For Andrés
One hundred years ago, at the Centro Artístico in Granada, on the evening of February nineteenth a talk on that variety of Andalusian music the Cante jondo, “deep song,” was delivered by Federico García Lorca, who later that year went on to oversee, along with Manuel de Falla, a contest intended to foster it, held ultimately at the Alhambra, and over the course of this year the event’s centenary has been recognised throughout the province and beyond, by the screening of a film at the Festival de Sevilla, the publication of a book of documents, and an exhibition in Falla’s own city, at the Museo de Cádiz.
A few days after Lorca’s address, the text was published in instalments in the Noticiero Granadino, in its feuilleton.
Federico García Lorca, “El cante jondo” (1922)
Not quite a decade later there would appear a collection of his poetry under the title Poema del cante jondo. – Evidently this form of music preoccupied him throughout his life.
For my part, being here but the merest of neophytes, I should like to venture a few first thoughts about this musical genre and its conditions, guided by a couple of Lorca’s words, in poetry and in prose. Right at the outset it ought to be noted, however, that this text has been sketched out largely for its own sake, and not mainly as a preliminary or draft positively meant to be revisited later. Though I hope to say more about the “deep song,” and to do so more than once, as I listen further to it, while improving my understanding of its language, this initial effort shall hew as near as it can to the coast of plausibility, skirting whenever possible the essayistic storms of conjecture.
Quite dramatically did the poet begin his lecture: with a blunt statement that the music itself, or rather its wellsprings of profundity, stood exposed to a serious, a mortal threat. Advancing towards it and its resources was a prospect of extinction. ¡Señores – he exclaimed – el alma música del pueblo está en gravísimo peligro. El tesoro artístico de toda una raza, va camino del olvido! A fund of priceless memories, the deposits of experience by which the story of the language (in the person of the select few by whom it had been spoken well) could be told, was set to vanish, not least on account of the musically-minded public’s want of care and taste, at the moment when los viejos were being thrust obliviously into the past in consequence of the banal music rushing in, la avalancha grosera y estúpida de los couplés which was engulfing everything. Soon they would take tesoros inapreciables de las pasadas generaciones with them to the grave, and this disappearance would be effected unremarked and thus with finality.
Once arrived amidst such circumstances, its own depth might undo it. The risk of sinking into oblivion, to follow through from Lorca’s pronouncement, may show that the term “deep” befits one main condition of this music as much as it does this or that bit of the latter’s own content. Moreover, the initial aspiration of the specifically Andalusian word “jondo” may carry more weight than the rest of it (not least because the aspirated /h/ in this kind of Spanish has behind itself a long sonic history), embodying thus an internal distribution of ballast that might presage a capsizing. – By virtue of the profundity of its sense, a characteristic which sets it quite at odds with an age more and more decidedly superficial and fatuous, that which is weightiest in the Cante jondo could end sunken to depths largely inaccessible.
With this brief denunciation of his years’ embrace of bad music, Lorca administered a small slap in the face of public taste, thereby calling to mind other gestures of this sort, such as already decades earlier the preface of the Goncourts to their Germinie Lacerteux, or Zola’s essay “Mes Haines,” had delivered. Those assaults on the reading public of the nineteenth century and its predilections, were mounted most likely out of the disgust provoked by their time’s literary decadence, so abundant in work that was pourri avant d’être mur, and in writers who through their tell-tale pretences would eventually disclose themselves as all along having been charlatans. And yet these condemnations were themselves issued by them not least pour se faire remarquer by that very same audience. Under an insidious pressure to attract attention to oneself, felt even by those scrupulous hommes de lettres who in other situations would have bridled at any such requirement, the inner motivation to write a work of literature above all for its own sake evaporated more and more; while in the adjacent realm of musical life, too, a comparable necessity took hold of the business of composing.
Authorship, whether of texts or of scores, was turning step by step into a white-collar profession rather like the others, as literature and music, for their part, were re-made gradually into undertakings akin to industries. Variations in the level of artistry began to take on something of the colour of the different grades of production amongst the factories where machinery played an ever-greater role, just as distinctions in the kind of taste evinced by individual members of the public started to look as though they were mainly the differences in degree of discernment generally expected of – the consumers. As a result, on both sides of this increasingly industrial domain, for the producers of the works on offer as for those engaged in their consumption, competition and the competitive urge affected every relation amongst individuals; and so, because on both a similar need to profile oneself held sway, on each side that which was thus distinguished could no longer really be the singular character of an individual, so much as it would henceforth be the definite level of the quality of the product, on the one, or of the discernment by which the latter was already virtually consumed, on the other, though neither of these attributes was able to manifest itself for any span of time beyond the most brief, largely on account of the imminence of – a next sale.
Competition amongst the producers, the works, and the consumers at any one level of quality, and antagonism amongst those of different ones, sped up the velocity of all commercial transactions, while, conversely, this multifarious strife was intensified by the sheer hastening of it all. Thus, by this peculiar dynamism, as they industrialised themselves from the early nineteenth century onwards did the literary and the musical life become battlegrounds, seemingly with finality, at least under anything akin to their present circumstances.
Inadvertently, however, the unending reign of haste which had overtaken literature and music and very much else besides in London and Paris, those capitals of the nineteenth century, did also encourage a certain sorting out of the several degrees of gifts and talents amongst the producers and amongst the consumers, or in the more usual terms, the creators and the publics, in literature, in music, and in the arts, under the proviso that those with more or the most of the endowments would often fare well when they evaded the attentions of those who, either by nature and/or in consequence of their own choices, possessed a lesser fund. Or sidestepped too near an encounter with the great many who, alas!, had little or none, lest the better perish under avalanches of grossly stupid copulæ, as Lorca might have said, had his lecture’s main subject been literature. – Such an asymmetrical dance of separation and avoidance, for its part, in the hands of more quick-witted authors who had honed their feeling for the humour of situations, could present a comical aspect; a live demonstration in miniature of that adroit manœuvring could also be occasioned by the inclusion of small jokes by which the more perceptive writers might signalise themselves and entertain one another and their peers amongst the readers, all this of course most often only being as it were whispered into print.
One instance of the cautious literary type of jest must suffice by way of illustration (there is neither reason nor time to belabour what this inconspicuous specimen means: the wit will be understood, or it will not be). The swiftness of human living and thinking nowadays, so much accelerated in the recent generations, leaves no time for the slow and gradual working out of inevitable changes.*
* Margaret Oliphant, “Russia and Nihilism in the Novels of M. Tourgénief”
Yes, such an acceleration of the rate of change in the mœurs and the meanings of words, to take only two main foci in any worthwhile study of works of literature (by no means only the Russian), is patent throughout the entire nineteenth century, that is, the span of years bounded by 1815 and 1914; requiring a bit of elucidation, in contrast, is a notion that the literary world of that century and later, and its neighbour in music, soon developed into a domain resembling a habitat by virtue largely of just that accelerating pace of life generally. – This clarification I shall now attempt very briefly to supply.
Increase in the sheer number of participants in the world of literature, not only the writers and the readers themselves but also the foundations, the libraries, the innumerable publications and periodicals, the schools and the universities, and the various other fora, quickly transformed the aim to get oneself noticed, which had hardly been unheard-of earlier within that domain, into something not really seen before, namely, a pressing need, an ineluctable requirement inherent in such a life that had to be satisfied not just one single time, in the older manner of a single initiatory debut of which the memory would long persist, but over and over again, and this by institutions as by individuals, all committing themselves to these repetitions which had to follow one another ever more rapidly in accordance with the expansion of the new economic sector to a size that was unprecedented in relation both to its previous scale, and to the nascent industrial economy in total. Short-lived stratagems designed to claim attention while also holding some things back from scrutiny, were soon devised as a matter of course, by individuals first and foremost but also by the institutions: affectations of comportment, dress, pseudonyms that were out of the ordinary, not to mention other modes of self-puffery more like outright pranks.
The market of letters was treated to a great variety of new sensations: sights, sounds, and even smells. These passed quickly through it in revue, as each was mainly fashioned as a device to advertise a literary product and thus to render more likely the eventual propagation of the novelties, the meanings, the ideas, and even simply the experiences the latter comprised. The plumage by which a number of writers would at times take wing above their fellows down below, whether of nomenclature, of dress, or of attitude, was most often suited to this end, as were the calls with which some literary works would make their presence and availability known, and even perhaps also the hints of aroma which a few authors would sprinkle over their collections. After only a short period of time had elapsed, as these stratagems succeeded one another and enriched the topsoil of letters by the aggregate deposit of self-advertisements, this literary domain would grow into a dense forest of symbols, a forum thick with signals, or in other words, a habitat.
So, when regarded from the side of the producers and the products, and probably from other angles as well, the literary world of the nineteenth century looks decidedly as though it were virtually a natural habitat. – Had Darwin not traversed the globe as a naturalist, closer to home, through careful observation of the writers in their various activities and of their words and their writings as they circulated or failed to circulate, he could perhaps have framed some version of his twin hypotheses about fitness as facility in adaptation and about the natural power of selection. Then the acceleration of the rate of change throughout the literary habitat of his times would have lent him a hand; thanks in part to those more speedy alterations, he would have been given a great body of material with which to formulate the comparative analyses requisite for any such theorems.
My scenario is a mere fiction, yet even so I should now like to introduce two contemporary encomia to Darwin’s main ideas; by these praises it is made clear how well adapted they were to the world of literature generally and to languages and their study in particular. The fit between them and those objects is close indeed, and this congruity may render more plausible the notion that he had been a perspicuous observer of more than the realm of nature and of natural history.
For, quite in keeping with his theory itself, must not one infer from its own survival and propagation, that it has shown a high degree of adaptability within the cultural environment, both then and now? How then could it possibly prevent itself from being taken as supporting the extended claim that not only amongst organisms, but within the mental sphere of words, notions, and meanings also, the proverbial struggle for existence operates with an overwhelming efficacy?
Within Darwin’s work – alas! – something like a glorification of sheer success does seem to be lodged, albeit covertly.
The first of these encomia was spoken a few years after the Origin of Species appeared, and rather fulsomely lauded Darwin by name.
Not every random perception is raised to the dignity of a general notion, but only the constantly recurring, the strongest, the most useful – insisted Max Müller in a lecture in London – those only survive and receive definite phonetic expression which are absolutely requisite for carrying on the work of life. Stringent selectivity must needs hold sway over their acceptance, first and foremost as a basic economic priority, but also as an intrinsic feature of political and even of poetic existence. Wherever, he said, notions are founded and then proceed to assert their independence, they at last receive admittance into the commonwealth of ideas and the republic of words – while in this connection he certainly spoke less of their present state than he did of the early ages of languages during which the latter had coined into intellectual currency a considerable number of common notions nearly all at once, nonetheless, as every notion does wear out in the end, there remains always a need of new ones, and so now and in future some will still rise up, unless our intellectual life becomes stagnant, and will receive the baptism of language.
Clearly, in these remarks the notion of natural selection was called upon to account for the relatively permanent residency of an idea within a language, in the shape of a definite word or term; but in what way, more precisely, had that notion itself come to be “baptised” – how and where did it originate? As Müller suggested rather forthrightly, it had been framed at least as much in response to some of the open questions circulating in those years within the sphere of literary debate, as it had been derived by Darwin from his painstaking observation, comparison, and analysis of natural phenomena in distant locales.
How are we to express that historical process in which the individual seems to be a free agent and yet is the slave of the masses whom he wants to influence, in which the masses seem irresistible, and are yet swayed by the pen of an unknown writer? – This question and others related to it had already begun to weigh enigmatically upon the minds of literary men, and many others besides, of various degrees of prominence, as the nineteenth century progressed. How does a new style of art or architecture prevail? How, again, does fashion change? – how does what seemed absurd last year become recognised in this, and what is admired in this become ridiculous in the next season? – The novel rapidity of these changes furnished much more source-material, thus allowing the principle of selectivity itself to be examined in a more comprehensive, a more adequately scientific manner. – We want an idea that is to exclude caprice as well as necessity – that is to include individual exertion as well as general co-operation – an idea applicable neither to the unconscious building of bees nor to the conscious architecture of human beings, yet combining within itself both these operations, and raising them to a new and higher conception.
In short, the notion of natural selection had been sought by literary men and natural scientists alike, while the very search for it, as an explanatory principle without which a mass of phenomena, by no means only within the realm of nature, could not be properly understood, already provided an indication that his intellectual creation, once published, would from that moment onwards be taken as fit for the most extensive propagation, and if naturalists are proud to affix their names to a new species which they discover, Mr. Darwin may be prouder, for his name will remain affixed to a new idea, a new genus of thought.*
* Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series, Lecture vii
The second encomium to Darwin’s ideas was published a couple of years later by Walter Bagehot, without identifying him or them by name, for by then what need would there have been for that?
This Darwinesque passage guided Bagehot’s reader through one dense thicket of the literary world, the zone wherein the words and meanings which circulate do generally meet the implicit expectations that, as each of those who participates there, and not merely the several individuals, believes or is assumed to believe, are actually harboured by all of them.
