Admonition
I find it pleasingly ironic that a word used to urge discipline on writers should act as a distraction. It makes me lose concentration, as though I’m bumping into – and noisily knocking over – a sign saying ‘Silence’ in a library. The very thing it seeks to prohibit is summoned by the collision. Different people will, naturally, trip up and stop at different words. No two readers making their way along a line of text will have identical understandings of what’s written. If we think of words as a kind of verbal hardcore or gravel surfacing our paths of meaning, it’s as if they shift and settle into different alignments according to the precise signature that’s created by our particular shape and weight and the way we lay our tread upon them. Our word-paths may take us to broadly the same destinations, but we arrive there via our own itineraries, garlanded with associations, memories, judgments, satisfactions and regrets that are drawn from our unique individual histories.
‘Admonition’ is, for me, one of those words that doesn’t sit level on the path of any sentence that contains it. It juts out with more than its designated meaning. This means that every time I come to it, I stumble. Other readers will doubtless have no trouble with it. For them, it will just convey its official meaning (reproof; counsel; advice; ecclesiastical censure). And where I hesitate at ‘admonition’ they will do so with ‘luminous’ or ‘instinct’, ‘litmus’ or ‘crave’ – or any of a thousand other words – in a way that I would not. We all have our own personal catalogues of trip-words.
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The coordinates of my most recent collision with “admonition” are easily given. I was reading Terence Cave’s book How to read Montaigne when I reached a passage about Montaigne’s use of Horace’s Art of Poetry. Cave notes that
Horace begins his verse treatise with an admonition to budding poets to impose discipline and consistency on their work.
Montaigne, of course, ignored all such admonitions, favoring – indeed pioneering – a style of writing that went its own way without regard for rules or systems.
When I read this sentence about Horace’s Ars Poetica, it took me neither to the classical world, nor to Montaigne’s sixteenth century France, still less to a weighing up of how the former might have influenced the latter. ‘Admonition’ made me stop concentrating on any of Cave’s lucid perspectives on the Essais. Instead, it took me straight to church. I don’t mean literally of course; I was still sitting at my desk. When I say that ‘admonition’ took me to church, I’m referring to the memories it awoke of being there as a boy. Between the ages of seven and twelve, I went to church most weeks with my father. Unsurprisingly, I have a raft of memories from those accumulated Sundays. They would, however, be a disappointment to anyone of a proselytizing disposition for none of what I remember has to do with Christian teaching.
The strongest visual memory is of the gigantic (to a child’s eyes) organ pipes, in gunmetal-grey, massed behind the pulpit like an array of artillery barrels, or monstrously enlarged tin whistles. Most memorable in terms of sound were the regular creaks of wood, made as people shifted their weight on the uncomfortable pews, the cushioning of which was austere, no more than tokenistic. I can still feel their hardness. I know there were stained-glass windows, but they have secured no firm hold on memory. For all their dimly recalled finery, their place is easily usurped by the taste and texture of the fruit gums my father used to pass me surreptitiously every now and then to punctuate the long haul of the sermon. The church felt warm and airless, and held a medley of scents. The flower arrangements, done fresh each week, lent a hint of natural odor, fleeting, fugitive, not always detectable beneath the smothering overlay of a sour dusty smell that seemed all-pervasive. It may have come from the radiators, or from some hidden reservoir of stale air drawn on by the organ and belched out through its array of pipes. A pungent trace of tobacco smoke was also powerfully present. It seeped from the impregnated clothes – and hair and skin – of the gaggle of elderly male smokers who stood outside on the pavement before the service, drawing deeply on their cigarettes, delaying coming in until the last minute.
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‘Admonition’ lies alongside these impressions, still vivid years after they first brushed against the fabric of the senses. It’s a memory rooted in incomprehension – which can act as a potent mnemonic. Sometimes things stick in mind simply because they baffle us and are held there as puzzles, pending a future breakthrough that will allow us to understand them. If that breakthrough comes – as it did in this instance – it doesn’t always mean a shift in remembrance. On some archaic, aboriginal level untouched by the light of any dictionary, I still think of ‘admonition’ as a puzzling sound, for all that I now recognize it as a word I understand. ‘Admonition’ occurred in the often-repeated phrase … ‘in the nurture and admonition of the Lord…’ Initially, I’d no idea what it meant. The only word in my fledgling vocabulary that stood near it was ‘ammunition’, so that adjacent meaning leaked its colour into mind every time ‘admonition’ was uttered, giving the Lord the kind of connotation his Old Testament persona might have embraced but that was scarcely what the minister intended.
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My little collision with ‘admonition’ while reading Terence Cave’s book and the way it took me back to church is self-evidently trivial. Why should so minuscule a transaction in the inner invisibilities of a reading consciousness warrant any mention? I write about it because it casts light on the way words work, a subject of perennial fascination to me.
That a single word in a 2007 book, written by an Oxford academic about a sixteenth century French writer, can send a reader in present-day Scotland into a reverie of childhood Sundays in Ireland is a good example – for all its seeming triviality – of the way words can shrink time and distance. But it also illustrates the unpredictable power words possess alongside their ‘official’ meanings. My collision with ‘admonition’ is a reminder not to expect a straightforward one-to-one relationship between words and how they move us. The reaction of listeners and readers to what’s said and written is a subtle, complex business that taps into a far richer loam of language than the ground where explicit meanings flourish. In the same way that the things around us have hidden histories that connect them to far wider perspectives than we normally accord them, so too words possess concealed cargoes nestling alongside whatever sanctioned payloads they carry. Being conscious of this contraband – which can be stored in even as unlikely a mule as ‘admonition’ – helps to keep us mindful of the potency and unpredictability of words and our susceptibility to them.
My stumbling on ‘admonition’ was precisely that: a stumble, not a fall. I soon regained my footing and continued reading Terence Cave’s excellent book, taking from it, I hope, at least most of what he intended rather than just following my own diversions. But it seems worth flagging up, via this single word, how much richer the experience of reading is than any slavish process of cut-and-dried exchange whereby neat verbal tokens of meaning are passed between writer and reader, each one charged with only an exact and unvarying voltage of meaning. Language is no simple currency with fixed rates of exchange. The transactions its electricity brokers surge and flicker across a whole spectrum of unpredictable possibilities.
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One of the British Museum’s many treasures is the so-called ‘Admonitions Scroll.’ This masterpiece of early Chinese art dates from some 1500 years ago. It depicts across an eleven-foot length of silk a series of scenes intended to tutor ladies in the imperial court on points of behavior and etiquette. Its admonitions are shaped by a Confucian sensibility, emphasizing that individuals should act according to the obligations seen as characterizing the social and familial roles they occupy.
Scene 4 (Lady Feng and the bear) of the British Museum copy of the "Admonitions Scroll", attributed to Gu Kaizhi.
My personal ‘Admonitions Scroll,’ which I’ve unfurled a little here – for there is more to it than I have shown is not so prescriptive or as sexist as the Confucian version seems to a contemporary Western perspective. For me, ‘admonition’ has come to act as a celebration of the richness and inevitable shortcomings of words rather than as any censure of them. It provides a reminder of the way in which unintended associations, and potent memories are lashed tight to sanctioned meanings. This provides a kind of unpredictable, secondary buoyancy so that as we voyage on the life-rafts language offers it’s easy to drift off course and end up in unexpected – but not necessarily unwelcome – destinations.
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Chris Arthur is author of several essay collections, most recently Hidden Cargoes. Further information about his writing can be found here: www.chrisarthur.org.