Metaphorical maps of improbable fictions: the semantic parables of Christian Morgenstern.

Some poets write as if they want to concentrate on words, to see less of the world and time and death. Consider Keats' blindly verbal circling in "Beauty is Truth, truth beauty - that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know," said as if we must keep repeating words to keep ourselves hypnotized.

We need not do that. Whitman didn't; read "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." Lucretius didn't; he described our words and us as parts and products of the universe. Jeffers didn't; he described words as a temporary result of that universe's evolution. For example:

It is not true that the word was in the beginning. Only in the long afternoon comes a little babble, and silence forever.

And those... to whom the word is God; their God is a word.

(The Double Axe, II, 47)

In referring to the universe and God, Jeffers describes words as only our abstract, arbitrary, approximate, and often misleading signs, and not what creates or controls the universe. So did the German poet Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914), as he anticipated Alfred Korzybski's "a map is not the territory."

Morgenstern made this fundamental point of semantics clear by making any absolute faith in words so obviously ridiculous. For instance, one of his characters enjoys visiting a town because nothing he hears there makes sense. That comes as a great relief, because he knows he needn't try to understand such noises. As Stuart Chase declared in 1938, in The Tyranny of Words, that for all the sense it makes, much of what we write and say amounts to blah, blah, blah; much of it may not mean much except as symptoms of past and present emotional confusions, and as omens warning us of more confusions.

In "Mowenlied," ("Gull's Song"), Morgenstern ironically claims all gulls look as if their name is Emma, so that if we have that name, it should compensate us for our inability to fly, as if names have inherent meanings and matter more than facts. To ridicule such misunderstandings of the limitations of language, Morgenstern shows what could happen if words did prove magically true. In "Der Werwolf," a werewolf digs up a dead school teacher and has him decline the noun "werewolf." When the schoolmaster says that word has no plural forms, the werewolf goes home, sadly thinking about his wife and children, who no longer exist, because those plurals don't. Morgenstern pretends that in Germany, even werewolves meekly respect authority, which may make the authorities seem worse than werewolves.

Morgenstern ridiculed the smug assumption that what we say must prove sensible, because we say it, as if the world must obey our words and logic. In "Die Geierlammer," Morgenstern reverses the syllables of lammergeier, the name of a vulture which eats lambs, to describe a lamb which eats us. He pretends that if the word exists (and it does, because he has just invented it), that dangerous lamb must, so beware! That imaginary verbal monster the vulture lamb seems more ferocious than any vulture; the lamb will suddenly swallow you, without waiting for you to do anything or die first, but (because of our emotional associations with the word lamb) it seems so piously innocent that bystanders fail to see it as dangerous, no matter what they see it doing; some humans may seem as pious, and dangerous, as Morgenstern's ferocious lamb, and some as foolishly deluded as those bystanders.

In "Die Unmogliche Tatsache" ("The Impossible Fact"), Morgenstern made fun of the German faith in written regulations: once a dead pedestrian reads the traffic laws and finds he got himself run over illegally, he decides that it should not have happened, so it could not have happened, and he becomes triumphantly alive again, as if our merely verbal logic could make facts unhappen.

Other species might think our words and wishes and logic absurd, a point Morgenstern subversively made vivid in "Fisches Nachtgesang," in which all but the title, "The Fishes' Night Song," both defies and needs no translation:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This looks a bit like the fish who sing it, if fish do sing, and if we see the U's as scales (including musical scales, one of the puns which allegedly make Morgenstern's poems untranslatable... but in understanding them, we learn some semantics). For example, the shape of the poem resembles that of the fish who sing it, which makes the poem a more obvious sign of its source and subject.

Like us, the fish apparently talk about themselves, but not very accurately (the poem's shape on the page leaves out their fins and tails and eyes and mouths); our abstract and arbitrary word fish (or Fisch) doesn't look even remotely like what it means. In C.S. Peirce's terms, the words remain Symbols, and not the Icons or images which might give us reliable maps, and not Indices, the clues or symptoms which might prove that their causes might actually have existed t basic semiotics, the theory of the types of signs which Peirce originated. What the fish sings seems boringly repetitious; it may seem to mean only me, me, me or I, I, I... but as long as I remains the word we use most in conversations, perhaps we ought not to complain.

If we see the U's as waves, and the - 's as fish, the song pictures the fish in their lake; like Narcissus and many a poet since, the fish may see their world only as it reflects or involves them. We may think of fish as dumb, in more than one sense, but consider their opinion of us. Our speech developed as a modification of breathing, which began as fish still do it, a point silently demonstrated by a Professor of German as he recited the poem by opening and shutting his mouth in time to it, long, short short, long long long, and so on, while looking as goggle-eyed as some fish do. We may look that absurd to other species as we talk, and make no more sense (watch television with the mute on).

Morgenstern also indicates his moral point regarding our misunderstandings of language by taking words literally as words to invent comically absurd situations, animals, and machines. In one poem, an idiotically clever and lazy maid gets told she must clean windows so well that the guests will wonder whether the windows have any glass in them; the maid removes the glass, gets fired, and so avoids a tedious job, a self-defeating success.

