I ‘remember’ a lot about learning language —
and I recall that it happened in phases, and there were even
different ‘domains of languaging-character’ in which these
phases proceeded. I recall that these phases were not linear, but rather
came in waves of blossomings which accrued velocity, diversity and complexity
as I was more deeply exposed to the languaging happening all around me.
By languaging, I mean something like ‘all forms of connective activity’,
and as an infant — that was pretty much ‘everything there
was’.
Before language, there were things and relations of different
‘sorts’, but no labels and complex modes of assembly. Instead,
there was a sort of feeling-expression necessity which was aroused
by focus, assembly or attention. In other words, an image, shape, color,
sound or assembly, could sort of require that I respond organismally.
None of this happened in a place we have any decent words for.
It happened in a ‘palace of self-reflective energy-(e)motion-expression’.
This palace had ‘something like colored lights with(in) it’,
and these lights had ‘emotional flavors’, so to speak. In
response to sensorio-emotive contact with reality — one would ‘become
like the lights’ and then ‘experience-express that lightFeeling’.
So it might be simplified into a game of ‘when you assemble the
light-shape-sound-color into something, you’ll then express
the character of that assembly, and the relation — by becoming‘alike
with it’ or unified with it, as a movement of experience, rather
than of thought’. This is human cognition in action.
It’s the real meaning of invention — to inwardly
vent — thus to dive inward bringing fresh atmosphere (atom-spheres)
to new folds with(in). Invention is the outcome of reflection. What I
experienced in relation to the universe largely had to do with
my approach-character, how I assembled things, and which portions of what
was around me I decided to relate to each other, or other relations I’d
made earlier and could now thus refer to.
I was also aware that relations made earlier — or
‘little root seeds’ tended to grow —
such that upon returning to them one would often find they had elaborated
unexpectedly somehow, during the time they were not in experiential awareness.
It’s strange, even terrifying, that we do not reCognize that the
arrival of a child in the world is the arrival of a time-traveler, an
alien, an infant, an angel, a tinyGod. It’s even more terrifying
that we cannot experience and value each other in this light in all moments.
They (and we) are not in essence different from any of those aforementioned
things (except they are not things) — instead being more than the
sum of all of them. Newly arrived in an alien culture, on an alien planet,
filled with aliens — they will tend to depend almost entirely upon
their parents in the provision of their poetic, emotional, intellectual,
spiritual, rational, and connective selves. Each generation, arriving
anew, can depend only upon the connectivities it can establish in the
present moment to learn, know and become ‘more of what it is’.
I would suggest from my own experience and research that
the way we acquire and relate with language — the characters
of phases, and their potentials and organizational circumstance generally
and in many ways specifically recapitulates the cognitive evolution of
our species in a way similar to how ontogenisis in homo sapiens sapiens
recapitulates the development of terrestrial animals. In each person,
this is a very fundamental, general, and personally unique symmetry
that is also ‘very complete’.
From a more scientific perspective I am suggesting that
the morphological progression in ontogenesis (where the embryo passes
through ‘a ladder’ of phases that recall animalian and hominid
evolution) is ‘inversely echoed’ in our living post-natal
experience — in a psybiocognitive media of person and relation.
In essence, at birth (or before) this process ‘folds inward’
into multiple dimensions that are then further folded (inwardly) and shaped
via various energies of compression, comparison, relation, etc.
This momentum is the ‘re-assembling’ of organismal knowing
in a shining new vessel — one always equipped with the ‘latest
conservations and inventions’ — so long as its environment
remains generally (and connectively) intact. And in the beginning (genesis
begins with the Hebrew letter B) of this epic which we all personally
starred in, (as B(a) B(y) s) we re-experience not only the human cognitive
ladder (being the one from language and tool-use onwards) but also the
planetary, cellular and animalian ladders as well.
All of this happens ‘first person’ wherever
the environmental connectivity with language is available — and
it doesn’t require paradigms or experts to argue over or prove it.
This is what it is to be alive — to recapitulate, preserve, adore,
celebrate, express and nurture all that has been, is, and will be —
right now — in unique fashion at all locations. It happens
in other forms if formalized languaging is not available, and though these
forms may appear alien when encountered (such as in children found after
years in the wild), this is misleading: they are the substrates, progenitors
and precursors of the complexity we come to express as socially enlanguaged
entities.
