Haj Ross

ABSTRACT I propose to look as closely as possible at Gerard Manley Hopkins’ brilliant and famous poem, ‘Pied Beauty.’ Hopkins was a Jesuit priest; his life and art were centered in a mystic’s vision. The mystic sees in all things the immanence of the Divine. In a sense, all things are thus equal; but nonetheless, Hopkins superimposes upon all things an asymmetric cline, which orders them from low to high, from far away from us to near, perhaps as a metaphor for the inner journey of self-purification that each human being is offered, to come personally to experience their own Divinity within. Let us agree to call this sequence the cline of person, and to say that the cline goes not only from third to first person, but from less first to firster (in a way which I take to be in accord with the spirit, though not the letter, of Peirce’s notion of firstness). This is the cline that points us towards Self.

Necessity vs. Selfishness Robert Frost's insightful yet tragic poem " Out, Out-" employs realistic imagery and the personification of a buzz saw to depict how people must continue onward with their lives after the death of a loved one, while also hinting at the selfish nature of the human race, whom oftentimes show concern only for themselves. The poem narrates the story of a boy who dies as a result of accidentally cutting off his hand with a buzz saw in his own yard. Frost employs imagery to reveal the setting, the boy's " yard " in " Vermont " right before " sunset " , using vivid detail to describe the " five mountain ranges " within eyesight of the yard. The narrator foreshadows the tragic event to come when he " wishes " that the workers would have " [called] it a day " and " [given] " the boy " the half hour that (he) counts so much when saved from work " , the adult responsibility of cutting wood with a buzz saw. While " nothing [was happening] " , the boy's sister comes out to tell he and the other workers that " supper " is ready. The boy, in his excitement at the signal to end the day's work, accidentally cuts himself with the treacherous buzz saw. Frost reveals a sense of the boy's pain by employing the oxymoron " rueful laugh " , displaying both the boy's extreme surprise and deep sorrow at the near-amputation of his hand. Frost continues to depict the shocking scene by describing the boy's reaction as he " [holds] up the hand, half in appeal…half as if to keep the life from spilling " from his body. The adult responsibilities the boy has been faced with, combined with the horrific mangling of his own hand, lead to the boy's own terrible revelation that " all " will soon " spoil " , which foreshadows yet the next tragedy, the death of the boy.

I argue that earlier theories of language have held that languages are noun-like – their edges are seen as being clearly and sharply defined, their categories do not interpenetrate (a word like “fun” cannot be both a noun and a verb)– while later theories of language are able to see languages as being verblike.  I see value in each perspective, and wish to see with both perspectives at once.  I argue that other sciences have also undergone “verbing.”

This is very chatty.  It is about the self-contradiction in a sentence like

                    I am wise.

      This means, if we are in search of wisdom ourselves, that we can never arrive at a place where we will “know” that we are wise, even if we are wise enough to know that we can never assert such a sentence.

      What kind of search is this then?  If you have wondered yourself, and are willing to hear some stumbling around, welcome aboard.

Here’s the whole title:

Confused discussion of wisdom and knowledge growing out of a need to say something TOO SOON at a conference on March 10, 1982, where the title of my talk is, foolishly, “Human linguistics.”  Hello, help.
      If you are seeking clear answers to any topic like this, do yourself a favor an steer clear of this mumbling.
      But if you agree that it is very important to look for wisdom, in others, so that you can find a way to aspire to increasing it in yourself, then you are very welcome.

This was my MA thesis in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in June of 1964.  My thesis director was Professor Zellig Harris.  The thesis is an attempt to describe the syntax of superlative adjectives and adverbs, and especially the syntax of such phrases as “of (all) the students” in a sentence like “Kim is the brightest of (all) the students.,” for which I coined the term “Adverb of range.”  It is written within the framework of transformational grammar, but the rules proposed in 1964 seem very clunky and inexplanatory.  The thesis is by no means an advertisement for the usefulness of transformational grammar.  It was just a paper written by a person deeply committed to that theory.

A poetic analysis of a brilliant poem by Pablo Neruda:  Farewell y los sollozos.  The analysis combines linguistic aspects of the words chosen by the poet with visual aspects.  In all written languages, poems are PLACED LANGUAGE – the decision to use a word in a line depends not only on what it means, but also on whether its location in one particular place in the line will connect it visually with other placed words with which it is kin.

An analysis of the most well-known poem, perhaps, in the whole world.  Every Japanese child (and almost everyone in Japan goes to school) reads this haiku – a form which has only 14 syllables – when they are around six or seven.

Old pond.
Frog jumps in
Sound of water

This paper proposes a new word, based on three Proto-Indo-European roots – the roots for Earth, for clan and for word.  But more important than the linguistic prehistory is the suggestion of a necessarily synergetic communitas – a hopefully more nearly optimal way of participating in Gaia – the one organism of Sol III in which we all participate – as Her nervous system.

