It took eight days. Eight long, frustrating days of battle against brambles in my chest and thistledown in my head. I feared at one point that my skull might shatter from the pressure and cast a million fluffy seeds free into the house (which would have been much to Tipper’s merriment) or that I might awaken to find myself merged with the sofa in a very Kafka’s-Samsa-meets-O’Brien’s-de Selby manner. And since I’m given to shelling myself with buckets of frustration when I’m not keeping up with things (this pleasant little passtime of mine falls under the category of ‘nice things acquired along my three-year misadventure’) I was lucky enough to top the whole charade off with a day-long stress-induced migraine. The freedom is feeling human again is most welcome.
Jack taught me today that there are no past or future tenses in Chinese. That I speak yesterday, I speak today, and I speak tomorrow. There was a program on the radio that I was sorry to have missed which talked about how language effects our perception of the world and the ways we behave it. I vaguely remember reading something about this a few years ago when I was poking around in linguistic theory, and how my thoughts ran amok considering all the ways in which our worlds are limited by this symbolism.
I equally remember reading vehement arguments against this idea (the details of which were far too onerous, if not downright fustian, in vocabulary for me to have truly internalized and been able to later recall).
I can’t help but feel that there must be something to it. Language as semiotic, as symbol, as stand-in, as mirror, as at times imposter, and even simulacra; itself defining what constitutes any given thing, rather than the thing itself being the matrix. Is it possible that society understands and reacts to its world primarily through the ways in which it communicates it? Is it possible that my understanding of and relationship to the world I exist in is experienced only through my learned symbolism of it? How restricted our understanding, our ability to exist. I can’t do much but offer questions, as I haven’t enough authority on the topic to offer statements, or answers (and lest I step on the toes of those linguists who might come parading to my house with torches and pitchforks).
What a language doesn’t have words for surely says just as much about it as the things for which it does, so it seems to me. I remember learning my freshman year, in an introductory critical thinking and art theory course, that language is a failure. That it will forever shortfall the depth and bredth of the truths for which it attempts to stand in for. Made worse in efforts to translate across different tongues (and, are not our own minds, laden with their unique lived experiences, memories, associations, each their own tongue as well?).
I don’t mean to sell language short of its absolute magnificence, or doubt my own love for it. To paraphrase David Chrystal, there is nothing more complex, nothing a greater testament to human creativity and innovation, nothing so impressive that we could possibly build with our hands or tools or technologies, as our languages, and all their incredible variations.
I need to stop now or this post will end up thrice as long.
First of all, so glad you're feeling better. There really is nothing like ill health to encourage you to stop succumbing to that universal human failing - taking good health for granted just because it's normal.
ReplyDeleteI was going to write quite a lot about my own experiences of using language in fiction over the eight years of writing it - how I became frustrated by its limitations because (as I later coined the phrase) 'perception is the whole of the life experience' and the subjective experience of perception can't have adequate words to represent it because it's both abstract and individual. 'Disappointed', for example, can only be read in terms of what the reader understands by the word, and each reader might experience disappointment slightly differently. It doesn't describe the feeling itself because feelings are unreachable by anybody but the subject. How do you describe the feeling of disappointment to anybody who has never been disappointed?
But the points your raise here are far wider reaching than that and could take up hours of discussion over a favourite beverage...
On a shallower note, did I ever tell you that when I started reading 'The Third Policeman' I had difficulty with the flow of both the speech and the narrative? I cured it brilliantly by 'hearing' it in an Irish accent. Plain sailing from then on.
That makes two of us (three, four..five, counting Jack and our noble creatures.)
ReplyDeleteYou've hit the nail on the head there - perception is the whole of life experience, absolutely. This sort of thing I could listen and talk about until the theoretical cows come home (and likely over more than one favorite beverage, for that matter!)
Ohhhhh! It makes complete sense that it should come together after you 'heard' it accented; it's written in a syntax that's derived mostly from that used in Irish (the remains of which find their way into some still-used colliquialisms). Lady Gregory's writings are much the same - but they read much more prose-ly. Have you read anything of hers?