When words go private:

...I I I WHEN WORDS GO PRIVATE A REVOLUTION ALTERING OUR SENSE OF THE SACRED W RITING of Ambrose, St...

...In Augustine's time it is clear that the written word was still close to speech...

...I hope it will reveal something of the oddness of our situation, the strangeness of our relationship to words...

...Later in grade school I heard girls on the playground chanting skip-rope rhymes, and one of the most popular was" Mary had a baby, wrapped it up in tissue paper, threw it down the elevator SHAFT...

...I wonder, though, if most poetry is written, even unconsciously, with the page in mind more than the air into which words are spoken...

...In any case, what has been described as a general loss of reverence and a sense of the sacred in our time could, in part, be traced to our distance from the word as a source of power...

...That magic was more common once...

...Augustine says, "When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still...

...Augustine found the fact of silent reading unusual enough to comment on it...

...Socrates worried that the advent of writing would sap the power of memory by allowing'people to rely on the crutch written words provided...

...There are traces of words-as-proclamation in political speaking and on newscasts...

...And they were fun and funny to hear, because they came from her of "all people...

...When I was a child my grandmother used to chant a nonsense rhyme to me...

...This column will come to no firm conclusions...

...Our foreign policy, however -- what our government actually does abroad -- is to a large extent determined in dozens of specific arenas within a vast institutional apparatus...

...These are formal, nearly liturgical situations...

...So, too, should any changes of criteria for grant making...

...All could approach him freely and it was not unusual for visitors to be announced, so that often, when we came to see him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud...

...it was written in order to be proclaimed...

...One consequence of losing a sense of the word as something which contains inherent power -- or magic, if you will - - is that we regard words as things we use to convey information or to change, even manipulate, opinion...

...The liturgical settings which we are used to in synagogues and churches arose in their original form during a time when words were meant to be proclaimed...

...A further detachment -- detachment from the voice itself -- is found in reading, and while concentrated reading has its own depth and intensity, it lacks something that can be found only in the spoken word...

...That does pot seem to be the context Reagan policy is constructing...

...But there are strong pressures from the administration to increase our aid there greatly and to target it explicitly to our "friends...

...One of these is staffing...

...I don't know how much television has cut into children's culture, but that special world which exists on playgrounds and in vacant lots and alleys and the places where children gather away from their elders is one of the last places where language still has its power as a form of magic...

...El Salvador is likely to be the test case...

...And then there was the experience of hearing some words for the first time, something which stays with you more mysteriously and tangibly than when you read them, though there is another palpable pleasure there...

...Until now, the Inter-American Foundation, in its modest way, has suggested that the United States could genuinely cooperate with Latin Americans in their own development, not merely patronize or manipulate them...

...The only anonymous oral art form left is probably the joke...

...Maybe I am alone in this, but as interesting as public readings of poetry or fiction are, my own most satisfying experiences with poetry or fiction have happened when I was reading alone...

...There are other strange hints in the lives of various saints --- they are said to have prayed aloud frequently, and this is commented on matter-of-factly, as if it were more common to pray out loud than to pray quietly...

...but they had a silly magic, too, something freer than words usually had about them...

...When you see children gathered without adults, playing games or huddled for some reason you can't fathom, don't assume they are doing something frivolous...

...It is difficult for us to imagine an age in which students and teachers commonly read aloud, even when studying alone...

...But this isn't the case with (for example) the radio, or the telephone, where the spoken word has a detached quality because the speaker isn't visible and really doesn't need to be...

...It has worked with exceptional morale and a fruitful delegation of authority...

...Augustine offers several possible explanations for Ambrose's curious habit of reading quietly and concludes that "whatever his reason, we may be sure it was a good one" (Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin, Penguin Books, 1961...

...There is an anonymous seventeenth-century ballad which the Oxford Book of English Verse calls "Loving Mad Tom," though it is also known as "Tom O'Bedlam...

...Much of what we consider a silent, interior thing -- reading or prayer, for example -- was at one point rather noisy...

...Loving Mad Tom" was made to be done out loud...

...I can't imagine getting much out of, for example, Rilke during a public reading...

...There is something defen...

...What they have in common is the fact that the speaker and what is spoken are necessarily joined...

...Sometimes that invisibility is an advantage, as when someone speaking politely on the telephone rolls his eyes or makes obscene gestures for the benefit of someone watching the conversation...

...And it must compete for congressional attention with the large issues of war and peace that now have such unfortunate immediacy...

