On the Inadequacies of Language Pt. 1

            One of the concepts I find most interesting in Taoism is one that, loosely, manifests as the Yin-Yang. Essentially, opposites define both each other & the “truth” underlying them. The Yin-Yang in Taoism is a representation of this dualism [1]. The Yin-Yang can embody many different dualisms, but let’s use Life and Death for an example here. If we say that the Yang, the white half, is Life [2] and Yin, the black half, is Death [3]. On an abstract sense, this is a snappy little metaphor that doesn’t say much, but concretely, it says a great deal. Life is the process of becoming dead, & it already contains the seed of death in it. That is to say, the black circle inside of the Yang is Death. Life, as a condition, is not being dead; whereas Death, as a state, is not being alive. The definitions of each contain their opposites. We see this in the Yin-Yang. [4]

            Without having first been dead, the experience of being alive is meaningless.[5] That is, there is no way to differentiate between the two. The same goes for being dead. Dichotomies such as these define each other through opposites & through negation. Light & Dark, Male & Female, &c. However, it is in viewing these seemingly opposite & irreconcilable conditions, Life & Death, or whatever, that the full picture becomes clear. The process of being dead then becoming alive then becoming dead then becoming alive, ceaselessly, is the full state of being.[6] It is the intrinsic “-isness” of existence. Regardless of our pontificating, this is the way things work, the Dao.  

            The way to know this Dao, then, in any sort of capacity is to study these dualities. The way to understand the nature of Life & Death is to study & experience Life & Death[7]. This fullness, this “-isness”, the very fundamental heart of the matters of life & death & existence & everything, is then the entirety of the Yin-Yang. The complete circle, the movement, the change from one to another and back again.  

            This is not an essay on Taoism, though. So, I will wrap up the major bulk of explicit Taoist thought with this well-worn platitude: “The Tao that cannot be spoken is not the Eternal Tao”[8] In essence, that which can be spoken is false, or leads to falsehood. For example, calling Life “life” implies that it is not Death. Though Life contains death & leads to death & is a part of the same whole truth as Death, calling it Life separates it from Death & is misleading.  

            Simply put, language lies to us. It is the finger pointing at the moon[9]. Language is a lens through which we view and describe & interact with the world. All lenses have imperfections. But the important thing to consider is that you cannot, never ever, see a lens through itself, fully. You cannot use a camera to take a picture of itself.[10] You cannot use language to describe itself fully. You can describe pieces of itself (grammar, syntax, &c) but again, the fundamental essence of language is indescribable in language.[11] Trying to fully encapsulate language with language is akin to fully describing a guitar by calling it a guitar: reductive, at best. If the Tao that can be spoken is not the Eternal Tao, that is, the way things are is beyond words & linguistic concepts, then we must look at what is unspoken about speaking. Language is the rules that define it, & the way it is used[12], but also the rules that don’t define it & the way it isn’t used.  

            So, if language is a Yin, what then is the Yang? Everything it describes, the moon at which the finger is pointing. Now this gets complicated. Meaning, in a linguistic sense, does not transmute well from tangible objects into thinkable objects or concepts that can be manipulated. What does a rock mean? It is difficult to explain something like that. Or better yet, it is impossible. Language is the Yin and Objects the Yang, one becomes the other, each contains the other, & they always touch but never intersect. You cannot have language without something to describe, an object; & an object is just a name for something, a linguistic idea.  

            Language & Object define each other by not being each other. They touch; they kiss; they never become one. No language, no matter how complex, can intimate the truth of Things, while no Thing can put forth its truth in a way that we can understand without language.[13] If we run with the principles in the Yin-Yang here, the “truth” (a scary sort of word) or “isness” (more accurate) of the matter is both & neither language n/or things. The interplay between the two, all of what they are & aren’t; basically, everything.  

            The issue stems, however, from our fetishizing of language. Don’t get me wrong, language is a spectacularly useful tool & one of the most incredible achievements of humanity.[14] But, when we lean purely on the Yang, we do not see the Tao. Both language & non-language are true & useful & beautiful in myriad ways, perhaps sometimes to the point of exclusivity. However, language remains as yet the best way to transmit very complex ideas. A piece of music or a landscape can evince beauty & so can a sonnet. Each beauty is different. What we’re confronting here is the ineffable. Language can manipulate an idea. It is easier to share a sonnet than it is to share the precise feeling of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth[15]. Whether or not one is more powerful than another is a meaningless question.  The fact is, one can, with much more ease and flexibility, share feelings, or approximations of them, with words.  

