In his article titled “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) (henceforth “Tradition”), T.S. Eliot conceives of the literary canon as an interplay between writers from both the past and present, where new poets would write with the work of old poets in mind. Where poetry is concerned, “the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (Eliot “Tradition” 3). Thus, new poets resist the past, but also incorporate elements of their forebears’ poetics into their own, resulting in a flow of poetic information and influences across diachronic time. My essay will apply this concept of a dialogue between past and present to language, arguing that T.S. Eliot resists the fixity of simply reusing language in historically-determined ways. This, in turn, is possible because of what Ezra Pound terms “logopoeia” or “a play or ‘dance’ among the concomitant meanings, customs, usages, and implied contexts of the words themselves” (Ruthven citing Pound 120). Therefore, instead of simply using language in a conventional manner, Eliot’s penchant for logopoeic play recognizes the slipperiness of language itself, which has the potential to harm and aid the poet in equal measure. On one hand, he recognizes that this surplus of meaning is uncontrollable and could slip out of the poet’s grasp, leading to a loss of authorial agency and an unstable sense of self when one can no longer express what one means, or even grasp any stable meaning. On the other, Eliot’s poetry seems to suggest that this very slipperiness is generative in its dynamism, producing new forms of unexpected meaning which also hold the key to unlocking the linguistic prison of inherited fixity. Thus, Eliot’s triumph transcends the temporal linearity of the canon in being both synchronic and diachronic. His poetry is rich in positing both potential salvation and inundation via this excess of linguistic meaning — an excess that is synchronic precisely because multiple meanings coexist in his poetry simultaneously. Yet, each revision of each separate meaning of the word on the part of the reader is also a diachronic rereading and reevaluation of the fixity of linguistic history itself, which temporally rewrites one’s own reading of Eliot’s poetry.
Eliot’s poetry discusses how language — or rather, ways of using language which have been popularized via historical consensus — can potentially be restrictive. In “Tradition”, Eliot states that “if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged” (3) [emphasis mine]. While Eliot was referring to poetry itself, the same may be said of any given poet’s use of language, which constitutes the very building blocks of poetry. To flesh out this concept of linguistic inheritance, one might quote Terry Eagleton: “[l]anguage always pre-exists us: it is always already ‘in place’, waiting to assign us our places within it” (175) [emphasis original]. In other words, language is a collaborative and metahistorical project, constructed out of a consensus between language users over a given period of time. As such, no one person can move too far away from pre-existing structures of language or put oneself out of this linguistic contract, because to depart too drastically from these structures is to descend into incoherent babbling. Therefore, in the context of poetry, any language exists prior to any one poet, and he/she is, in some ways, forced to write with the pen of another/an Other. And if the poet is doomed to recite the words of another, like a schoolchild would in a stifling classroom, then one might say that creativity in poetry is difficult, if not impossible. Eliot laments how poets that simply repeat the words of others are doomed to be trapped within obscurity and historical determinism; “[w]e have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition” (“Tradition” 3). The transience and erosion inherent in the image of moving sand emphasize that any tradition — linguistic or otherwise — can destabilize the foundations of poetry just as much as it can be used to construct or write it.
This anxiety is reflected in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (henceforth “Prufrock”), where the drudgery that plagues Prufrock/Eliot’s poetry is at least partially linguistic in origin. Here, the way the words of others trap the Prufrock persona reflects Eliot’s concerns in “Tradition,” where linguistic and poetic traditions trap the poet. Eliot writes, “And I have known the eyes already, known them all –/The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,/And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,/When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall” (“Prufrock” 55-8). It is possible, among other readings, to engage with this excerpt as a self-reflexive commentary on poetizing. For instance, one might read the eyes as Others who are gazing at the Prufrock persona to evaluate or “formulate” him. Thus, the “eyes” may be interpreted as symbolizing distant observers that are judging the poet, perhaps a reflection that “he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past” (Eliot, “Tradition” 5). Yet, the homonymy between the “eye” and the “I” that comes before also draws the past and present together. Eliot corporealizes this sensation of being measured against poets of the past, describing it as one felt “in [the poet’s] bones” (“Tradition” 3). Here, the image of “bones” suggests that the past is literally embodied within the poet, just as the scrutinizing “eye” and poetic “I” are fused together aurally. Thus, Prufrock/Eliot is trapped by others, but Prufrock (“I”) also bonds with the other personae (“eyes”) in reinforcing his imprisonment by virtue of feeling trapped. Perhaps, then, one might say that, in serving as a bridge between the past and present, the poet is complicit in trapping himself in history and historicized uses of language in poetry.
