As
I was working on yesterday's post about Becoming Aware, I kept thinking
about how our human languages frustrate our attempts to explain things
that are perceptual rather than conceptual. The normal solutions to
this are (1) use complicated words that almost no one really
understands (such as 'synaesthesia'), (2) use words that are so
ambiguous as to be meaningless (such as 'integral'), or (3) make up new
words (such as 'presencing').
None of these alternatives does
any favours for the reader or listener. As Frederick Barthelme says in
his rules for good writing "Obscurity is not subtlety; intentional
obscurity is pinheaded and unkind."
Lakoff's point that "we can
only think what our embodied brains permit" gets to the heart of the
problem. Our brains work by analogy. The patterns in our brains are
formed substantially by our personal experiences, and those personal
experiences are 'informed' by our senses. If you can't explain
something to me by analogy to something my senses have actually
experienced, it is doubtful that you can make me really understand it.
In that case, better you show me, so that I 'experience' first-hand
what you mean, than waste energy trying to tell me. If I cannot
'relate' what you describe to something I already know, then you might
as well be talking in a foreign language.
And language is
precisely the problem. Our languages are designed very practically to
reflect the wiring in our brains (and vice versa -- language plays a
role in forming the structure of our brains) and to convey concepts
that are essential to our survival. Their very syntax is analytical
-- syntax 'breaks things down' in useful ways. Every sentence therefore
has a subject, an action, and an object, so that everything is taken apart, 'objectivized', made other.
Subject literally means 'throw under' while object means 'throw in
front' -- our language's process of analyzing everything is literally
violent. Our whole modern culture (and our sciences) are about taking
things apart to understand how the pieces work and go together, so that
this knowledge can be applied in useful ways. Our languages reflect
that culture and are also deconstructive.
The things that could
not be analyzed, at least in our early history, were taken on faith. It
was left up to the gods' representatives on Earth, who communicated
with the gods in non-Earthly language, to understand and interpret
these things in a way that would allow them to instruct the rest of us.
We did not develop languages and words to describe 'integral' things
simply because this was not necessary or useful for our survival. That
was (and is) the job of artists and poets, who are unconstrained by the
denotative meaning of language and (usually) the need for precision or
utility.
Most of us today live experientially narrow lives
(limited exposure to nature, to other cultures and languages, to doing
things in the real world rather than thinking about things and working
with written ideas and abstractions) so our ability to relate and to
imagine, especially as we get older, is poor. Even worse, many
important modern concepts (such as monetary systems, strategic
management, mental illness, global warming, and string theory) are so
complex and abstract that we cannot relate to them in concrete terms at
all -- it is only if and when we really care about them and their
consequences that we undertake the enormous work needed to at least
partly understand them. So as our lives become more abstract and
complex, more and more of the tasks of understanding these complexities
are left to experts. The rest of us, impoverished by the narrowness of
our life experiences and unmotivated to study the increasingly esoteric
abstractions of experts in all areas of human activity, are left with
knowledge and understanding that is largely shallow, narrow, numb, and
useless.
We might as well be machines, and some would argue that is what we have largely become.
Nowhere
is this narrowness more problematic that in our (lack of) understanding
of and connectedness to 'the environment'. The term alone is objective
-- it is something other and apart from us and our civilization (when
we speak of human 'environments' we are understood to be speaking in
analogy). Most of us have no experience base, recollection from our
early childhood, or connection to our instincts that allow us to
appreciate intuitively that the whole concept of 'environment as other'
is a non sequitur -- in every sense of the word it 'makes no sense'.
Somewhere
inside us we have a kind of primeval appreciation that we are part of
the environment, but neither our personal experience nor our language
inform that appreciation and give it meaning. In fact they tell us the
opposite: that a consequence of human affluence is an impoverishment of
'the environment'. But how can 'we' be taking away from something of
which we are inextricably a part? So the incompatibility of these
concepts causes us to file away the idea of ourselves as a part of the
environment, so that when politicians and corporatists talk about the
need to reduce regulations and funding for 'the environment' to be able
to satisfy more pressing human
needs, no one points out, or even thinks about, the absurdity of such a
conception. With the complicity of our narrow modern experience and our
take-everything-apart languages, we have 'forgotten' everything that
made us so successful a species (successful as part of the whole) for
our first three million years.
It is a matter of debate whether,
at least as individuals, we can unlearn the absurdities of modern life
and, at least by broadening and deepening our personal experiences,
'remember' what it is to be a part. Words like Gaia, integrity and
holism will not help, however. These muddy, ambiguous, made-up,
spiritual-sounding terms are more likely to annoy most people than
enlighten them. Political parties, demonstrations, laws and speeches
about the need for us to reconnect with and become again a part of the
rest of life on Earth won't work as long as our language forces us to
speak about the environment as 'other', and as long as their experience
and our languages make our message unintelligible. What can we do, with
such constraints, to help the 6.5 billion people on Earth understand
what we mean and its importance to the future of our planet?
I have no answers to this, and I'm not sure there are any. But I offer three areas to explore that might surface some answers:
- Save our breath, stop trying to tell and convince people, and instead show them -- by creating working models of communities in which people are
a harmonious part of all life in those communities, living in balance
with a light footprint. The woman rap poet in Toronto who says she's
tired of 'environmentalists' coming into her urban neighbourhood
talking about the importance of planting trees, when that neighbourhood
is full of angry young people with no job prospects drawn to the
promise of wealth and glamour in local drug gangs, is absolutely right
not to care about the-environment-as-other.
- Use the arts
(including film and photography) to convey the message, since they are
not constrained by the limits of language. As an example, there's a
song by James Taylor called Gaia which includes the passage below.
Unless you know the song, these lyrics probably won't have any impact
on you, but few people who have listened to the song are unmoved by its
soaring melody and brooding harmonies, which 'say' much more than the
words and open people up to its message:
Turn away from your animal kind,
Try to leave your body just to live in your mind,
Leave cold cruel Mother Earth behind -- Gaia,
As if you were your own creation,
As if you were the chosen nation,
And the world around you just a rude and dangerous invasion. - Explore some inventive linguistic
ways of expressing new (and ancient) ideas with everyday words. In
yesterday's post, for example, I was playing with hyphenated words as a
means of trying to convey concepts that defy clear one-word expression:
I used 'engaged-as-part' as an adjective to describe awareness (instead
of 'integral') and 'being-a-part-of' as an adjective (instead of
'holistic') to describe human activitythat is not automatic, disconnected information processing activity.
The
third approach intrigues me as someone who works with words. It doesn't
cost anything, and our language is in serious need of broadening and
freeing from its current frustrating constraints. The Swan and Shadow
poem by John Hollander I posted
last Saturday showed what we might do with our linear, constraining
language with a little innovation. I know a lot of the readers of this
blog are also writers -- what other ways could we explore to liberate
our language from its cultural biases and limitations of expression,
without making up words nobody understands?
artwork above is my own creation |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