            Additionally, words are more standardized.[16] The qualia of the word “fear” is much more similar, between people, than the feelings evoked by hearing someone break into your house at night. Three hundred people will all see & experience different paintings when looking at Monet; though the sentence “She went to the store” has a much more similar effect on each of them.  

            The grand irony though, is using words to describe all of this: a necessary evil. I would that shying away from someone’s direct gaze or offering a seat to someone could be as expressive as an essay. And perhaps it is, but in a very different way. I have a hunch that everyone feels the same movement inside that I do; in great waves whooshing over the brain at 2 A.M.; that great feeling of something happening, even if one isn’t quite sure what it is; the unspeakable that lives inside of our soul. We, as humans, are compulsively driven to share these feelings; we are, & always have been, very social animals. Relating experiences, sharing knowledge, fostering bonds & goodwill & good relations between each other is a very fundamental & important part of our being. 

             It is with this essay then that I wish to submit a very small vote of dissent. Language is, undeniably, a very complex & important part of the way we interact with the world & each other & each others' worlds; I am not suggesting that we all become mute in an attempt to share more beautiful or genuine emotions. But, just maybe language is overused. Maybe we spend too much time searching for words & not for souls. Language is very good at sharing feelings with each other, but it is important to remember language is the sharing & not the feeling. It is the canvas, not the paint nor the painter. I ask the reader to try & spend more time observing wordlessly, & less time prattling on with a pointless inner monologue that seemingly constantly drones on between our ears. I have spent far too many words, saying far too little things. Perhaps now you too grow tired of them & yearn for some silence. It is with that that I leave you.

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1 Though not at all in the Cartesian sense; this much shall become apparent soon.

2 A completely arbitrary and decidedly Western idea; in Asian cultures white often symbolizes death & mourning

3 It is very important to understand that the Yin-Yang is a symbol in motion, for this metaphor to be useful. The Yin & Yang are slowly turning, like shadows on a hillside. What was sunny will become shaded & vice versa. Additionally, The Yin already contains the Yang, as the smaller black circle, & the Yang contains the Yin. 

4 This is excluding, of course, all of the fiddly bits in between death in life, both as an experience & as a state of being (such as a virus). This is a bit simplified, for the sake of argument, but the point of this essay is not these fiddly bits, but language, which will be dealt with more thoroughly. Perhaps a later entry will focus more specifically on these fiddly bits.

5 Alan Watts expresses this, nicely, discussing death. The response fearing death, the “What will it be like to fall asleep and never wake up” is its opposite: “Well, what was it like to wake up never having gone to sleep?”

6 This is in a very physical sense; the material that makes up our bodies will, in time, make up other bodies. This is, again, not an essay on Reincarnation.

7 Though in “experiencing” death we experience not-experiencing & “forget” everything we have ever experienced. Alas, in our limited human capacity, we cannot fully express or understand the fullness of living and dying. So it goes.

8 This is, in essence, the first line of the Tao Te Ching. However, there are as many different ways to translate this document as people reading it, so take it with a grain of salt. The general idea stands.

9 But not the moon itself. It points at the moon and says “There! Look this way!” but pales in comparison to the real moon.

10 You can hold it up to a mirror and picture the reflection, which is what I am trying to do here. But you can never capture the fullness, the entirety, the “-isness” of the camera with itself. Not even with another camera.

11 As is that of everything else.

12 Take that, Descriptivists & Prescriptivists; You’re both wrong!

13 Even a “thing” is a linguistic and philosophical concept. Separating the cosmos into bits and baubles that are somehow supposed to be different even though they all interact, all have sprung forth from the same process that made everything else. It is all one big thing that looks like a lot of smaller things.