In another, nuns misunderstand the word "expedite" on the packages sent to them as the name of the saint who sends them those packages, and so they start a new cult in honor of Saint Expedite, who exists only as their misunderstanding of a word. In a third, when a rooster gets burnt at the stake for laying an egg and the poor bird crows his final agony, the Christian crowd mishears the sound as a name for God without noticing their own misunderstanding. They misclassify the bird with a word, valuing the word more than they do the bird, punishing it for their own mistake, and so the bird painfully dies, a martyr in both senses of that word, and like us, a witness and victim of all-too-human stupidity.

In "Die Hecht" ("The Pike"), Saint Anthony converts a pike, who piously decides to eat seaweed instead of other fish. The seaweed becomes excrement after traveling through the Pike's alimentary canal and so pollutes the lake that hundreds of its fish die in agony, nourishing no one. When summoned to see the grim and smelly result of the conversion he had insisted on, the saint says only "Holy, holy, holy," as if that solves or explains something, unconsciously redefining the word "holy" by this example.

Morgenstern's verbal inventions demonstrate the limitations of language, his own included. These inventions include spectacles which reduce writing to its essentials, as it does in condensing thirty-three of Morgenstern's poems to just one question mark. As we run out of time and trees, we need such spectacles; they do what a critical intelligence does, helping us see what matters, and thus to make moral and time-and-energy-saving choices by constructing the appropriate abstractions (and by testing them against the facts).

Morgenstern pretended to have invented a daynight lamp, which turns day into night, reversing what ordinary lamps do (and why not, he seems to ask, when it works in words?). Another poem mentions scales which weigh each individual's worth and express it in music; because Morgenstern's hero Korf does not exist for the respectable, he gets only silence. One poem mentions a theatre which revolves around its four stages, each of which represents the world in one season; when someone makes a model of that theatre, the model becomes a real world, tiny but complete in itself as it circles through its mysterious changes, as if a map or model or words could become a world. By thus pretending to reverse the relationship Korzybski noticed between words and maps, and the territories they may describe, Morgenstern demonstrated its accuracy a generation before Korzybski said it.

"Die Geruchsorgel" ("The Olfactory Organ") punningly refers both to our noses and to another of Morgenstern's "merely" verbal inventions, a musical instrument which uses smells as the notes of its music. Presumably someone could actually build and play such an organ, and someone else compose music for it, a possibility Morgenstern used as a comic and revealing parable about language:

Palmstrom builds an olfactory organ And on it plays Korf's sneezewort sonata. This begins with alpine herb triplets. And enchants with an acacia aria. But in the scherzo, suddenly and unexpected, Between the tuberoses and the eucalyptus, Come those three famous sneezewort passages Which give the sonata its name. At these B-C-sharp-a-choo syncopations, Palmstrom Nearly falls off his chair every time, while Sitting safely at his desk at home. Korf throws opus after opus onto paper.

As he keeps on playing, and sneezing, Palmstrom parodies the romantic cliche about suffering for your art, while the demonic but cowardly composer Korf lets Palmstrom's allergy torment him, a metaphor which makes the emotional effect of music (and possibly poetry) seem like sneezing, and thus comically unromantic. Korf plays with notes he writes on paper, which only signal the smells, which leaves him safe, while poor Palmstrom suffers from at least one of the smells themselves, another example of Korzybski's metaphor about maps remaining only maps. And did Morgenstern know that acacias have no smell? The fact that they don't makes the enchanting part of his music of smells the metaphorical equivalent of silence, which our words can make seem enchanting.

Morgenstern's zooful of imaginary animals and other absurdities describe limitations. Authorities may like to think they have absolute power, a dangerous delusion Morgenstern mocked in "Die Behorde" ("The Authority"), which begins like Kafka's The Trial but has a more ingenious hero:

From a police station, Korf gets a strongly worded form: WHO is he, and HOW, and WHY? WHERE has he lived so far? WHAT is his status? WHERE was he born, WHICH year, WHICH day? HAS he permission to live there, and if so, WHY? HOW much money does he have, and WHAT does he believe? (IF he doesn't answer these, he will go to jail.)

Signed, Borowsky, Heck.

Short and clear, Korf answers: To the High Director, and according to the law, The person established by the signature below Presents himself as, according to middle class convention, Actually non-existent, and signs himself below, Notwithstanding his sincere regret about the fact above,

(To the district Police Station at....) This the chief concerned reads, stunned.

Korf's answer mocks authority by using its form and law to prove that because he has no legal right to exist, therefore he doesn't, so the law cannot apply to him. By obeying the law so literally, he defeats its purpose but remains beyond its reach (a verbal miracle we might hope to accomplish ourselves). He cannot answer most of its questions, so he doesn't (a person who does not exist doesn't live anywhere, has no money or status or beliefs); he uses the law and logic to make them both absurd. Actual police could solve the problem illogically, of course, by jailing any actual person who tried Korf's solution, but because Korf exists only as Morgenstern's words, they can't get him; words cannot become the subjects they describe.

NOTE

I included my own translations in this article, changing the capitalization and line spacing of 'Die Behorde' to make its point and structure more obvious; readers may want to consult Max Knight's The Gallows Songs, Christian Morgenstern's Galgenleider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964) and The Daynight Lamp and Other Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), W.D. Snodgrass and Lore Segal's Gallows Songs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), and Walter Arndt's Songs from the Gallows (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

Robert Ian Scott teaches English at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. His books include a recently revised edition of The Specific Writer.