accidentals and substantives

the frisson of language

I've found the epigraph for my dissertation:

It is the constructive powers of language to conceptualize the world which have been crucial to man's survival in the face of ineluctable biological constraints, this is to say in the face of death. It is the miraculous--I do not retract the term--capacity of grammars to generate counter-factuals, "if"-propositions and, above all, future tenses, which have empowered our species to hope, to reach far beyond the extinction of the individual. We endure, we endure creatively due to our imperative ability to say "No" to reality, to build fictions of alterity, of dreamt or willed or awaited "otherness" for our consciousness to inhabit. It is in this precise sense that the utopian and the messianic are figures of syntax.

--George Steiner, After Babel

It is also in this precise sense that the mantic is a figure of syntax--a syntax with which I've experimented in the past.