Part 5: “Full of you’ll never know what will turn up”

I take it for granted that every one of us is all of the time making. Making dreams and reality, sense and sensation, monologue/dialogue/multilogue, doubts and knowledge, perception and experience. To live is to make a living, blood cells and amino acids, proteins and carbon dioxide, hormones and synapses.

We live and we say so. Whether fundamentally by motion and the occupation of space, or humanly by gestures and communications. Ever refining our capacities, both biologically and technically, we attempt, invent, create and construct our way along. Language, in its many forms is a principal way we make and are made.

Living or anything-ing implies movement implies change implies flexibility. Language is no exception to this implied principle. Malleability and flexibility – RELATIVITY – is at the core of living and living language. This is why I prefer talking of human activities and behaviors in active tenses…languaging, marrying, being, loving, and the like – is is what it is as it is is-ing.

RELATIVITY is a helpful idea-term for another powerful reason. It implies RELATION. Relations between all things as they are (are-ing). We skein language into the midst of this as a stretchable porous border, like air molecules or water, identifying and allowing difference and movement at all moments.

This is a splendour, a method and means, matter and medium by which we relate, flexibly, comprehensibly – to ourselves, to one another, to world.

Is it?

Because all that’s alive is making and moving, all is “full of you’ll never know what will turn up.” Language not only assigns the full, the you, the what and turning up, but is itself “full of you’ll never know what will turn up,” a relational medium and a matter we’re in relation with!

Pushing a bus while you’re driving it.

Stammer, stutter, flow, overflow.

It marks, misses the mark and overshoots the mark all at once.

This is why ontological thinkers like philosophers and poets believe language is wedded to human being as to be inseparable. Like our physiognomy, it’s a being we cannot investigate or relate to without it. We’re unable to separate from being to examine being. Unable to assess language without using language and being used thereby.

Shrug.

So those of us entranced by such apparently impossible conundrums do it anyway. Scientists and priests, philosophers and fantasiers – we anatomize ourselves and feign beyonds; microscopic particles and telescopic generalities,

it becomes a form of very sophisticated childs-play, a gravely serious and frivolous game, not unlike going on living which is the same thing as dying.

Granted – it’s fantastic – and impossible – what drives us? See – you never know what will turn up – and any direction you head (as a human) will be paved with language while you’re laying its bricks.

Astonishing! Astounding!

Helpless! Hopeless!

Like living toward death?

It’s what we do. Let’s call it “keeping up with relativity,” or “languaging” or living,

any one will do