In this zone, definitely aimed mimicry was never met with, due to the fact that original men who like their own thoughts do not willingly clothe them in words they feel they borrow and hence they would either refrain from entering it to begin with, or when they did happen to venture in, it was by dint of an adaptation of whose operations they remained unaware. For a man cannot think to much purpose when he is studying to write a style not his own – Bagehot took this point as read, and moreover, very few men are at all equal to the steady labour, the stupid and mistaken labour mostly, of making a style. How therefore could writers who also possessed a modicum of respect for their own thoughts participate at all in the business of getting work published? His answer drew elegantly upon Darwin’s theory. Most men catch the words that are in the air, and the rhythm which comes to them they do not know from whence; an unconscious imitation determines their words, and makes them say what of themselves they would never have thought of saying. Each publication, and especially the periodicals come under the sway of haste, now comprised a veritable habitat, to which any writer adapted, or better, was adapted as simply the pre-condition of any acceptance there. By this simple resolution, a portion of his self-respect did remain intact, at least while he still was relatively fresh; quickly, however, further experience would show him the reality of his profession. Everyone who has written in more than one newspaper knows how invariably his style catches the tone of each paper while he is writing for it, and changes to the tone of another when in turn he begins to write for that. Arrived at this point, some consolation might be found if a scribe such as this saw his mercenary situation as itself displaying in miniature the condition of the period in its entirety: just as a writer for a journal without a distinctly framed purpose gives the readers of the journal the sort of words and the sort of thoughts they are used to; so, on a larger scale, the writers of an age, without thinking of it, give to the readers of the age the sort of words and the sort of thoughts – finally Bagehot supplied the Darwinian point for which his own readership had been waiting – which those readers like and prize. Yet in this avowal those readers, or, if not them, then other readers, might well have detected a note of criticism, an undertone of ironic distance and admonition, which swelled noticeably up in the conclusion: not only does the writer, without thinking, choose the sort of style and meaning which are most in vogue, but the writer is himself chosen. Or, in other words, is selected. Indeed if he mistakes he is soon weeded out; the editor rejects, the age will not read his compositions.* For of course not only he, but the latter likewise, the other professionals and the world of literature altogether, the readers included, had all to exist as best they could under a more and more relentlessly selective principle.
* “Physics and Politics,” no. i
The danger in the application of some version of the principle of natural selection to the literary sphere, namely, the elimination from circulation of the weightiest meanings and thus the expunging from memory of their correlate experiences, or even more disastrously, the placement of an insuperable barrier before them, to block their first entrance into it, was already pointed out. Awareness of this specific imperilment, I should now add, predates the nineteenth century by hundreds of years; long before it had patently been espied by Francis Bacon, for example, though, to be sure, at the outset of the seventeenth the idea was conveyed by him in other terms.
From the process of selection, the more mediocre will tend to emerge more readily than the best that has been thought, or if not the best, then that which is weightiest. Sheer success can never be a guarantee of quality, as if the multitude, or the wisest for the multitudes sake, were not readie to giue passage, rather to that which is popular and superficiall, than to that which is substantiall and profound – the philosopher remarked – for the truth is, that time seemeth to be of the nature of a Riuer, or streame, which carryeth downe to vs that which is light and blowne vp; and sinketh and drowneth that which is weightie and solide.* – Sadly, but in keeping with this truth, the items which sink to the river-bottom are more often than not those done largely for their own sake, their purpose sited within themselves, rather than the ones which were devised primarily as means to an end, as the latter have been constituted in order to be borne towards some other destination.
* Of the proficience and aduancement of Learning, bk. i
During the course of the nineteenth century, the ever-wider application of the new definition of “fitness to survive” by the criterion of adaptation to the surrounding conditions, I should like to propose, gradually dried up the inner sources from out of which, con amore, things done for their own sake would emerge. Yet how, more precisely, was this inward desiccation brought about?
At first, I surmise, individuals enthralled by Darwin’s theory began to scrutinise others for their putative “fitness” – not merely, as in an older order of assessment, their worthiness. During the early 1860s and perhaps afterwards, depending on the locale and the rate of diffusion of the basic idea, this tendency may even have taken on the proportions of a craze. (Quite conceivably, if the literary world had long before become a habitat in relation to which the theory would then seem to be eminently plausible, such a craze had broken out in advance of its publication in 1859, or even decades earlier.) For what piece of human character and conduct might elude an analysis under the aspect of its fitness so defined? – peered at in order to discern the ways in which it was adapted and adapting itself to its environment, how ever the latter were delimited in the minds of these not so casual observers. How much functional significance might they then impute to even the minute bits of personality which previously had not ever been noticed before, or were otherwise dismissed immediately as being flukes of no further interest, entirely unrelated to any constraints or pressures of any kind at all!
Subsequently, individuals, but not necessarily just the same ones with whom the craze had commenced, began to imagine a scrutiny of this very kind impinging upon themselves quite anonymously, as though one were always being assessed for “fitness,” from one’s largest traits right down to the small details, stared at insidiously from every angle and out of nowhere in particular. Cast into disarray under the onslaught of this half-illusory attention, one started to entertain doubt about the veracity of one’s own conscious motives whenever anything to be done for its own sake was pondered, as though behind that ultimate envisioned aim as it was registered in one’s consciousness, in actual fact yet further goals were intended, as some force within oneself rose up unconsciously in anticipation of a challenge of self-adaptation that would have to be met. (A challenge to whom or to what precisely, is of course a question relevant in this connection, but it is not one which need be pursued here.) Such a prospect onto an unending succession of the ulteriorities by which one always was actuated, or prompted to believe oneself to be, would throw one off-balance, in reflective thought as in purposive action.
In a third stage, individuals (the term was already turning into a misnomer) would find themselves more and more often not merely engaging in scrutiny of their conscious motives in order to ascertain something of the forces presumed actually to exist behind them, but also delving into, and this probably rather frantically, as a matter of great concern, their own “fitness” itself, with reference to themselves on the whole and to all the various constituent elements, real or imaginary. Into the recesses of one’s personhood the struggle for existence would be imported, as it were, inaugurating a great upheaval in the relations previously established there, and whereas before under the manifold scrutiny one’s vital balance might have been to a considerable extent impaired, in action as in thought, now being rendered an outright impossibility was the interior concordance of forces which (an individual could begin to intuit once its pre-condition nearly was vanishing) had earlier eased the way towards the doing of anything for its own sake. Thus, henceforward the inward forces were reduced into means to ends which once attained themselves became means in their turn, and so on in interminable cycles.
Soon enough the very capacity to do anything for its own sake became scarce. For the, as it were, environmental result of its gradual disappearance, the rather odd (unintended?) consequence of the age’s obsession with the survival of the fittest, Nietzsche would find an apt word: the desert. When the refractive envelope around the most vital parts of an individuality (“ein geheimnissvoller Dunstkreis,” he had termed it a decade earlier) was pierced through by too-intrusive scrutiny, with its freedom from over-observation stripped away, so soll man sich über das schnelle Verdorren, Hart- und Unfruchtbarwerden nicht mehr wundern – to paraphrase, he, not long after Müller and Bagehot issued their encomia to the Darwinian vision, had hoped that in such a case people would at least display some remnant of tact and not put on a show of puzzlement at the general state of rot and arid sterility to whose reign their own prurience was contributing, thus condemning whatever remained of genius in the literary realm als Gestirn ohne Atmosphäre zu kreisen* – as he said enigmatically – or, in other, more pointed words, consigning it to suffocate dimly in a periodical orbit.
* Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, ii, 7
Two decades further on, in the fin de siècle, the disappearance of things that were done for their own sake was again pointed out, this time briefly, as the idea itself had started to circulate by then. Rien, dans la nature, ne tend à un but, ou plutôt chaque but est à son tour un point de départ – thus it was fittingly expressed by Camille Saint-Saëns: la nature nous donne le spectacle d’un perpétuel cercle vicieux.*
* Problèmes et mystères, vii
Though the composer spoke ostensibly of “nature,” naturalism or indeed any other of the -isms of his times could just as well have been invoked, for in due course the bistrots and brasseries of culture served each of them up mainly in order to stoke the public’s appetite for the next.
Under the conditions of literary and musical life as these transformed themselves step by step into quasi-natural habitats, that often the writings of the participants in those domains should overflow with expressions of revulsion and disgust, does not exactly come as a surprise. As creative activity devolved into a means to an end much like all the others, henceforth but one moment in the cutthroat cercles vicieux of which the worlds of music and literature were more and more obviously comprised, especially in London and Paris, the likelihood that any work really unforeseen and new might be produced by the creators did diminish markedly when each of them began to regard himself, his own creativity included, as being just such a cercle vicieux on a smaller scale, made to churn himself over and over within narrow limits, lest he perish. What self-loathing, amongst the more percipient inmates in this mill, must have welled up whenever they admitted to themselves that se répéter sans cesse et piaffer sur place was all they ever did or still could hope to do.
Nausea in the face of all this led more than one of them to depart for other shores; trips abroad, to countries where such developments had advanced less far or were yet largely unknown, represented another outlet for the pervasive dissatisfactions.
One such destination not bereft of atmosphere, was Spain. (Throughout the nineteenth century, the country’s tumultuous national life may have heightened its appeal further.) In 1840 Théophile Gautier toured it; not long into his voyage, he came across a church on whose front a sight caught his eye which he made sure to record. Le cadran de l’église d’Urrugne où nous passâmes portait écrit en lettres noires cette funèbre inscription : Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat. Oui, tu as raison, cadran mélancolique, toutes les heures nous blessent avec la pointe acérée de tes aiguilles, et chaque tour de roue nous emporte vers l’inconnu.* – Though the last clause of this feuilleton notation (it was the daily newspaper La Presse which first published his report) may contain a small piece of irony a bit akin to the inconspicuous joke to which I referred before, it is the inscription above this clock which really leaps out at a reader who, well, has some time on his hands, much as it must have at the writer when he first saw it. To those of a pensive cast of mind, or inclined to outright melancholy, this sentence – They all wound, the last kills, as it may be rendered – can provoke thoughts that would be most unlikely ever to end by becoming means in their turn.
* “Sur les chemins. – Lettres d’un feuilletoniste (1)”
This very phrase, long before it was mounted above any clock, had often been inscribed on sundials; hence not the hour or minute hands of the mechanism, but sunlight itself delivered the strokes. And very obviously so in Spain, where at times the sunshine is exceedingly fierce. – From this great datum of the country’s conditions of existence, very tentatively I should now like to suggest, stem certain traits of language and life, of the sort which some onlookers may tend to appreciate more distinctly by virtue of their sheer unfamiliarity.
First and foremost, the need of shelter from the sun’s rays when these are most intense, may have been much on people’s minds whenever in the history of the Spanish language (and comparably in Portuguese, less extensively in Italian) it happened that an unavoidable word was redoubled: in the place of the single verb which in more Northern climes appears as to be, être, zu sein and in classical antiquity as esse and εἶναι, in Spain and the Spanish-speaking world two are available, ser and estar, with etymologies distinct from one another. These two verbs’ different etymological sources are not my concern here (etymology will have a different role to play later in this essay), but simply the fact that neither of the pair is derived from the other. As a matter of logic, both are independent. Nor does the distinction between them pertain to grammatical function, such that the one expresses being in the existential sense while the other fulfils the predicative task of the copula. No, these two verbs seem to differ above all in the longevity of the states or conditions which their application relates to this or that subject or substance, that is, whether this longevity endures indefinitely or merely for a definite period of time. – The answer, in short, that which may clarify the first emergence of this pair of verbs, under the Spanish sky, were the various degrees of shelter which any substance or subject must have afforded its own conditions or states, especially but perhaps not only during the hours when the outdoor light at full force overwhelms everything.
The conservation of things in their being, or of the being that is in things, itself takes on a more definite, delicate, and even dramatic profile when being for its part is conveyed by two verbs rather than by one alone. Conserving this, after all, does require that it be defined – in this effort logical procedures of definition do have an important role to play – and if two verbs avail themselves here, then it seems we may neatly sidestep the perplexity that elsewhere arises when the very term to be defined is also a requisite within the definition itself.
For not only are the states or conditions of things in need of shelter where the very first condition of all appearance (that is, light) can also easily overwhelm them, but the things themselves as well. – Moreover, when this conundrum is so patent, how long some thing endures will always be spoken of in the comparative, specified explicitly or implicitly in its degree of longevity, if only because there is already an act of comparison lodged in the choosing of the one or the other of the two verbs for being. – Thus the difference between definite and indefinite duration is not itself essentially a qualitative one, and so its intrinsically relative nature, when one applies each verb adroitly, can lend a delicate and/or a dramatic shading to observations about the dimensions of transience in human life, and then to further reflections concerning the preservation that which is transient might call for.
As an example: present-day museums, built for a specific purpose which are set to endure for some definite period of time, nonetheless afford shelter to a great many much more ancient objects created for their own sakes long before, all meant of themselves to be everlasting, and which – in the best case – shall still exist long after these erstwhile domiciles will have been deconstructed. Now, could not the depth of this topic for reflection, namely, that which might seem most curious and thought-provoking in such an arrangement of permanency, be plumbed farther if the states of being may be put into words in two distinct ways rather than merely in one?