14 The issue with all tools is that they use us. By allowing us to interact with the world in a different way, say the invention of fire (another amazing tool) it changes the way we view the world. Now a tree isn’t just a tree it is also, perhaps more so, firewood. This use, this new definition of tree becomes inseparable with the tree itself. To someone who uses & understands (on some level) fire, a tree will forevermore be firewood. The amount of change that the tool exacts on our perceptions of & dealings with the world is perhaps proportional to the size or amount of change of the tool. A tool as massive & groundbreaking as language, then, must be profoundly conscious-altering.

15 Though maybe a good try is "Fucking sublime beyond belief"

16 Note the distinction between “more standardized” & “totally standardized”

One definition of the sublime

It has to be said: the stars exist beyond human time, beyond human reach. We live in the little pearl of warmth surrounding our star; outside it lies a vastness beyond comprehension. The solar system is our one and only home. Even to reach the nearest star at our best speed would take a human lifetime or more. We say 'four light-years' and those words 'four' and 'years' fool us; we have little grasp of how far light travels in a year. Step back and think about 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second – whichever you think you can grasp better. Think of that speed traversing 671 million miles in every hour. Think about it traversing 173 astronomical units a day; an astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, thus 93 million miles – crossed 173 times in a day. Then think about four years of days like that. That gets light to the nearest star. But we can propel ourselves to only a few percent of the speed of light; so at 2 percent of the speed of light (ten million miles an hour!) it will take about two hundred years to go those four light-years. And the first stars with Earthlike planets are more like twenty light-years away.

 It takes a hundred thousand years for light to cross the Milky Way. At 2 percent of that speed – our speed, let us say – five million years. 

 The light from the Andromeda Galaxy took 2.5 million years to cross the gap in our galaxy. And in the universe at large, Andromeda is a very nearby galaxy. It resides in the little sphere that is our sector of the cosmos, a neighbor galaxy to ours. 

So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun – and then – these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again.

from Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, p. 328-29

 

Inner and outer disorder

In Eliot and His Age, a literary biography of T. S. Eliot, Russell Kirk observes:

All about him, in those late years when I knew him, he perceived inner and outer disorder, but was not dismayed. 

For Eliot, it was important that "we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph." Preserve the good, resist evil. As he grew as a writer, Eliot was moved to embrace the idea that

the world is real, but… the self perceives the world only in a glass, darkly A general intention among men to reconcile their different – and fragmentary – points of view throughout common references cannot suffice to avert solipsism; neither can the possession of a common language. For us to catch some glimpse of what we really are, and to act with some apprehension of the human condition, we have to pass beyond abstruse ideas… we must nurture the moral imagination.

 The moral imagination, Kirk explains elsewhere, is "that power of ethical perception" which transcends "the barriers of private experience and momentary events." It is the "apprehending of right order in the soul."

Kirk makes explicit religious appeals in discussing the moral imagination (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke), but as I see it, religion or no religion, one must choose optimism over cynicism if one is to possess a moral imagination. That optimism could have its source in Christ, in Buddha, or in existence itself. Whatever the case, the moral imagination acknowledges the lessons that can be learned from history, literature, music, and other art forms, and compels us to use that knowledge so that we may preserve the good and resist the "strange gods" that come with consumerism, apathy, and being, like Prufrock, the "flaccid Everyman."

We are at the intersection of time and the timeless. Ultimately, to possess a moral imagination is to acknowledge that we are all human and should act like and be treated as such. That, I think, is something that has been lost, individually and collectively. But I remain hopeful that that will change.

Saltillo - "A Hair on the Head of John the Baptist"

I loved you not.

Metabollocks and inanity

The issue, here, in commencing posting long & boring diatribes is that, ostensibly, there is no audience here. Not even the ironic "Notes from Underground" sort of acknowledging the audiencelessness of the writing, no, we would very much like to have an audience & are sadly lacking. This, I believe, is called a " vanity project".

This particular vanity project will be a collaborative meta-dumping-grounds for ideas re:society&culture&existence&life as well as links or discussions or shameless pilfering of things (videos, articles &c) we find interesting or relevant or whatever. Ideally there will be dialogue (entre collaborators & consumers) re:the goodness of posts or veracity of ideas or the relevance to our world &c. 

Essentially, a community (of yet-to-be-known size) will be fostered to create, discuss, & share observations & pontifications about the world around us.

One would hope to see something good here, but only time will tell (before, of course, it erases any traces of our existences & efforts). 

Hugs and Kisses, 

Garth