`To Be Fully Languaged'

My first knowledge of involutes came when, as a reporter, I researched a feature story about mathematics and how it was combining ancient learning, often Greek and Arab, with computer science. Go to MathWorld for a handy explanation and illustration of something you probably did as a kid with pencil and string. I remember having a toy, the name of which I no longer remember, that involved fitting a pencil into an adjustable frame over a piece of paper, selecting a setting, and turning a dial to make a veritable fractal jungle of curves. Even then I sensed the aesthetic and scientific were complimentary, not antagonistic.

The word derives from the Latin involvere, meaning to wrap or envelop, and as an adjective it means curved like a spiral. In botany, an involuted leaf is curled at the edges, as during a drought. It evolved further, as involuted, to mean intricate or abstruse, similar to its etymological cousin, convoluted. To me, involute sounds like an archaic synonym for homosexual. In The Secret Lives of Words, Paul West mostly ignores the mathematical and scientific senses of involute and concentrates on its use by Thomas De Quincey in Suspiria de Profundis (1845), a sequel of sorts to his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). In Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey defines involute as “a compound experience incapable of being disentangled.” West writes:

“He provided other definitions as well, none as luminous or precise…he was concerned with enigmatic experiences that just would not go away. In proposing to name such experiences, not only reproducing them and devising similar ones, he anticipated comparable tangles in the work of Ionesco, Breton, and Beckett. His extraordinary contributions to modern aesthetic theory consist in his recognition that, as Raymond Queneau said, in an absurd world you live absurdly. So De Quincey invents absurdities of his own that he adds to the absurdities already there in life, realizing that there can be no total, but that, in adding to the absurd you have made your protest even while using the enemy's weapons.”

That final point distils the sense of humor my brother and I have shared since childhood, and underlines the subversive nature of the seriously ridiculous. Don’t mistake De Quincey for a Monty Pythonesque prankster, despite the assumptions you may wish to make because of his problems with narcotics. I encourage you to read Suspiria de Profundis, especially the essay West quotes, “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain.” Here, in a voluptuously written nutshell, is Proust and De Quincey’s prescient insight into brain science:

“A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions . . . What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies."

In one of his finest pieces, “The Landscape of His Dreams,” collected in An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), Oliver Sacks writes of memory:

“It may be that we need to call upon both sorts of concept – memory as dynamic, as constantly revised and represented, but also as images, still present in their original form, though written over and over again by subsequent experience, like palimpsests.”

I love the literary echo of palimpsest across a century and a half, and it sparks my own memory of the first time I saw the word, around 1971: in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, a novel that is itself a madly comic palimpsest. My university library has all 21 volumes of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, edited by Grevel Lindop and published in 2000 by Pickering & Chatto, and I plan to start poking around in it, as I have been in Paul West’s nonfiction. My digression started with a single word, involute, and I think West would endorse the effort. In his preface to The Secret Lives of Words he writes:

“To be fully languaged would entail knowing all the languages and their histories. Only a few manage that while the rest of us pick away at the feast.”