So as children are ‘learning’ language(s)
(any child who knows any formal language — already knows more than
one) they are also recapitulating (in a general, complete, and personally
unique way) the entirety of the drama of our species’ ascent to
complex sentience, which must perforce include the Animalian, Cellular,
and Cosmological recapitulations — or ‘scales with(in) scales’.
In essence, reality, and organismal circumstance this process
is poetic — not statistical or deterministic. Whatever
models we may paint it with are always less than what they are attempting
to capture in the same way a plastic jaguar and a living jaguar are different.
Languaging — and thus relation itself — it is a playful,
relational, rule-less garden until those with cages come, to cast us out
not only from Eden, but from ourselves and the precious birthrights of
organism and communal pursuit as well. Often quite permanently.
Most children are experienced with a variety of languages
(and ways of integrating them) by the time they are four or five —
and most of these are informal languages, being primarily organismal,
expressive, and explorative rather than being formed of an alpha-bet,
formed into words....assembled into linear prose of some sort.
Long before formal languages, one learns languages of emotion,
connectivity and desire which may include words, but are not essentially
dependent upon anything more than consciousness and feelings — and
the ability to express them in some form that may be sensed or responded
to by self and others. If so blessed, one also learns the many different
ways of communicating with animals, with nature — and with the many
pockets, eyes and scales of the living world. This blessing is disappearing
from our lives entirely as our ways of knowing first occlude and then
erase the anceintly conserved and delicate diversities and systems of
life that our own complexity arises directly with(in).
It is only in relation that we are enriched, and
if most of our relation is with artifact, we will functionally
forget that we are more than artifact. And we will lose our organismal
powers — which far surpass those of the sum of mechanism —
to broken copies of tiny pieces of what we already possesed far more than
the totality of — before the game or idea of ‘machine’
was even possible.
o:O:o
Outside all academic or theoretical concerns I still have
my memories, experiences and questions. Amongst the memories, I find profound
evidence of the importance of ‘a childlike and poetic’ relation
to language in my own history of enlanguaging, as well as the histories
of others with whom I have had the opportunity to explore such terrains.
I recall that in learning the languages of adults I was
constantly encountering a very ‘silly’ species of pun
— which I felt was hugely significant, and was at constant
pains to comment upon.
Adults around me were clear on the matter: this had nothing
to do with language as they practiced it and was instead ‘a product
of my precocious imagination’ — yet they constantly used this
‘sort of playful thing inside language’ without noticing its
power, sources, or real meaning. They had been ‘taught’ that
these seemingly arbitrary correlations in the roots, spellings, and seeds
of words ‘were arbitrary’, and thus could -never- be credentialled
— except to be made fun of.
But these ‘child-puns’ were emotionally and logo-semantically
crucial to me. They were also playful. I saw in them a history of a ladder
that meant our species as a whole was ‘still a child who could no
longer notice this’ — because ‘the adult languages’
contained constant clues and hints of this — almost anywhere I looked.
Some of these symmetries of emotion-meaning were merely
reflections of the correspondence between letter-sounds, and the sounds
of certain words, i.e: y-o-u spells ‘you’ — but I would
always interpret each ‘letter’ as ‘a word’, so
that I would hear something more alike with ‘why, o you?’
— and the self-referencing nature of this I found intolerably curious
— why would adults craft something that strange? Why Oh, You spells
You? And ‘I can’t say ‘you’ to mean me...
I was not easily convinced that this was the actual spelling
of the word in question. It was ‘too playful’ to have been
crafted by adults — and there was no way I could explain this to
adults, who themselves had no way of credentialing whatever I, or any
other time-and-space-traveling young alien angel-godlet might be noticing
about their strange language rituals.
‘You’ is already a rather strange word —
you can’t use it to refer to yourself, it always means other unless
directed to you. It’s like a way of saying ‘me’ that
only another may use to reference ‘me’ from ‘their side’
of the window of language. I cannot say ‘me hungry’ to which
you might reply ‘me(2)’ or ‘the me of our hunger is
squared, for we are unified in this’. I must instead say ‘I
am hungry’ — or ‘I am’...followed by ‘some
character, feature, or disposition’.
