In the Mirror of the Past

by Ivan Illich

  Please note how Nebrija proposes to substitute for the vernacular a ‘device,’ an ‘artificio.’ Unruly speech shall henceforth be substituted by standard coinage. Only 200 years earlier, Dante had still assumed that any language that had been learned and that is spoken according to a grammar could never come alive. Such language, according to Dante, could not but remain the device of schoolmen, of ‘inventores grammaticae facultatis.’ Nebrija has a different perspective on power and rule. He wants to teach people the language of clerics, to tighten their speech and to subject their utterances to his rule. For Isabel the Queen, language was perceived as a domain. For her, the vernacular is the domain of the present, the utterance in which every speaker is sovereign. For Don Antonio the grammarian, language is a tool that serves, above all, the scribe. With a few words, he translates his ‘dream of reason’ into a monstrous ideology, the supposition on which, henceforth, the industrial system shall rise. Artifact shall substitute for autonomous subsistence; standard shall replace unruly variety; predictable outcomes shall remove the risk of surprise. He presses language into the service of fame — or more precisely, of a new kind of fame that is best called ‘propaganda.’

  I want to lay the foundations of that dwelling in which your fame can settle. I want to do for my language what Zenodotos has done for Greek and Krates for Latin. No doubt, their betters have come after them. But to have been improved upon by their pupils does not detract from their, nay, from our, glory to be the originator of a necessary craft, just when its time had become ripe; and, may you trust me, no craft has ever come more timely than grammar for the Castilian tongue.

  In only a few lines, Nebrija spells out the sales talk of the expert to his government that henceforth becomes standard:

  Majesty, you need the engineer, the inventor who knows how to make out of your people’s speech, out of your people’s lives, tools that befit your government and its pursuits. No doubt, believing in progress, I know that others will come who shall do better than I; others will build on the foundations that I lay. But, watch out, my lady, you cannot delay accepting my advice: ‘This is the time. Our language has indeed just now reached a height, from which we must more fear that it slide than we can hope that it ever shall rise.’

  Already, the expert is in a hurry. Already, he blackmails his patron with the ‘now or never’ that leads to so many modern policy decisions. The queen, according to Nebrija, needs the grammar now, because soon Columbus shall return.

  After your Majesty shall have placed her yoke unto many barbarians who speak outlandish tongues, by your victory these shall stand in new needs: in need for the laws that the victor owes to the vanquished and in need of the language that we bring. My grammar shall serve to impart to them the Castilian tongue as we have taught Latin to our young.

  We know well whose concept of language won out: language became one more tool managed by the professional lackey to power. Language was seen as an instrument to make people good, to make good people. Language became one of the major ingredients put by the hermetic alchemist into the formula by which new men were made to fit a new world. Mother tongue, as taught in the church and the classroom, replaced the vernacular that mother spoke. Mother tongue became a commodity centuries earlier than mother’s milk. Men took charge of the ‘educatio prolis,’ shaping Alma Mater as their social womb and breast. In the process, the sovereign subject became a citizen client. The domination of nature and the corresponding improvement of people became central public — supposedly secular — goals. ‘Omnibus, omnia, omnino docendi ars’ — ‘to teach everybody everything totally’ — became the task of the educator, as John Amos Comenius spelled it out in the title of his book. The sovereign subject turned into a ward of the state. The doctrine about the need for primary education for the exercise of citizenship destroyed the autonomy of Isabel’s subjects: she could tax her subjects, force them to statute labor or call them into the army; she could not attain the sovereign dignity of their tongue as every school teacher does.