The “formulated phrase” in the next line may be read as a sign of the abovementioned linguistic repetition. One could understand this as phrases that are like mathematical “formulae” established in the past, which have been tried and tested and repeated ad nauseum, leading to static poetry. Similarly, “formulated” also invokes “formalin” or “formaldehyde” when analyzed with “fix,” which in turn connotes “imprisonment” along with “tissue fixing” when one injects formalin into a specimen to preserve it. The image of Prufrock “sprawling on a pin,/ . . . pinned and wriggling on the wall” (Eliot, “Prufrock” 57-8) further supports this reading, as Prufrock is likened to a dying, preserved insect pinned against a specimen display, struggling futilely to escape. This suggests that one may simply be doomed to resurrect taxidermied versions of old forms in writing supposedly “new” poetry. The poet thereby falls into Victor Frankenstein’s trap of claiming to create new life when he/she is merely stitching up corpses. In this case, the “eyes” that fix one with a formulated phrase are personae who trap the poet in his linguistic prison — Prufrock/Eliot is being forced to repeat historical formulae in his writing. Yet, the “eye”/”I” homonymy, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, means that the line may also be understood as “The ‘I’s that fix you in a formulated phrase,” making the poet himself complicit in his own imprisonment. After all, poetry is also an act of authorial agency — the poet is given the formulated phrases and traps himself within fixity by formulating poetry with these pre-existing linguistic formulae. In short, reading “Prufrock” suggests that poetry is a prison guarded by poets of the past, the present and maybe even the prisoner himself/herself. Poetry traps one within a linguistic determinism when one is, on some level, repeating the past without changing it.
However, one might argue that inheriting a linguistic and poetic tradition need not necessarily be historically deterministic for one’s poetics. In “Our Word is our Bond” (1983), Geoffrey Hill expresses the sentiment that words restrict and limit, but also suggests that they inherently contain the potential for creating new meanings. On one hand, we might say that words have already been fixed on the page and within history. On the other, each word or image in a poem can have multiple, mutually constitutive meanings, repeatedly shifting between these concomitant meanings. This logopoeic slippage between these meanings is precisely that which allows Eliot to write complex poetry that builds on tradition without merely imitating it. Hill’s statement is the perfect embodiment of this ambivalence: “‘Our word is our bond’ (shackle, arbitrary constraint, closure of possibility) is correlative to ‘our word is our bond’ (reciprocity, covenant, fiduciary symbol)” (161). Reading Hill against Eliot’s views on tradition, one might say that all words are old words that restrict and “shackle” us to the limits of historical determinism. Yet, the word is also a “fiduciary symbol” in the sense that we can think of it as an investment in “the Stock Exchange,” an image that Hill himself invokes (147). By investing in one word, we can get two or more in return, resulting in a fecundity of meaning — even meanings that are simultaneously synonymic and antonymic, as in Prufrock’s/Eliot’s “eye” and “I”. Therefore, “art never improves, but . . . the material of art is never quite the same (Eliot, “Tradition” 6). This allows Eliot to apprehend new, ever-shifting forms of meaning in the “art” of poetry because logopoeic change itself is a phenomenon that inheres in language as poetry’s “material.”
