For example, here is one that is the best evocation of female aging within this Euro-American cultural space that I have ever read.

                    And the dawning will be
that string of pearls you wear always untied on your pearly
thinning neck, o! the
muffled bones that
press in the excited dazed laughter. And you
will wear bandages on those tendons
snapped by the fury of loving
joyfully.

Here is another, one that comes right after in the edition I am reading.

                         of your oh nothing is the world and
   nothing
said is your word, kept on its diagonal
axis by the steps of illiterates. And beyond any saying is
   the true
schoolbook. Summer smiles in a sweet rustle of soft
green leaves, but the darkness of its weaving I won't tell.
And my necklace of ideals (only the earth knew the shore
it lapped while men squeezed the flower) is a dream
more real than your candied light pressed in today's
   machine.

The way she breaks apart linguistic expectation allows for the strands that string the pearls to take a place in the construction of meaning.

the strings that bind and order, visible

How cool is that.

The second bit seems to me to speak of that silence I am reading about in Sara Maitland’s book. That same silence I so want for myself. So tomorrow on my break at work I will be reading poetry at the Starbucks across the street. One way to survive.

War Variations by Amelia Rosselli, translated from the Italian by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti

The only way I can understand this idea is to acknowledge the world that we cannot grasp through language. But this is unclear. Is there a world we language users can grasp without language? Thought about another way, experience of the world is profoundly changed by language concepts and structures. Still unclear. While probably true, this says nothing about what impacts language concepts and structures. What if those structures are reflections of the pre-linguistic world?

Let me try this:

1. Our species experienced things prior to its acquisition of language.

2. Species without language communicate.

3. Recent research in embodied cognition suggests that intelligence, reason and language are physically grounded.

4. Evolution tends to work by using existing structures and patterns of organization (whether physical or behavioural) and finding new and useful ways to use them.

5. The world is all that is the case. But contra Wittgenstein, I also think that the physical world is enough to explain the language world.

Things get sticky after this.

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)

As a poet and person with a whole raft of unusual perceptual experiences under her belt I find it almost impossible not to experience language as a entity distinct from me. I also find it impossible not to experience the world as a thinking being. I can do it but by dint of mental brute force but I cannot maintain it. Does this mean I believe these things? No. Not without evidence other than my experience of it.

I had a dream some years ago in which my synesthesia played a crucial role. In the dream I come to consciousness inside the head of a bear. That is, I am aware that I am dreaming and I am neurologically tied into the bear’s head. I still maintain my own human circuitry so there are limitations to what each sense can experience but what senses I do have can be reconfigured for the duration of the “ride.” For example, if I was in the head of a hummingbird, I wouldn’t be able to see ultraviolet as the hummingbird can because, as a human being, I simply don’t have those receptors. However, I would be able to use some sense to pick up on those frequencies – perhaps it would come in as a particular tonal group.

In the dream about the bear I smell the world with the bear but what I perceive comes in visually. I see the scent trails as coloured ribbons. The dream allows me to understand that the bear’s relationship to time is different from mine because it can smell time as scent potency. In other words, the bear’s physical (sensory and cognitive) structures organize and limit basic concepts such as time. The same organizational potential must be true for us since we evolved with the same basic environmental forces in place. Some things are important for us to know about and some are not and since no one species can sense all of it, each species has a limited, but viable, range of sensory input available to it. Perceiving too much would not promote longevity. You’d never be able to sort through it fast enough to deal with sudden danger.

So now I have an experience that I think of as a bear’s. My knowledge of bear anatomy almost certainly had something to do with how my mind came to understand the effect of sensory organization on conceptual foundations but has that really anything to do with an actual bear’s experience? And does it matter?

For me the real question is: Does language conscribe reality any more or less than the organization of our senses? I suspect not but since I also suspect that language is a development grounded in sensory structures, I think the question of what’s outside subject and object might be a misdirection at its heart.

Still, we think of memes as operating on people – that memes use people to propogate themselves as genes do. Having said that, there is no way in which human genes or human memes can exist without people. They have no intentions in the reasoned sense of the word. As an example: There are cultural ideas that work poorly in current situated human activities and there are ones that work to foster human feelings of success. The cultural ideas that promote desirable feelings are going to be repeated, i.e. be replicated or spread. There is no need for the idea to have a mind of its own.

I can think of the Phenomenological “thing” like this. Using the gene analogy, words are the bases but perhaps the 5-carbon sugar and the phosphate group are sensory structures and embodied experience and the “thing” that results – the particular gene of this analogy – is independent of us only in the sense that it is first an echo and product of us and our history.

Boggles doesn’t it? The text was supposed to read “here we come” rather than “hear me come.” Spelling matters.

From cakewrecks.com. Thanks, Justine, for the site.

(Thanks Shannon for the pic.)

