MAGIC AND LANGUAGE
END OF THE INFORMATION AGE
“The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.”
Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons”
“The creation lives as genesis beneath the visible surface of the work. All intelligent people see this after the fact, but only the creative see it before the fact—in the future.”
Paul Klee
MAY 15, 2011. Over the years, I’ve tried to dip into the vast technical literature of linguistics, and I’ve always come out of the experience exasperated.
The writers either make obvious observations (dressing them up for a party), or they slice their subject matter into miles of thin baloney, as they turn what we all understand, speak, and write into sub-sub categories of structure.
To mix metaphors, it’s as if they’re analyzing flight by dragging a dirigible down to earth by attaching thousands of weights to its underbelly.
Whereas, the poet can take us into another space with one line: “And the sabbath rang slowly in the pebbles of the holystreams.” (Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill)
If you’re going to say language reflects consciousness, better to just say it. Trying to chart how the operation works is futile. On the other hand, if you say language reflects what consciousness wants to do, you have more wiggle room. One of those wants is magic.
Consciousness wants to exceed ordinary reality and all its samenesses. How? However it can.
The culture may heap praise on dollar-getting and successful marketing and cunning practical skills and devotion to making the right deal, but consciousness in the background wants expansive magic.
When these two worlds collide, you get Learn to Levitate in Three Easy Lessons and Wear This Blue Stone and Become Rich.
The unlikely marriage is made in a Vegas chapel with a Wayne Newton impersonator as the minister. Actually, Vegas is probably the only place in America where money does become magic, because the total immersion and dedication to it is single-minded. Nobody pretends it’s for charity. It’s money, cash, solidified adrenaline. The mob dreamed up that alchemy. They invented popular loser’s magic, American style.
Theoretically, you could build a Poet’s city in the desert, where, around the clock, pumped into every room of every hotel, spread out on the green-felt tables in the big rooms, you’d find nothing but lines of Keats, Shakespeare, Yeats, Hart Crane, Rimbaud, Whitman, William Burroughs, William Gibson, 24/7…
Who knows what would happen in that city after a few years. You might find people drifting out of their ordinary minds and hovering a few hundred feet above the sand.
A certain percentage of customers would claim to be addicted, and rehab centers would spring up, people sitting in circles in rooms and cleaning up by grunting monosyllables at each other.
So that’s the prelude to today’s piece:
Stash this in the waking at dawn folder…
It happened the moment the Internet went public.
Of course nothing really ends. It’s just superseded.
So several levels are operating at once. Or maybe hundreds, thousands of levels.
While the global spread of information will go on forever, the END was signaled by the first people who worked the online data. They played with it, invaded it, changed it, reset it, wormed their way into figuring out how it was built. For them it was material to be woven and attached and discarded.
They were seeing information as pieces of vaguely recognizable IS. Didn’t matter what it meant, particularly.
Select a random piece.
“Sugar burns.”
The thought stretched out like a long lazy piece of gum, from mouth, between two fingers, past the nose, into the other hand, on a summer afternoon, cicadas in the canopy, sugar burns, a thought at the bottom of a mantrum when you think you’ve finally reached the last stop on the bus line, and everything is going to be good forever.
But of course, it isn’t going to be the same good.. Things change. The thought, a datum, goes through incarnations of place, time, home, the makeup is scuffed away and new powders and liners are applied. Does it matter what the face was, originally?
So these first meta-miners were working the strings of clusters of symbols, and the foundations and channels along which they could be flung. What else was there to care about?
Shadows, reflections, suggestions, hints, looking at a distance, down on ponds and streams and swarms and orchards of data…and finding a strange joy.
Perhaps all languages were really that way. Or if they weren’t, they could be.
Two people could exchange, not the facts, but the glints.
Not what did you learn today, but how did you transmute it?
An avalanche of stupidity might result back there on level one, but on level two something was happening.
The Net is the transportation company resurrected. The trucks loaded. Which route works? Where are the slow-downs and blocks? How’s the weather? Where’s the loading dock at the other end? Who’s driving? Did they do the maintenance inspection on the fleet?
You’re driving down the road at dawn, and the cows are standing in a field of green, the grass so high it obscures their legs and they look like they’re floating, and not a thought is given to what’s in the back of the truck.
Data jingle and jangle, and once in a while, you receive a little jolt of electricity, and you think you might have just translated them into something telepathic. Because you’re as far away from the cow as the shop owner who’s supervising the way the leather coat will be hung in the window. And when it’s close to sunset, and the lights come on in the street, there are little puddles and streaks of red and purple on the collar and the long sleeve. You penetrate a paper-thin barrier, and you’re in a world an inch away from the old one. Floating. Seeing.
Level one is crumbling. No one knows what a noun is or a verb, and the act of diagramming a sentence is as ancient as praying to the sun.
You wonder whether language was always meant to be more, a series of brushstrokes that make and unmake three oranges or a garden in Giverny.
You wonder if everyone is holding on too tight, and that’s why the magic doesn’t flood the days.
The meaning of meaning isn’t breaking any bones or nations. It’s sliding in through the narrow cracks and all the literal Godmakers will eventually have to accept it. They cover their ears and sing one song until they go deaf.
Somewhere, a software code grinder is reaching for his cup of coffee and out of the corner of his eye, he sees a hundred strings across the screen, and they are moving slightly, and one character jumps out of its nest. It taps a shoulder, and that shoulder puts an end to the world we knew.
We ARE moving in the direction of USING another kind of language, one that will, in the moment, ever changing, express sensations we’ve only glimpsed, and it will express them in a long flow…
BUT THEN we come upon a shape, an old shape, a complex circle done in slice-and-dice geometric perfection, encompassing hundreds of attached slender anchored tendons, the kind we might once have made with a compass holding a pencil on the end. Inside the circle, when you look closely, you see other shapes, pointed stars, and someone tells us this circle is the translation of an echo passed between two moons a trillion miles from Earth. Yes. The celestial music…and we pause. We pause, and there is a shift in our tectonics.
We recall our abject devotion to how the universe was designed.
We recall the hypnotic slow-down that signals our commitment to it.
We feel the new language fading out like a blank check in the hands of a Treasury agent.
Do we move into the New, or do we revert to the old temple of worship at the feet of Universe-as-it-is?
LIFE, or SLEEP?
JON RAPPOPORT
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