  The third mutation in the vernacular has happened under our eyes. Most people born before World War II, rich and poor alike, learned most of their first language either from persons who spoke to them, or from others whose exchanges they overheard. Few learned it from actors, preachers or teachers, unless that was the profession of their parents. Today, the inverse is the case. Language is fed to the young through channels to which they are hooked. What they learn is no more a vernacular that, by definition, we draw into us from roots, that we send out into a context in which we are anchored. The roots that serve for this purpose have become weak, dry and loose during the age of schooling and now, in the age of life-long education, they have mostly rotted away, like the roots of plants grown in hydroponics. The young and their linguists cannot even distinguish any more between the vernacular and the high-class slang that they take to be ‘gutsy.’ Language competence now, to a large degree, depends on sufficient supply of teaching.

  The lack of personal sovereignty, of autonomy, appears clearly in the way people speak about teaching. At this very moment I am talking to you and, in another four minutes, I will be speaking with you, when the time for discussion will have come; but neither now, nor then, will I be teaching. I am arguing a point, presenting to you my opinions — perhaps I am even entertaining you. But I refuse to be pressed by you into your service as a teacher. Much less am I educating you. I do not want anything to do with that task for which nature has not provided me with the necessary organs. I have told you, perhaps, about some facts that had escaped you about the Abbey of Gorz or the court of the Catholic kings; but, believe me, it was done without any intent at shaping or trapping you for the sake of education. And I hope that I have convinced you that it is more than a terminological nicety when I insist that teaching is a very peculiar, always hierarchical, form that conversation in the vernacular sometimes takes. Unfortunately, many of our contemporaries cannot grasp this any more. Language has become for them a commodity, and the task of education that of training language producers by equipping them with a language stock.

  A short while ago I was back in New York in an area that two decades ago I had known quite well: the South Bronx. I was there at the request of a young college teacher who is married to a colleague. This man wanted my signature on a petition for compensatory pre-kindergarten language training for the inhabitants of a slum. To overcome my resistance against this expansion of educational services, for a whole day he took me along on visits to brown, white, black and other so-called ‘households.’ I saw dozens of children in uninhabitable high-rise slums, exposed to all-day TV and radio, equally lost in landscape and in language. My colleague tried to convince me that I should sign the petition. And I tried to argue the right of these children for protection from education. We simply did not meet. And then in the evening, at dinner in my colleague’s home, I suddenly understood why: this was no longer a man but a total teacher. In front of their own children, this couple stood ‘in loco magistri.’ Their children had to grow up without parents — because these two adults, in every word which they addressed to their two sons and one daughter, were ‘educating’ them. And since they considered themselves very radical, off and on they made attempts at ‘raising the consciousness’ of their children. Conversation has turned for them into a form of marketing — of acquisition, production and sale. They have words, ideas, sentences; but they do not speak any more.

  PART THREE

  H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness

  * * *

  Lecture to the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture May 1984

  I am told that for the last 70 years there have been citizens in Dallas who have urged the construction of a mid-city lake. The community expects this lake to water finance and fantasy, commerce and health. A commission is at work to explore the feasibility of such an artificial body of water downtown. Toward this study the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture would like to make a distinctive contribution: we are to reflect
on the relationship between Water and Dreams, insofar as this bond is part of ‘What makes a City Work.’ Dreams have always shaped cities, and cities have always inspired dreams, and traditionally water has quickened them both. I have serious doubts that the water is left that can connect the two. Industrial society has turned H2O into a substance with which the archetypal element of water cannot mix. My lecture, therefore, is divided into two parts. The first evokes the dream waters of Lethe, and the second introduces the history of flush. The conclusion comes back to the initial question about fantasy life among engineered things which have lost the elementary power to mirror the unfathomable waters of dreams.

  In the city of Kassel a German baroque prince has built himself a castle surrounded by English gardens which solicit the waters to betray all they can tell. Water is not only meant to reveal itself to the eye and the touch, but to speak and sing in seventeen different registers. Thus dream waters mumble and ebb and swell and roar and trickle and splash and stream and dally, and they wash you and can carry you away. They can rain from above and well up from the depths: they can moisten or just wet. From all these wonders of water, I select its power to clean: Lethe’s ability to wash off memories and H2O’s function to eliminate waste.