No use.  If the title hasn’t hooked you (It is a title of a poem by the canny New England master, Robert Frost), BTW, the paper (if such a loosened and chattiness can be graced by being called a “paper”) STARTS with the whole poem, so even if you  trash the rest of it, you will have been  chilled with a but of magic Frostm what else can I say?

Hard to abstract.  Gaseous thoughts about ineffability, and the need to go ahead and say wha can’t be said anyway.  The idea that the great writers know that there are things that can’t be said, they lie beyond language  and so what, say they?  They go ahead and get them said anyway.  And one of the ways is by scrinching their words up and together and like that, till they seem poetic, and thus break through the unbreakable barrier around everyday language.  Now tell me that this was a helpful abstract.

Roman Jakobson, trickster, genius, polymath, calls anyone who is not like him  (a huge mind in literature, especially Slavic, an equally huge mind in linguistic theory (think only of the endless ripples caused by his monograph Kindersprache, Aphasie und Allgemeine Lautgesetze (1941) [Child Language, Aphasia and General Sound laws]) - e.g. a linguist who knows nothing about literature, or a literary scholar who knows nothing about linguistics – a flagrant anachronism.  I for one, don’t wanna be one of those.  A very tough row to hoe.

This note concerns what it is that is the core of a discipline – what it is that a student must learn, in order to be accepted as a practitioner.  To be a chemist, historian, linguist, you must learn the languages of chemistry, history, linguistics.  And these “languages” are very experiential affairs – they do not concern merely equations, and forms of argument, methods of validation.  They have to do with how you  move through your life and profession.

This is a poetic (a.k.a. stylistic) analysis of a wonderful poem by William Carlos Williams:  “To Waken an Old Lady.”  I use various linguistic goggles to look at the poem – tricks of the trade, which I learned from my scalawag brilliant mentor an friend Roman Jakobson, to try to explain why the poem hits us so deeply – us old ladies.

This paper will seek to demonstrate the existence and distribution of two different types of wh-clauses. Often, both types are referred to as “questions” (whether embedded or in main clauses), even though, as we will see, not all of these clauses have the standard function ...

This one is about what really counts in the mutuality of education.  The root of this common word is too often forgotten:  duco - I lead.  There is a prefix before the duc- : e, which is short of ex-, which means “out of.”  So the Roman thinker who made up ex+duc+ate understood:  x leads y out of z.  Someone or something leads someone or thing out of something.  And for me, while the x may be the teacher, it is the z which is the whole story:  the z is the seed in the student.  If that student’s seed is a chemist-seed, and that student gets wonderful teaching, out of that seed will emerge a wonderful chemist!  Ditto for a pastry cook - great muffins!  The whole deal is almost magic, when the missing ingredient is richly present:  LOVE.
          Yup, friends, when there is not enough love around, the whole thing dries up and grinds to a halt.

            So always remember, whether you are a mom or a pop or a kid, love all of it, and also each other.

            Huch!  I have spoken.

I always send out to students a huge surf of pdfs.  Way too many to read.

But they come with an Iron Rule (no exceptions, ever!):

        You are not allowed to read anything that you do not want to.

      It is obviously impossible to read everything (cf. worldwide web).  Your reading time is precious.  So make sure that you only use that golden time to read words that will put you and keep you on that delicate and hard-to-sense path towards the deepest Self that is within you, and is trying to help you to become.

The Perpetual Project (2004– ) asks you a bunch of questions about your learning.  There are no rights or wrongs, only degrees of clarity.  After the seven questions are stated, a number of student answers are given.  See which ones light up your mind the most.

Some musings about the nature of information, after having encountered a wonderfully strange book, by Theodor Holm Nelson:  Literary Machines.  The author is the true inventor of the World Wide Web (or more accurately, of something much grander and deeper, of which the web is a pale shadow).

This paper aims at opening one of Pandora’s more capacious boxes, to wit: the pragmantax of such rhetorical questions as the above title and similar sentences such as those in (1)-(3).
(1)  Where better to play chess than on I35?
(2)  When better (for us) to finish off the Rocky Road than right now?
(3)  *Where better to play chess than [right now/into the snow/for six hours]?
*When better (for us) to finish off the Rocky Road than [for six hours/by whining]?

This is about sentences like
I have been to NY/*I was to NY.
It discusses the question as to whether non-finite have + -en can have a present perfective interpretation when in non-finite contexts, such as after modals:  ?I would have been to NY.

I apologize.  I have by mistake uploaded another paper of mine, Human linguistics, which talks about the goals of science and life, in many ways similar to those discussed in this interview that Alex Karaku, an undergraduate senior at MIT, did of me in around 1978, I believe.