Something relatively more permanent being sheltered by something else that is less so – this is an arrangement full of interest not least on account of its delicacy, one which seems as though quite possibly it could become a stage for some drama, does it not?
Within the precincts of some institutions such as the Museos de Bellas Artes in Seville and Granada, and of course the Prado in Madrid, there are preserved several marvellous bodegones, the characteristically Spanish variant of the still-life genre, in which a few ceramic vessels are shown set off by sober lighting, just a bit distant one from another, all virtually personages for the ages, so uniquely and, yes, proudly does each carry itself, almost as though none deigns to notice the others, nor how they are all observed! So, on my side, I do begin to ask myself whether they have been granted some extended refuge for themselves and their own transience in and by the paintings, or if, quite differently, it is the nimbus of their own stately presence which envelopes the latter and insulates it against time’s advance. – Speaking provisionally, I think it can be said that the tables shown in these paintings are like stages; the nuances of the reserved dramas being played out on them I will need to fathom much better, if this question of the shelter and the sheltered is to be seriously pursued.
Overwhelming sunlight and the expedients adopted to counter it, may be detected as a factor in the background of another feature of Spanish life, the evident degree of hardiness in the face of scrutiny and the concomitant of this, the persistence of the resolve whereby something or anything might be done for its own sake. Those who have overcome the challenge posed continually by a fierce sun, will most likely find it easier to withstand human scrutiny and to sustain their own capacity for actions that are not or not mainly means to an end – thus both characteristics seem more readily to live on in Spain, whereas in many other countries they have become so rare that whenever they do manifest themselves they may even be “tolerated” as mere inconsequential remnants and near to extinction, themselves regarded much as the exhibits in anthropological or natural-history museums commonly are (hypocritical words notwithstanding). And this condescension elsewhere has by now quite a long story behind it (as was intimated before).
An attitude like that would find the Spanish language itself, even or especially on the phonetic level, where the potential expressiveness of its sound is frequently actualised so as to create small sonic events out of sheer delight in their expression, rather at odds with its main guiding assumption. Fortunately, for dissenters who hold out for something else than the over-use of the categories of means and ends, the ways in which Spanish is still handled with reverence do demonstrate how languages even now can be instruments in more than one sense . . . Most striking in this regard is the pleasure taken whenever (not infrequently!) the trill of an /r/ is intensified into a small detonation, all the more so when it is repeated at least thrice in quick succession. – At times when the delivery is quite skilful these varied manifestations of the language’s prowess can render the intent ear nearly drunk.
As with phonemes set off like firecrackers on account of the sheer thrill of their sound, so too with the bits of drama hurled into everyday life, and not into personal relations only. These are interspersed mainly to enliven and divert the proceedings with brief interludes, to while away some part of the time – this at least is what I have seen during my months thus far in Madrid – interjections of moments of theatre between those individuals who are unsubdued under scrutiny, unbowed by the consideration of means and ends.
And still other supports of resiliency in Spanish life and language, if one thinks about them along analogous lines, may be related back to this primary condition, the occasional intensity of the light.
Even the care about which at least one entire philosophy is spun, and with which (a subtle circle there!) its very own being has been grasped in the singular as a fundamental structure of all existence – even care and its ample force may disclose some unexpected or unsuspected aspects when the impetus to reflect upon it is given by Spanish conditions, and not only by the latter generally, but especially by that significant poetic music, the Cante jondo.
If one tries to delineate the correlations between care and time on one side, song on the other, by comparing the shape which it assumes under the reign of the different temperaments, temperatures, and tempos, that triad of basic features of existence which some philosophers have had reason to ignore, then a more adequate, a fuller, a deeper understanding of all of this may be obtained than otherwise. – In any case, that is the assumption which guides the following quick excursus (here there is room for nothing further) through the old physiognomy of the four temperaments, to each of which separately there does seem to correspond a different profundity of a care that outfits the latter with a sense all its own.
That the reality of these four has long been entertained, affords grounds enough to inquire a bit into each, though, of course, if they do all exist as anything other than mere figments of imagination, in actual fact each is only ever encountered alloyed with others, in mixtures of variable proportions. And as within one human being, so too in and amongst groups, from the smallest to the largest: the interplay of the different temperaments can resound as though it were an intricate enduring tune or a whole memorable symphony (in the rare instances when they happen to accord best with one another). This spectrum of all their conceivable temperings is no argument against any attempt to typify the character of each individually, no more than it should interfere with the resort to explanatory abstractions whenever political science or the study of history aims to clarify rather than to obfuscate.
Throughout this excursus, some etymologies and excerpts from literature will pass in revue, and from them a few conclusions will follow: the latter are no less provisional than everything else in this essay, something I stress particularly, as a number of them may prove less than welcome in certain ears. Generally speaking, one does well to avoid adding to the store of unreason, the heaps of irritation, ressentiment, and animosity, of which our world as it is, is already overfull.
(By way of documentation of some of the etymological particulars which are themselves often very curious, in the Appendix there is printed verbatim the text of a few of the relevant entries from a comparative study of English etymology.)
Turning first to the Roman writer who compressed the notion of cura into a terse definition for the ages, and reading between the lines, the suggestion is plausible that it first emerged amidst a predominance of the warm-blooded temperament, the sanguine. Cura, quod cor urat – this is Varro’s gloss on the word: care is thus designated because it burns the heart. For those in whom this temperament held sway over its counterparts, cura would stoke a fire in the human heart: so what is it which frequently set the latter aflame, and hence might in some cases have needed to be tended to, looked after, or even cured outright? For, according to him, the verb was derived from the substantive: Curare a cura dictum. Here the answer seems patent: above all it was under the power of love that the heart itself might fall ill. To ears as dulled as ours often are, the word “lovesickness” could be nearly as meaningless as a pair of sheer sounds ( jug jug, for example), but in Rome the condition was nothing to be trifled with, as is clear from Ovid. – And thus love-songs, whose tristesse frequently devolves in our times into triteness, were chanted with a like seriousness and care.
Why did love so easily give rise to bouts of madness, whether small or large? At issue is that destructive cast of mind, jealousy. – Suspicions regarding the amorous intentions of the beloved, in the face of the attentions of possible rivals, did not a little to ignite the cura in the lover’s heart; and yet this very suspicion was anything but self-allaying, for not seldom it itself might have prompted both any innocuous bystander and the beloved alike to assume the roles which otherwise would never have been donned: hence the amorous passion itself would provoke the very outcome which the lover seemed most to dread, and so it could easily prove a twofold affliction, first setting the heart aflame and then cruelly dousing it.
A wise lover, one who kept his wits about him and avoided the traps which too great a cura would lay out, took pains to call back to mind as required that which he ought to have learned by heart – this expression varies the Latin phrase glossed in Varro’s next sentence: Recordari, rursus in cor revocare. Such a lover, to put into words the thought between these lines, would strive to remember what his heart had felt to begin with, and remain ever after within the politic bounds of discretion in all such affairs; while by contrast, an incautious lover might be led beyond due limits by his own curiosity and thus in the end call forth the very thing he was inquiring into – curiosus, quod hac præter modum utitur.
Practical wisdom such as cautious lovers would evince, was also expected in the halls (curiæ) in which senatus rempublicam curat and the officiating priests (curiones) discharged the tasks of the cura sacrorum publica* – expectations generally met, at least while Rome was a republic. For in political as in private life, one had need of just the right degree of cura, and erring too far in either direction, in both of these domains, would bring something like a fate down upon oneself from out of the near future – this may have been approximately the shape taken on by the experience of time while the sanguine temperament set the tone.
* De lingua latina, bk. vi, 46
An apt summary has been provided by Auguste Blanqui of the dominant attitude during those ages towards the arrival of any fate (fatum). Il inspirait l’effroi, non l’enthousiasme, et loin de placer en lui leur espoir, les anciens n’en attendaient que calamités. Réagir contre sa malfaisance et se dérober à ses coups par une activité fiévreuse, c’était toute leur préoccupation.* The conundrum of this feverish activity, which it seems plausible to attribute above all to the sanguine temperament, would have been to discern how much time and cura to bestow upon any action, lest by a lack or an excess the fate they wished to avoid would be summoned to advance upon them. So, amongst them what will not be found, is any embrace of fatalism such as proposed by the notion of amor fati, whether in the acceptance one might discern amongst certain philosophers later in antiquity, or in the form of Nietzsche’s simulacrum of a doctrine. – Alas, the death of the Republic was itself an epochal fate, and not the least of its effects may have been an upheaval in the relations amongst the four temperaments, a change in their relative proportions on the greatest scale.
* notebook, July 28, 1868
Passing now to consider the melancholic temperament, there is already a hint that its prominence may have arisen as the eminence of the sanguine receded. For the fire which burns the heart, marked within the word “cura” itself, does not then disappear but is transmuted in kind; it will be set, when it is set, quite differently under the predominance of each of the four. And here one may recollect the observation of Heraclitus’ that fire is the first of the elements in the cosmos and the others its metamorphoses (πυρὸς τροπαὶ),* with all of this presumably transpiring in cycle after cycle (though this last idea may represent more of an accretion introduced later by some of the Stoics). – Whether in its more minimal or its more extended variant, his basic notion does seem strangely to presage the division of the four temperaments, and this adumbration may call forth reflections which themselves will be pronounced in their melancholy. Perhaps it is not an aberration to observe a definite sequence as each of the four temperaments comes into prominence successively, if in fact human history displays – or if it can be construed as displaying something like this succession; rather, it may be a discovery in the spirit of one of the earliest philosophical intuitions.
* fragment 31 (Diels)
However, the melancholic temperament is given much to reflect upon whenever the intellect’s perspective is directed towards the past, especially at points where great distress and disaster has piled up before it, and these are plentiful. So, to take an early instance, centuries before Heraclitus, at one moment in the Odyssey, his host asks Odysseus why he weeps at the telling of a tragic story, for, after all,
τὸν δὲ θεοὶ μὲν τεῦξαν, ἐπεκλώσαντο δ’ ὄλεθρον
ἀνθρώποις, ἵνα ᾖσι καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδή.*
(The gods devised it, spinning out the ruin around
men, that for those yet to come it might be a song.)
Melancholy is incited by this passage not as a vicarious tragic sentiment in tune with Odysseus’ own, nor in a second-order ἀναγνώρισις, no, neither is at all what engenders it; rather, when the explanation offered of why the suffering took place does not so much illuminate the matter as make light of it (a jest?), it is this implicit denigration which arouses a melancholic response. Fates were inflicted so that ages later they may be sung – this espousal of posterity does not exorcise the grief (ἄχος) which readers may indeed feel along with Odysseus, as though by a κάθαρσις, but provokes it to change into something else entirely, something more profound: revulsion that burns the heart when one understands how unfair chronology is. By any and all chronological arrangement, grave injustice is done: from this idea the flame is struck, amidst that cura which besets the melancholic temperament. Here the Latin term is not inapt, not an anachronism, for the Romans were the first inheritors of this piece of Greek literature in particular (amidst many others), those for whom its song was deemed to have been sung, and so, simply by virtue of this very transmission, their own history does not merely comprise some measure of chronology, but is itself chronological through and through, as any successor’s must necessarily be.
* bk. viii, ll. 579-80
As more and more was inherited, through the course of time, the intellect had a greater storehouse of history to look back upon; especially when the inheritance began to comprise a number of separate epochs. Once Rome became an empire, this further development would have been palpable, I imagine, and if so, amongst the denizens (no longer citizens strictly speaking) the melancholic inclination would have begun to spread as the sense of the manifold injustice of it all burgeoned and was regarded as increasingly inescapable. – At least outwardly inescapable, because the “activité fiévreuse” by which people, as it were, carefully strove to avoid the arrival of any fatum, remarked by Blanqui, would as the dominance of the sanguine temperament was supplanted gradually relocate and become mainly a characteristic of the individual life of the mind, replacing the former object, a fate impinging upon them from the near future, with another, namely, the cura firing up the latter’s heart – which also, were certain precautions not taken, might burn it up.
This heart-fire was the awareness that chronology is an injustice perpetrated upon earlier ages – but also, conversely, upon the later: as priority in the order of chronology was never solely a disadvantage, but also conferred a great superiority. Who would not, all things considered, have preferred to be a Roman citizen rather than a mere denizen? Hence, in the aftermath of the Republic, someone of melancholic temperament, under the sway of cura, would regard himself, insofar as he was a successor, as the perpetrator of one injustice, but also as being at the very same time the victim of another. And this duality of role, the further he reflected upon the matter, as those of such a temperament are wont to do, would have unsettled him more and more; intellectual awareness of the manifold injustice inherent to his position could easily have become, in a word, consuming. Awaiting him then might have been any of those declivities of the mind to which an excess of melancholy can readily lead.
