I wonder if any of my small band of readers found this posting provocative and whether it set them thinking, in the way that I have often done on this blog, about the relationship between language and thought. It would seem there can be language without thought, not just in the sense in which one asserts it as an insult, but in the way in which one finds speech can utter completely unbidden and unreflected.
But phraseology as the ornament of the mind: it struck me with that sense of shock that runs through one's being on finding something, in art or discussion, that seems to apply intimately to oneself - or possibly so, requiring a defence.
It reverberated in two areas. Like most people, I like to think I am capable of thought, and, perhaps neurotically, I wonder whether thought is subverted by expression. Cut out anything you think particularly fine, as Dr Johnson advised.
I also like to think I am capable, on occasion, of designing furniture and worry about the place in it of ornament, so demonised by modernist thought and practice from a century ago and persisting into the present day, especially among the higher ranks of respected architects. Ornament perhaps became demoted from the role ascribed to it by Ruskin (and even Morris) as the creator became more determinedly autonomous, often in defiance of the economic logic of the day.
But if phraseology and ornament are condemned as mere efflorescence on the act of creation, to what extent can expression and thought be separate, if at all? In art it is an orthodoxy (at least when critics are confronted with the question, rather than indulging in talk about a work of art) that the art object is the meaning and that an abstracted 'meaning' is always a lesser thing. Why else bother to create the work of art? Even if the commentator is sometimes the creator - never trust the teller; trust the tale, as Lawrence put it. But mere talk is not art - or is it?
