liquid crystal river

Near the Voykovskaya metro station, an aunt is handing out advertising leaflets, calling out by rote: “Ossetian pies! Delicious! Lush! It's funny, of course. Anyone who has never even tried it, but has simply seen Ossetian pies, knows that they are anything but fluffy. Yes, my auntie probably didn’t really eat them: they are still quite expensive. As for the splendor, this is true for general reasons. The tongue itself tells her what to say. She needs to praise the product, right? If it’s food, then first of all you need to confidently say about it that it’s tasty. And specifically the pies, if they are good, then it means they are fluffy. Her cottage cheese would be fresh (or, as they say in the market, the freshest), the honey would be aromatic, the apples would be sweet (although I personally, for example, prefer sour ones) or, perhaps, juicy. In linguistics this is called the “lexical function Bon.”.

By the way, about lush pies. In 1987, an article by L. Piyasheva (under the pseudonym L. Popkova) appeared in Novy Mir, in which for the first time in the Soviet press it was stated that capitalism is good and socialism is absolute evil. The article gave the impression of a bomb exploding. Actually, as far as I remember, there was nothing in the text that was not talked about in Moscow kitchens, but it was absolutely incredible, dizzying and amazing to see it published in a Soviet magazine. So this article was called “Where are the more magnificent pies?” - it was meant that they are more magnificent in West Germany, and not in East, in South Korea, and not in North. In short, the pies are richer where there is no socialism.

In poetics there is a term “permanent epithet”; It is believed that such epithets are characteristic of folk poetry (clean field, blue sea, red sun) - the same in the epics of Homer, closely related to folk art (rose-fingered Eos, cunning Odysseus). Everyone remembers at least from children's fairy tales and folk songs: a beautiful maiden, a kind fellow, a wild head. In folklore, there are often combinations that are funny to modern ears, in which the definitions are inappropriate or directly contradict the rest of the context: He blew off the head of his violent wife , or Your young faithful wife is not at all faithful to you. We are not used to this: now we strive to select definitions that are relevant specifically for a given situation. But here it’s different: the definition signals that an object belongs to the world of norms and indicates what essential property the object has in this world. The hands there are always white, which is why in the folklore text even the arap’s hands are white. Needless to say, lush pies would be just right here.

However, we note that this method of choosing words, in which the definition describes an object not in specific circumstances, but ideally, in the world of dreams, is characteristic not only of folklore. I once studied the language of Russian poetry of the early 19th century, in particular the wonderful and unfortunate Batyushkov. Here, for example, is how he writes about the river: “It seemed to fall asleep between the meadows / And formed a bank in the mirror waters, / Like a wonderful chain, it wrapped around the forest. / The entire space of its flowing crystal / Trees, intertwined with branches, overshadowed, / Fed with moisture and decorated the shore.” The modern reader is struck here, of course, by the combination of a flowing crystal. Just think, we only recently heard about liquid crystal monitors, and the poet, it turns out, foresaw everything... Nothing happened. It’s just that in an ideal world the water is crystal clear, which means the river is a crystal. And the fact that it flows has nothing to do with this.

Or here's another example. Batyushkov has a line: I drank roses with honey on wet lips. The kiss is indicated here by the metaphor of “drinking,” and in this situation, the fact that the lips are called wet in relation to the moment of the kiss gives the description a completely unnecessary and generally alien physiology to Batyushkov. But this is true only to modern ears. In fact, the author did not at all mean to combine these two ideas, and it did not even occur to the reader of that time. Here everything is separate: wet lips are beautiful lips from the world of dreams, and no one drinks the moisture from them; The question of how you should drink roses also does not arise: it’s just that the lips are scarlet and the kiss is sweet, hence the honey.

Batyushkov, like Zhukovsky and Vyazemsky, belonged to the school that Pushkin called the school of “harmonic precision.” It is remarkable that the critical articles and correspondence of the poets of this school are filled with denunciations of various kinds of logical inaccuracies. Thus, Vyazemsky wrote about Lomonosov: “When the dawn with a crimson eye / The blush multiplies the roses. The Crimson Eye is no good. It does not at all poetically mean inflammation in the eye and directly refers to the eye doctor.” Or: “Lomonosov said: Dawn with a crimson hand! This is good; only resembles a washerwoman who washes clothes in the river in December.” As noted by L.Ya. Ginzburg (now the reader knows her primarily as a remarkable writer and thinker, but officially she was a literary critic and wrote, in particular, about the poets of Pushkin’s circle), “The pink-fingered dawn would not have embarrassed Vyazemsky, although this metaphorical formation is more complex, but it has behind it is a strong tradition. Crimson hand, crimson eye - unusual phrases; they do not sufficiently obscure the primary meaning, which led to the implementation of metaphor, which from a rationalistic point of view is always comic and absurd.” Arzamas resident Voeikov wrote about Pushkin: “Wild flame - soon we will begin to write: a manual flame, a gentle, polite flame...” But Voeikov, comments L. Ya. Ginzburg, undoubtedly would not object to the formula - a flame of passion, a love flame. Voeikov also argued that the expression dumb darkness also allows one to say: “chatting darkness... arguing darkness, darkness asking indecent questions and answering them without blushing...”. It would just be interesting to show Voeikov some poem, say, by Mandelstam. To the modern reader, dissatisfaction with the combination of silent darkness seems not even a quibble, but some kind of nonsense.

Speaking of darkness, morning dawn and so on. As a child, I remember reading in some place like “Page Sixteen” of the “Literary Gazette”: “A young Eos with purple fingers came out of the darkness... I wonder where this Eos got her manicure done?” Now I looked on the Internet and saw that this joke is repeated, clearly independently, by different authors. Homer's line now seems funny to many, but Vyazemsky was not bothered by the purple fingers of the goddess of dawn, but the crimson hand of dawn made him laugh.

What am I talking about? Language is not just words, phonetics, and grammar. These are also the customs by which we connect meanings with each other. And these customs, like everything else in language, change over time.