This seems to have come from engrish and if you have a peek over there you will find some howlers. Many of them have a sexual component almost certainly not intended by the product’s or service’s advertiser.  It makes me wonder what those fortune cookies really say. But really, isn’t that the real power of language and its relationship to meaning construction. All of a sudden what is visible are some of the deep webs which bind words together with the fine thread of categorical relationships and it makes you look around for other previously invisible things. If you think about the words “poisonous” and “rubbish” you can see how they really do fit together and if you work at it even a little you can stagger backwards into meaning-folds of the original language and take a guess at how “poisonous” is used more generally.  In other words, it gives us a glimpse of the connotations of “poisonous” in another’s context and by doing that, it makes temporarily visible our own contexts. It’s the difference, the dissonance, between the two that makes this funny.

Now that I find interesting.

Maybe that’s why I keep banging my head against philosophy. Same combo. It’s really hard to get my head around some of the ideas that must seem so very logical to those who perpetrated them on history, but I just can’t get there without really, really hard work.  Someone I have been emailing with recently said that this is, in part, because I don’t share the same cultural assumptions as those writers/thinkers. I suppose that’s what makes it hard work, because to understand, one must first unearth one’s own assumptions, and, if not uproot them, at least pot them so that they can be moved about one’s intellectual garden. A must, if another (or self) is to be understood.

For me learning another language is like that. First it’s very much a chore, since I might be good at many things, but learning language is not one of them. Second, one of the things that makes reading so much fun are the connotative links that enrich words like “hedgehog.”  The thing is that the links for “hedgehog” are different than the ones for “hérisson” despite their denotative similarity. So (re) learning to read in French is like taking on a new kind of philosophy — let’s call it narrative philosophy, unless you come up with something more fitting.

Unfortunately, I can’t get started just yet. I have this ENORMOUS crunch at work that won’t let up for another 10 days or so. Hérisson will have to wait until then. Speaking of work – I’m late. Gotta go.

The excerpt reads:

Salish isn’t just a language of words and grammar. It’s a bridge between generations – a link to culture and identity – and for the Kalispel, it’s dangerously close to being lost forever.

I am used to hearing Salish spoken at ritual events, and I know some of the people involved in the attempt to rescue the language at the Spokane. But here in my apartment in Vancouver, reading the Inlander, the thing that really gets to me is imagining losing my ability to read Shakespeare or Chaucer or any of the other seminal writers that express what it is to be who we are as English speakers.

Imagine that. Imagine losing the ability to reach out into our past, losing Shakespeare. Arguably, we would lose ourselves. To whom would we then belong?

rad.i.cal (rad’i k’l) adj. [<LL. < Lm radicis, genitive of radix, ROOT] 1. a) of, from, or going to the root or source; fundamental; basic [a radical principle] b) extreme; thorough [a radical change in one’s life] 2. a) favoring basic or extreme change, as in the social or economic structure b) [R-] designating or of any of various modern political parties, as in Europe ranging from moderate to conservative –n. 1. a) a basic part of something b) a fundamental 2. a) a person having radical views b) [R-] a member of a Radical party 3 Chem. A group of two or more atoms that acts as a single atom and goes through a reaction unchanged, or is replaced by a single atom 4. Math. a) an expression showing that a root is to be figured b) same as RADICAL SIGN

rad.i.cal em.path.y
1. an emergent property of the social needs and the biological organization and limitations of the human being
2. the ability to “read” the world and assess it accurately by the way it makes the body feel
3. often felt as “moving out” from the world of “me”, into the world of “I” “we” and “it”
4. often interpreted as a “mystical experience” (and all that phrase encodes within any particular culture or group)
5. is simultaneously used as a noun describing a state (when it is perceived as subjective [as coming from within the body]), a verb when describing a task or responsibility (when it is perceived as relational [coming from the space between the relating beings]) and an ethic (when perceived objectively [coming from without the being])
6. our newest, and therefore weakest, evolutionary gift and therefore a function of training—Just as the capacity of language is coded into a child by birth, language cannot develop without socialization, so radical empathy is coded into us (probably in a rudimentary way) but can only be activated by training.

Definitions “radical” and “empathy” from: New World Dictionary of the American Language Students Edition Prentice-Hall. David B. Guralnik, Editor in Chief. Published in 1981 by Simon & Schuster.

Things, whether words or symbols, carry a (usually) hidden payload of meaning. The specific content of that “payload” is contingent: what books you read, who you meet, what culture you were born into, what films you see, what languages you have learnt to speak, what accidents occur around you, what superstitions you carry, what your parents told you was true. For example, someone I know says that for her, “uprightness” is mostly to do with morality; the word carries a sense of surety and an image of some human being standing tall in his or her goodness. Not for me. Paradoxically, the word triggers an image of a human male slightly crouched over while another postures, flinging his arms back, expanding his torso, his leg stance wide, exposing his groin to view. For this bit of hilarity, I blame Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.