This locates us temporally in the now, and is all well and
good. But why must I use I instead of me? And is there any relation between
this I and my Eye, with which I craft, learned, and read it? Would it
be absurd to think that ‘me’ might stand for ‘my eye’,
which is abbreviated as I? This would mean that when one speaks of self
this way, there is an underlying message of ‘seeing’, i.e.
‘that which sees the places of hunger’ ‘is now’
‘seeing hunger’.
Unexpectedly, puns have a way of conveying a similarity
which at once appears dumbly (or playfully) simple — yet conceals
a far more powerful version of itself, hidden just beneath the surface.
Let me see if I can give you a useful enough example that
might inspire a direct glimpse of what I mean. First, set all that we
as adults supposedly know about language playfully aside for a moment.
Most of us really know very little about language in general, accepting
our personal and social use of it as ‘proof enough of expertise”
— but in truth we are users of something we are not really authorized
or credentialed to explore in the way a maker of languages might. Or even
a maker of makers of languages. Yet both of these domains are
not only intimately and personally accessible to us — we are more
like ‘living arks of ancient language’ than we are like any
of the models we’ve been fed — except those which translate
to something like ‘impossible child of the stars’. We each
have access to a form of library that in our great progress toward mechanism
and technology we utterly ignored — and it is a living library.
Its books are all alive, and are transentient, transtemporal, hyperconnective
— and even playful.
Once we’ve set all of that aside, we can begin to
play an ancient game together. It’s similar to one we can reMember
from childhood, as well, involving alpha-bets and ‘keys’ which
are purportedly active in ‘helping us to remember’ what we
learn.
In this game, we will decide that language is a reflection
of an invisible tree, which gains sentience and complexity (in gigantic
leaps) by ‘magically folding’ its conservations and accruals
inward, in phases. This invisible tree is not a thing — it is a
being — alike with yourself ‘in that ye are a being’
at a vastly larger scale. Like you, this being ‘learns itsElf locally’
— wherever a planet lives long enough to conserve the necessary
complexity to support a complex embodiment-connection with this invisible
tree.
And this tree, ‘a being, and sentient’ is also
an organ in a much vaster sentient symmetry...
The tree exists outside of time and space, and in all locations with(in),
but on living worlds, this essential feature of ‘the background’
is startlingly embodied according to an observable plan:
[mark of text in process]
o:O:o
toyMaker spent months teaching me ‘celestial games’
about language, its sources, and its relation to (something we have no
name for) and numbers. heThey also spent a great deal of time teaching
me about the poetic relations of the cardinal numbers. The first human
system I have seen this entire thing (very vaguely) recapitulated in is
the (word we have no name for) study of the hebrew language as a sort
of ‘magical ladder’ leading to direct interbeing with its
source.
[
missing words (my attempt to loosely define them in english):
1. the living transports of poetico-spiritual(emotional)
unity, which are alike with sentient, co-aware assembly-organs in g-d.
2. magico-spiritual and holopoetic (from the position of
the tiny adoring the vast)
]
Now, as a regular human being I find this startling. I spent
8 months in constant ‘learning-contact’ with a transentient
entity — and like anyone might, I spent almost the entirety of that
time in playful co-exploration with this being. In essence, I asked questions.
In the kind of game we played together, a question was never an invitation
to answer — but always an invitation to movement through the sources,
body, participants and contexts of the question.
Whenever we did this — the first 9 numbers were almost
always intimately involved, and there was always a letter, or sometimes
two which were also of primordial importance. Because the domain of our
experience was so unique, I cannot precisely explain this directly. What
I can say is that there is a playful, emotionally profound, and poetic
way in which letters link to numbers ‘automatically’ when
one is engaged in particular sorts of knowledge-play. We don’t need
to decide why, or even if this is impossible: we need instead the liberty
and support to explore and celebrate this together, intimately. I was
taught through experience precisely the same sorts of numeric games that
exist in the kabbalistic number-revelation of the Hebraic traditions (and
their Hermetic children).