The inner sentiment of justice and injustice, in the heart of a melancholic person, may prove uniquely implacable and demanding. At times this fire whets its tongue as though to request a meal –
Seul
Le
Feu
Peut
Lécher
Sa
Propre
Langue.*
– and then what matter the dish so long as it be fed! The melancholic might himself be fastened on and entirely devoured, if he is not . . . Regarded from the outside, his predicament might seem even a bit funny, but for him it is the most serious matter of all: temperamentally he cannot live without cura, but nor evidently can he live with it, either, and yet it is only with its help that he might find a way to resolve this very conundrum. How complicated therefore is everything made by the melancholic temperament, what an intricate labyrinth does its life wind through, whenever the intellect turns towards the past – that is the curatorial posture assumed habitually by this type – in a mad campaign to find amidst those precedent regions anything apart from injustice upon injustice!
* Malcolm de Chazal, La Bouche ne s’endort jamais
Somehow a melancholic of this description will have to discover clever stratagems by which to turn care against care and counteract the distress that cura often inflicts upon someone such as he is.
Displacing himself onto a different temporal ground, might represent one such, and thus perhaps it is due mainly to this type of temperament that some of the less common verbal tenses have been elaborated, in grammar as in literature. Hence here a debt may remain to be acknowledged. How few people do divine the weight of melancholy one must first have shrugged off, in all likelihood, before ever mustering the courage to undertake an intellectual-imaginative exploration of the anterior future! – to mention just one salient point. Yet by what other route could its possibilities vis-à-vis the other zones of time have been disclosed initially?
Clever stratagems by which persons of melancholic temperament would restrain the cura within themselves inside due limits: to the search for these may also be owed the supplementing of the term by another, “sollicitudo,” which, at first glance, seems to be quite synonymous.
Yet a higher degree of awareness of the stakes may be read out of this other term, for if cura should have been a curative attitude but became all too often, in the case of the melancholic temperament, worse than whatever malheurs were there to be cured, by adopting a posture of sollicitudo with regard to oneself instead, one might at least recognise that the debility induced by too great a cura did affect oneself as a whole, in one’s entirety and not only in some part or parts. How so? By the etymology of the word “sollicitudo” itself, compounded as it was from “sollus” (the attribute of wholeness) and “citus” (the passive perfect participle of the verb “ciere,” thus the quality of having moved or been set into motion): hence sollicitudo would be preferred to cura as an attitude, and by implication as a designation for a fundamental structure of all existence (as a much later philosophy would have it), if only because, as under its sway an individual would be altogether unsettled in a manner he did not want at all, sollicitudo itself encouraged him to realise that help from an external source would have to be – solicited.
Though the implicit connection to speech and to utterance was not marked in the first age of the word “sollicitudo,” whereas with “cura” this was the case (if only on account of the involvement of cura in the mind’s inward operations of recordari and revocare in cor), even so, from the former a verb pertaining to communication did emerge in Middle French and then in Middle English, much the same ones that still circulate in both languages today.
Now, if cura could be applied practically-medicinally to parts as to wholes, whereas sollicitudo seemingly by definition related solely to the latter, then whenever a melancholic opted to speak of his own “sollicitudo,” it would have suggested that he laid greater stock in that old adage, Health is in the whole, than he would have done had he remained attached primarily to the term “cura.” But in which whole was he then seeking to find or to recover it? – that would have been the question.
In the later Quattrocento, as one entire epoch came to an ignominious close and all manner of objects comprising an enormous inheritance of culture began to arrive in the cities throughout Italy, and above all in Florence, the old fire in the heart of the melancholic temperament, the sentiment of the great injustices perpetrated by chronology, would have roared up anew, and more scorchingly than ever before, given all the plentitudes which intellects turned towards the past were then able to consider: or, at least, these flames would have burned exceedingly hot when all those items were first arriving. Amidst circumstances like those, it comes as no surprise that thought regarding the notions of cura and sollicitudo themselves, taken as topics for reflection especially under the aspect of time and time’s vanity, should have conveyed some profound or, at least, some suggestive intuitions, occasioned by the practical concerns of people come under melancholy’s sway who recognised that on this very account they had manifold pitfalls to elude.
Perhaps nowhere more than in the circle around Marsilio Ficino, reflection on these matters was carried out not only in solitude, but between friends, providing frequently the substance of their conversations and the occasions for exchanges of letters. Assistance and advice, philosophical and medicinal, was often carefully solicited, and this very focus of interest became something like an emblem by which, to be sure with tact in its display, these interlocutors could distinguish themselves as forming a whole in its own right. (A whole in search of its health?) In so doing, this assembly of antiquity’s adepts set an example that would prove to be quite modern in its cautious disclosure of the melancholic’s self-concern; on this point especially subsequent centuries have taken it any number of times as a model, and so the recollection of these Florentines themselves entered into the chronological inheritance that arouses the fire in hearts such as theirs also were.
In one of his letters, responding it seems to solicitations for advice about the predicament in which he and his fellows did find themselves, Ficino first alluded to the relocations within the order of time which the inward-directed effort to set limits to one’s own cura might bring about, even against the will of anyone seeking to accomplish this. (About these consequences, unintended or otherwise, I’ve written a bit elsewhere,* and shall not rehearse any of that here.) Then came the piece of advice. Iterum – he implored his three correspondents – precor atque iterum uiuite Læti. Nam fata sinunt: dum securi uiuitis. Sed ut re uera sine cura uiuitas ne unam quidem hanc curam summite: qua solliciti curetis unquam: qua potissimum diligentia curas effugiatis. Vna enim cura hæc mortalibus heu miseris omni cura cor urit.** His prescription – with how ever much seriousness or irony Ficino, in the capacity of physician, as he also said, may have provided it – I shall attempt to convey in English as follows: Over and over again I entreat you to live joyfully. For the Fates allow it, so long as each of you lives carefree. Yet in order to live truly without care, never heed that last stipulation itself too solicitously, lest you then suffer under further care. Do try, therefore, as you flee all cares also to avoid too great a diligence, for by this single care alone the poor mortal heart will again burn with every care. – To unravel this skein of words as simply as I can: the state of living joyfully depends upon the allowance of the Fates, and hence as with life generally it too is likened to a filament. Because its duration is finite, which is underscored further by the choice of a conjunction (dum) to introduce its limiting condition, namely, the length of time one passes in a carefree manner (securus), how could a mortal ever assess whether the allotted span is still intact? How else but by attending to the matter, that is, with cura? Alas, then this thread will itself be severed.
* In the text by which this website was re-inaugurated.
** letter to G. Canacci, B. Canigiani, and A. Corsini, September 16, 1489
Accordingly, with just a bit of reflection upon the subsequent remarks, surely it is not difficult to hear how quizzical they are (though his precise meaning does remain elusive)? They have the paradoxical tenor of a joke, do they not? But behind the sound one may smell the intellectual sweat of an “activité fiévreuse” on Ficino’s part as he sought to evade the arrival of a fatum. And then his inclusion of the term “sollicitudo” sharpens the point, as though positively to underscore the sad reality of melancholy, when most predominant in the temperament, that never will its cura be curable by cura. A cure for this condition there will never be.
Awareness of the inward sentiment of injustice which burns and can burn up the heart of the melancholic when cura holds sway over him – his intellect directed towards the past, or towards other regions of time and space construed as though they were past – from this one’s attention is diverted when, as in Ficino’s bit of advice which soon discloses itself as being a miniature word-labyrinth, the predicament of this temperament is in fact stated once more, but now with an application of somewhat different terms, as if by such a procedure the solution would be offered. While the repetition may amuse for a while, this doctor’s orders are not truly medicine but at best a palliative, depending on how one swallows them.
Their own cura can consume even those who have the most of it, or the least, just so long as they are of decidedly melancholic temperament. This cannibalism or even auto-cannibalism is easy to lose sight of – it is horrible to behold – but it is what calls out for attention; and though Ficino wrote often of Saturn, that classical exemplification of any progenitor who devours his progeny, for a better comprehension of this tendency inherent to melancholy I now turn elsewhere.
Back to Spanish ground, in fact; and though in this connection I could leap ahead and take a tour about the room in the Prado where Goya’s “Black Paintings” are sheltered, now instead I shall revolve backwards some centuries to consider briefly one small bit from a work written in a language entirely unrelated to Latin.
This bit, itself really no more than a concept – but quite a far-reaching one – crossed my path years ago while I was looking over some excerpts translated into English from the Zohar, the unsigned Kabbalist work most likely written or at least compiled during the late thirteenth century and plausibly attributed mainly on account of its idiosyncratic Aramaic to Moses de León.* Then it stuck in my memory, and afterwards I’ve often wondered what depth of meaning might be lodged in it, what were the experiences behind it into which one could delve with its help. For this small bit, even then, and much more so now, seems to be a prime instance of things “weightie and solide” left behind by the river of tradition, yet thus which also somehow are saved.
* Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Fifth Lecture
In form a commentary on the Bible and the later authoritative texts, the Zohar might by this chronological position alone be imbued with a substantial portion of melancholy, or offer itself as the starting-point for further trains of thought having a decidedly melancholic cast. – Yet whereas care’s melancholic fire generally is lit first and foremost when the intellect turns around and casts an acute eye upon chronology and the manifold unfairness inherent in it, in this singular context the sentiment of injustice reaches still further. For the history of the Jewish people, even before but especially since its existence became thoroughly diasporic, is unequalled in the quality and quantity of the melancholy to which it conduces.
The supplanting of Athens by Rome, or the order of the latter’s different ages and then its long strange northern afterlives, or the Ancien Régime’s incomplete supersession (an enormous failure in the contemplation of which, amidst the “Great Reset” and on the road to “2030” as we are, l’esprit marche dans les ténèbres once again), none of these successions induces reflections nearly as melancholic in historically observant minds (regardless of the degree of reverence for “History” such a mind may happen to feel and/or evince).
Rather than by the term “diaspora,” within the realm of this history itself the dispersal of the Jewish people is designated an exile (גָּלוּת, galut), and so conceived it occasioned the remark in the Zohar to which I’ll now return.
It occurs in a section prompted by the Biblical verse the King James renders as follows: For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, euen a iealous God.* His jealousy has been much remarked upon; and insofar as it is permissible within this religion to speak of its divinity in human terms, the attribution is an index of a sanguine temperament and the type of care specific to it. For the term “jealous” renders the Hebrew “קַנָּֽא” (kannah), and the basic concept “קִנְאָה” (kinah) is jealousy in a wide sense: ardour, passion, and zeal. He entered into the Covenant with his people jealously, and expects it to be upheld likewise. – During those ages of Jewish history, long before the dispersion, if the sanguine temperament were the dominant one, as I imagine it must have been, then the meaning of all this, the implications included, was understood and also acted upon readily, especially since what otherwise would follow is spoken of elsewhere in the Bible at length, conveyed by warnings and maledictions which in sheer frightfulness exceed even Aeschylus at his most terrifying. Those possible consequences, in this one verse, are all alluded to by the memorable image which expresses the other divine predicate, “consuming fire” (אֵ֥שׁ אֹכְלָ֖ה, esh akal) that should perhaps instead, with greater exactitude, be called devouring.
* Deuteronomy, 4, 24
That other predicate, of course, is divine justice. Its Biblical severity, in subsequent ages, has often elicited perplexity and even scandal. – Suffice it here to remark that during that early period also, as amongst the Romans somewhat later, reflection upon the paradox encapsulated in the adage, Summum ius, summa iniuria, was well-known. – Such reflection would perhaps have circled not least around a small yet thought-provoking sonic co-incidence: the word “קִנְאָה” is nearly identical in its sound to the term for a specific kind of dirge or lamentation, “קִינָה” (kinah), though between these two concepts no relation has been uncovered by etymology, so far as I have been able to ascertain.
Justice, as a topic for reflection, would in any event have become ever more of a preoccupation and disclosed further of its virtually unending complexities as, step by step, the sanguine temperament retreated in the face of the increasing prominence of the melancholic, during the ages of Jewish history which preceded the establishment of the diaspora or exile in the shape in which it still continues to exist, even now. And with its formation, that prominence became a predominance; everywhere it looked, the melancholic’s intellect was given more food for thought, and whichever way it turned, stoked by care his heart would burn with the sentiment that history itself was injustice.
Nor was this melancholic’s person itself exempted from that sentiment, for the exilic state in its entirety was construed as furnishing a permanent reminder that penance still had indefinitely to be done. Accordingly, awareness that while he was a victim of the injustice of the history, in different respects he was also both a perpetuator and a beneficiary of it, would have been difficult to elude. Hence he, much as with the other cases of melancholy, would always run the risk of being consumed by the very care which he, much like them, evidently could live neither with nor without.
The jealousy (קִנְאָה) which earlier had seemed to represent an adequate answer to the question of the reason for the many misfortunes which were met with, sufficed no longer, and perhaps thenceforth could not even really be fathomed, given the general change in temperaments. At least in the passage in the Zohar which I can now address (after some detours – hard to avoid whenever melancholy is at issue!) the notion does not appear at all. Instead it is the concept of the “consuming fire” around which this text circles.
Here is the remark which, in an English translation, caught my attention years ago; what follows is first the Aramaic and then another version in English, the work of the unnamed editors at the project which has kindly made the whole available via the Internet.
