getting a stir
so many night-after-nights
It’s a wall.
There is no way in.
Now that I’ve made the choice to leave
your heart suddenly has a gate
You fling it open for the first time
but I’m gone




Wall Words as Failing & Falling

As a very young child I remember watching a black and white television programme about Winston Churchill. For me the most memorable thing about the entire documentary was a wonky he once built.

Metaphors and signifiers, I am attempting to convince you, as well as expanding and enriching ones language also fail and fall. There is no guarantee that the previous signifier (or metaphor) of a set, retains its “originality”  when somebody -or anOther/s-  adds to it, compliments it, changes it. 

Walls, like Hadrian’s ancient Wall in Northern England, do not stay the same for ever. This, our very own local wall, was completely ignored during the  early years of Hadrians successor.. but eventually bits were used. Much later in history parts if it were recycled in the eighteenth century by General Wade to build his military roads hastening troops on their way to crush the Jacobite rebellions in Scotland. His "success" was celebrated in an additional verse to the national anthem.

Lord grant that Marshal Wade

May by thy mighty aid Victory bring.

May he sedition hush,

And like a torrent rush,

Rebellious Scots to crush.

God save the King!

Living in an increasingly visual culture, it is crucial to remind ourselves that words are heard, have sounds, rhythms, inflections. They can also be depicted. In this they share some attributes of internet memes. Take this example from Hadrian's time. 

MAISCOGGABATAVXELODVNVMCAMMOGLANNARIGOREVALIAELIDRACONIS

These letters are taken from the rim of a pan or beautiful pot discovered in 2003. It is contemporary with Hadrian's wall

To read the signifiers one needs to separate letters to form words:

MAIS (Bowness-on-Solway) 
COGGABATA (Drumburgh) 
VXELODVNVM (Stanwix) 
CAMMOGLANNA (Castlesteads)

But  the remainder:

RIGORE VALI AELI DRACONIS 

demands extra effort.

Just as walls might fall, develop chinks, get rebuilt, renamed, or recycled: so do signifying words. They often change when I repeat them to myself; but even more so when the Others take them over.

The Greek word verb μεταφορειν  from which our metaphor has to do with moving: often from one place to another. Translation also can be a moving or replacing of words and associated meanings. Though  metaphors (and extended metaphors) doubtless recreate and refashion  language: there is also a loss, if not several losses: evident in my own reconstruction of -and associations with 

 RIGORE VALI AELI DRACONIS

Draco could possibly be the personal name -or nickname- of a soldier posted to Hadrians Wall (wallus)  who perhaps commissioned the pot -along with its meme-like inscription- as a souvenir to take home. The phrase might also have a multicultural reference because Dracon (snake or crocodile) could also refer to the special insignia -or alms- of a troop Roman soldiers. The wall itself may be fierce, strong or dragon-like. Finally, it is likely native people living immediately north and south of the border wall  (-around Cumbria-) spoke Welsh. The red dragon (y Dragaig Goch) was embodied in countless native myths.

MetaForm-Moses

This is a neologism, possibly invented by myself whilst preparing for tonight’s contribution.  Another neologism once upon a time was the literary genre “tragicomedy”. A tragedy with a happy ending one might well say. Pyramus & Thisbe, was a an ancient tale constantly retold, the oldest written version is recorded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses dated around 8 CE. It is a story about forbidden love that ends messily due to a series of assumptions, misidentifications, and guesses so that one lover kills himself. After a period of ritual mourning the female lover kills herself too. So there are a number of transformations in this story: from love to death for instance. 

The changes celebrated by Ovid's book are usually biological transformations. The originally white berries of a mulberry tree are changed blood red in honour of Pyramus who stabbed himself under a mulberry. Yet the Mechanicals’ adaption turns Ovid’s tale into pure comedy, if not farce.

Back to my confusion and neologism. 

This talk is billed on you website as “talking to a brick wall” which may well have originated with me. This phrasing is close to a popular idiom, often used with sarcastic and critical intent. It is also a singular word “wall”. The plural is admittedly odd: it alters a common idiom "talking to a brick wall" quite considerably. It is inconceivable that one might repeat the experience of wall-talking and make habit of it! Few will want to try-out conversions with different walls to savour the results.

Maybe a repetition of wall-taking is accompanied by a delusion, a hope, need, or compulsion so that “this guy is driven to talk” at walls!! Maybe he expects some life-affirming replies from the walls!

My fingers refused to type “metamorphosis” (change of form, like pupae become butterflies). Instead my mangled version of the word persisted. Somehow I wanted to combine: metaphor, signifier, changes, literary forms, and Moses.

I may well be over labouring my point here (unlike the Mechanicals in  Midsommer Night's Dream  who manage most things comically).  When words are passed from one person to another, one culture to another, there are great gains, losses, mistakes, but always transformations. Some transformations are hidden for a while … others forever!

I hope the “brick walls” of my words, my Welsh ancestors, and my signifiers in general have been of some use to you this evening.

June 30 2022.

Note: from the internet resource wordsense

“This is the meaning of dracō:
draco (Latin)
Alternative forms
dracco
Origin & history
From Ancient Greek δράκων ("serpent, dragon").
Noun
dracō (genitive dracōnis) (masc.)
A dragon; a kind of snake or serpent.
The standard of a Roman cohort, shaped like an Egyptian crocodile ('dragon') head.
The astronomical constellation Draco.
(ecclesiastic) The Devil.
Usage
Draco usually connoted larger sorts of snakes in Classical usage, particularly those which seemed exotic to the Romans. One traditional rule gives the distinction among the various Latin synonyms as anguis being a water snake; draco being a "temple" snake, the sort of large, exotic snake associated with the guardianship of temples; and serpens being a common terrestrial snake. This rule is not universally credited, however.
Derived words & phrases
draconarius
draconigena
dracontarium
draconteus
dracontia
dracontium
dracunculus”
https://www.wordsense.eu/draconis/