THE HABIT OF LANGUAGE
OCTOBER 19, 2010. We develop a deeply ingrained habit about language, about how it feels to operate it, how it feels to understand it, how it feels to be confused by it, how it feels to go back and forth with it, how it feels to think with it, how it feels to report events and states of mind with it.
Okay, fine. I’m not advocating destroying language or the experience of it. I’m just pointing out, to those who can grasp it, that using language puts us in the position of believing we understand what’s it all about, what it feels like—and consequently, when some radically new notion about language shows up, we automatically reject it because, well, we think we’re already experts…
It’s okay and acceptable if someone comes along and says, “Guess what? The Hopi language has no words that indicate time. They only have the present.”
Well, we say, that’s weird, but it’s very interesting and illuminating. We can deal with it. We know about present and past and future tense, and if some tribe doesn’t have two of those tenses, we can grasp that.
Of course, it turns out this assertion about Hopi language is controversial. There are people who claim it’s entirely false and the Hopi do have words about the past and so on…but that’s another story.
But suppose someone (in this case, me) says there can be language in which all the “words” can change meaning and do change meaning from moment to moment, as they are received, and yet each experience of a “word” is powerful and clear and distinct and subjective and expansive.
No, that couldn’t be. That isn’t language. That goes against every experience and feeling about language we have. It goes against the deep, deep habit we’ve formed about what language is.
So we have a person who goes to a museum and looks at a room full of paintings by Kandinsky, and the meanings of these paintings comes through as clear as a bell—and each time the person returns to that room, the meanings are clear and vivid but DIFFERENT.
And, to top it off, the person sits down in a chair and takes out a pad and oil crayons and begins to make drawings that are RESPONSES to the Kandinskys. “Hey, he spoke to me, so I’m answering him.”
And then Kandinsky actually APPEARS in the room with his own pad and oil crayons, so he can answer back…
Well, without invoking ghosts, we can have this kind of exchange. For example, on a stage in front of an audience. THE MAGIC THEATER. Maybe it won’t be drawings, it’ll be words, but words no one has ever heard before. Invented words that sound like…music…sort of. Words, sounds, that carry great emotion and attitude. Back and forth, back and forth, between two characters on the stage.
And a certain portion of the audience leaves the theater because they think they’re in a crazy place and they want no part of it. But others remain, and after awhile, the whole thing on the stage begins to come through like a revelation out of the fog.
This is REAL. This is happening. These people are communicating on stage, and what is passing back and forth between them is creating layers and levels of sensation and feeling in the audience…layers and levels they’ve never felt before and didn’t even know existed.
Didn’t even know existed.
It’s not religious feeling or sensation, and it’s not mathematical feeling and sensation, and it’s not like the sensation of listening to Bach, and it’s not like the sensation of writing a clear paragraph, and it’s not like the sensation of eating a pineapple….it’s unlike any sensation or feeling the person has ever experienced.
In fact, these new feelings and sensations and thoughts are opening up whole new huge territories that were previously unknown…and the sensations aren’t engraved in stone, they’re changing.
I once did a brief poetry experiment. I brought together several people from different countries and I taped them reading poems in their native languages. Portugese, Persian, Italian. It was all about listening to the SOUNDS of the poems. What they meant was unimportant. I didn’t care about that. We just listened to the sounds and rhythms and the emotion. We had no idea what the words meant. It was quite fantastic. Of course, it went against the habit of language to be listening to the poems in that way, without knowing or caring what the literal meaning was. But that’s what we did.
The habit of language limits our experience. It limits our experience of what language CAN BE. It limits our experience of what REALITY can be.
Well, someone says, this whole thing is ridiculous because you don’t really UNDERSTAND what these people on the stage are saying to each other, you as the audience are making it up, it’s entirely subjective, you’re IMAGINING IT.
Yes? And?
You see, that’s exactly the point. This is a language of imagination. On both sides.
It’s talking in and through and by imagination.
But that doesn’t make it any less real, whatever “real” means. It makes it compelling and powerful and beautiful in ways we’ve never imagined before. The impact is THERE. It’s alive. It’s changing.
We’re plugging into a faculty and facility that has been lying dormant in us for perhaps eons. And now that we are plugging into it, reality is expanding by the second.
The old habit is being shredded, and we’re flying freer and higher and wider and deeper.
Who knows what spaces and times will now become available to us?
Now, perhaps you understand better why I’ve spent so much time over the years writing and talking about systems and structures and their limits.
The habit of language and the belief that we truly understand what language is and isn’t? It’s the lid we place on possible reality.
JON RAPPOPORT