Truckling on

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'Truckling' is one of those words that become odder and odder the more you say or ponder them.  'Truckling' now means to yield meanly or obsequiously.  It is a reasonable and intriguing question to ask why this particular word in this particular form has acquired this sense.  Fortunately we have a number of lexicographical snapshots of its earlier incarnations which, like those unbelievable and embarrassing photographs taken so many years ago showing us with weird haircuts and in outmoded fashions, map out quite clearly the sometimes startling shifts of meaning and - further back - of morphology.

Before it acquired its present pejorative sense, 'truckling' meant to place yourself beneath someone else.  It derived from the truckle bed, which was habitually stored under an ordinary bed, and so was necessarily lower.  It was therefore a fairly natural jump to talk of someone 'truckling' - taking the truckle bed - in other situations.  But it was also an inspired one, born of people's love of analogy, of finding shapes in life that match, of fleshing out the one-dimensional literalism of a word with a multi-dimensional panoply of sly and sideways meanings.

The truckle bed was named for the truckles - small wheels or castors - which it employed.  It was therefore once the bed with the truckles; the English language's powerful compacting ability - where nouns can be rammed together in these pithy, descriptive combinations with an ease denied many other great languages, for example the Romance family - created a new concept out of two old ones.  Time and habit soon did the rest, until the truckle bed became a single idea apprehended without any sense of bifurcation.

The truckle as castor had its origin in an earlier meaning of the word: in medieval times it was a small, grooved wheel used as a pulley for a rope.  Again, our innate ability to spot similarities encouraged the transfer: when people started using small wheels as castors, they clearly looked like truckles, even though they were different in purpose; so truckles they became - or rather the world of the truckle was extended to embrace them.  Linguistic dynamics and the society which drove them then saw to it that the centre of gravity of the word shifted from its original usage to the later, apparently more common and useful one.

The truckle as pulley can be traced back centuries more.  There is a Norman-French word 'trocle' with the same meaning; truckle is merely its Anglicisation.  'Trocle' in turn derives from a simplification of the Latin word 'trochlea', itself a honing of the Ancient Greek 'trochilia'; both mean a pulley wheel.  What is remarkable is not that we can follow the word back so far, but that down the years such myriad tugs and turns have been inflicted on its form and function.  What we do not know are who the people were who caused these shifts.  For every one of them was instituted by someone, at a certain moment, who had the requisite insight or indolence or ignorance.  Nor is this process at an end; who knows what 'truckling' may mean tomorrow?  Perhaps you do: perhaps you will make the next great semantic leap for the world and language to follow.  After all, someone has got to do it.  Keep on truckling.

(1990)

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Ludwig van who?

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In our apotheosis of the greatest artists we strip them of the very humanity that lies at the root of that greatness.  Too often we elide the life, thinking of the works, not the men and women who made them.  We may know in a purely abstract way that they were born on such a date, studied here, married there, produced this masterpiece under those conditions, but these remain disembodied statements: they have no person at their centre.

Because of our awe, we tend to think of Beethoven, say, as a kind of Platonic essence, the common divine factor to all his music.  We forget that he was ultimately a deaf, smelly old man who died in great loneliness.  More importantly, we forget that he was born at a time when the classical idiom in music was reaching its maturity; as a result, he happened to arrive on the scene when there was a perfect framework for the kind of compositional iconoclasm that forms the core of his achievement.  In a word, as far as timing was concerned, he was lucky.

This may seem an outrageous thing to say about one of the supreme musical masters; but it does not detract from that mastery: the music he wrote still required an incomparable genius to write it.  But the fact remains that just as his time needed someone with exactly his skills to produce the works he did, so Beethoven himself needed precisely that time.

Take the same man - the same physical and psychological make-up, though obviously with an upbringing changed in details - born now in the fourteenth century.  Music was fundamentally different in its sound, its structure, its scale, and in its performance.  A fourteenth century Beethoven might well have produced masterpieces within those conventions, but they would never have had the impact of works which could draw on the rich and complex possibilities of the classical language at its peak.

The same is true of all the greatest artists.  Shakespeare needed the English language to be poised exactly as he found it - a fresh and subtle blend of powerful Anglo-Saxon roots with infinitely variable Latinate extensions.  Born a hundred years later and his works for the stage would have been incomprehensible doggerel.  Rembrandt too absolutely required the Renaissance's anthropocentric assumptions, and his milieu's painterly techniques, to make the final searing self-portraits possible.  Picture him during the impressionist era, an eccentric and obsessive academician.

If the key creators are great partly because of their eras, it follows that there may well be hidden among us Beethovens and Rembrandts or equivalent figures, whose particular cast of genius is at odds with today's artistic currents; they are like powerful orators forced to use a bad phrase book to communicate awkwardly in a language not their own.

But we should not mourn these losses too much; after all, there are for certain greater tragedies.  For example, the millions of gifted children who will never realise or even discover their vocation, through being born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in a desperate poverty which makes art a superfluity.  There are Beethovens out there, for sure; but we will never know their names.

(1989)

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Chiral asymmetries

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The word 'sinister' says it all: it means, originally, left, and its unabashed negativity stands in stark contrast to the positive connotations of 'dexterity', which derives similarly from the Latin word for 'right'.  But it is no wonder: Nature itself discriminates.  If it were literally even-handed, there would be as many people born with hearts on their right as those with them on the left; in fact this reversal of all the body's organs is extremely rare.

Chirality - that is, handedness - is altogether a mysterious business.  Consider the mirror:  facing it, your right side becomes your left, and your left, your right; and yet top does not swap places with bottom.  Actually, nothing swaps over; it is simply that chirality is intimately bound up with the 'sense' of space - a sense which the mirror reverses.  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for such a profound concept, chirality crops up frequently in the world of sub-nuclear physics.  Handedness goes to the heart not just of life, but of reality too.

Mysterious it all may be as a philosophical abstraction, but the many practical consequences of Nature's unfair habits are not in doubt.  Since there can be no compromise between right and left, the sinister part of the world loses out in a vote decided by a crude show of hands.

We dextrists may take corkscrews for granted; imagine, though, if the turn went the other way.  Handles in general presuppose that your right arm is the stronger; if it is not, you are faced by a difficult choice: a weak, but natural action, or a strong, unnatural one.

Things are improving.  As the world population has increased, so has the viability of catering for the minority group of the left-handed.  Consequently, many everyday objects that imply or have acquired a handedness can be obtained in a mirror-image form.  Leaving aside the joke left-handed teacups, there are now scissors for the left-handed, as well as flutes, violins and guitars.  At least the widespread availability of the left-handed pen nib, along with writing tools that assume no one chirality, has brought equality to a crucial area; after all, Arabic script is produced right to left with the right hand - an equivalent situation to that of the sinistrist scribe in a dextrist writing system.

But there remains one domain that is stubbornly handist, with little hope of any remedy: that of traditional Western art.  Representational paintings expect to be read from left to right.  Typically an optimistic image will rise across the canvas, a gloomy and despondent one fall.  Thus, like chirality, the mood of a picture also is reversed in its mirror-image.  That this was explicitly understood is proved by the habit of composing subjects with the emphases switched in the other direction when painting cartoons for tapestries, for example in Raphael's great series.  Transferring the cartoon image to the tapestry reversed the sense, and so restored the traditional chirality and created the intended effect.  As a consequence, for those with a leftish take on the world most of the greatest masterpieces of Western art must seem subtly but irredeemably flawed; no sinister plot, for a change, but a dextrist one.

(1989)

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