normally, when i'm reading a couple of books at once or in quick sucession, i'll automatically notice similarities between them, and to me, they'll both end up being about largely the same thing. i can't help but see the unity between two texts, most of all with my long-term project godel escher bach, which seems to contain all human knowledge and rings with any book i'm concurrently reading. as you can expect, especially with things that you don't notice until they're gone, this recently was broken, and the man responsible? alan moore.
give him half a provocation, and the he'll rattle on about language; the power of language, and how language is magic (in fact, i can't believe peter jackson didn't get him to play gandalf). take this excerpt from judgement day (ta dan):
young glory: you're silly.
hermes: ah, but "silly" means wise or divinely touched. did you know that? you ought to be careful with words.
...
demeter: do not trust [hermes]. the god of mind and mirth and language is the deadliest god of all!
but do words have 'ultimate' meanings? the confrontation here comes from lewis carroll, via hoftstadter; surely words only mean what the person saying them wants them to mean? 'this language is your language', to misquote woodie guthrie. i've always naturally believed this, coming from a background where religious services are given in herbew - can't god understand english? or more likely, god doesn't even listen to the language, but feels the devotion behind it, like when one talks to a cat with a mixture of compliments and sweet noises - the compliments are there because one likes the cat, and expresses it in one's own language, and although the cat cannot understand the words, it understands the sentiment.
a short excursion into the world of insults.
i have often pondered about the usefullness of insulting someone; calling someone a cunt is only comical. why not just explain what they did wrong? (see previous post about being human) in this respect, one does need to be very careful with what word one chooses. 'cunt' is surely related to the french 'con' which translates better as 'arsehole', or maybe more abstractley, 'orifice'. to me, 'cunt' has no negative 'cunnatations' any more, and even with nathan barley, i understand his nickname as a reference to how someone else would use the term, in a blunt and p'haps misdirected way. we have to take something out of the recent history of the word, because cunt is still used as a slang for vagina, and not to harp on, but unless you're a gay man, what's wrong with that? tumour is a much better insult; something that works against the whole, and also something that no-one would want, but best of all, no-one is a tumour, so it is better than spac, or scoper. of course, you would not want to over-insult someone. if someone drops a plate on your toe, it would be wrong to call them a 'hitler', one would prefer 'klutz' or 'prat', but these only mean clumsy, they're less offensive because they only describe what the person is, fairly accurately. you knocked something out of a cupboard, so i'll call you a name that means clumsy. fair enough. slightly redundant, but most human communication is. this essay, for instance.
but moore always equates language with magic. my conception of magic is the same as how i talk to cats; i have always assumed that a focus word could be anything, as long as it worked it for you. i'd be surprised if this wasn't true, and so far, moore hasn't convinced me. i'm not dissing the power of words - i still believe they are inextricably linked to the concepts in our minds, and as such, do hold tremendous power. to anarchically fool around with them as carroll does is dangerous and nihilistic. but it is also as truthful as using them correctly. in moore's 'the courtyard' (spolier warning!), when the protag gets his dose of 'aklo', which turns out to not be a drug, but a language, he is given words such as 'wza-y'ei':
"a mental floor gives way beneath me. i realise i know what the word means; have known all along. wza-y'ei is a word for the negative conceptual space left surrounding a positive concept, the class of things larger than thought, being what thought excludes."the protag goes apparantly mad with this new knowledge, his mind unable to cope, but is that just how us mere mortals, with our unexpanded conciousnesses, view his actions? regardless, through this elegant and moving section, moore shoots himself in the foot: he made that word up. he could have put any series of letters there and the concept would have been the same. tangentally, this illustrates the platonic ideals that exist in our minds already, something else that both hofstadter and my AI studies have implicated; visually, we cannot help but see spheres, converging lines, squares askew and so forth. these things are in our head already, and i believe the same is true of fundamental concepts like love and fear, upon which more complex functions of thought are built, and clustered, and represented as words.
where moore succeeds in 'the courtyard' is in the teaching metaphor. when studying something new, it pays to accept the terms used by the people you're learning from; why would you want to confuse matters by having a different word for the same concept, or worse, a different concept for the same word? indeed, can any of us have any concepts that are the identicle to other people's? coincidentally, this is the chapter i am still reading in godel escher bach.
there is no conclusion.
3 comments:
While merrily revelling in underage beer drinking in the sand dunes when I was 15, a member of our party insisted that his shoes were brown.
"But they're clearly blue," I said incredulously.
"Well YOU might think they're blue, but I see them as brown. And who's to say that you're all wrong and I'm right?" came the shoe wearer's reply.
This demonstrates that language is all about the speaker's sentiment (as Grilly rightly said), but also the listener's perception. So if I called someone a cunt and meant it jovially, there would still be a risk that the person in question would take offence because they perceive the word cunt to be a form of abuse.
Similarly, I could call them something completely innocuous and they could perceive me as being sarcastic and again take offence.
So language is a conundrum, and I do believe it's very important to try to decode the way in which we think, write and speak.
However it is also equally cruical that we realise that such debates pale in insignificance when confronted with Real Life. In Hypothetical Land, we can all scratch our studenty beards about the word "cunt", and pat ourselves on our liberally-minded backs for not taking offense at a commonly perceived offensive word.
But in Real Life, if a boss, collegue or lover were to screan "you CUNT" at us in a heated argument, there would be no doubt that it would cause offence - because in Real Life the nice safe rules that we've constructed for ourselves go straight out the window when confronted with raw emotion (in this case emotional language).
So yes, there is no conclusion, apart from this: having gained no clearer insight from this debate, why should Grilly or I bother to compose posts/replies in the first place? Why not sod it all, leave theorising to the old crones on Newsnight Review and go outside and live life? Surely then we could REALLY learn something, rather than spend precious minutes sat hunched over a keyboard?
But I whisper such blasphemy quietly, since such an opinion undermines the whole idea of blogs themselves.
And since I hava a blog myself, I'm keeping my trap shut.
andy is wrong in his comments about 'real life', because he's already covered the same ground a couple of paragraphs above. when the boss screams at you, most of their meaning is in the scream, not even the words they choose. they could call you 'a jar of marmalade' with the same vigour and you'd still get the point.
and why watch people have moral debates on newsnight review when we can do it ourselves? are we not capable?
a quick thought on blasphemy: it is an empty word. either what one says is 100% true, or less an 100% true. if it is true, then i am wrong and must accept it. if it is entirely false, then i have nothing to fear from it. and so forth.
what grilly says above is wrong; he knows full well that the truth doesn't always win out, and his faith in rational debate is undeservedly strong.
Post a Comment