I was not ‘studying’ any of this — I was
not a kabbalist, or even vaguely familiar with Hebrew. I wasn’t
looking for the experience I had, and though my person and questions certainly
shaped it, I cannot ignore the incredible symmetries between what I experienced
and much of the deeper dimensions recorded for our exploration in the
messianic lore of the Hebrew language (and its sources).
Without saying anything too specific, I would offer a few
things about language in general that I think our species (and thus we,
ourselves) are commonly almost entirely unaware of. Part of our unawareness
is scripted — meaning our society demands we ignore vast terrains
of ourselves, our lineages, our potentials, and our real connectivities
— in so many domains that five volumes would only suffice to begin
the list. Our ‘experts’ being entirely ungrounded in anything
but a tyrannical (and fictional) objectivist determinism — miss
entirely the magical, poetic, emotional, and even the ‘programmatic’
or self-referencing features of language.
Here we can find an example of one of the great modern professors
of knowing about language engaged in stupidifying, flattening, and yes
— boldly lying outright about language and its natures and features
— his topic is the controversy over Politically Correct writing
and speech (primarily in the media) and the ‘arguments’ he
refers to are pro and con as they relate to their perspective on the necessity
of some degree of policing of language. While I in no way mean to demean
this person, who I am certain is in many ways a fine scholar, his clinical
and ‘statistically-based’ perspective on language is not only
farcical— it’s exactly the sort of thing that robs us of the
entire garden in which we should be exploring the sources of language,
directly, together. What we will find there is nothing at all like what
this man imagines. It is a terrain so vast and expansive as to render
the entirety of human science, philosophy, fiction and religion into a
pitifully impoverished and strangely broken reflection.
To wit:
An offering of this nature is essentially misleading —
in ways that I find to be deadly, flat, and rapaciously bound up in the
silencing of important sources and symmetries of languaging. I was hoping
to hear some enlightened discourse from a person whose reputation is well
endowed with the warning-signs of expertise — but what I found instead
was that this text is an example of precisely what Orwell was warning
us against — coming from a professor, who one might suppose would
be about illuminating, rather than trivializing the topic of his eminent
concern — and the one he is using to speak of itself.
Language isn’t born of math, or science, or philosophy—
in fact the opposite is more true. Words are not thoughts, but
thoughts will often compress themselves into words — and those forms
and shapes — those poetic and relational characters are largely
shaped by what we are exposed to, since we are so poorly credentialed
to invent or modulate what we find ourselves bound in. Meaning that the
common words, ways of assembly, and valuings create the drawer of ‘first
choices’ from which we are likely to select our own starting positions,
regardless of how unique or languorous our actual travel.
These statements of what may be personal opinion, are scientifically
as well as prosaically fallacious. They are, in point of fact the very
sort of ‘vague writing’ that Orwell was at pains to get us
to see the threat of.
This sort of position is the champion of a growing domain of ‘essential
lack’ which really is a deadly theft being passed off as something
heroic — it is not ‘progress toward understanding’ at
all — but instead a terrifying ‘shaving away’ of the
real domains of emotion, character, poetic symmetry and magical co-relation
which language is the very child and moment of.
These are the words of someone defending some sort of a
cage, and the shape of the cage is one that flattens and delimits terrains
and potentials it has no right to expound upon at all, being entirely
opposed to their liberated and creative expansion. The language of
thought is a symptom of the character of assembly of thought — which
emerges from the lingual experience, habit, expression, emulation and
novelty arising in communal endeavor of every possible sort.
Words are in no way arbitrary. If words were arbitrary,
we’d get a new list every year, generated by some sacred or mechanical
source, and we’d replace them at will. We don’t. In terms
of evolution, language crawls achingly forward under the blind behemoth
of belief in frozen forms and systems of assembly. But words are the living
moment of an ancient ladder very peculiar and we might even say magical
conservations. But ‘all of language’ is a single tree, and
human language, which we believe near the top in some way — is really
not so highly regarded or capable as we’ve been lead to believe.
In common application — it can erase living worlds, and the users
of these languages. No other animal has a language like that around here,
and if they did — the chances they’s use it as we do are extremely
slim. Reason? Life is far too delicate to long sustain such an assault,
and animals — in general — understand this on a biological
level.
