5: Extreme language: discovery under pressure
Lord Williams of Oystermouth's Gifford Lecture series is made of six lectures under the overall title ‘Making representations: religious faith and the habits of language’; the fifth lecture of the series is entitled 'Extreme language: discovery under pressure'.
Lecture abstract
One of the most complex aspects of our language is that we refine the patterns we create in it - by rhyme and metre and metaphor - in the confidence that through this process we will discover something about what our habitual language does not disclose.
The language of art - and in striking measure the language of innovative theoretical science too - assumes that what we perceive is more than it appears, and that it ‘gives more than it has’. The processes of rediscovering ourselves through the deliberate distortions and re-workings of familiar language (as we do in poetry, prose or scientific narrative) once again suggest a significant confidence in the bare practice of speech to transform understanding and the relation with what is real.
What is encountered is essentially oriented towards something like communion or integration.