.אִית אֶשָּׁא אָכִיל אֶשָּׁא. אֶשָּׁתָא דְּקוּדְשָׁא בְּרִיךְ הוּא, אָכִיל אֶשָּׁא אָחֳרָא
There is a fire consuming fire, a fire of the Holy One, blessed be He, which consumes the other fire of the Other Side.*
* Vayikra, ch. 66, 442
Justice and injustice constituted evidently a twofold topic of concern to the author, for he – carefully, I should say – separates the “consuming fire” spoken of in the Biblical verse into two: firstly, a “fire consuming fire” (אֶשָּׁא אָכִיל אֶשָּׁא) or else, to adjust the term in accord with the other, a fire that devours fire, and secondly, a “fire” of the sort which here below (the “Other Side” of the English) is all too common, or in other words, at least by implication, the numerous misfortunes large, middling, and small with which exilic history is replete.
Fire of the first kind will at some indefinite moment devour every fire of the second kind – such is the expectation to which the author seems, on a first reading, to give voice. Therewith, ultimately, a rectification would be brought about.
Recall, however, the “consuming fire” in the Biblical verse was itself a composite of the ways by which retribution would be exacted against a people strayed from the obligations it had assumed, and realise that in the Zoharic text, centuries later, this “fire” is itself one of the items to be consumed – would then its prospective destruction not shimmer into view as an event distinctly strange and even Saturnine in at least one respect? For the very ordinance by which the exile was instituted, is to be obliterated by the one who issued it, or, in other terms, a progenitor is to devour his own progeny. (Here a possible misunderstanding should be avoided: the eventuality spoken of by this passage is not identical to the coming of the Messianic age set in some unspecific time yet to arrive, and its envisioned occurrence might even stand in full opposition to the latter, that is, as possibilities they would be opposed in an entire, not a dialectical antithesis.)
It is as though the predicament of the melancholic temperament, generally but a step from being devoured by the fire of its own care, that is, by its sense of the unfairness of history, including the relative injustice inherent in its very existence, were itself restated in an optative future tense and inscribed in heaven itself as that which is hoped for above all.
If that is so, then one further move brings this train of thought to a ne plus ultra of a conclusion: as here below the melancholic type of care tends of itself to vanish, burnt up by the flame it itself has unleashed, just so the fire that devours fire is bound to finish itself off up above in the end.
Now, to terminate this account of the melancholic temperament’s backward turns (since I have quite a lot else still to touch on): care like this may indeed wish that once it flames out, its successor be – an absolute nothingness.
Forward now to address the third of the temperaments, the one most prone to irritation and anger, the choleric. Right at the outset I should note how difficult it seems to conceive of any transition from the one just touched on to this, whether on a small, a middling, or a large scale: between them no relation of this kind seems at all obvious, at least to begin with, although in this connection some reflection upon one or two of Shakespeare’s figures might provide a key.
Now, to anticipate: after the care specific to the choleric temperament and the fire which it sets in the heart are isolated, the subsequent findings may prove rather surprising and fresh; quite possibly a few stereotypes, old and yet common associations of ideas, will then be exploded.
One persistent stereotype, however, is an index of perhaps the classical locale of this temperament, and so I heed it in turning now to England, the native habitat of the concept of spleen (and where this sort of wilfulness itself is familiar though not perhaps really well-known).
Yet the spleen is but a later outgrowth, while the very distinctive development which etymology has ascertained throughout the history of the English language in the term “care,” along with some others connected closely to it, goes all the way back to its first emergence, that is, to Old English.
A first consultation of the etymological record already discloses something rather surprising: the term “care” is not derived from the Latin “cura,” to which only the English word “cure,” whether as a noun or as a verb, is owed. No, the word itself has an entirely different derivation, and what is more, its meaning today is much the same as in Old English, though of course its sound and its spelling have been altered through the passage of time. The persistence of its first sense is all the more worthy of note, as in other Germanic languages this same term has diverged quite considerably from its origin. (Their divergence and its significance will be addressed later on, in connection with the fourth and last temperament.)
The Old English words “caru” and “cearu,” the latter also in the variant “cearo,” meant what today’s term still does, especially when the language is treated with the love it merits, namely, anxiety, sorrow, and also, as is obvious, care in its more restricted signification, the concept then as now applicable either in the singular or in the plural. These words, and their cognates in the sibling languages, according to etymology, in their turn emerge from a conjectural source in their common ancestor, namely, the term “karo” in the older Teutonic, which meant sorrow and care, and this conjecture is buttressed by that term’s plausible likeness to others of various ages in languages in several branches of the Indo-European linguistic family: the classical Greek “γῆρυς,” sound or voice, the Latin “garrire,” to chat, to talk, or also to chatter, the Ossetic “зар” (zar), song, and “зарын” (zaryn), to sing, the Welsh “gawr,” noise, cry, or clamour, and – not least – the Tocharian “kärye,” care. Behind all these, in the Indo-European proto-language, etymological study has conjectured the existence of a common verbal root devised by onomatopoeia, “ĝā̌r-,” to shout, to cry, an action of which a much later echo, as it were, is heard by etymologists in the Old High German word “chara,” a lament, as well as in some English words still in circulation today, which ring just a bit differently when this distant conjectural origin is borne in mind, assuming, of course, that it is credible.
If so, then this profound English word “care” has always had behind itself something like the original type of lamentation – a derivation indicating a relation the inverse of the one encountered elsewhere, wherever, that is, care, how ever it be designated, has been acknowledged or suggested as being the feature of existence in response to which sorrowful song later arises. – Already one may surmise that the structure and the meaning of care might disclose themselves in a distinctly different, even in a unique manner whenever the choleric temperament is pre-eminent or predominant, a circumstance which is, after all, not exactly an unusual occurrence in life regardless of the language or the country.
What manner of song may be heard in (by and through) this English word itself, shall be exemplified and examined in a moment. – In the case of its fellow, “sorrow,” the latter’s etymological development too may intimate something about the figure taken on by care under the reign of the choleric temperament.
“Sorrow,” largely in the same sense as today’s word, is met with under the forms “sorewe” or “sorwe” in Middle and “sorg” in Old English; but what the term even at the outset lacked was the connection to the problem of illness in human life and how best, providently, to avoid it: just this quite practical interest figured and continues to figure in the meanings of its cognate words in other Germanic languages, and also, farther afield, in those of some words in languages in other branches of the Indo-European group, like the Old Irish substantive “serg,” sickness, or the Sanskrit verb “सूर्क्षति” (sūrkṣati), to care for, be worried about. All of this concern was taken on by that borrowing from Latin, the word “cure,” and accordingly no cause remained for the other term to be oriented intrinsically towards times yet to come.
Another first intuition about the shape assumed by care as a fundamental structure of existence when the choleric temperament dominates, may be gleaned from the etymology of that indispensable English word “sake,” on which this essay’s argumentation (such as it is) relies so heavily. Here an obvious narrowing in the meaning has taken place, as in Middle English the word meant lawsuit or strife, its reference earlier having been still broader, even evidently encompassing the jurisdiction in lawsuits, and this breadth is encountered today in the cognate terms in other Germanic languages, which on this account may be applied in numerous contexts: often they seem to be at home amidst long and rather indefinite or interminable processes, whereas the English concept readily conduces to sectioning off time quite precisely, a definite favour therewith being shown to the present. Moreover, in keeping with this preference, the word allows for an easy and elegant designation of things and deeds done for their own sakes, whereas the constructions which have been put together to meet the same need, in some of these sibling languages, are a bit awkward, somewhat less than agile.
Not the least of the challenges met by those who left their countries behind and made for themselves a new home across the North Sea, prompted in this venture by a high degree of the choleric temperament, was the task of devising a quite new rapport with time and place, and so it stands to reason that amongst them a decided preference for the present should be evident. Thus were their cares themselves their songs, thus their sorrows were in themselves now unbound from the past and the future, and thus that for the sake of which they did it all was the deed itself, as an action sufficing in its own right.
What is the fire by which care burns the heart of the choleric? Not anything as abstract as an ideal, I infer from this early English experience, far rather a passionate urging towards self-reliance and self-sufficiency.
All this is illustrated in a few passages from one of the first poems in Old English put into writing, the “Wanderer.”
Note that, as preserved, a channel seems to transect the poet’s work.
In the first passage, he expresses the circumstances in which cearo finds itself, on that new other side of the North Sea.
no þær fela bringeð
cuðra cwide-giedda cearo bið geniwad
þam þe sendan sceal swiþe geneahhe
ofer waþema gebind werigne sefan.*
(Not ashore are many brought
of the well-known ballads. Care then is ever new
for him who would send so very often,
over the waves that bind, a weary spirit.)
While images that are hard to fathom are not absent from these lines, the “waþema gebind” being amongst the more obscure, nonetheless he does seem to speak his notion of “cearo” in a forthright manner, though tersely. In the version in today’s English which I have appended, I hew closely to the most obvious meaning of each of the words, striving to repeat the cadence and to match the number and the flow of syllables: yet with a small adjustment of the mood in one line –
for him who otherwise would have to send so very often,
– the alternative of which the poet was thinking, as I surmise, may better be brought out. That the condition he speaks of would follow from a choice of one of the alternatives before him, and does not simply rest like an obligation upon him – this seems evident to me, since he is a free man and a free-speaking one, a point not needing to be argued. (But if one were to enter into an argument about it, much would hinge on the meaning which the modal verb “sculan” was introduced here to convey.)
* The Exeter Book, “The Wanderer,” ll. 54-57 (Gollancz)
The other of these alternatives is the one he does favour, and by this choice the idea conveyed through the word “cearo” shows itself to be profound. (Otherwise it would pertain only to a weary spirit dispatched in imagination back across the sea. – Yet although, as it seems to me, the poet alludes to that spirit only as one actor in an alternate possibility, the condition of weariness may reveal a side otherwise unsuspected, when the choleric temperament predominates.) For then, in the absence of that forsaken sum of music, cearo bið geniwad – his cearo is itself a song, and indeed a self-renewing one, of a sorrowful tone to be sure, but nonetheless song! Or if, somewhat more precisely, the cearo he speaks of is not that, even so, from out of it such song shall flow very soon, and steadily. (Of that his own poetry would then be proof.)
Care is song, actually or potentially. – By this disclosure a profundity of meaning otherwise lost in the immemorial history of the word “cearo” was retrieved from its resting-place. And this finding, the catch of an intuition hardly known and yet virtually priceless, is owed to the anonymous Old English poet who by his own choice had left some great part of his own personal past behind, once he set out for a new shore; thus the discovery could perhaps have been made only under this circumstance, by someone whose ire when aroused would be quite consequential.
Not solely when touching on care but also in his vision of sorrow, the poet speaks profoundly. Another passage can be introduced in order to illustrate this point.
þonne beoð þy hefigran heortan benne
sare æfter swæsne sorg bið geniwad
þonne maga gemynd mod geond-hweorfeð
greteð gliw-stafum*
(Then are the heavier the wounds in his heart,
sighing for one so sweet. Sorrow is ever new
when kinsmen’s memory his mind does traverse
with greeting’s glad tones)
The sorg described here is already an instance of what the modern English word “sorrow” means, namely, a state of mind whose locus is the present, and not, as with the cognate terms in other Germanic languages, a condition whose duration is indefinite, permanent, or even coeval with all existence. – Moreover, here a curious proximity between sorrow and joy is exhibited, between a wounded heart (“heortan benne”) and the latter’s sheer capacity to feel, as though to insist how injury is not simply injurious but also in some degree a vital necessity. Sorrow replenishes itself in the heart by virtue of the latter’s imaginative power, which is in turn itself kept alive through this self-renewal. (The power is an exercise of imagination rather than of memory because all of these inward actions are participants in a present-tense activity of the mind.) – Now, after a moment’s reflection, claims such as these do suggest that the poem stems from a largely choleric temperament and was, is, and shall be most readily understood by those disposed similarly. Not such a surprise, this, as on its face the work is of warriors. (And will not any wanderer at times have to be or at least act as one?)
* ll. 49-52
Also worthy of note is the evident parity between this poet’s mind (mod) and the recollection (gemynd), as the two would seem to greet one another as peers, for the grammar does open a question whether just one goes forth to receive, or to be received by, the other.
Turning now to the third of the triad of words whose development is so interesting in English, “sake,” admittedly it does not feature in this poem. Yet one passage does address that perennial question, What renders a deed worthy? – a suggestive co-incidence, calling forth the thought that the predominance of the choleric temperament may have encouraged the noun to narrow down the scope of its reference from processes to discrete actions, during the long transition towards modern English. Nor is this so very surprising, either. The greater the importance attributed to the practical assessment of a deed’s worthiness, and this ever more in the present, rather than within much less well-defined horizons, as still today in the other Germanic languages, the more important would it have seemed to hold ready a concept with which to identify, not the inherent purpose strictly speaking, but rather the why of it, that is, that by or for reason of which the action was taken.