Like Hill, Eliot also seems to suggest that the taxidermied phrase can be “formulated” again to change its meaning. This is accomplished by “fixing” — both injecting and repairing — overused formulae, imbuing them with new meaning. With this in mind I wish to return to my analysis of “Prufrock” to explore how Eliot uses linguistic slippages to reformulate and revive dead phrases. Just as the “eye”/”I” aurally conflates the third-person and the first-, as well as the past and present users of language, so does the lack of a specific “subject” doing the “formulating” in “Prufrock.” In other words, we know that the phrase is “formulated” but, in the text, Prufrock/Eliot does not specify who formulates it and, perhaps more importantly, to what end. While my previous reading implies that the phrase has been “pre-formulated” by the past, this lack of a specific subject in this sentence also opens up the possibility that Prufrock/Eliot can “re-formulate” the phrase. On one hand, as already mentioned, Prufrock/Eliot is complicit in his being fixed by language. On the other, Eliot hints that the poet might just be the key to “formulating” an escape plan to break out of the prison of tradition. “Prufrock,” then, is self-reflexive because it demonstrates that the poet can teach old words new tricks by choosing what words to use and how they are used. After all, tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour,” perhaps both in the sense of “giving birth” to new meaning with old genes, and “labouring” through the potentialities inherent in language to select the right genetic material (Eliot, “Tradition” 3). Even the term “formulated phrase” can serve as a good example of this “rebirth” because, ironically, it is not a commonly used, “formulated” phrase, despite the fact that both “formulated” and “phrase” are commonplace words. In other words, it is “formulated” resonating off “phrase” and vice versa, which transforms “formulated phrase” into something fresh that is greater than the sum of its parts. And this composite entity then goes on to resonate with other words in Eliot’s poetry, like “fix,” leading to more and more permutations of meaning as these linguistic formulae multiply themselves against each other. In much the same way, logopoeic slippage and the resultant multiplication amongst formulated phrases allows Prufrock literally to break free from the constraints of the poem and escape linguistic tedium. This dance of words is precisely that which turns the poem’s drudgery against itself, transforming the fixity and ennui of “formalin” into the dynamic resistance of “reform.” Thus, the poet escapes the threat of historical determinism via using the words of another to generate new meaning; he is both writing within and without the stifling prison of canonical inheritance.
Additionally, one might say that Eliot also potentially implicates the reader as one who also formulates: the word is indeed a salvific “covenant” or “fiduciary symbol” between reader and writer, as Hill suggests (“Bond” 147). Therefore, just as the writer cannot constantly resort to traditional uses of language, so does the reader have to revise traditional modes of reading. “Prufrock” posits that engaging with linguistic ambiguity, rather than excluding any reading from the poem’s overarching meaning, is the key to grasping transcendent meaning through readerly interpretation. Through embracing the text’s linguistic ambiguity in its totality, the reader perpetuates historical determinism as he/she reads and is complicit in reiterating old formulae via fixing on just one meaning at a time. Yet, he/she can also choose to constantly (re)interpret these commonplace words to formulate new modes of reading, just as I have been attempting in this paper. After all, a “covenant” implies communication between the writer and reader, and part of the message is lost if the reader “reduce[s] whatever could be reduced to plain prose” (Hill citing Isaiah Berlin, “Bond” 147). In other words, “logical excisions” of one linguistic interpretation or another are reductionist — they cut one off from the “‘play’ . . . in language” (Hill, “Bond” 147). Quite literally, the reader of “Prufrock” will be unable to see or hear that “formulated” resonates with the potential for rejuvenating “reformulation,” if he/she ignores Eliot’s logopoeic play. Thus, this potential for linguistic “reform” extends to the reader’s hermeneutic practices as well, despite the fact that, or perhaps, precisely because this route to emancipation only exists as an ephemeral linguistic slippage. Thus, just as “Prufrock” describes how the poet is a participant of tradition, so too does tradition implicate the rest of us formally. As speakers and readers of language, we are complicit in trapping Eliot, Prufrock and most importantly ourselves if we ignore the narrow escape route that Eliot leaves for us. Similarly, we, too, must be ethical users and readers of language who can only comprehend poetry fully if we appreciate the potentiality inherent in linguistic slippages of meaning. Otherwise, we are cut off from the possibility of being liberated from the confines of a rigid hermeneutic tradition, which allows for only one reading of a given text.