This paper is an interview by an MIT senior undergraduate – Alex Karaku - whose senior thesis consisted of interviewing about 14 MIT professors about why they worked at MIT, what their lives were about, and so forth.  This wonderful talk that Alex and I had was the last of his chapters.  He was without doubt the deepest and most intelligent undergraduate that I ever met in my time at MIT (1966-1984).

This is a musing about what seem to be neuter pronouns in languages where there are really only masculine and feminine pronouns.  Quick example:  French has a pronoun for masculines - il;  and one for feminines - elle.  But French uses neither of these when it is making sentences about general sentences.  Here is one:

      La            femme  –  c’est beau.

    The(fem) woman      it-is    beautiful (masculine form)

      This short paper is about pronominal like French ce, which is guess one would have to translate as “it.”

This is a questionnaire for the reader.  Is the study of language a part of your spiritual, or religious, or metaphysical, etc., life. of is it a purely academic or scientific enterprise?  Even before I started working on poetry around 1975, I found that for me, there was no doubt that looking for linguistic truth was not to be divorced from work on myself.  But as soon as I started to read poetry carefully, and to read what poets said about their verbal art, it seemed to me to be completely clear that their poetry and their inner work were one.
          This was a problem for me, and still is.  It is one thing for my search for truth to be a kind of inner work, but it is another for me to insist that this identification must be shared by students who come to work with me.  I wish I knew how to resolve this conflict in myself.

An analysis of a four-line poem by Santa Emily Dickinson, in which the great poetess implies the existence of a noun BY NOT MENTIONING IT and does the same thing with an unmentioned verb.  Good luck finding these unparts of this poem, which was read to me by Sonia Bicanic as we walked through the gloaming of an amazing evening in Beograd in the late eighties.

Under the pressure of having to keep up with rapidly moving action, sportscasters of hockey, basketball, football, curling (?) speak in “clipped speech” – they often omit the objects of verbs which would necessarily appear after the verb, in less rapid-moving speech genres.  This short note begins to look at some of these clippings.  The big mystery:  why are there some transitive actions that still keep their objects?

More rough autobiography.  What I did in the period  1970-1975 (I was working for Bruce Fraser’s firm, and I had to justify a grant that Bruce got for me to do research there, so this was a progress  (some would doubtless say “regress”) report.  It was all about changing the categories for talking about language from discrete categories, to non-discrete ones.  See whatcha think.

This are some extremely rough notes abot how to get various temporal adverbs, like [last/next] [month / week / Tuesday, etc.]  The x before this x -> last X

    So why not *last day?  Because there is a special lexical item for last day - yesterday.  And next day = tomorrow.  What of next Christmas?  <- the Christmas of the year that is after this year.

        Etc.  Have fun with these.

These are some further musings, from 1982, about what teachers and classes made a difference in my life.  If you have read my paper called “Human linguistics,” (in either of its versions), or the interview that Alex Karaku did with me , or my paper “Waking up,” and liked that, you may like the flavor of this one too.  Like the book that I have just written, whose name is the poem that came to me, with no work, when I was meditating one morning on a rooftop in Brasil.

                                      everything
                                      less vast
                                      than love –
                                      let go of

I sensed love in each of the classes that made a strong impression on me.  I think that there is not enough emphasis on the necessity, the centrality, of love, in all our lives, in all we think and feel.  As Noam Chomsky said in an interview, when asked how it was that he was remarrying in his 80’s, he thought that a life without love was not worth living.    That’s what I think too.

This is a rough version of a talk I gave in Amsterdam in 1981, about how my syntactic thinking became squishified,  about taking a vacation from the Linguistics Wars to do phonology with Paul Kiparsky, about discovering freezes with Bill Cooper (cf. our paper “World order”), and about implicational hierarchies in general.  It was supposed to get all the way to poetics, but it never did.

A Thoughtful of Quotes, from mostly all over.  When I was smart enough to remember to thank the friend who gave me one of these, the thanks are appended.  But for many, which I have lived with for decades, the giver’s name has worn away, like the curve worn into the store steps of the great university.  I urge you  to share these and others of your choosing with the path that you and your life choose for each other.

Elizabeth Hanson, an MIT undergraduate, in 1980 wrote a paper for our class on poetry and life – about a poem by Wallace Stevens, called “The House Was Calm and the World Was Calm.”
        So as soon as you see this first line, you think:  Stevens will put concept next to and inside or wrapped around, another concept.  A deep look about how a poet holds their words together – a beauty of a study on coherence.

This is a more than necessarily rambling romp through what I call HL - which is what linguistics is when you remember that you are a human being as much as you are someone who loves to figure out how languages work.  And you respect others who have this same love, and you might disagree with them, but never would you lose your temper and forget that – hey, we are all going to die – and get mean and nasty, as I have gotten.  Live and learn.