Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
—“Flower in the Crannied Wall”
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Scientists and poets have always struggled to find the hidden meaning of our world, the secret formula that explains everything. Of course, if they did discover what “God and man is,” as Tennyson said, they’d still have left out woman, who probably holds the secret.
Decades ago, I heard a charming exchange of ideas between a man and a woman that went something like this:
Man: “Well, whenever I say man or mankind, everyone knows that this includes woman, too.”
Woman: “That’s what you think.”
And there you have it. It doesn’t matter if the man was speaking the “truth,” that in his own mind he included women. I suppose that’s what our Founding Fathers would say. (What our Founding Mothers thought hasn’t been revealed by the early historians, who were male.)
Of course, Tennyson can plead metrical necessity in his poem. He couldn’t really fit “I should know what God and man and woman is” into the rhythmical scheme of his lines, not to mention its grammar. Even “I should know what God and people is” doesn’t work. In a way, our thought processes get corrupted by our vocabulary, the seemingly inclusive and innocuous word “man” rendering “woman” invisible.
It’s a problem of language. Thomas Jefferson, the principal writer of our Declaration of Independence, wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” High language indeed, but it doesn’t only omit women: it leaves out America’s slaves, at least 15 percent of the country, as well as the various Indian tribes (i.e. “savages”) that we had also defeated or deceived. Today, this omission seems “self-evident,” but not so in 1776. They knew that women and slaves and Indians existed, but didn’t register as individuals. James Madison (calling them “other people”) proposed each slave be counted in the census as three-fifths of a person, for purposes of official population counts and taxes; women counted as whole people, but couldn’t vote.
Well, language is hard. In our own time, pretty soon it will be “self-evident” that gays deserve equal rights, but this is still evolving. Even the word “gay” didn’t grab hold of today’s meaning till the 1960s. But it caught on fast: By the ’70s, I couldn’t recite Wordsworth’s famous “I Wandered Lonely as A Cloud” to my students without having them snigger at “A poet could not but be gay/In such a jocund company.”
Even what we should call the descendants of former slaves is complicated and changing. “Negro” got corrupted, “Afro-American” seems illogical, “black” seems incorrect (as, of course, does “white”). “People of color” is unwieldy, and implies that others are “people without color,” which is untrue.
Still, we should listen to the poets. Fifty years before Tennyson, the visionary William Blake saw that the old way of looking at things was killing our society. To “see” clearly, we need to develop the right words. This is a slow process.
Problem: Of course, I’m a man, and probably don’t know what I’m talking about. All my life I’ve tried to exhibit the “manly” virtues, primarily physical ones like strength or courage (“weakling,” for example, is a seemingly neutral adjective, that in actual use applies only to boys or men). This means that, like our athletic President Gerald Ford, I probably played “too much football without a helmet.”
The Harlots cry from Street to Street
Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet…
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro the Eye
—from “Auguries of Innocence”
by William Blake (1757-1827)
This article appears in Oct 2-8, 2014.