In this third passage, the worthiness of a deed is tied closely to the self-reliance and thus also to the self-restraint of the doer.
ne sceal næfre his torn to rycene
beorn of his breostum acyþan nemþe he ær þa bote cunne
eorl mid elne gefremman*
(never should his anger rashly be
got off a man’s chest by his words alone if he does this remedy not know:
the hero by valour is proven)
Inward self-control is possible not least because the eventual resort to an ultima ratio does allow for and even encourage one’s rational deliberation with oneself: rashness, accordingly, does tend to be held in check by the person of choleric temperament himself – whenever he has enough confidence in his own powers.
* ll. 112-14
Hence a valiant deed is correlate to a person of choleric temperament in whom the urge of self-reliance has the mastery.
Often it is the fire which burns in the heart of such a person, lit by the desire of autonomy, that sets limits to the expression of the anger he feels. – Eruptions of spleen, when they occur habitually, may then perhaps be taken as indications of the senescence of this temperament in the course of an individual human life.
Upon a larger scale, it has demonstrated its great longevity in England, and several centuries after its immortalisation in the lines of the “Wanderer,” its profile was described by another poet in rather similar terms, during the Elizabethan period, the age of the country’s literary history in which the rapport with Italian literature generally and with Florentines such as the participants in the Ficino circle in particular, was ardently sustained. Amongst the range of the latter’s interests, it was not least the careful attention – philosophical, medicinal, political – devoted to the question of the different temperaments, which commended them to their English counterparts around a century afterwards.
During the last decades of the sixteenth century, cultural life flourished under the challenges posed by England’s increasing prominence amongst nations, and above all on account of its difficult relations with Spain. In the years of greatest tension, the late 1580s, the moment of the Armada and its defeat, on the political stage especially the choleric temperament would have been quite prominently represented, affording the dramatists and authors chance after chance to observe many outstanding specimens of it in action and at leisure, and thus to assemble material for literary depictions of the type, under this or that guise.
Thus was quite an acute miniature portrait of the humour rancorous delivered in a poetic tale by Edmund Spenser, just after the watershed year 1588. Whether he himself related this likeness to the choleric temperament specifically, may be set aside as a question perhaps for another moment when it comes time to delve again into some of his period’s literature – in it the several temperaments which variously with curelesse care consume the hart are illuminated by any number of authors, well-known today and less so. At present, however, that the lines in the “Wanderer” accord neatly with these that follow, furnishes sufficient reason to propose as an image of a choleric the Malbecco who can
neuer dye, but dying liues,
And doth himselfe with sorrow new sustaine,
That death and life attonce vnto him giues.
And painefull pleasure turnes to pleasing paine.*
Sorrow has itself become sustenance. With this turn, to state clearly the evident implication of the transformation, the care which devours the hearts of those in whom the temperaments addressed previously hold sway, or threatens to devour them, and may in the end feast upon more than their hearts alone – care, for those of predominantly choleric temperament, seems to nourish them instead. Surely this is a very thought-provoking twist, is it not? – And with it, too, the contrarieties of transience and permanence, of pain and pleasure may be examined anew, possibly to reveal facets whose existence one had not imagined before.
* The Faerie Qveene, bk. iii, Canto x
Subtlety in philosophical reflections on the nature of pleasure, pain, and their manifold interrelations, such as offered by the best philosophers in the English language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or, on another plane, the proliferation of eccentrics in all parts of English life, to mention only a couple of characteristic developments, might well have emerged from out of the prevalence of just this choleric temperament, as reflected in the two poems addressed already, and thus may remain rather inexplicable if reference is not made to it. – What is more, the choleric temperament’s prominence in England may illuminate how, contrary to stereotypical expectations, that counterpart of the political and the contemplative “ways of life,” the Aristotelian “βίος ἡδονικός,” the life of pleasure, has greatly flourished, though usually unremarked, amidst those environs.*
* To sketch out a profile of the βίος ἡδονικός as led in England, is an overarching aim in an older essay about the works of the composer Marc Yeats.
Centuries further on, during other years of imperilment, a further expression of this distinctive variety of care is given in a work by a third English poet, though by now it was composed on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, some months before the outbreak of the Second World War. The occasion was a commemoration of an elder peer just passed away, and so the poem by W. H. Auden is of a sorrow like those of the two others. Profoundly he entreats himself:
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.*
Yes, this is an entreaty, and it also fulfils its own request – but, of course, not all ears will so readily hear the rapture of distress which animates these lines and much of the rest of the poem. Those that do, may then understand it not merely as sounding the profound theme of human unsuccess but also as being a song bursting forth from the latter, itself instantiating it. For it itself is a piece of unsuccess! This poem, a deed done largely for its own sake, was untouched by any intent to succeed, in any of the senses of the term, and thus it embraces the present moment set apart from all else, as perhaps the most or even the only human choice, relatively speaking, that still remains to be made.
* “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
Hence the poem stands with all that never has been, is, or shall be selected by history, nature, or that natural-historical habitat the literary and musical world, and not least with the instances of significance cast aside as unfit.
A garden may indeed yet arise, as per the image in the poem’s penultimate stanza, but its growth, if or when it begins to supplant that which was selected, shall have to find others to tend to it. – Here suffice it to remark, by way of rounding off the presentation of this temperament, the choleric, that for the manifold temptations of success it is the one which may offer the most potent cure.
The last temperament to be dealt with, the phlegmatic, is challenging to characterise along similar lines as the others, on account of its coldness. How plausible can the notion of fire possibly be in this connection, when dampness is everywhere and warmth so scarce? (How is song to be heard over the coughing?)
Yet with this fourth temperament also, the heart is at times enflamed by care, though this does transpire in a manner all its own, and the term itself will be adjusted accordingly. For here how distinct, but distant – clear – but, oh how cold! is the light which Sorrow watcheth to behold – and under a predominance of the phlegmatic, this icy illumination represents the relatively best case. – For a similar reason, such a temperament does not exactly conduce to the making of poetry, and so the elaborations in what follows will feature some passages in prose.
Where is a prevalence of this temperament met with? The question is not hard to answer: in the Netherlands it is conspicuous to such a degree that the country is frequently taken as the textbook example of this phenomenon, and so, while underscoring at the outset all the standard cautions about the pitfalls of generalising, the common notion may be taken as a suitable point of departure.
Etymology can substantiate this perception in a remarkable way. The very same term which develops into the present-day English word “care,” with little change in the sense from Old English onwards, has shifted its meaning quite considerably in the progression from Middle Dutch to the language in its current state. In that earlier period, the word in the adjectival form “carich” meant sad or sorrowful, a shift which after all did not represent so deep a divergence from the meaning of the English cognate; but subsequently its sense took quite a turn, and in today’s Dutch the meaning of the adjective “karig” is scanty or frugal. Meanwhile, the several senses of the term “care” are conveyed by the word whose English cognate, as I mentioned before, is “sorrow” – and this Dutch substantive, “zorg,” ranges even more widely in its ambit, particularly in the anticipation of times to come, and in its reference too, as it is applicable not least to all matters of health in the broadest sense of the word (whereas in English the noun “services” and not “care” is frequently used in such contexts). Now, I surmise, while of course simplifying greatly, there is an inner logic to the way in which these two Dutch words have developed in parallel, the one expanding its reference and the other changing its meaning, a logic that can be explicated on the assumption of a prevalence of the phlegmatic temperament, with its intrinsic predilection for economising (whenever possible reducing) the efforts required of it: insofar as zorg in the full range of the word’s meanings could absorb so much of one’s concern if one gave it half a chance to do so, one would have to be quite karig in one’s dealings with it, and especially as regards allotments of time.
However, a moment’s reflection should show this to be anything but an enduring solution to the problem posed by zorg, whenever the phlegmatic temperament was dominant, for almost immediately, its own karige predisposition would engender a number of zorgen in turn, above all in any dealings with other people. So then, in a further step, that which someone of such a temperament most cared about, and on account of which some considerable part of his zorgen arose, would have to be reserved for himself as far as possible, kept under wraps, and shared, if at all, then only with some few others, and even that in a manner rather karig.
That which the phlegmatic most cares about need not be money, though by an obvious association of ideas one may think in this connection of the type of the miser. Yet behind the latter’s avarice, there is a good portion of ressentiment and envy, and these attitudes might also be native to the phlegmatic temperament as such, inherent in the way the fundamental structure of care is manifested in his existence. For at bottom, it is not even money which the phlegmatic, if he is also a miser, regards as being in scarce supply and hence to be sequestered by him as far as possible, but rather time itself. There is simply not time enough for everyone, in his view, and this notion, coupled with the envy and ressentiment which it may provoke – this vile complex is the strange fire (antifire?) which particular circumstances can ignite in his heart.
One illustration of this will have to suffice here – since our time, too, is limited! Every so often during my years there I myself witnessed a peculiar occurrence in the Netherlands, when some individuals who evidently cared greatly about castigating events in other countries or even the latter altogether (most often their vehemence matched their ignorance of that about which they were speaking), would, if the conversation then turned around to address Dutch problems (these topics being raised with rather more direct experience of them), quickly become indignant and terminate the conversation – as though at bottom it were not the country but rather some special prerogative of their own which they felt compelled to protect. But what prerogative was this? It was their own rapport with time which they so brusquely defended, the time which they had to reserve for themselves exclusively, for, as they seemed to believe, there simply was not enough to suffice for sharing it in reciprocity with others. (What egalitarianism!) – At any rate, after being present at a number of such conversations, enough to discern some pattern in these odd altercations, that is what I began to infer.
Objection might well be raised to the idea of a prevalence of the phlegmatic temperament throughout the centuries during which the transition was made from Middle Dutch to the present-day language. For then one is speaking in particular of the country’s Golden Age, the incomparable seventeenth century, excellent in many spheres of achievement, whether one looks at the paintings or the sciences, or towards the figure of a most singular and special philosopher, and surely that age was on the whole anything but phlegmatic in its temper? Indeed it was not. (And because it was not – or better, it is not least for the sake of what remains of that earlier, largely non-phlegmatic age in the country today, the works of art sheltered in the museums, for instance, or the spirit of critical defiance which still animates the Verzet, the opposition to the horrible mad régime that currently reigns in the Hague, that I do now from elsewhere continue to hope the country or its worthier parts will find a way to destroy the cage being built for it.)
Yet from the outbreak of the war of independence from Spain in the later sixteenth century through to the last years of the next, the Netherlands faced the gravest threats from without to its existence, autonomy, and way of life, and accordingly the other three temperaments were given a very broad field to distinguish themselves prominently. So what share in the Golden Age may be attributed to this fourth one? Little to none, that is the most obvious answer. – Once those dangers were overcome, however, and the departure of William of Orange for England in 1688 may be taken as an acknowledgment that this had in fact been accomplished, the stage was set for the phlegmatic temperament to supplant the others, and especially the choleric, indeed to inherit the sum of their achievements and to live off them, as a successor and rentier. And this relation to the Golden Age has lasted far longer than that century itself. Something of the dividends – for it is under this aspect that they are construed by the phlegmatic temperament – circulate in the Netherlands even now, and as such are made use of officially, treated with honour or else dishonoured, as deemed expedient by the régime.
Nonetheless, if one peers attentively at the Calvinist doctrine of the elect, in the shape in which it was embraced in the Netherlands early on in the Golden Age, or at that century’s embarrassment of riches understood not as having represented a moral or ethical dilemma of the first order (as which some cultural historians of today have depicted it) but as having constituted in the eyes of the wealthy mainly a practical difficulty, namely, the pressing need posed by their wealth of finding a satisfactory mean between its display and its concealment, then even during that period of Dutch history one may realise how the phlegmatic temperament too contributed something of itself and was admixed with the three others.
At present, alas, this temperament plays a major role in the general indifference which has allowed the Hague régime largely a free hand to implement its agenda for the country. Beyond this consequence, a number of the régime’s policies have sought to instrumentalise towards its own ends the ressentiment and also the envy which care can stoke in the phlegmatic heart. This sad topic is treated in some detail in another essay published on this website, and here I shall only add that if the incipient form of total rule which now confronts us is guided by the idea that there is insufficient room on the planet for all its inhabitants, then one should understand how the phlegmatic temperament can be led by its own basic attitude, the conception of time itself as scarce, into acceptance or worse of this form of government. Hence the phlegmatic temperament, wherever it overshadows the others, a predominance encountered not by any means solely in the Netherlands, is becoming a political problem in its own right. Any response to this should adopt a conscientious seriousness of approach, for as Hannah Arendt cautioned us, presciently, total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible. Therefore the concept is not to be trifled with, even or especially informally, and hence, she remarked, we have every reason to use the word “totalitarian” sparingly and prudently.* Unfortunately for us all, its usage does seem to be necessary again, over against the rulers who now arrogate to themselves the power of apportioning existence, freedom, and life itself – and exercise it stingily (karig).
* The Origins of Totalitarianism, Preface to Part Three: Totalitarianism, i
Now, in order to concretise further this anatomy of the phlegmatic temperament, I’ll turn my attention to the German-speaking regions, for the history of that language too, much like the Dutch, affords some insight into it, when the etymology of the relevant words is taken as a point of departure for reflection – carefully.
