Language
is an organ of perception, not simply a means
of communication.
languageless
It seems
extraordinarily difficult to imagine humans without language. It
is even considerably difficult to imagine what it would be like
for a speaker of modern english to attempt to reasonably communicate
with someone from a culture that employed language in a more charactered,
childlike, and poetic relationship with its metaphors and their
referents. We can see such a distinction even in modern languages
such as Spanish or French when compared to English.
Though a poetically
linguistic culture or language appears primitive to our own perspecitve,
it could be crucial to human sentience that these gardens are preserved
and elaborated, rather than being devalued, rejected and shaved
away into compression. Such a language or culture is very likely
to be far more functionally advanced than our own: were we to encounter
an intelligent alien species of the sort we could communicate with
— we would likely find them in grave confusion about how and
why we managed to shave these domains away. They might also be confused
about how we thought the result was survival, progress, or even
survivable.
It is possible, for
example, that a more poetically enlanguaged culture might recognize
the cognitive dangers of specificity in a way we do not,
and may have conserved this quality of relation in their inward
terrains after discovering that language can trick one right out
of existence, if only slightly mishandled. It is like a
snake that will hunt as a servant your people if they sing the correct
song, and kill their children in the night if they do not.
There is an entirely animalian, yet human domain within us that
knows the dangers of language, and avoids them unless in
crisis or desperation. As I will often repeat, language and animals
do not yet get along. This relationship is startlingly newer than
we might imagine, especially in its current phase.
In a situation where a poetic speaker faces a largely apoetic listener,
a metaphor may be in fact be communicated, without the active meaning-content
or poetics that are the real goal of the gesture of communication.
This is a kind of tokenization, or compression. Some of the meaning
is lost, and in many or possibly most cases, the most significant
elements and linkages are the first to be hidden. To cross this
gap requires something more than mere language, as well
as intimate understanding of the gap. It can be especially difficult
to record some forms of metaphor or narrative accurately
for this reason. They require a shared experience of signaler
and recipient.
Though the time when our people were without language may seem distant
to our persons and probably our experience, they are far closer
at hand than we imagine. They are happening inside us, right now,
on a fairly consistent basis. Part of us is still a human without
language, and probably the largest part of that is an animal without
language. We are comprised of animals — cells without
language, organs without language — and we are capable
of knowing without language. It
may not be the same species of simulational knowing — but
there are many domains of knowledge which become very difficult
to credential once presented in text — regardless of their
demonstrable reality.
Language
is not required for an organism to dream. While I believe the dream
serves many domains of function., one of them is the expression
and elaboration of organismal language. This is one of the places
where the animal talks to the human in a language both can understand
— and whose communications commonly find their way into conscious
recollection. We do not dream with words, but with liquidly poetic
relational agents, each uniquely representative of character —
each changing when we attend them with greater focus. We believe
our waking universe to differ dramatically — yet this is primarily
a matter of the metaphors we select in defining ourselves and our
relations. The ‘containers’ and precursors — the
holophores of our metaphors, are our wings, or cages — depending
upon the nature and liberties of our relations with them.
While editing this I
could not help but see a metaphor that is hard to express in words
— but I could model it as a single-frame cartoon, and, having
shaved away most of what is most important about it, I
can still deliver a sort of tiny toy of what this metaphor was:
I saw a cartoon of a
man lying in bed, with a large bubble above him. In the bubble was
a cartoon-view of his cellular constituents. They were doing a hilarious
and sacred dance which was electrically unifying — and fun
— a way of regenerating and celebrating identity in every
participant at once — such that the product of ‘a dream’
in the sleeping man would emerge as the result of their ‘torrentially
inclusive party’.
I could imagine various captions of the cells ‘talking’
to each other, i.e: ‘He finally shut off that word-machine,
and all those other extraneous functions! Call everyone everywhere...it’s
time to ’go impossible’ again!’
o:O:o
What we are likely to discover on close examination is that our
relationship with language is not alike with our simple models.
It is not like our complex scientific models. It is more like the
intracellular relationships in a scalarly organized ecosystem such
as the human body — or the living Earth. Essentially, language
is a transport of organismal connectivity which, when encountered
extrinsically, conserves the opportunity to set up residence as
a locally embodied symbiont. It is not a virus, but instead acts
like a wandering recombinant organism in a systems within systems
of populations — attaching itself wherever possible, to whatever
degree is possible, given the circumstances — and changing
itself and its hosts and contexts in the process.