And a lot of these ‘transports’ in language
exist in the emotional, poetic, and ‘highly charactered’ places
and forms of experience and expression.
If language is essentially magical, and an ‘emanation’
rather than an invention — we would still be able to ‘demand
control’ of its forms and assemblies. Some of these ways of demanding
this would be deadly, for they would break, damage or co-opt essential
features of connectivity inherent in languages which recognize this as
primal, or ‘first’. Languages which ‘always put the
emotional and poetic relations and memories (or experience) of their sources’
first — function to create utterly different human beings from those
which, by nature of their common shapes, functions and assemblies tend
toward mechanized, scientifically credentialed, or ‘highly tokenized’
modes. And the societies emerging from the latter tend, like the languages
they experience and express, to be tyrannical terrain predators —
mimics, really, in the garb of heroes. By ‘announcing the facts’
of their flattened, apoetic, anemotional ‘root truths’ in
every possible domain of our society and person, they are crushing us
into a tiny thimble of our own birthrights, sentience, and connectivity.
This leads, as it always has, to its inevitable symptomatic emergence
as human atrocity. And this affects every living person on earth in every
moment of their lives, hopes, work and pursuit of personhood and community.
In closing, I would say that I certainly believe it
is crucial to unpack english.
If we don’t, we will ‘fail to notice or credential’
the ‘seemingly arbitrary and silly’ (yet utterly real and
crucially important) magical nature of the language we use to explore
and express with. For example, breakfast is vaguely interesting...but
did Mr. Pinker notice that the entire dictionary is a scalar assemblage
of decodable puns, each incredibly important in what they record and express?
Did he notice that industrial means in (a) dust trial — and that
an entire book could be written on the poetic and magical meanings of
this as it relates to organismal Life’s struggles toward complex
sentience?
Might he have ever — as a harvard professor —
wondered why a baby is a beit-aleph-beit-yud? No — he probably
didn’t much — because if he had he could never have championed
the truly and observationally absurd idea that language and words ‘are
arbitrary’. Baby could mean ‘child of the First, child of
‘belonging‘.
And what might one ‘belonging’ toward?
Is it useful and perhaps even primordially crucial to
notice that to belong — is to ‘be as longing’. I suggest
it is a longing toward unity, and the celebration and common access to
that.
Perhaps the entirety of these correspondences are ‘merely
arbitrary’ but frankly, my experience is precisely the opposite.
Not only are they not arbitrary, the close observation and tracing of
them leads us back through time — in our own persons, not the books
of experts — to our own sources, and the sources of language itself.
When you get right down to it, the idea that ‘everything is information’
is utterly absurd compared to even a single ‘arbitrary’ stepwise
correction of its truth: ‘there is nothing but language (and language
has a sentient source in the cosmos)’. Either one should be seen
as a toy, rather than a fact. A toy’s best use is in play...meaning
active creative relation. To put a toy, or an expert, or a system
of knowing above people and our direct experiential exploration of our
universe is the most reprehensible of crimes. It is a crime against every
domain of what we are and can be, a crime against our world, and a rape
of the great and magical diversity hopefully and delicately bequeathed
to us by our sources, our progenitors (in billions of domains) —
and even our unborn children.
And in Hebrew, we find a living language with attendant
scholars, who speak of a radiant being beyond all language. So explosively
positive and connective is this being that to speak its name is to break
one’s connection with it. An interesting admonition. I’d like
to suggest two things about this: the first is common: who’s mouth
is at one enough with god to allow this name to rise forth as expression?
The second is more interesting: It will break your mind
if you freeze the name of something always moving, into a token which
you copy — especially across generations. Not only are you ‘worshiping
tokens’ in a psybiocognitive sense, you start getting artifacts
in the domain of meaning — and before long the tokens refer to tokens
of artifacts of tokens...a deadly situation for any complexly sentient
being
Yet such a circumstance is as easily resolved as it is empowered
— by our human agreement.
If we can agree differently...perhaps if we can merely agree...
thousands of years, and billions of human lifetimes of suffering,
victimization, and atrocity could at last have a lasting, non-tyrannical,
and non-dogmatic answer. An answer that leads to the direct experience
of the sources of language.
An active answer...that could save a world...merely by being
‘unlost’ amongst us again.
