Tag: language

Masterful Hejinian on Language

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing6 Comments

“Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say.  

We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children.  Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects – balls and rivers.  Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes.  

They discover the words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them – a displacement producing a gap.

Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world.

Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions.

Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition.

This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it – 

Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes.

It makes us restless.

As Francis Ponge puts it, ‘Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.’

Instead that center of gravity seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.

Language itself is never in a state of rest.

Its syntax can be as complex as thought.  And the experience of using it, which includes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active – both intellectually and emotionally.

The ‘rage to know’ is one expression of the restlessness engendered by language.  ‘As long as man keeps hearing words / He’s sure that there’s a meaning somewhere,’ as Mephistopheles points out in Goethe’s Faust…”

–Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry–

Today’s Delights – and salivatory anticipations

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading1 Comment

In love with language

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces6 Comments

Ah, “the perpetually changing, muddied, maid-of-all-work, our common language…a public instrument, a collection of traditional and irrational terms and rules, fantastically created and transformed, fantastically codified, heard and uttered in many different ways”

-Paul Valery-

Summarization often feels inherently erroneous.  Much as I have an insatiable passion for “figuring things out,” for the observable “hows” and “whats” of scientific inquiries and theory, much as it evokes a delight of fascination and sense of knowledge or understanding to learn of the makeup and behaviors of neurons or cells, cerebellums or furry beasts, none of it ever feels comprehensive or resolving.  The human, to me, is some paradoxical wonder of natural capacities and probabilities and dynamics and flexibility that can endlessly occupy and consume us.  Like any part of the cosmic system, from quarks (or smaller?) to global social and environmental systems.  Language has long served as a place of experiment and observation for me of just such probability- and convention-governed behavior coupled with a kind of infinite openness and flexibility.  I believe this is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to working in words as a medium.  But listening to other artists it is easy to see that oils, wax, clay, plastic, etc. also have these inherent qualities.  Dance.  Music.  Craft.  Parenting.  Romantic loves.  Friendships.  Relations.  Essentially, relations.

A primary personal pleasure for me is delving into theories.  Semiotics, linguistics, neurobiology, aesthetics, philosophy, information systems, communications, psychology and the like – all provide  me rich excitement and spell-bound, breathless appetites and anticipations.  The process of learning and becoming – interacting with world, others, ideas, stuff – it is what makes me tick in realms of gladness.  This past week I’ve burrowed down into the work of Max Black and related source documents, particularly Wittgenstein.  I wanted to share some of Black’s “summarizations” because they retain the mess and complexity of what he is observing in a way that feels authentic.  For those of you who share the interests…the following derive from Max Black’s The Labyrinth of Language.

“The extraordinarily ramified network of skills, habits, actions, conventions, understandings, which we bundle together under the label of ‘language’ is too complex to admit of any simple summary…”

“For all its fixity of structure at any given time, a living language has an inherent plasticity and capacity for growth and adaptation (it is more like a developing organism than an inflexible machine).”

so instead of definition, Black offers what he calls a “landing stage” for directing our attention to certain features of language…including the following:

Language is rooted in speech

Language is directed, reversible and self-regulating

Language is an institution (always part of a speech-community, a participatory action)

Language is a particulate system (“a finite repertoire of elements and arrangements generating infinite diversity and novelty”)

Language is meaningful (expressive and evocative)

Language is plastic (of the most rigid and most malleable of human institutions)

so I offer these reflections today as a celebration of the magnificent medium we all of us are using to some extent throughout all of our lives and activities – ah language – ah “open systems” – ah humans – ah world!

Writing it out : writing in

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Writing9 Comments

Into (and out of) the labyrinth of language

“there can be no fully articulated thought without symbolic embodiment…

language is the very stuff of which ‘ideas’ are made…

to separate thought from its symbolic manifestation would be as futile

as to try separating a mind from its embodiment in a human organism”

-Max Black, The Labyrinth of Language–

“words are part of action and they are equivalents to actions”

-Bronislaw Malinowski-

            Sometimes silenced.  Pressured in channels.  A void creates a vacuum.  Fettered speech – often necessary but variant to “open” or “expressive” on a relative continuum.  To a purpose.  Carrying a message.  Responsive.  Reducing uncertainty.  Extrinsic.  Sometimes.

As if a balance of scales.  A fluid diagram – flow chart.  Internal at the individual end, external at the communicative social.  Between are many pages, many possible sounds.

If days go by.  When days go by.  After days without a feeling of spillage, a “seems” – the experience, for this writer, of unexpurgated, unconventional intrinsic release – that is, writer’s personal experience (a complexity of interactions – organism with environment and others) there ensues a kind of illness, like constipation, like perpetrated violence or censorship, like oppression – that, unless a leakage is allowed, some systemic crack, a private valve – writer risks implosion.  (Say – depression, frustration, resentment, anger).  Holding a forest beast under the lake.

