Up Against the Word(s)

– a philosophy of language series –

in the sociology of knowledge

[if this book were a book and shaped like a rectangle, it would be redundant among other things and so on, but perhaps it is a circle and therefore repetition is therefore]

(one of many disclaimers)

Part the Second: True to your word(s)

And so one must wonder over/about how to shape or forge a writing that might be “true.” True to what? is the question that first comes to my mind. Immediately I sense an answer along the lines of “true to experience, human experience, living.”

Okay. But the options are many, perhaps limitless, no? It is easy to imagine someone setting out using language in hopes to be true to a theory, or a memory, an historical event, a relationship or a dream, a feeling or a painting one has seen. Some may intend to be true to the present (as it’s occurring) or to the past as it’s been recounted or remade in language or impression? To be true to ideas or previously languaged things (obviously involving so very many removes and hypotheses about what the previous tellers were attempting to be “true” to, or not). Or how about language itself, theis malleable system of signs, communication – how it works, what it references, invents, incites, depending on the terms selected, their organization, pronunciation, punctuation, etymologies, contexts and ideologies?

All would apparently boil down to the experience of the one implementing the signs: how that one has acquired the forms, contents, vocabularies, grammars and syntaxes of the utilized signs, or, beyond that, their singular perception and interpretation of their own memories, relations, readings, hearsay, acquisition of data and so forth. All to say “truth,” if one means by that some objective correlative to actuality, to “things as they are,” seems highly suspect, even as in this case, I might attempt to be “true” to the highly suspect meaning of the word and signified concept (ideology) “truth.”

So, if correlation to actuality becomes a highly individualized affair of each language-user, that a human, in fact, cannot hope to use words in any fashion directly translatable or apprehensible to another…why the setting out to inscribe?

One might suggest it’s a relative thing – like space and time – that communication takes place in fields of overlap between the flexible meanings of signs. That one hopes for difference and therefore the requisite similarities, to provide and provoke comprehensions limiting and expanding but somewhat assimilable – conversational – texting-with, vocalizing-with, another or others…some active reduction and proliferation of possibilities between multiple language-users and their contexts of situations.

Fair enough. A hope for convergences in a commonly based palette and culturation. Generalized and individualized from all sides.

Is this what the “writer” is after? Some correspondence (between themselves and their experience, between that relational complex and others)? Perhaps. Or maybe more accurately the languaging impulse fluctuates along a vast scale of minute gradations of aims and intentions, including, always, the relational effects of using (participating, knowing) language itself. It’s a mud pie! And so beautiful it looks like chocolate mousse sometimes.

And just became so, in the metaphoring of a kind of pie some persons will recognize, depending on their own experience and the culture they come from.

In part.

I was raised in a faith that was based on a book full of words. At times it exploded with prescience and resonances in the life I was becoming, at others it fell flat or rang false, but its education in languaging experience held merit. When I say “raised” I mean inculcated and immersed. I learned terms and their arrangements by “heart” or memory and rote – as principles and rules for interpreting world and self. Childhood learning has a way of patterning subsequent life, and it comes back to me again and again when world overwhelms and skips past my reason plopping its bulky finger on “play.” I woke to it this morning and I listened. This is what I heard:

The Word: A Commentary

“In the beginning was the Word

the Word was with God

and the Word was God.

(the same) was with God in the beginning.

Through (the Word) all things came into being,

not one thing came into being except through (the Word)”

• Gospel of John 1:1-3 –

The light comes on and I see that you are there. I can describe you now, move toward you, interact with more knowledge and intention. I now see the table and chair on my right, between us to the side, underneath the window which is covered and which I had not known to be there, nor the “outside” or beyond, even the gap of it, the doorways, the thresholds, until the light came. On.

I had not known the cat nor dog that made their sounds of presence, like your voice and breath I sensed, until the space of living was enlightened.

The Writer’s gospel, the good news, about language and mystery and its use to shed light. Brings to awareness, aids comprehension, might even be said to bring into being (for its users) all that comes to register as existent in its own particular way.

Emotions and landscapes, persons and things. The self, once considered in words, takes on. Until that moment all is inchoate, unformed, a mix of sensations unlocalized like innumerable living points in air. The Word(s) direct and give shape, question and expose. Let there be light.

Whatever rudimentary forms of communication prevail, among cells, among plants, among animals and stars, this light, language, the words and ideas, is the light of humankind. The life of its persons.

This is a gospel that I can believe in, bearing itself out in experience. As one’s vocabulary expands to circumstances and situations, life begins to seem understood, seen-through, engaged, if only in the duration of the verbal processing.

Linking the field like fenceposts and wires, the word traverses the between and the voids or the opens, like light reflecting matter, whether in the subtlety of the atmospheric layers or the gleam of a yellow school bus. It is there, I am here, we become. Same registering difference, word requiring letter and sense, being: being-with.

And so the surface grows scribbled. Notated, defined, addendum’d and erased. The living word, in action as much as its participants, adjusting, accounting, enumerating; revise and repeat. Expand. Express.

It is the territory between exterior/interior, centripetal/centrifugal, ever breathed into the void, calling to and called by. Ever beginning, the become of all things. As we segment times and spaces, sense duration and bounds, so the Word moves along with each complex, reporting, revising,

Recall. The naming of ocean and air – what were they before but a void exhibiting difference? The animals, people, feelings and actions – unknown variations – “behaviors” and “appearances” – then light.

It has come into the world. Avail yourselves of it. Turn on the lights – and read, and write. Bring what is (for you) into being. In the beginning, the Word, and at its end, the beginning. There is always more word for the void.

N Filbert 2012