Sheets-Johnstone, in her book The Roots of Thinking, suggests a theory that recognizes the primacy of human movement and body form in the conceptual development of the traits we think of as quintessentially human – things like our bidedalism, but also our concepts, things like art, philosophy and love. Essentially, one trigger for our conceptual evolution was the change in how we saw the world. Literally. Once we got up on two feet, lifted our heads higher from the earth, we got our eyes facing out to the horizon more and more each day. It changed what we saw, what was fodder for our thinking origins not to mention what it did to our pelvis, and the capacity for human females to give live birth to those mutations – big-brained babies. I mean who knows if our lineage produced the occasional big-brained child prior to bipedalism? What’s true is that now matter how potentially good a mutation is for the evolutionary line, it means nothing if the young can’t be born alive. Whatever the truth is, the fossil record strongly suggests that bipedalism was a watershed in the evolutionary potential of Homonids like Ardipithecus and Australopithecus.

The thing I find most delightful about the whole idea of uprightness being the genesis of our evolution into the intelligent, aware beings we are today is what Sheets-Johnstone says may have triggered the upright stance. What she says is that sexual display in males was probably the impulse for this shift. Such a wonderful idea! It reached into my mind and grabbed my attention with such force that I felt it wrap its conceptual arms securely around my idea of how we got to be this way so that I know it is unlikely ever to let go. And now, for me, blown away is the primacy of the moral connotation suggested by that acquaintance of mine.

Think Sheets-Johnstone’s idea is bollocks? Male chimpanzee displays, whether sexual or aggressive, are often augmented by the on-two-feet stance. It makes them suddenly appear bigger, and therefore more intimidating, more powerful. The stance displays the penis as opposed to the on-all-fours position where male sexual traits are hidden. Now think about what a rush of excitement and sense of power does to a penis. It does the same thing in chimps. So when they stand up and display, it isn’t their chests that they are really showing off. Feeling powerful and sexual arousal go hand-in-hand. Think about male ritual displays – war games, sports, etc. – and the reputation those “warriors” have when it comes to women. Think about suddenly facing and surviving danger and what it does to the libido. Aggression, power and desire are linked in the Hominid line and it shows in our behaviours and in our bodily responses.

Another interesting thing: in the on-all-fours position of most primates, the displayed genitalia are female. With the advent of bipedalism, the primary sexual region of the female is hidden and the male’s is frontally displayed. I wonder if this change explains the sexualization of the female breast? We want something to swing too? Especially having gotten used to being the one to display — seriously now, display has a real purpose. Perhaps the changes brought about by uprightness required some adjustments in the female form and male attitude to that form in order to accomplish the original primate goal associated with genital display in females. Of course much of that changed with the advent of hidden oestrus but, I suspect, that also evolved as a response to bipedalism.

As an aside, remember the famous footprints from eastern Africa? When I see graphic representations of the ones who made the footprints, it looks like a male and female pair bond. It may not be a true representation, but still, those pictures, along with Sheets-Johnstone’s theory, made me wonder if hidden oestrus, and indirectly bipedalism, wasn’t the environmental impetus to the development of human pair bonding, which contrasts so much with chimp and bonobo sexual and relationship organization. I mean, what’s a man to do when he can’t tell when a woman is receptive by the colour of her butt? He has to convince her to stay with him so that when she is receptive, he’ll be right there.

I imagine the difference a lack of uprightness would have made to how we perceive the world. Would our ideas of proper “gender” displays for each sex have different content? How many genders would we have? Is the sudden (on an evolutionary timescale) hiddeness of primary female genitalia the reason that our breasts have suddenly become—compared to chimps or other primates—enlarged? Is the use of the penis in a permanently visible display the reason why the human penis is so much larger than any other primate’s?

Uprightness. Stars. Evolution. Spiritual discipline. Ethical choices. Wants and needs. What the body knows. They are all connected in my head, but whatever the term denotes in any given sentence, always underpinning it is that image of the two males in the middle of a symbolic display of evolutionary humanity. Morality, our capacity to think at all, the concepts we form, discard, renegotiate, all these are pinned on the what I have learnt about the origin of our uprightness.

Despite our general mediocrity with respect to specialized survival equipment, one power we do have is that we can tell when something dangerous is near and we can specifically relate the nature of that danger to others, whether that danger is past, present or yet to come. This skill, which is actually a set of interrelated communication skills which include language but are not limited to oral-aural linguistic ability, develops through the primate and hominid line as we evolve greater abilities to read nuances in the faces and bodies of each other, to tell if others thought things were fine, or if they, by the tension in their hands or shoulders, knew that some form of danger was near (whether it be from someone outside the group or from someone inside it). We need the information as a hedge against what we cannot singly run from nor fight with any reliability. Without each other, alone to face what is both stronger and faster, we would die, but what we cannot face alone we can face as a group. The body evolved to know this. It evolved to know the group is essential to life because those of us that clung to the group, that learned to live within its limitations, did not die unproductive. With each other, by being able to read the world in the face of another, we had a better chance, and our children had a better chance.

