Tag: language
New Feasty Arrivals – kudos Inter-Library Loan
Borrowed Mask 1.
The only rule,
the only law
of genius, of imagination, of abandonment, of truth,
is change.
.
Not reworking, but change.
.
What is this borrowed mask?
The same old song once more?
Will Apollinaire defend us
this time?
As he did Renoir,
his Arcadia, his nudes.
Who will bring back
the soul of art?
Who will bring it back
from the Underworld?
Picasso having played
Orpheus this go round.
2.
Never rework,
the influence being imaginary
at best, but isn’t that
enough?
.
Always new again,
though there is no new
matter.
No new paint.
Only rearrangement.
No change.
Nothing to be changed.
No looking back.
No back upon which
to look.
-Percival Everett-
Infinite Medium / Unlimited Meaning
“And the fact is that ordinary words don’t have just two or three but an unlimited number of meanings, which is quite a scary thought; however, the more positive side of this thought is that each concept has a limitless potential for variety. This is a rather pleasing thought, at least for people who are curious and who are stimulated by novelty.”
– Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander –
Supplement
Astounding – I’m in my fourth decade of life and this is the first day the beauty of this word has hit home…
supple-ment
which put me in mind of Rodin…
and of the cacophony of arguments followed by caressing clarifications toward shared understandings
of characters presented and nuanced, developed, made complex
of statements expanded and explained, extended into metaphors
vowels echoing sustained
hard Cs molding into soft
crashes dwindling into static
facts becoming rumors becoming murmurs, whispers, sighs
wailing come to weeping come to tears come to rest
Something that completes or enhances something else when added to it. |
Dialogue
“You and I exchange lines of dialogue. Each line is a trap, a misuse, and each misuse is justified by some standard upon which we have previously agreed, if tacitly. Thereby appears the nature of meaning. It is a force that hazards to subjugate other forces, other meanings, other languages. We understand this all too well and yet, and yet – well, it is like the infirmity, the defect at the base of a dam. It will hold and it will hold and then it will give up, the dam will give up. As do we all…
“Believe what you like. Or, better, believe what you believe; it’s always easier, if you ask me. You would have me imagine that in some cases language really is just a simple transmission of rather functional, if not banal, messages between speakers. Not only is that not true, but it is necessarily untrue, even in the most functional of exchanges, say between two firemen or a pilot and her navigator or a surgeon and his operating-room nurse and here between you and me as you attend to me, where I use she and where I use he and even why I might have put she before he, or did not phrase the question as he following she.”
-Percival Everett-
A Complexity of Signs
“I had another friend who was so certain that the only way he could identify himself was through language and further by losing himself as object within language that he lost his mind, possibly within language as well, but I never knew what the hell he was talking about.”
– Percival Everett by Virgil Russell-
and highly recommended
Into Letters…Words…Language
(click image for music)
Or perhaps correspondence…(Asking after the Nature of Nobody, pt. 3)
from pt. 2:
It writes this as “my world,” or “the world that I in-habit.”
Or perhaps correspondence…
(Asking after the Nature of Nobody, pt. 3)
…is precisely what is occurring.
“Each biological life-form, by reason of its distinctive bodily constitution (its ‘biological heritage,’ as we might say), is suited only to certain parts and aspects of the vast physical universe. And when this ‘suitedness to’ takes the bodily form of cognitive organs, such as our own senses, or the often quite different sensory modalities discovered in other lifeforms, then those aspects and only those aspects of the physical environment which are proportioned to those modalities become ‘objectified,’ that is to say, made present not merely physically but cognitively as well…the difference between objects of experience and elements of sensation is determined primarily not by anything in the physical environment as such but by the relation or, rather, network and set of relations that obtains between whatever may be ‘in fact’ present physically in the surroundings and the cognitive constitution of the biological organism interacting with those surrounding here and now.”
-John Deely, Umwelt–
Given the apparent disjunction of its maps to the potential largesse and intricacy (unknowns) of the territory, it reconsiders.
It thinks it may be inextricably related to the territory. In no way accurately or exhaustively (in relation to the territory) yet constitutively via what kind of co-respondence pertains (in relation to the species of which it is an example).
In other words, by inter-relation to the territory, and by nature of its dynamic organismal systems of sensation-perception-cognition and communication (+ language – the capacity to model the above relational systems): it is I.
It co-evolves personhood. The capacity to refer to an I among Is. An individual personality among a We.
Map and territory, co-respondent. The map being a model of that correspondence and correlation. Therefore, of course it is idiosyncratic and fraught with misperceptions, disjunctions and erroneously organized interpretations and representations of the networked environments…yet the map = correspondence with the territory in species-specific experience.
Perhaps?
Correspondences of one to many and many to one, and to a very delimited aspect of the territory, but still constructed by real linkages (reciprocal relations and responses) to that “Territory.”
Bees’ links look different. If a lion were to speak we would not understand. Every organism its own relations to the territory, selecting and responding, sensing and processing various aspects of the territory into species-specific lifeworlds, but correlated and corresponding particular to their kind.
Or…our maps are our maps. Ever changing, adapting, responding to our environments and experiences, genuinely related to the territory, representations of our habits of being in the world (in-habit-ing it as humans).
I can’t lay claim to truth about the territory, but my maps derive from it and shape my forays within it, can be shared and examined, evaluated and adjusted with other mapmakers, and trusted as the experience of a peculiar entity of a particular species modeled in reciprocal relation to specific environs of the territory.
“The map is not the territory” but a model, a depiction, a fragment co-evolved in and with that territory, a specific kind of rendering and representation, and valuable for the explorer-species of the sign.
All my Words are Silent 