...Over the years the IAF recruited a staff that belies the reputation of government agencies -- it is energetic, idealistic, experienced, efficient...

...When the public debates and big decisions take place, they occur within a context established by many small and less public choices...

...today we consider a man who moves his lips when he reads to be barely literate...

...I have found that with few exceptions I would always rather read poetry than have it read to me...

...If they are lucky they are, certainly~ without realizing it, the priests and priestesses of a nearly dead religion, one which matters very much...

...Whether a new president will reaffirm those strengths -- or change them -- should bequickly apparent...

...I I I I I I I 1 I I l l I It was probably the invention of movable type and the democratization of literacy tl~at led us to separate the word from its place in the public and physical world --- by which I mean the place in which words had to do with the the human voice and social role of the person who proclaimed them...

...By a knight of ghosts and shadows I am summoned to a tourney, Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end...

...The IAF has believed that the violence and politicization of conditions in recent years have necessarily limited its useful role there...

...I remember being told by a classmate who seemed to know more about the mysteries than I did about those strange people who contained both sexes in their bodies...

...That of your five sound senses You never be forsaken Nor wander from yourselves with Tom Abroad to beg your bacon . . . . With an host of furious fancies, Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear, and a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander...

...She was a sane and strait-laced lady who, playing with grandchildren, could say such things...

...It went like this: "Skinna minna ringo, you and I jingo, solomon a bingo, walla walla wee, salanda sumbay umbum bar o'soap...

...I am not sure that William Carlos Williams was...

...Me thinks it is no journey...

...What has happened is not, I think, a matter of human evolution so much as it is a radically changed relationship with words...

...We would sit there quietly, for no one had the heart to disturb him when he was so engrossed in study...

...To read silently, to regard reading as a private act, had to be explained...

...Without arguing that the shift was a good or bad thing, I want to suggest that we have not considered it enough...

...When words became an interior commodity, something private and detached, a profound shift happened...

...I can see his face and the brick wall behind him to this day, and I always have to translate the word "hermaphrodite" into its real meaning before I can appreciate it...

...I couldn't believe that such people existed, and he said solemnly, "Yes, they do...

...They're called Morphendykes...

...The House Foreign Affairs hearings at the end of January may help clarify the administration's intentions and mobilize the IAF's congressional supporters...

...They are also perhaps the last vestiges of proclamation...

...ALEXANDER WILDE (Alexander Wilde, who formerly headed the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., is now Senior Fellow at the Helen Kellogg Institute, Notre Dame...

...After the new president is named, there are several key areas which will indicate whether the administration is continuing to follow the Heritage Foundation scenario...

...sive about Augustine's assertion that Ambrose's quiet reading must have had a good reason behind it...

...The fate of the Inter-American Foundation is in the hands of Congress...

...But sustaining a I l l I 1 I I I II II I Of several minds: John Garvey defense of its autonomy and character will not be easy...

...JOHN GARVEY 10 February 1984:75...

...Not that we can no longer meet his poetry that way...

...First floor, second floor, third floor . . . . " It never seemed to occur to the girls who sang this out, their ropes slapping the blacktop with each number, that the unfortunate baby was falling upward...

...The written word itself is very new in terms of the whole of human history...

...Imagine the tone of voice and wagging head motions of television anchorfolk Commonweal: 74 across a breakfast table...

...It faces a formidable coalition of ideological and bureaucratic forces that would like to remake it...

...Traces of it remain in various familial links and in children's culture...

...But to manipulate words means that their power is not really appreciated, and because the power is there, because words carry us more than we know, there may be unfortunate consequences for those who violate them...

...Here are its first and last stanzas: From the hag and hungry goblin That into rags would rend ye All the spirits that stand by the naked man In the Book of Moons defend ye...

...It is hard to define that something, but it comes close to magic, and a primitive sense of the power of the word...

...Even before I had seen the spooky and comic drawings of Edward Gorey I saw one of his pale little people, trailing tissue in a dark ascent over the Saint Agnes playground...

...Our changed relationship with the word has its benefits...

...The cadences of a political speech would be clearly out of place in casual conversation (as would the curious habit of politicians who refer to themselves in the third person" the governor of Illinois, Jim Thompson, will sometimes refer to Jim Thompson, as if he himself were absent - - a habit very little children also have...

...There is something fascinating about the magic here -- I would certainly like to know more about the Book of Moons - - but there is something equally fascinating about the fact that this is anonymous...