In the German language, the word “Sorge” has developed in a manner quite similar to the Dutch “zorg,” and so there is no need to rehearse its history. As for the other relevant term, its development is somewhat more variegated: in Old High German the adjective “karag” meant anxious, then “karc” or “karg” took on the sense of clever or shrewd in Middle High German, while in the language presently “karg” has a somewhat broader sense than its Dutch cognate: its meanings range from stingy through scanty, sparse, meagre, to barren. The last of these may itself express a certain presentiment (distant – clear – but, oh how cold!) of what the result might be once the karge attitude becomes widespread and, as it were, stints everywhere and in everything.
The first mention of the basic attitude to which I’ll call attention, is found in a letter sent by a Dominican priest to his god-daughter, a few years after the Reformation commenced. Word had reached him that she was tending to comport herself poorly, as though she credited the new doctrine of justification by faith alone, and accordingly he sent a loving yet biting reproof: disem meynem tochterleyn – he addressed her – gefallen. wie dann allen Lutherschen. außwendige werck nichts. dann sye wandern alleyn ym geist: vnd seyen vber menschen. vnd vber menschliche engel vielleicht. oder engelysch vnd gantz geyst worden. daß sie menschlicher werck nicht merh dorffen vben vnd schweben alleyn ym geyst – in other words, to convey something of his epistolary flow, she much like the Lutherans does not favour outward works at all, for they walk alone in spirit and are as though above mere human beings and even above those of them who are more angelic, as though they had themselves become entirely angelic, purely spirit, no longer in need of performing any human work, floating alone in spirit. But such a posturing surely had had a reason, it could not possibly have been practiced without a cause, could it? No, it could not have been, and the explanation was not far off. Obviously there was something which they für sich alleyn behalten wollen above all: the reich gottes* itself – so the motive of their comportment was their wish to keep God’s realm for themselves alone. A desire by which they would in effect permit themselves, and themselves only, much or indeed every misconduct.
* Hermann Rab, “Zuschrifft an Catharina von der Plaunitz”
This proprietary interest on their part, if not also the manner in which they comported themselves, matches quite well the basic posture of the phlegmatic temperament as anatomised thus far on the basis of observation and etymology. Worthy of note in this passage, moreover, is the first significant occurrence in German literature of a concept which would play a starring role at the end of the nineteenth century and afterwards (though it was introduced already a century before), namely, the Übermensch. Admittedly, the evidence of this Dominican’s autograph is ambiguous, for in it the compound term is not formed, its two elements being written instead in the usual manner, separately, as a preposition before a noun (vber menschen); yet even so, it is thought-provoking to consider how the first Übermenschen may in fact have been newly-minted phlegmatic Lutherans who, had they been allowed to, might have absconded with time itself like thieves in the night. Perhaps then in Nietzsche’s later embrace of the term there was more humorous irony than we today might see at first.
Around two hundred and fifty years after this Spottbrief aimed at the Lutherans, the phlegmatic temperament played a role at another moment when a pivotal concept evidently first saw the light of day, and this time around it was situated off in the background. Hence somewhat more of an exegesis is called upon to point it out; now, however, to vary my presentation of this temperament, since it has thus far been bluntly one-sided and negative, I should like to recall how the key word “karc” or “karg” had earlier in Middle High German the quite different though not contrary, the perhaps more affirmatively-meant significations of shrewd and clever. Amidst a crowd of phlegmatic temperaments, with their characteristic penchant for Kargheit much in evidence by virtue of their sheer aggregation, minds or even simply ideas that were karc, that is, in a word, smart, would have had occasion to arise and distinguish themselves, would have been provided ample material upon which to reflect. – Perhaps a presentiment of just such a situation had been compressed into the meaning which the German word itself would subsequently cast off, though possibly this one sense was not so quickly lost altogether, if ever it finally were? – Be that as it may: the point to note is how the phlegmatic’s typical karge attitude could, despite itself, prove good for something.
The concept in question is nihilism (Nihilismus), and in this German form it seems to have made its debut in the course of university lectures on geography delivered in the summer semester of 1774 by Kant. The term, needless to say, carried in his usage a quite different meaning than those which have become common since the latter years of the nineteenth century, and yet perhaps some echo of this original sense may be heard in the term’s later significations. – Configured into French, from the early 1790s onwards the word and its related terms circulated widely, already then evidently in usages akin to the subsequent developments, while it was repeated more or less in the initial sense, so far as I know, only once again, in an English analogue in 1871, during a well-known public lecture.*
* For the prevalence of the word during the French Revolution, two contemporary testimonies may be recommended, an entry in Adam Gottlieb Gebhardt’s “Französische Neologie,” and then a few years later one in the second volume of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Néologie. – The lecture was delivered at the Birmingham and Midland Institute by Thomas Henry Huxley, and afterwards published under the title “Administrative Nihilism.”
Geography, as the subject of the 1774 lectures, was handled in a broad scope, and some relevant natural phenomena were addressed. Thus Kant also spoke about the relation between warmth and cold, not only touching on them as physical realities, but also delineating the two concepts. Die Wärme ist – he asserted – etwas Positives, wie das Licht, und Kälte wie Finsterniß sind bloß Namen für den scheinbaren Mangel jener. In other words: Heat is something positive, like light, and “coldness” much like “darkness” are merely names for the seeming lack of the former. Were one to extend this notation in a more figurative way, and apply it to the human temperaments, then the sanguine would probably be reckoned as the primordial one, and the phlegmatic as representing its privation.
This implication is in itself provocative, so provocative indeed that it gives rise to the further idea that behind this question of physics Kant already was thinking about human nature, possibly along the lines of comparative anthropology, another of his abiding intellectual interests, which he later presented so strikingly in some of his own last published works. – Fine and well, but what then is heat? Die Wärme haben wir eigenthümlich als Bedingung der Ausdehnung für jeden Körper zu betrachten. Nirgend fehlt sie ganz. Wo sie fehlte, könnte keine Organisation Statt finden; es wäre da eine gänzliche Aufhebung alles Organism. Und weil es keinen streng unorganischen Körper giebt: so würden wir uns, bey der Annahme eines überall vorhandenen gänzlichen Mangels an eigener Wärme, welche eintreten müßte, wenn wir sie als etwas bloß von außen her Gewirktes betrachten wollten, in die Nothwendigkeit gesetzt sehen, einen Nihilismus anzunehmen, dem Vernunft und Erfahrung widersprechen.* This lively specimen of his style of lecturing I shall put into English as follows, replicating as nearly as possible the arrangement of his clauses. Heat we should properly consider to be the condition for the spatial extension of every body. Nowhere is it entirely lacking. Wherever it somehow were missing, no organic life could arise at all; there instead one would have an utter cancellation of all organic capacity. And because there are no such things as strictly inorganic bodies, we would, were we to adopt the notion of a complete lack of inherent heat met with everywhere and anywhere, an assumption which could not be avoided if we wished to regard heat as something caused merely from the outside, see ourselves placed under the necessity of adopting a nihilism which reason and experience contradict.
* Physische Geographie, vol. i, pt. i, sec. ii, § 44, Anmerkung
At that last clause, one’s intellectual ears do perk up, but what precisely does the term “Nihilismus” signify there? Evidently it designates a theorem whereby a privation would be substituted for a positivity as the starting-point for scientific observation and theory. Now, while this is certainly not the place for considering what the result of such an inversion might be, as regards the history of philosophy more generally or the philosophy of history more particularly, it is proper to notice how within this, as it were, nihilist theorem there already seems to be contained the germ of the later notion of a “heat death” which the physical universe will at some distant moment of time itself undergo, all its warmth ultimately drained away: or, to vary the point just a bit, implicit in this theorem is a premise which, if drawn out by deductive procedures, would bring a reasoner to the latter conclusion.
Such a “Nihilismus” is, Kant insisted, contradicted by reason and experience, and one would be inclined to agree, at least if the verb “contradict” (widersprechen) is taken in its most obvious sense, avoiding the temptation to attempt any dialectical somersaults – except for the intuition that, where phlegmatic temperaments are present in considerable numbers, experience and reason may not speak nearly with the same force against it as he hoped they would, for such a temperament, when it reflects upon its own condition, could well start by putting coldness in the place of warmth, thus affirming the “Nihilismus” as an accurate correlate to its own phlegmatical nature. – That Kant took the time to remark on what he himself said was no more than an impossible hypothesis, may itself imply that he had in fact espied some such angle from which the “Nihilismus” might, on the contrary, seem quite veridical. Then one does wonder how much direct contact with the phlegmatic temperament did stand behind his reflections, both in this 1774 lecture and later on, in his expressly anthropological texts.
The ease with which the later notion of “heat death” may be deduced from the “Nihilismus” suggests how apt was Kant’s coinage of the latter term; while the sheer obviousness of the idea of applying deductive procedures to that theorem, understood as a sort of mirror of the phlegmatic temperament itself, may in turn indicate something further, namely, the feeling of loneliness with which a person of such a temperament, if he be inclined to reflect upon his own condition, may soon come to regard it and himself.
Because the peculiar appeal of deduction (and of tautology) as procedures of thought to thinkers who are unable to surmount the loneliness they feel, therewith spinning out as far as they can what they themselves have wound up within this or that premise, is a topic treated in a previous essay on this website, there is no need to repeat any of it. All I will now tentatively add, is that this lonely feeling may itself stem from a prevalence of the phlegmatic temperament, and could perhaps then be explicated by reference to the latter. (Note that this assertion of a significant connection, in any individual case, would need to be reached through empirical observation, done very tactfully and cautiously, while deductions would be employed at most only rarely! Any more ambitious undertaking may safely be left to the professional soul-doctors.)
Despite the protestations reason and experience may have raised to them, thought-experiments, often drawn out at length, and attaining great speculative heights, did proliferate in Germany in the aftermath of Kant’s critical philosophy, and frequently enough it seems as though the initial impetus was provided by something akin to the theorem he had baptised as a “Nihilismus.” – Well, whatever this novelty may have contributed by way of a surge of intellectual energy, the activities of the mind throughout the subsequent decades are admirable and commendable (not that one necessarily agrees with the approaches or the results). However, what was never in evidence during this part of the nineteenth century, is anything like a predominance of the phlegmatic temperament. Yet after the war of 1870-71, even though a complete stagnation of intellectual life, a possibility conceivable at all times against which Müller had warned already some years before, was not then ushered in, the country’s political and its philosophical life too was turned into a theatre wherein that temperament assumed a leading role. – Especially today, in the middle of an immense Gründerschwindel on a global scale, otherwise known as the “Great Reset” and the “Agenda 2030,” how deaf and blind would one have to be, when the Gründerzeit is considered anew, not to hear and see that temperament everywhere in operation?
Directly after Germany’s loss of the next war, in November 1918, one opponent of the country’s established order turned his attention back to the earlier victory. In it he detected already the defeat of spiritual energy and intellectual intrepidity, soon to be squelched under a mentality ever more avid in a single pursuit alone, the attitude of the “Chicago an der Spree,” as Berlin was called. That even poets acquiesced bei dieser amerikanischen Form einer rein mechanisch merkantilen Weltanschauung (to the American form of a purely mechanical mercantilist world-view) and did not follow dem Muster ihrer immer emsigen französischen Nachbarn (the model of their tireless French neighbours) who had undertaken neue Welt auch neu zu durchdringen (to probe anew as required into a new world ), the sum of these poor choices ist Deutschlands größtes Unglück gewesen und beweist, wie der 1871 gewonnene Krieg im Jahre 1872 schon so gut wie verloren war (has been Germany’s greatest misfortune and shows how the war won in 1871 was already as good as lost by 1872). An angry sorrow runs through these lines, alongside a considerable quantum of irony, and all in all the predominance of the phlegmatic temperament was implicitly held responsible for the country’s ills; to its avidity was due the suppression of the flights of the mind generally, and thus only for economic phenomena did the language continue to fashion adequate concepts, such that nothing but economic topics remained intellectually alive in Germany. Die Sprache bildete nur für wirtschaftliche Phänomene noch ausreichende Begriffe und damit war etwas anderes als Ökonomisches in Deutschland überhaupt nicht mehr lebendig.* – This narrowing of the creative capacity of language by the functional demands placed upon it, may be taken as an illustration of the operations of the principle of selection in the literary and linguistic spheres which both Müller and Bagehot had called attention to already decades before, and the linkage might be pursued in the other direction as well, thereby suggesting perhaps something more specific about the character of that natural-historical habitat: possibly it had long since become one main locale where the phlegmatic temperament was actively bred or incubated.
* Carl Sternheim, “Die deutsche Revolution,” ii
To pursue that line of thought this is not the place, nor need I say more about the horrible strife just a few years off in the future whose rumblings a reader may hear by attending closely to this epitaph of the Wilhelmine era; but one bit in it is suggestive of a trait I take to be especially typical of the phlegmatic temperament and which thus allows its portrait to be rounded off properly. (Was this bit also ventured in an ironic tone of voice? Who can say?)
