Commerce and the abuse of language

Shortly before curfew last Sunday evening I drove through Cape Town on an errand to pick up a forgotten cell phone and was struck by the down at heel tone of the place. The lockdowns and alcohol restrictions and the working from home that have constituted our major attempt to limit the impact of the pandemic seem to have made shells of the work and play spaces of the city center.

I glanced at the closed window of a pub called “The power and glory” which I often hear stories about – a place where people who like to speak of themselves as creatives gather for wine and flirtation. It didn’t look glorious at all.

I started thinking about words and how they are used and abused. This drinking hole of course draws it’s name from a collection of words called the Lord’s prayer . Here it is.

Our father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done in earth,
as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever. Amen.

It reminded me of the Cape Town Food Market window in Claremont where it looked like some branding expert had googled “quotes about coffee” and had misinterpreted T.S Eliots line “I have measured out my lif e in coffee spoons” from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as a celebration of the role of caffeine in a person’s life instead of the signifier of a middle aged man’s ennui as he finds no love nor meaning in his life.

I am irritated by these misuses of language. They both lift words out of their contexts, strip them of their rich meaning and bend them to the ubiquitous purpose of persuading people to spend money on an addictive substance. They seem to me acts of a culture unable to curtail it’s self-abuse as it cannibalises it’s artistic and spiritual achievements in service of commercial ends.

It’s like using Beethoven to sell margarine.

Whatever one’s religious persuasion, in the context of the Lord’s prayer, wine is a symbol of communion with a deity. In the redefined meaning of the words “power and glory” wine is a libation with which to de-stress from work and a potion with which to lubricate the evening’s erotic possibilities. Eliot’s words provoke insights into the effect of the age of modernity on the human spirit. Recommissioned as marketing material for overpriced cappuccinos, they assume an ironic quality to those who know the poem and are reduced to the triviality of a slogan and forgotten instantly to those who don’t.

Here’s the stanza that includes the line about coffee.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

Indeed it seems to me the voices are dying, drowned out by the monotone that booms it’s exhortation to trade into the public space. Think about how much of what we read and hear in a day is attached to advertisement. Billboards, packaging, shop signs, flyers, pamphlets on and on progressively stripping words of their magical power to conjure and provoke and invite us towards transcendence.

Hmmm – I’m going to make myself a sign saying the “end is nigh” and stand on a street corner. Someone’s sure to buy the message or toss me a coin.

Here’s another line from Prufrock

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Amen to that.