However, this is not to say that Eliot perceives these linguistic slippages as purely generative and emancipative for language users. Instead of allowing us to stabilize and articulate our selfhood, this instability of meaning-making means that “the actual speaking, writing human person can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said” (Eagleton 170). Therefore, language is not merely a fertile plain, but is also a quagmire that liberates us from fixity, only to potentially drag us down into its instability. This inability to locate oneself within language is encapsulated within Jacques Lacan’s “I am not where I think, and I think where I am not” (Eagleton citing Lacan 170). Similarly, I might say that “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object” (Lacan 84) [emphasis mine]. In “Burnt Norton” (hereafter “Norton”), Eliot recognizes this, remarking, “Words strain,/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/Will not stay still” (152-6). Here, the word itself begins to “decay” with the “imprecision” of multiple meanings. “Slip” and “slide” corporealize this linguistic slippage and make it all the more palpable due to the physicality of the metaphor, while the repetition of the “s” sibilant simulates how tension builds up as words shuttle and strain between meanings. The plosive “p” and the first stressed syllable in “perish” accentuate the force of the word splitting. Subsequently, the words on the page do indeed “decay” momentarily after “perish[ing]” as the line fades and “crack[s]”with a line break. Moreover, the phrase “will not stay still” is itself semantically ambiguous, where “still” emphasizes both the fact that the word “will not stay in place,” but also that it will not persist or remain intact long enough for us to pin down its meaning: it is ephemeral and “will not stay, still.” In short, then, Eliot recognizes that linguistic flux also connotes death, destruction and discursive decomposition.
Yet, in “Ash Wednesday” (hereafter “Wednesday”), Eliot again acknowledges that this linguistic mobility or slippage is also a form of dynamism that sustains his poetry in its fecundity. One might even say that the force of the word splitting is a necessary precursor to writing complex poetry: if a word is not left to die and shatter, language is stable but lifeless and unable to dance logopoeically. He writes, “Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, the Word without a word, the Word within/The world and for the world” (151-4). The image of the “still” word connotes stability, yet it is also silent and, on some level, only an abstraction because the word is “unspoken” and “unheard.” Moreover, this word seems to be incomplete — it is “the Word without a word.” Yet, despite its inchoateness, it is also “the Word within/The world and for the world,” where the use of the capitalized “Word” invokes the concept of Logos — the transcendent language of Christ Himself that comprises and also produces all meaning and is hence both “within” and “for” the world. This ostensible paradox is, perhaps, not as paradoxical as it seems. When a word has not yet been written or spoken — transformed into an utterance — it does indeed encapsulate all its potentialities of meaning because the writer or speaker has not yet invoked or actualized the particular meaning(s) that they want to. Thus, one might say that this silent Word bears the seed of all established meanings, past and present, and therefore it is impossible to write without accessing it. Yet, this word ultimately also has no meaning and imprisons for yet another reason: it is “still” because it is unuttered, and does not yet resonate with other formal elements in an utterance, such as other words. Therefore, any logopoeic dance or slippage is impossible while the word remains still and isolated. In the words of Lacan, “It is not only man who speaks, but in man and through man that [language] speaks; in that his nature becomes woven by effects in which the structure of language of which he becomes the material” (274) [emphasis mine]. One might therefore say that language is meaningless when it has no one to “build on” or “speak through,” no human being to inflect it and give it structure, form and meaning by placing it in context, against other linguistic elements. Accordingly, this ostensible unspoken “Word” is not completely transcendent because it contains the infinite possibilities of meaning, but none of these possibilities can ever be “(corpo)realized” until the word is uttered and thrown into linguistic flux. Thus, the unspoken word encompasses both a linguistic history that is stable, totalized and infinitely meaningful, but is also lifeless, unuttered and thus meaningless. And, as mentioned, by uttering the Word in conventional and predetermined ways, one risks becoming a scribe or copycat, rather than a writer.
