Saturday, January 7, 2017
A Minute Meditation
We exist in the element of language. Someone has said that to think is to talk to oneself. The implications of this equation are critical. Language is necessary to thought, and thought (as it is manifested in language) distinguishes us from all other creatures.
-- N. Scott Momaday --
from the Preface of The Man Made of Words
Is it true then that we can think only about something for which we have a word? The appendix to George Orwell's 1984 contains a thoughtful essay on this.
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I realized in high school geometry that there is a deeper level of thought than the verbal. First, I would *see* a proof; then, I would put it into words. The need for music, painting and dance demonstrates that there are important places where words don't go.
ReplyDeletecould it be that words actually serve to hide or disguise the real world that otherwise we would see in all it's stunning clarity...? a sort of wall protecting us from the real thing...
ReplyDeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteSometimes hide or disguise or shape the real world when we think about them, going beyond the physical sensations. I think much depends on our prior experience with a particular term, whether our past experiences have been mostly positive or negative or mixed.
agree... language is so tied up with perception that the two indeed seem one... possibly impossible to imagine it any other way...
DeleteR.T. and Mudpuddle,
DeleteThis whole area of thinking, language, and perception is so closely intertwined that I wonder if we will ever make any headway in separating out the various elements.
Momaday also brings in another factor--oral cultures and literate cultures. Oral cultures obviously came first and I must what differences may exist between oral and literate cultures.
living in the present is like being in jail... thinking of all the legends transmitted by word of mouth; writing seems a bit ephemeral in comparison... oral accounts seem to lend a long drawn out vision of history whereas printing vanishes almost over night... of course the same might be said regarding modern technological "civilization", which nowadays appears more temporary than ever...
DeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteIf "living in the present is like being in jail," do you prefer living in the past or future and avoid living in the present?
R.T.,
ReplyDeleteHow could the blind read Braille and write and talk or the deaf read, write, and sign without language skills?
Mudpuddle,
ReplyDeleteBut, today, it is the oral legends that are rapidly disappearing, along with languages, cultures, and traditions, and their only hope for survival is being transmitted to writing. Or, so it seems to me.
both are true, maybe: that i would rather live in the past OR the future and that oral history is vanishing; although, i guess it's true, also, that more exegeses are being written about ancient traditions than at any time in the past; sometimes i think that the real argument is over whether anyone really knows anything at all... except what he sees and deals with on a daily basis... The Tempest: it all seems so much like a dream, now...Prospero waves his hand and it all disappears...
DeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteWe are such stuff as dreams are made on."
"What is this life? A frenzy, an illusion,
A shadow, a delirium, a fiction.
The greatest good's but little, and this life
Is but a dream, and dreams are only dreams."
Pedro Calderon de la Barca
La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)
excellent quote tx.. sitting here at the keyboard, without us hearing a thing, a snow laden pine about 80' high slowly collapsed into the front yard, blocking the front door; ms. M at the sink said, "oh my..." then dead quiet for quite awhile; now i've got to go crank up the chain saw and get to work... in the cold wet snow, yuk...
DeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteThanks.
One of the unheralded joys of winter?
got about half of it cut up so we can get in and out of the house; the rest will wait until the snow melts... don't know what we'll do with all the limbs an branches, yet... glass of wine time, nowl...
DeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteA glass wine sounds fine. Well, you have time to ponder the fate of the limbs and branches.