Middle Voice
May 26, 2010
One of the most haunting features in this synchronicity of poetic language has been, for me, the “middle voice.” Olson mentioned it during our seminars in ’64-’65 but I could never quite figure it out. Just had some intuition that there was something there. This has come to lap at the shores of my interest in hybridity and “inbetweenness.” A concise Wikipedia description:
Some languages (such as Sanskrit, Icelandic and Ancient Greek) have a middle voice. The middle voice is in the middle of the active and the passive voice because the subject cannot be categorized as either agent or patient but has elements of both. An intransitive verb that appears active but expresses a passive action characterizes the English middle voice. For example, in The casserole cooked in the oven, cooked appears syntactically active but semantically passive, putting it in the middle voice. In Classical Greek, the middle voice is often reflexive, denoting that the subject acts on or for itself, such as “The boy washes himself”, or “The boy washes”. It can be transitive or intransitive. It can occasionally be used in a causative sense, such as “The father causes his son to be set free”, or “The father ransoms his son”.
I had studied some Latin so I’d been into “case,” but the closest I think I’ve come to zoning in on it was through Sam Levin’s “paradigmatic thought suffix” or something like the paragram in bpNchol, anything in language that happens “while standing in the doorway,” the contiguity of being able to see both rooms.
Here’s Olson’s page with its push toward the proprius.