In order to resolve these conundrums, I argue that Eliot, in “Wednesday,” attempts to forge a balance between the metahistorical fixity of language and its unfathomable flux, since both are necessary components for his model of the transcendent Logos. Accordingly, Eliot’s maxim — “[t]each us to care or not to care/[t]each us to sit still” — may be interpreted as advice for the poet as he/she tries to strike a balance amidst this precarious linguistic limbo (“Wednesday” 38-9). In other words, the poet’s task involves taming language such that it becomes comprehensible (“teach us to care”), yet not too much such that the words become too stiff to dance (“or not to care/[t]each us to sit still”). Eliot accomplishes just this as he writes, “Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled/About the centre of the silent Word” (“Wednesday” 156-7). Accordingly, picking up on Eliot’s own poetic image of the world, one might describe his vision of Logos as a macrocosmic structure that resembles many planets revolving around a sun. The sun at the core of the solar system is stable and stationary but also vast, “the centre of the silent Word” that is at once infinitely meaningful but also meaningless in its unordered infinity. And the poet is the one who gives the word its dynamism but also tames it, structuring the word within a larger microcosm, but also limiting its meaning to a few planets dancing around the solar core, so that a reader may grasp the word instead of being drowned in linguistic chaos.
Thus, the world whirls “[a]gainst the Word” in two senses. First, silence gives the Word metahistorical, referential stability and is the axis that its meanings orbit around, in the sense that the stable core is the support that dynamism leans “against” symbiotically. Secondly, the stable core also controls this excess of kinetic energy so that the system does not spin out of control: a word’s meanings whirl “in opposition to” or “against” this historical stability. Accordingly, the Word in Eliot’s poetry does not reduce meaning into prosaic banality, instead fostering multiple meanings within the text while also limiting them to prevent Babelian confusion. Thus, silence and voice, stillness and movement, are mutually constitutive but also oppositional for Eliot. After all, silence is a necessary precondition for one to be heard: “where shall the word be found, where will the word/Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence” (Eliot, “Wednesday” 159-60). Similarly, the line “unstilled world still whirled” (Eliot, “Wednesday” 156) may be read aurally as “unstilled world still world,” where the world is both dynamic and stable in Eliot’s vision, since both fixity and flux equilibrate each other. Thus, Eliot’s poetry recognizes that a word must anchor its meaning on at least some historically-recognized, traditional consensus in order to gain stability. Yet, the word must also be free to revolve within and between its multiple meanings, in order to formulate rich poetry that evades the trap of historical determinism.
One might therefore say that Eliot’s poetry resists the shackles of history by restructuring language as a synchronic system, wherein multiple symbiotic meanings coexist within a word at any one time and feed into each other. Yet, one may also think of this model as diachronic, since one must reread — or at least mentally revise — a word again in order to comprehend its other meaning(s), even if this only takes a few seconds. The eventual result of this is a system of communication in Eliot’s poetry which stretches across both synchronic and diachronic time. This system’s synchronicity destabilizes any notion of “one” linguistic tradition or one unified meaning, while its diachronicity allows both Eliot and the reader to travel back in time to rewrite the poem in new ways that defy poetic tradition, even as they build on this history. This coexistence of multiple meanings or multiple linguistic traditions may be seen in “Norton,” where Eliot writes, “What might have been is an abstraction/Remaining a perpetual possibility/Only in a world of speculation” (6-8). As mentioned earlier, one may view language as just such an abstraction, because what has not been uttered — “what might have been” — indeed “[remains] a perpetual possibility” that is waiting to come into meaning. The word “perpetual” emphasizes the timeless historicity of the Word, but also the infinite and perpetual meanings of the silent Word, which were discussed earlier. Eliot then adds that this is only possible “in a world of speculation,” finally concluding with a fullstop that puts an end to any promise of “perpetual possibility.” At this juncture, one might thus say that Eliot is dismissing these possibilities as impotent because they are “only in a world of speculation.”
However, he goes on to suggest that these speculative, “ghostly” possibilities actually have the power to influence “corporeal” words that have already been processed into meaning: “What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present” (9-10). As in his other poems, the semantic potential of “one end, which is always present” is self-reflexive, since two meanings of “present” — both that which is “current” and that which is “there” — are indeed present as perpetual possibilities. In other words, the speculative meanings of a word, which do not exist on paper per se, are “always present” in the sense that they are always there, despite not being uttered or written out. They are also “always present” today: always in the present and existing alongside what Eliot has already written down, and what the reader has already cognized into meaning. And “end,” too, might connote a more negative “halt” to coherence. Yet, it can antonymically connote coherence itself: one might understand “end” as telos, as in “a means to an end” or even “an end to incoherence.” This process of semantic slippage, then, is again both configured as disorienting yet purposeful. In remaining intangible but also omnipresent within time, the multiple logopoeic threads in Eliot’s writing serve to disorder our understanding of time and meaning, but they also allow us to rewrite history.