In this way it could be modeled as a species of intelligent transports
operant in concert with biocognitive hypersystems. If the animals
disappear — the entire domain of language and spatialization
becomes defunct — since it is alive with and in them and their
connectivity-transports. Formal language, such as I am using here,
is an organism alive as a connective element within the sentient
pool of a given species. Because of the essentially organism-like
activity of this momentum, it can accomplish something which is
as powerful as it is potentially deadly. It can mimic anything.
Anything at all. Fundamentally, language is mimesis. Seen
as an organismal symbiont rather than a tool, the power of language
accrues a more realistic stature — it is a changer of animals
and planets. It is the container we trust to hold the most sacred
and most crucial of our systems of knowing. If we mishandle our
relationships with it, we are selling ourselves, our children, and
our world to a virtual machine which will gladly consume us as resources
— and continue to until there is nothing left to consume.
The question of language and god(s) is even more complicated now
than it ever could have been at any time in our planetary history.
Humans and gods are not as easily distinguishable as we model them
to be. Nor are any of the definitions, alone, of much positive use.
What is the difference between a living unityBeing and an idea?
We must presume it significant, yet most will relate only with ideas
— in the vaguest sort of search for something that isn’t
actually waiting within the ideas at all.
Consider that thousands or millions of humans, and billions of animals
have come to the knife of hopeless sacrifice merely to appease ideas.
This has changed over the last 3000 years — in that what was
once promulgated as holy by some is now spoken of as progress by
others. Where we once sacrificed each other and the children of
Earth to implacable gods — we still do, faster, and in greater
number — to models and machines. Where once the Gods were
bicameral experiences which later ‘left’ and required
shock and awe to simulate or stimulate contact with — they
are now simpler — and have found their evolutionary ladder
to be one that leads to machines. Idols, instead of living contact
with sources.
This has for thousands of years been perhaps our most deadly problems
as a species — were we to single one out for favoritism. Where
once we observed and participated in the real and poetic sacrificia
of the living world, we now purchase a demoniacally entokenized
rePresentation. Our purchase comes, rather than to our eyes —
to our bodies — in the cognitive mail that is the moment-to-moment
activity of every living organism on Earth. We receive the sacrifice
ourselves. We are the sacrifice. The pool of victims has been vastly
expanded by our ability to turn ideas into machines. It can now
include an entire biosphere, as well as the specific victims. It
can include every human person at once, and all those unborn as
well. Perhaps it always did.
We may usefully reflect upon the idea that animals are not incapable
of complex representation so much as they are resistant to it. We
ourselves are resistant, until a very specific set of biological
and cognitive constructs are activated. Even then, there is an ongoing
organismal resistance, and even crises in relation to enlanguaging.
The part of us which
lies singing to itself behind this wall of logics and maps, offers
powers and potentials that make the sensational heroics of our fictions
appear vapid in comparison. It is these domains of our cognitive
gardens that language draws its energies from — sometimes
depleting them in very real or seemingly permanent ways. Language
is tokenization, and the organismal relationship with tokenization
is a forked tongue: one side leads to struggle, and then symbiosis
— the other to disease and death. The animal we are must not
be sheathed in the cages of language, but instead expressed, supported,
celebrated, and nurtured by this relation.
While in the modern moment this appears improbable, these feature
of our relationship with language could, and I believe must, change
in the flash of an eye. My conviction is that as biocognitively
elaborate creatures we comprise and connect with much vaster domain
of self that is shaved into the smaller sphere of language, and
the human organism openly resents this. Somewhere inside us, functional
infinities of unexplored potentials are crying out for common activation,
empowerment, celebration, and support. When we locate and unlock
these potentials, our universe will change in ways our wildest predictions
could not do justice to. If we fail to locate them, a similar, but
far less desirable outcome will accrue — perhaps more rapidly
than we might imagine.
On a brighter note, I am certain that the next step on the ladder
of complex sentience we are climbing is one that re-includes its
sources. I believe we will are already seeing examples of this in
ourselves and our children that we cannot recognize because we believe
evolution only happens on geological time scales — an idea
which was never even vaguely accurate. There are over 6 billion
human beings on Earth. If we are ‘all connected’ —
which I experience as a fact as valid as evolution — evolution
is happening every second. Perhaps we’re simply not empowered
to take advantage of this momentum. Yet.
When we do, it will be one of the pivotal steps in our evolution
as a species. It will result in ways of knowing, mutual uplift,
and human connectivity, unlike anything we’ve experienced
or have any record of. We will discover it in our choice of domains:
mutual uplift — or catastrophe. Either way, the check is in
the cognitive mail.