  Dreams perform catharsis, which means that they clean, and dream waters can clean in several ways. The sprinkling with holy — lustral — water dissolves miasma; it quenches curses, dispels the pollution that lingers at certain places, can be poured on the hands, the head or the feet to wash off impurity, blood or guilt. But there is another catharsis which only the dark waters of Lethe perform: Lethe’s waters detach those who cross them from memories and allow them to forget. Since I have only thirty minutes to speak to you, Lethe’s catharsis is the only one I can address. This makes my question about the proposed city lake very narrow: can the soul’s river of forgetfulness which flows into the social pool of remembrance reflect itself in the purified disinfectant that is metered, sewered and piped and then poured into an open-air reservoir downtown? Can the city child’s dreams about ‘letting go and forgetting’ be watered by the liquid that comes from taps, showers and toilets? Can purified waste-water ‘circulate’ in fountains or lakes that mirror dreams?

  The lustral waters of Lethe flow; they do not circulate like the blood and the money and the piped flush that swell the social imagination of the early industrial age. Already in 1616 William Harvey had announced to the London College of Physicians that blood circulates through the human body. It took Harvey’s idea well over a century before it was generally accepted by practising physicians. In 1750 Dr Johannes Pelargius Storch, the authoritative creator of an eight-volume gynaecology, still could not accept the general validity of Harvey’s theory. He accepted that blood might flow through the bodies of Englishmen and wash out their wastes; in his own patients, the women of lower Saxony, he observed the blood flowing and ebbing through the flesh. Storch understood what we now grapple to grasp: the fact that the re-definition of blood as a medium of circulation calls forth the social reconstruction of the body. The quivering and symbol-laden flesh and blood of tradition must be recast as a functional system of filters and conduits. By the end of the eighteenth century Harvey’s theory was generally accepted in medicine. The conception of personal health based on the brisk circulation of blood fitted the mercantilist model of wealth — just before Adam Smith — based on the intensity of money circulation.

  By the mid-nineteenth century several British architects began to speak about London according to this same paradigm and repeatedly recognized their debt to the ‘immortal Harvey’. They conceived the city as a social body through which water must incessantly circulate, leaving it without pause as a carrier of dirt. Without interruption water must flow into the city to wash waste and sweat from it. The brisker this flow, the fewer the reservoirs that breed ‘congenial pestilence,’ the healthier the city will be. Unless water constantly flows into the city and is constantly pulled out through its sewers, the new city thus created by the imagination cannot but stagnate and rot. Just as Harvey had created something previously unimaginable, namely blood as a medium of circulation and thus the body of modern medicine, so Chadwick and Ward and their colleagues by the creation of flush invented the city as a place that needs to be constantly relieved of its remains. Like the body and the economy, the city could be henceforth visualized as a system of pipes.

  The history of H2O as the embodiment of archetypal water could be written in many ways. I here deal with the engineered degradation of the substance that makes it refractory, unfit to carry the metaphor we would like it to serve. All I can do here is to insist that ‘water’, unlike ‘H2O’, is a historical construct which mirrors — for better or for worse — the fluid element of the soul, and that the H2O-bound water of social imagination can be very far out of tune with the water for which we long in our dreams. Today’s city water constantly crosses city limits: it comes in as a commodity and it goes out as a waste. In contrast, in all Indo-Germanic myths, water itself is the limit. It separates this world from the other; it divides the world of those now living from the past one, or from the next. In the large family of Indo-Germanic myths the other world does not have one fixed location on the mental map: it may be located below the earth, on a mountain top, on an island, in the sky or in a cave. However, everywhere in this other world is a realm that lies beyond a body of water: beyond the ocean, on the other shore of a bay. To reach it, a river must be crossed: here you are ferried, there you must wade. But in all myths this way that leads through the waters, on the other side leads to a spring, and the river that you have crossed also feeds this otherworldly well.