In fact, Eliot takes this a step further by using his persona to compress time itself, and explore these possibilities in his poem physically: “Footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage which we did not take/Towards the door we never opened/Into the rose garden. My words echo/Thus, in your mind” (11-5). Here, it is precisely Eliot’s corporealization and actualization of the speculative through the image of the rose garden that draws the speculative and the realized together in the “present.” As Ezra Pound states in “A Retrospect,” “[a]n ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (n.p.) [emphasis mine]. One might therefore think of metaphor or logopoeia as just such Poundian Images, in that they condense meanings into a single, stable point in time. In other words, the speculative meanings of a word are given the same epistemological weight as the initial meaning that the reader first concretizes in his/her head when reading the text on paper. Therefore, Eliot’s use of the rose garden metaphor, and the numerous uses of logopoeia which I have already discussed, suggests that the image itself is a means through which the polyvalent meanings of language may be expressed in all their multiple facets. Furthermore, this is achieved without succumbing to the chaos of Babelian confusion, because an image’s compression of ideas and concepts also structures poetry. By this, I mean that any one image may have multivalent meanings, but these are always finite and ordered for the reader through the unifying force of this image, even as it presents all of them at once as abstract speculations.
Eliot thereby explores the speculative through both “memory” and images, which traces, but also compresses, multiple time-lines of meaning into one totalizing present/presence. In much the same way, the reader recalls past meanings of words, but, in re-examining them, can add on to the extant meanings which have already been discovered. In so doing, the reader formulates a singular, coherent mosaic that encompasses the word’s multiple valences of meaning all at once. Yet, the reader does so by reprocessing Eliot’s synchronic images through time, thereby transforming the synchronic into the diachronic. In a similar vein, as the poetic persona’s “words echo thus,” they also “re-sound” or “sound again” and take on new epistemological structures of meaning, just as the speculative possibilities build on and echo against possibilities that have already actualized themselves on paper (“Norton” 15). And although patterns may ostensibly appear concretized, “[t]he knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,/For the pattern is new in every moment/And every moment is a new and shocking/Valuation of all we have been” (Eliot, “East Coker” 85-8). In other words, in exploring the speculative, Eliot constantly reformulates the seeming, “falsif[ying]” fixity of historical patterns, just as the reader constantly reworks Eliot’s poetry by accessing these speculative threads to make and remake meaning multiple times. A good example of this would be “formulated” in “Prufrock,” which evokes both “formalin” and “reform:” words that may be antonymic, but resound off each other when “formulated” is read and reread. Thus, Eliot’s works rewrite the patterns of linguistic history both synchronically and diachronically, while never completely dismantling the convention of this tradition. Instead, Eliot reformulates the very temporality of language itself, cutting across time to draw multiple related genealogies alongside an extant chain of inheritance.
In conclusion, Eliot’s poetry is self-reflexive in that it plays with logopoeic slippages of language — semantic, aural and visual — in order to demonstrate that language is truly infinite. Eliot also demonstrates how these infinite possibilities of meaning are enriching, but could potentially also inundate us in Babelian chaos when we can no longer produce any stable meaning out of this flux. Conversely, the means by which language is used may also become trite and formulaic, since any user of language always risks being forced to repeat historical patterns in uninteresting ways, in order to escape the disorientating chaos that language entails. Eliot’s solution to both linguistic chaos and banality suggests that, even though there may be a historical pattern to language that can potentially be stifling, one can also reread and rewrite this pattern diachronically. In doing so, one also accesses multiple meanings across time in a single, synchronous moment, just as many interpretations, even some that potentially contradict each other, may exist within a single Eliot poem. Therefore, the poet, the reader and any user of language must forge a balance between the stability of traditional uses of language and the potential chaos of meaning-making itself. In so doing, we may gain access to a Logos that frees one from the shackles of linguistic inheritance, and is meaningful in being both dynamic and stable.
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