Whereas the choleric, in contrast to the phlegmatic, seems to contain within himself a self-replenishing impetus for action, the latter by his very nature strives to economise in the efforts required of him, and so the motive-force of the actions he does take remains a bit obscure, requiring some further elucidation. – There is a means which does seem to recommend itself to meet this need: it is the rather duplicitous procedure of assembling some or many of one’s own worse traits, which one never explicitly acknowledges as such (though implicitly admitting their existence by the resort to this very procedure), and assigning them to some enemy whom one ostentatiously loathes and yet to some degree silently or secretly envies, all the while however volubly denying that one is doing anything of the sort: for this very act of externalising attribution is amongst the items attributed to him! A duplicitous manœuvrer such as this, if it succeeds, will create what the German language calls a Feindbild, an image of an enemy, and hence, in the eyes of the one who does in fact originate it, never is it he himself who has done so! Instead he assigns that activity solely to the Feind whose Bild was his work.
In itself such a stratagem is rather clever – should one call it karc? When applied by a person of phlegmatic temperament it is especially so, as it neatly solves the problem posed by his own inclination towards the lesser effort. Efficaciously creating one’s own enemies will furnish any number of occasions where activity seems no longer merely an option but has become unavoidable . . .
The derogatory German notion of an amerikanische Form einer rein mechanisch merkantilen Weltanschauung, in this or that variant, is a constituent element of just such a Feindbild, one whose lineage in German-speaking lands is very long (nor by any means is it now just a part of a bygone history); from its simple usage or else its sotto voce citation in the remarks I quoted before, one may fittingly conclude that the traits comprised in it were in fact made in Germany and could be met with quite often in that country during the Wilhelmine era – and afterwards.
Yes, this Feindbild owes more than a little of its great longevity to the prevalence there of the phlegmatic temperament itself.
After all, that temperament remained rather prominently in the mix, politically and otherwise, after 1918 in Germany. Under the Weimar Republic, it entered into literature any number of times. Somehow it does seem to find a way of extending its own existence, and this facility is accentuated in one of its most notable literary appearances during those years, a small character sketch which distills as though in a quintessence the intuition that the phlegmatic lebt nicht aus dem Gefühl, daß das Leben lebenswert sei, sondern daß der Selbstmord die Mühe nicht lohnt* – this temperament lives from the feeling not that life is worth living, but rather that suicide does not repay the effort.
* Walter Benjamin, “Der destruktive Charakter”
Care like this keeps its distance and is cold indeed – but better that some reason for concern persist rather than none at all.
Late as it’s gotten after this tour d’horizon of the four temperaments, now I return to Lorca and his concerns of a century ago. Tempting as it may be to discern a sequence in these temperaments’ distribution, historically and geographically, as though haphazard appearances aside they do really follow one another in a definite pattern, and that not once only but rather in cycle upon cycle, here merely a few of the ideas gathered about them and their cares are brought in, to help reflect upon a moment in one of his poems wherein the song itself seems like a beginning.
In the section “Viñetas flamencas” of his Poema del cante jondo, Lorca included a poem entitled “Café cantante,” a tribute to the legendary singer La Parrala (Dolores Parrales Moreno, 1845-1915) and a picture in miniature of what by all reports had been an unforgettable stage-presence.
The one-sentence portrait within the poem was drawn by four precise strokes.
Sobre el tablado oscuro,
la Parrala sostiene
una conversación
con la muerte.
Amorous care and its particular weight, jealousy, are not in play on this café stage, but the whole scene, imbued with a sober mood, does call to mind the precautions with which the Roman curiones fulfilled their responsibilities, seeking as far as they could to avoid the issuance of a fatum. This difficult task of long ago is also hers, and an attentive reader senses through Lorca’s language the hush in the room as she proceeded to discharge it. Under the public’s scrutiny from every side, her composure was maintained as she put into practice the high seriousness of the sanguine temperament.
The depth of the conversation which ensued, one imagines, was owed to an underlying melancholy which would by no means have been heard from only during the course of the song itself. Had she not thought carefully about time and its manifold injustices, reflecting upon this ultimate theme from various angles, quite in advance of these performances, how then could La Parrala ever have persuaded herself of her readiness and capacity to find the right words? As she must have known, only under this condition would they prove fittingly grave and sufficiently profound.
In order to undergird the delivery, as a singer, to hold her own in the conversation, as an interlocutor, and to keep herself focused upon the other requirements on stage, as a performer, and this all at once, a degree of present-mindedness was necessary to attain, while amongst the listeners, too, a comparable attitude would likely have been requisite; hence on both sides, I surmise tentatively, something like a concurrent transmutation of sentiments of sorrow into attentive capacity was occurring, an effect to which some admixture of choleric temperament had substantially contributed.
By the fortuitous blending of these three temperaments and their different kinds of care, the performance in the café cantante could have opened, for all the attendees, the performers too, a “tesoro artístico” as Lorca had termed it some years before, the storeroom of meanings and experiences sheltered within the language itself and at most times so inaccessible one hardly notices that somehow it still is there. With these immaterial treasures rich, & strange, handled as delicately as such items must be whenever they are retrieved, beginnings might indeed have been made, in music or poetry or song or yet other fields.
– That’s an auspicious little manifesto of humanism, but isn’t something missing? Et in Arcadia ego, no?
– Well, all in due order, that fourth line was next up. The fourth temperament, too. Oh, these interruptions! Mi impedisco ultimamente di portare a termine il testo, to vary what someone once exclaimed, more or less.(The original remark stemmed from Martin Heidegger’s exasperation towards the end of a 1966 seminar, notated by Giorgio Agamben (L’uso dei corpi, “Intermezzo ii,” 11).)
La Parrala now upon the stage, by grace of the temperaments together, was conversing with a figure whom she entranced, though likely in no sense had she ever been in love with death. For the latter, whether imagined as Atropos with her scissors, as a skeleton wielding a scythe, or as ein Meister aus Deutschland, to instance but three, generally has neither on its hands much time to spare, nor much affection in its heart.
Death (la muerte) is not exactly known to enter into reciprocal relations, nearly never seeking to converse. Whenever it-he-she does deign to speak, the mood selected is almost always the imperative, because for its-his-her ends few words prove sharp enough, by hints more can be said with less, and nothing any longer repays the effort (die Mühe lohnt nicht). Vain expenditure is avoided as far as is feasible, this end aims as much as it can to economise its means, and so, if by any of the four temperaments such a figure may plausibly be typified, in all likelihood it will be the phlegmatic alone.
Drawing out this reticent personage onto the stage and into an extended colloquy – that is quite a feat on the part of La Parrala! All the more so if, as I aver, the phlegmatic temperament will not hesitate to protect the one thing it most cares about, time grasped under the aspect of its scarcity which it therefore reserves exclusively for and to itself, by terminating a conversation suddenly and retreating into its own inward stronghold.
Of the four, the phlegmatic is the one most inclined to “shelter in place,” in the horrid parlance of today which seems as though coined expressly for it. In contrast to the others, the structure of care in this case, temporally and spatially – or else, as the Heideggerians would have it, in terms of the “Zeitigung der Zeitlichkeit,”* the temporalisation of temporality and whatever neologism is devised to convey an analogously twofold conception of the dimension usually called “space” – should be defined as “ekstatisch,”** if at all, then only in a way rather different than with the other three.
* Sein und Zeit, sec. ii, ch. vi, § 81 ** sec. ii, ch. iv, § 69, c
What manner of speech La Parrala was able to solicit from death (la muerte), this Lorca did not say, merely following his four lines with the remark that she does not “come” (viene) even though called upon to: by this I hear the suggestion that this conversation itself, while the performance was taking place, distracted or diverted la muerte from her own proper role as the executor of fate. During that interval she was despite herself entranced onto the stage. If so, then the audience was afforded a rare chance to observe this otherwise secretive figure, or to speak somewhat more prosaically, an impetus had been given towards intuitions with which new reflection upon the subject of death might afterwards commence.
How better to exemplify the profundity of the Cante jondo than by this scene? And to illustrate it for the ages, as amongst the dim lights in the café cantante, against the darkened ground the old words were themselves saved from extinction, if only while the song lasted, emboldened to glow and to raise a cry, as though to entreat those who did hear and see them to think on their unsuspected song with care.
Appendix
For the reader’s convenience, what follows is drawn from Ernest Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.
care, n. – ME. care, fr. OE. caru, cearu, ‘anxiety, sorrow, care’, rel. to OS. kara, ‘sorrow’, OHG. chara, ‘lament’, Goth. kara, ‘sorrow’, OS. (mod) karag, ‘anxious, sad, sorrowful’, OE. cearig, MDu. carich, ‘sad, sorrowful’, Du. karig, ‘scanty, frugal’, OHG. karag, ‘anxious’, MHG. karc, karg, ‘shrewd, clever’, G. karg, ‘stingy, scanty’; fr. Teut. *karo, ‘sorrow, care’. These words are cogn. with Gk. γῆρυς, Dor. γᾶρυς, ‘voice, sound’, Arm. cicaṙn, ‘swallow’, cicaṙnuk, ‘nightingale’, Ossetic zar, ‘song’, zarun, ‘to sing’, L. garrīre, ‘to chat, talk, chatter’, W. garm, OIr. gāir, gairm, W. gawr, ‘noise, cry’, Toch. kärye, ‘care’. All these words derive from the I.-E. imitative base *ĝā̌r-, ‘to shout, cry’. The sense development of Toch. kärye, ‘care’, E. care and the related Teut. words may be illustrated by the following stages: cry – lamentation – grief. Cp. chary, cur, garrulous, Gerygone. Cp. also German.
cure, n., care. – ME., fr. OF. (= F.) cure, ‘care’, fr. L. cūra, ‘care, solicitude, concern’, fr. OL. coira, which is of uncertain origin. Cp. curate, curative, cure, curette, curious, accurate, assure, manicure, pedicure, pococurante, proctor, procure, scour, ‘to clean’, secure, sinecure, sure, Kursaal.
cure, tr. and intr. v. – OF. curer, ‘to take care of, to heal’ (whence F. curer, ‘to cleanse’, fr. L. cūrāre, ‘to care for, take care of, heal’, fr. cūra. See prec. word.
garrulous, adj., talkative. – L. garrulus, ‘chattering, talkative’, fr. garrīre, ‘to chatter, talk’, from the I.-E. imitative base *gar-, *ger-, ‘to cry’. See care and words there referred to, and cp. esp. German and the first element in Gerygone.
safe, adj. – ME. sauf, saf, fr. OF. salf, sauf (F. sauf), fr. L. salvus, ‘saved, preserved, safe, well, sound’, which is rel. to sālus, ‘sound condition, welfare, well-being, health, safety’, salūbris, ‘health-giving, healthful’, solidus, soldus, ‘firm, compact’, OL. sollus, ‘whole, entire’, and cognate with OI. sárvaḥ, ‘uninjured, intact, whole, entire’, Avestic haurva-, ‘uninjured, intact’, Toch. A salu, B solme, ‘whole, entire’, Arm. oƚǰ, ‘healthful, entire’, Gk. ὅλος (for *ὅλFος), ‘whole’, Alb. ǵaƚɛ, ‘strong, fat, vigorous’. Cp. sage, name of a plant, salutary, salutation, salute, salvage, salvation, salve, ‘hail’, Salvia, salvo, save, silly, soldo, solemn, solicit, solid, solidus, sou. Cp. also holo- and the second element in catholic.
sake, n., purpose. – ME. sake, ‘strife, lawsuit’, fr. OE. sacu, ‘quarrel, strife, jurisdiction in lawsuits’, rel. to ON. sök, ‘charge, lawsuit, effect, cause’, Swed. sak, Dan. sag, ‘thing, matter, affair, cause’, OFris. seke, ’strife, dispute, thing, matter’, MDu. sake, ‘lawsuit, matter’, Du. zaak, ‘thing, matter, affair, cause’, OHG. sahha, ‘strife, lawsuit’, MHG., G. sache, ‘thing, matter, affair, cause’, Goth. sakjō, ‘strife, quarrel’, OE. sacan, ON. saka, ‘to quarrel, accuse’, Goth. sakan, ‘to quarrel’, fr. I.-E. base *sag-, *sěg-, ‘to track down, trace, seek’, whence also OE. sēcan, Goth. sōkjan, ‘to seek’. See seek and cp. sac, ‘cause of dispute’, soc, socage, soke, soken.
solicit, tr. v., to entreat; intr. v., to make solicitation. – ME. soliciten, fr. MF. (= F.) solliciter, fr. L. sollicitāre, ‘to stir, agitate, move, excite, urge’, fr. sollicitus, ‘violently moved’, lit. ‘wholly moved’, solli-citus being a compound of sollus, ‘whole, entire’, and citus, pp. of ciēre, ‘to put in motion, move’. For the first element see safe, for the second see cite. Cp. insouciant.
sorrow, n. – ME. sorewe, sorwe, fr. OE. sorg (in the inflected cases of the sing. sorge), ‘grief, anxiety, affliction’, rel. to OS. sorga, ON., Dan., Swed. sorg, MDu. sorghe, Du. zorg, OHG. soraga, sorga, MHG., G. sorge, Goth. saúrga, and prob. cogn. with OI. sūrkṣati, ‘cares for, is concerned about, something’, OIr. serg, ‘sickness’, OSlav. sraga, ‘sickness’, Lith. sergù, sir̃gti, ‘to be sick’.