  Bruce Lincoln has shown that Greek, Indic, Nordic and Celtic pilgrims on their way to the beyond all cross through the same funereal landscape designed according to the same mythical hydrology. The slow-flowing waters the traveller crosses are those of the river of forgetfulness. This river has the power to strip those who cross it of their memories. The sleepy beating of the head in the threnos with which the mourning women lull the heroes of Thebes into their last sleep reminds Aeschylus of the monotonous beat of the oars across the river Acheron. However, what the river has washed from those on their way to the beyond, is not destroyed: the traveller is only divested of the deeds by which he will be remembered. The river carries them to a spring where they bubble up like the sand at the bottom of a cosmic well to serve as drink for the elect: the singer, the dreamer, the seer, the wise. The water induces drunkenness of a sober kind ‘sobriam ebriatatem.’ Through these messengers who have returned from their dreams or journeys, a trickle of living water from the realm of the dead brings them back their memories for which they have no more need, but which are of immense value to the living. Thus the dead depend on the living much less than the living on the dead. What the river Lethe has washed from their feet, the throbbing well of Mnemosyne, returns to life.

  When the sky still lay in the arms of Earth, when Uranus still shared his bed with ‘broadhipped Gaya’, the Titans came into existence. And, in this firstborn generation that preceded the Gods, there was Mnemosyne. She is too old, too archaic, to be the mother of Apollo, but she furnishes him, Maya’s son, with a soul which always finds its way back to the source, which can never forget. Hermes-Apollo thus has two mothers, and this seems to make him into the God-guide. The hymn to Hermes calls her the Mother of Muses. Hesiod distinctly remembers her flowing hair when he describes her stretched out with Zeus engendering her daughters. She herself is the pool in which the Muse of Enthusiasm bathes, no less than the other daughter, Forgetfulness. This appearance of Mnemosyne among the Titans who precede the Gods is crucial in the history of our water. By being placed among the Titans, a cosmic element becomes the source of remembrance; the well of culture, the spring of a first kind of city — and water as the source of remembrance acquires the feature of woman.

  However, this archaic well of oral tradition has no place in the classical cities. The classical cities of Gree
ce and, above all Rome, are built around aqueducts piping water to fountains. Not the well feeding a pond, not the epical singer, but engineered jets of water and written texts consigned to books shape their flow of water and of words. No Greek city has preserved an altar or well dedicated to Mnemosyne. She is still invoked by literate poets who want to rub shoulders with Homer. But Mnemosyne is no more the source of sober intoxication. Her name now stands as a personification for the literate storehouse of memory which Plato knew would dry up remembrance as the throbbing source beyond the river of Forgetfulness, remembrance as the pool fed by the terminal river. Remembrance as the Titanic co-mother of Hermes is replaced by a new kind of memory, as written culture replaces oral, and legal the old customary order.

  From the well to the jet, from the pond of remembrance to the sculpted fountain, from epic song to referenced memory, water as a social metaphor goes through a first profound transformation. The waters of oral culture that flowed beyond the shores of this world are turned into the most treasured provision with which a government can supply the city. Given the task, I would begin by writing the history of the changing shape and the meaning that the changing perception of water gives to the city. In such a history the fountains of Rome, the waterworks of Isphahan and the channels of Venice and Tenochtitlán would appear as extreme and rare creatures. The city built along a river, the city constructed around the well as if it were the navel, the city depending on rainwater from the roofs, would become ideal types among many. However, with rare exceptions, all cities into which water is brought on purpose from afar have had until recently one thing in common: what the aqueduct brings across the city line is absorbed by the soil of the city. The idea that the water that is piped into the city must leave it by its sewers did not become a guiding principle for urban design until the steam engine was already a common sight. In the meantime, this idea has acquired the appearance of inevitability — even now when the sewer often leads into a treatment plant. What these plants produce and generate is further than ever from the water of dreams. The cities’ need for a constant toilet has only tightened its hold on the planners’ imagination. To loosen the spell of this social construct on our imagination I propose to study how this spell was cast.