The body knows the nature and existence of the other and it impels us to honor that knowledge through our feelings. Knowledge surfaces in the terror of abandonment; in the horror of isolation; in the need for the group and its symbols to be eternal, to be forever there in case of need. It is emotion that originally drove the evolving hominid body, developed the primate social engine. It is emotion that has made us human, made us cling together, made us fight each other, made it possible for us to work out rules by which we could coexist (as well as decide which of us should die) and manage the mutable social world. It is the emotional systems of the brain that told our ancestors—without the group we die. In both terror and joy our ancestors obeyed the brain’s dictate by becoming one of the most socially adept species currently on earth.

But feelings, unmediated by reason, have their cost as well as their benefits. Terror makes running when exhausted possible. It makes us pay attention whether to a “real” threat or to that of a dream or story, but in a world of diffuse and ever present stress unrelieved terror leads to heart attacks and mental breakdowns. Knowing that your kin react poorly when a certain form of stranger comes around may save your life if the stranger is a rabid dog, but this same skill, this adaptive strategy that makes the social world possible, also causes a great deal of trouble. If, for example, the stranger is another kind of human with some marked physical or cultural distinction, then the situation is likely to end badly for someone. The fear of being shunned, excommunicated from the group, refused entry, refused help and kindness, these fears make us emotionally ready to do nearly anything to ourselves or to others so that we may stay within the group.

Of course are not all feeling and drive; we are also story and reason. We construct stories to tell ourselves why we should do whatever it takes, regardless of the pain or cruelty, to belong. And it is these stories, those calming rationales, those short-cuts to hard decisions about what to do in the face of terror, it is these stories of my way or the highway, of my country do or die, that become for us more real than the original fear of exclusion and abandonment that precedes it. We kill and die, in other words, because of the same mechanisms that evolved to enhance our chance of our group’s survival. Here’s a famous example of how this works:

Published for the first time in 1963, but conducted in 1961 (a year after the Adolph Eichmann trial), Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that would be called Obedience and Authority. He wanted to know under what conditions obedience to authority would countermand our unwillingness to hurt others. Would we “just follow orders” as so many German people had claimed they did resulting in the atrocities we now know as the Holocaust. Briefly, his answer was yes, people will do horrible things to another to please someone in authority. What Milgram concluded was this:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

The experiment was really very simple. There was an actor in a separate room where the subject could hear the screams but not see the person screaming. The subject was told that this was an experiment to gauge the effects of punishment on learning. The subject was told to shock the subject if the subject got an answer wrong. The subject was given an example of what the shock would feel like and in some cases even told that the “participant” (the actor) had a heart condition. With each “wrong answer” the voltage of the shock was increased—at least in the perceptionof the subject. The experiment stopped if the subject refused to administer further shocks in the face of four separate authoritative prods by the experimenter or when the subject had administered three shocks of 450 volts in sucession. 450 volts.

Milgram, before he conducted the experiment, asked his colleagues what they thought people would do. They believed only a few (1/10th of 1%) would reach the maximum 450 volt level. There is a deep seated belief that abhorrent behaviour is the practice of the “unnatural” or the “evil” and not of the ordinary man and woman. What actually occurred in Milgram’s experiment is that 65% of the subjects administered the maximum voltage and no one—not any subject—refused to stop before they had administered 300 volts.

All it takes to reenact Milgram’s experiment (and many further studies were done, all confirming his findings) is a difference in power between people, a need to be acceptable to those in authority and a willingness to use power to force others to conform to one’s own particular fiction. In other words, Milgram’s experiment is reenacted every single day.

This is what it means to be human and why the development of disobedience and the ability to say “no” is so important to the development of a workable human ethic. It is essential to understand why we do the things we do. We must understand that we are animals, primates, that we have a biolgical inheritance that underpins our desires and behaviours. We need to know this so that we can use other aspects of our inheritance (for example, compassion) to work against this tendency to obedience.

When I say “no god” there are worlds of responsibility, history, belonging, duty, delight and memory attached. Most of these worlds come along unbidden and unconscious; some are linguistically learned and some are not. That is how language works. Its power lies in what it says as well as in what it brings along in the tail of its bright efflorescence. Words are like comets, burning with meaning and presence but they only do so because of the dark intense space through which they pass. Any utterance is like this. The universe of “no god” is both full of dark corners and cups of light because this world and its creatures are also such. The universe of language is born from the universe of the world. Each reflects the other. Each changes the other.