In Defence of the Word (and a lack of talent)

In Mandelstam's eyes 'philology' was a profound concept of moral importance - the word, after all, is Logos, the embodiment of all meaning... His whole life was devoted to the defence of 'philology' in his sense - it was connected in his mind with inner freedom...

Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, (translated by Max Hayward, 1974)


The Bible is a compendium of esoteric manuscripts. It has a deep metaphysical core, I mean how could it not when it clearly revolves around the great unifying force of the cosmos that is referred to as 'God'?

What or who is 'God' is the ultimate reality of the bible... but not just of the bible, but of life itself. This is why the bible has endured, and why we nominally Christian societies set our calendars by the day Jesus, a man who attained Christhood (awakening), was born. Epistemologically, Jesus is little different from Siddartha Gautama. Where Jesus became 'Christ' (awake), so too did Siddartha Gautama become 'Buddha' (awake). It is this awakening that the bible cherishes. And that all Christians seek. Awakening as peace, as love, as truth, as light. 

The Pure Land Buddhists speak of the Buddha of Immeasurable Light and Life. The Taoists speak (or rather, do not speak of) the Tao - (the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao).

This is no different to Jesus' utterance of 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.' Indeed, the Tao is the Way.

When the clutter is cleared, when the weight is removed, the light is revealed.

In the Greek language, 'I am' is a very intense way of referring to oneself. It would be comparable to saying, 'I myself, and only I, am'. Clearly, this intensity conveys what the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani calls 'the self itself', that is, the greater originary Self (God, if you will) that is the source of all life, and not the narrow small 'I' which is fabricated after the fact.

The Bible was written by people with a clear understanding of metaphor, analogy and symbolism. To be sure, there are stories that no doubt happened more or less as described with a few tall tales thrown in for good measure, but the deeper stuff, the sayings of Jesus, the names of people and places, the more miraculous undertakings here and there, are inscribed with a profound metaphoric-metaphysic foundation.  Understood thus, the Bible is probably one the greatest books ever written. For it encourages that which it seeks to extol, namely the spirit and the ultimate ground of all being, the self itself which it calls 'God'.

Part of our problem is that not only have we forgotten where the self comes from (in being waylaid  by a society based on distraction and work) but we have forgotten where words come from. Our language has been whittled down to conform to the limited objectives of a narrow-self society, in other words a society that is largely without soul (or when it is, that soul is itself packaged and relegated to a few days of the year in the spiritual calendar). Our command of language is absolutely pitiful which only adds to our confusion when confronting a great text like the Bible which is fundamentally a book of Words. The Word, after all, is Logos, the embodiment of all meaning.

Get to the root of words and you'll get to the root of the self. In a way, this is the poet's remit, (as a fundamental philologist), clearing away the topsoil, the layers and layers of conceptual deposits, in order to get to the bedrock, the Logos, consciousness not of any thing but consciousness pure and simple..

We, today, are apparently multi-talented when it comes to languages, being able to speak and converse in two, three, four and more languages.... But this really is of little import when it comes to actually understanding. You may speak 33 languages fluently but can you speak the language of clarity? Can you understand... ? Can you get beneath and behind the word into that space that precedes it? Can you see where it came from, out of which spirit it was born? Can you see the Logos?

Talent, really, is a hindrance. But we are obsessed with it.

If you examine the word 'talent', you will see that it has wandered a fair distance from its classical Latin definition of 'weight', and is originally related to the proto-Indo-European root tel- meaning to bear or to carry. 'The more gifted a man is', wrote the Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, 'the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.'