Biography
The Margins of Silence
Heinrich Wohl – sceptic, mystic, provocateur
I’ve had Heinrich Wohl on my mind since at least 1971, but it’s possible he has been with me much longer. I can’t remember when I first became aware of his amusing and illuminating presence. I ought to introduce him and give you a taste of his idiosyncratic approach to things.
Wohl was born somewhere in Germany or, some say, in South East Asia between 1918 and 1925. There is inconclusive evidence that his father may have been travelling, very slowly, through Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam at the time, and his mother, about whom Wohl speaks on rare occasions with reverential solemnity, may have been a resident of one of those countries. Wohl mentions two brief stories about his father’s time as a conscript in the German army during the First World War. In a lull in the fighting, amidst the mud and black humour of the trenches, Wohl senior was seen to suddenly climb out of his dark bivouac carrying a bucket of water and a wooden ladder. In what seemed like a long theatrical silence he walked through the rubble and mutilated gardens of the small French village in which they were camped and proceeded to clean the miraculously unshattered windows of two cottages that were otherwise riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel. On his return to the trench loud applause and cheering broke out from his usually muted and cynical company and, it seems, from a troop of British soldiers who had watched flabbergasted at this outbreak of village normality and domestic care.
On another occasion Herr Wohl had organised the court martial and execution of a rifle, on charges of ‘insubordination and conduct unbecoming of a military weapon’. With great seriousness and some hilarity he and his friends deployed a formidable range of arguments for the prosecution and defence. An old sheep, somehow still alive despite the anarchy of the times, had been appointed as adjudicator of the proceedings and was considered to have pronounced a guilty verdict by breaking wind with extreme vehemence during summing-up by defence counsel. The rifle, beautifully cleaned and oiled and blindfolded, with a polished helmet balanced on its bayonet, was propped up against a farmyard wall and shot by six soldiers. It was one of the few times when Wohl senior was seen to show any emotion. His face, which apparently usually had the deadpan equanimity of a Buster Keaton, was over-run by tears and a squall of anguished anger.
By the 1960s Wohl junior was referring to himself as a professor of contra-linguistics and as a ‘philosopher of the ordinary’. He was often heard to mutter, while smiling, that he held a low position in the ‘university of marginalia’ – even claiming that he was ‘a cleaner, with the most efficient broom in academia’. Although he tended to play down or even deny his own status as an artist, he was also, along with Joseph Beuys, a seminal, if little-known, figure in the development of European performance art.
Given the lack of information readily available, even in these days of instant searches of apparently universal databases, a brief note of explanation may be in order. ‘Contra-linguistics’, of which Wohl was a pioneer and sole exponent, deals with what is not definable in language, that is: what is left-over when we take away logic, rationality, empiricism, deduction and determinism, and yet persist in asking questions of the world. According to one of Wohl’s notes contra-linguistics attempts to examine the nature of questions such as: what or who is God? what is it like to be omniscient? how long is forever? where is everywhere? what lies at the meeting of opposites? how do we deal with the demands of divergent and apparently irreconcilable intentions and beliefs? Contra-linguistics, in short, deals with the capacity of language to ask the unaskable, to be meaningless, yet somehow to be meaningful, to inhabit a contemplative silence while chattering, making images and delivering the occasional poetic epigram.
Wohl states in his ‘The Margins of Silence’, published privately in 1953 in an edition of one, that we ‘shall only continue to develop our languages and our cultures if we maintain a fluid boundary to what we can talk about and no boundary to what we can’t’. In the same work he also states his concern with ‘the study and perpetuation of paradox, ambiguity, imprecision and the ridiculous search for answers to unanswerable questions which constitutes the true essence and meaning of language, and (by implication) the prime function of philosophy’. Although, two paragraphs after this statement, he goes on to say that ‘philosophy has no essence, it is an inexplicable activity which, like long-distance running or the climbing of mountains, has no useful functions other than enjoyment, the non-pursuit of war and the passing of time’.
In ‘The Margins of Silence’ he makes many serious and largely positive references to Wittgenstein despite disagreeing with almost everything Wittgenstein has to say. Not only did Wohl contradict those whom he quoted with affection and approval, he also contradicted himself on many occasions, often articulating (very eloquently) both sides of an argument with equal fervour. He was fond of Emerson’s remark that ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, although he thought that Emerson should have practised what he preached with more consistency.
The sole copy of ‘The Margins’ has never been found nor, as far as I know, has it ever been seen by anyone other than Wohl himself and by the printer, whose contract with Wohl included a clause that he was never to discuss the contents of the book with anyone and that he was to destroy the plates from which the copy had been made.
Most of what we know about Wohl and about the contents of his book comes from a type-written manuscript of uncertain date - June 1964 is written at the top of the first page but this is crossed-out in pencil and overwritten with other dates: 1864, 1934 and puzzlingly, 2004. This manuscript seems to be a selection from a multitude of notes found in the margins of books on the shelves of his library. Many of these notes were also used in one form or another in ‘The Margins’.
John Danvers September 2008