Words

"Walk with me. hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning. Meaning mewed up like an anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall. And if we pull away the panelling, then what? Without the surface, what hope of contact, of conversation? How will I come to read the rawness inside?"

The secret of languages today. Reading Winterson's Gut Symmetries, and it's ingenious how she manipulates language...the first forty or so pages are veritable poetry, with poor old me having to stop every other line to make some remark or other. I'm running out of page space. Sometimes I wonder if I'm really getting the point, or if I'm just being self-indulgent in writing so much, and in reality most of it is crap. But what I see in the book fits into such a pretty pattern, and Winterson seems to agree with what I think she's saying, so even if what I think is wrong, it's convincing enough for me to think that I'm right. And at the end of the day, if the illusion is convincing enough, maybe we should be happy with it. For all practical purposes. Why go digging into philosophical black holes?

Anyway...languages. Communication. The meaning hidden behind the Word. The power of the word as a form of telepathy between two distinct minds. The transmission of meaning. But words are inexact tools of communication, and perception and interpretation are always coloured, warped by our own viewpoints. There are only relative measurements: inexactitude is built in to the quantum universe, as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle points out rather smugly. So we are unsure of what we think, or what we feel. And we use words with imperfect and inexact meanings and definitions to express our ideas. And our audience interprets them with a flawed viewpoint, and his own idea of what the words mean. With so much inaccuracy and uncertainty, it is quite wonderful that we manage to transmit any meaning at all.

It's the isolation of the personal experience - we are unable to use these words to express meaning accurately, and we can only trust that the other person is understanding us adequately enough. Language itself does not permit the grounds to build a genuine sort of sympathy, and yet, these words, these symbols, are all we have to reach across the gulf of incomprehensibility between two consciousnesses. It is something we take on faith, I guess...we trust that the word actually means something, though there isn't anything inherent to it that compels it to mean something. And we trust that other people understand us when we talk. Otherwise surely we wouldn't bother talking so much. When the world refuses to provide the certainty we require, our imaginations, and our faith, blind or othewise, come in to pick up the slack.

And other languages, shades of meaning hidden in unknown words, unknown sounds. On BBC yesterday a minister complained that a mistranslation of a colloquial term from French to English had made him seem vulgar. If we can't even grasp all the infinities wound up in our own language, how can we begin to appreciate the velvety feel of someone else's terms of understanding? Maybe mathematics, then, is the only truly universal language, with its own internal logic that spins outward by itself, tantalising us to seek more and more meaning. In some senses numbers have a meaning independent of themselves - if we changed the symbols, the logic would still remain unchanged. The eternal spirit behind the evolving form.

But if we changed the alphabet, if we changed the sound, would meaning remain unchanged in our language? "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Really? Is nothing then derived from the curling of the tongue, the reverberation of air in that shperical cavity at the roof of the mouth? I think it wouldn't be the same, close, but no cigar. Maybe it's just the way we've grown to think about things, such that the meanings are inherent to the words. Without the word there is no meaning. Without the meaning, who needs words?

Words, so simple, and yet so powerful. Words, the ultimate metaphor, the most widespread images of the modern world. English isn't pictographic like Chinese, but the same shapes are taken by faith to represent the same things. And taken in combination, all the meanings tweak one another, complement and contradict, until a blend is obtained that adequately reflects what we mean. And then, the image and faith are used to establish a commonality of understanding, the beginning of companionship, the seed of sympathy. Maybe whoever invented the Word was lonely, all those ideas trapped inside him. The Word made Flesh. He's supposed to be a saviour too. Then the words came to cast these images and meanings out of one consciousness across space, and even time. You know how it's like, to feel like you understand someone that's long dead.

All these words. We have to take it on faith, I guess. There really is no other convincing way. The link we establish between me and you is fragile enough already. And though we know that reality is not nearly as stable, we can pretend, and we need to pretend, for all practical purposes. If I can pretend that I understand you, and you can play along, and it all looks convincing, then maybe it's enough. What's the use of digging deeper into the watery mud, to set off the landslide? We already know that nothing can be stable. The thing is to try to live with it, to try to love with it, and if anyone knows a better way than pretending, care to extend a hand out to the rest of us? We'll try to understand.

"Aliquem Alium Internum"...what does this mean? Does anyone have any idea?

pondered by phoenican @ 14.6.05