Arthur Koestler coined the term 'bisociation' (The Act of Creation, 1964) to offer a theory of the creative act (which at its simplest informs something as ubiquitous as the joke), and his ideas have indirectly led to a more general theory of 'conceptual blending', where disparate ideas come together and generate creative thought.
But this curious process of unbidden relevance is an associative (and accretive) process, not a bisociative one: it is the connections between ideas, not their differences, that seem to be at work.
This was the sequence of associations this week:
1. Translation (literature)
2. Hildegard of Bingen
3. Mothering Sunday
4. Church Times today, 27 March, letters page
Translation
One of the week's possible blog posts was to be called In Praise of Translators. There were three obvious ones - translators of Dostoyevsky (David Magarshack), Eco (William Weaver), and Borges (Norman Thomas di Giovanni). Halfway through the article, I suddenly remembered another - Christa Weisman, who prepared an 'unrhymed, unscanned literal' translation of Goethe's Faust for Howard Brenton's 1995 play. The final words of the Chorus Mysticus in Part II of Faust, well known for its magical appearance at the end of Mahler's 8th Symphony, in German begins Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, which Brenton gives as
All that passes
Is merely a symbol;
Here the unwinnable
Is won:
The impossible
Is done;
The eternally feminine
Pulls us up to heaven.
Hildegard of Bingen
The Oxford Book of Flexible Anthems arrived yesterday. Flicking through it at random, I came across Hildegard's Laus Trinitati, in English, but with an editorial footnote:
The composer uses the word 'creatrix', ie a female creator, in the second line
as indeed she does/did -
Laus Trinitati, que sonus
et vita ac creatrix omnium...
Mothering Sunday
Every Sunday at St Oswald's the congregation is given an A4 sheet with bits and bobs of information about events in the three Waterside parishes, the day's readings and Gospel, and so on. That's on the back (or front) of a preprinted "bulletin" for the day, called Sunday Link, which always features a short prayer to help the congregation get in the mood, sorry, to assist meditation and contemplation. Last Sunday, Mothering Sunday, the prayer read:
God, you love us as a caring mother, and we
inherit our gifts from you.
Help us to recognise them, nurture them
and use them, whatever our age or gender,
so that we may share your mothering love
with others...
Church Times, 27 March 2009
A letter to drag us back to the real world:
Sir: You say, with qualification, that
those who "refer to God as 'she' are
perfectly at liberty to do so"
(Leader, 20 March.) But biblical
usage includes contrast: our God and King
is neither "the Queen of Heaven"
(Jeremiah 44.17) nor "the great goddess"
(Acts 19.27). So male titles for
God require non-use of feminine ones.
It doesn't automatically follow, of course,
but the letter was from a male member
of the clergy.
On the other hand, the cartoon was as splendid as usual.
"The composer uses the word 'creatrix', ie a female creator, in the second line."
ReplyDeleteI should challenge the description "female". It would be more accurate to say "grammatically feminine", agreeing with the feminine noun trinitas.
Compare the way that in e.g. French if one has referred to a king as "sa majeste" one then has to refer to him with the feminine pronoun "elle", until such point as one uses a masculine noun of him.
The use of "creatrix" here is trivial, not significant. It has no more import than the use of the feminine relative pronoun "que" does.
Thank you, The Welsh Jacobite. Grammatical point taken (my Latin is rather rusty, being some 52 years forgotten.) But the footnote in Flexible Anthems is its editor's (Alan Bullard), not mine (I quoted it in full), and it was the footnote which sparked the association of ideas. I'll leave "as indeed she does" in, otherwise your correction would be meaningless.
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