Slipping out and away, writer beast finds a crevice or hollow, cavern or plain in which, from whence, he or she can reduce uncertainty, verbalizing observations and ideas.  As if life is the laboratory that would go unmarked and unnoticed without jotting tallies on a page.

Writing it out – writing in – a labyrinth.

Taking up the ball-point pen, dragging it along the surface of clean paper, is like turning the tap.

Hiss and sputter – tubes finding matter or substance, inciting energy – then flow.

 

I write about heaven and hell, the monsters here to there.  Of inscribing itself, the requirements of entity and imagined self or other.  The many, the few, and the plants and the beasts.  What air.  In the woods and the desert, the mind.  The heart with its loves and its rage.  Perpetual fears and the virus of mayhem.  I write about her and the children, of friendships and evil and time.  About death, about life, about learning.  In senses, in theories, in words.

It’s not difficult, I’ve just done it.  And you have provided the meaning, already.  Each term stimulating your “abouts,” descriptions and definitions, the semantics.  I craft words your eyes and ears compose commentaries to.  Little point to my telling.

Yet some of you read differently, perhaps listening.  Maybe wonder the about.  How it comes to be, what is signified for me, and why just so?

 

Creates conversation.  Your doctor can doll out the pills you receive and absorb, internalizing into your existent system.  Your god may tell you what you should do.  Your boss indicates how you should do it and when, friends and family surround you to be.

Not I.  I don’t want it to work quite like that.  I am spinning no story for you to follow along, no pattern upheld to your measure.  Writing it out in the labyrinth of language, I mean for exchange, for a wander – we enter, we leave the deposits we find, discover and fashion with so many hands, so many eyes, ubiquitous ears.

Write it out writing in, in the reading together, again, wending our way trading secrets and gems, co-constructing meanings and moods all to the tunes of language.

 

I step out of the water and dry.

The Labyrinth of Language
by Max Black

N Filbert 2012

This has been one of those weeks…children home sick from school, an art show to hang (see here!), school studies, and all the sundries of necessity leaving very little time for nourishing reading and composition.  Needed to set aside some time beginning this day.

Reminded of things…

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, WritingLeave a comment

arbitrary views of aging posts on my site somehow meandered me into this…

and I like it!

Ronald Sukenick

http://bweal474.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/postmodern-fiction-paper-21.pdf

(I still can’t find that masterful essay “The New Tradition in Fiction” by him I so want to share with all of you)

you can find it in here!

I’m Learning

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing5 Comments

Within the architecture of participation, she asked for plausible promise.  More is different, she said.  I was learning a new society.  Worlds become foreign in very small missteps.  I am learning.

It’s never one-to-one.  Each encounter multiplies complexity.  Even the same.  Identity remains to be found.  Only hints and surmisings.

In that look I believed I had found you.  I suppose I did, and so many, pronouns always plural.

We disparage our language its labyrinths.  Drowning in oceans of context.  Each arriving a  slipping away.

How else might it be true?

“Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say.”

– Lyn Hejinian –

*phrases lifted from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody

The Pleasures of Reading : An Aspect : Multiplying Translations

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy1 Comment

The Pleasure of Reading

In other words (than what?  than which?) we all of us are readers, all of us writers.

That is a pleasure.

And all of us, always, doing both.  Simultaneously.

 

Speaking of my textbooks (were we?) – information sciences, developmental and behavioral psychology, reference services, librarianship / and the research to the side – physics, evolutionary biology, neuro- and cognitive sciences / my pleasures – novels, poems, stories, others’ blogs, visual, aural, literary artifacts / my relational – wife, children, family, friends, society, culture – gestures and vibes and dialogues and signs / my “self” – sensations, perceptions, formulations of these, reformulations, adjustments and maneuvers.

In other words, at all times, I am reading, even if only my lack of memorable dreams, or pulses and breaths.  And writing it all in actions, movements, responses, adjustments of speaking and writing and making.

It is a metaphor, obviously.  Perhaps.

 

Roman Jakobsen purported that “all meaning is a form of translation, and multiple translation (polysemy) is the rule rather than the exception.”  (I am translating his text just now into another con-text).

Wolfgang Iser’s (perhaps, anyway insofar as I am translating it here) concept of actual text (text as it is recorded by an author) and virtual text (actual text as read by a reader).

This is an aspect of the deep living pleasures of reading/writing for me.

 

An author/speaker/artist/scientist/mother/etc. has an urge or sensation – a possibility of action/behavior/message/idea (a virtual text) and translates it through multiple processes and levels of activity through some medium into an actual text/painting/utterance/experiment/recorded idea/sound, etc.  There it is in the real world – a physical artifact in time and space – added – if only for a moment.  Transforming (simultaneously) its maker into a recipient (translating a now existent text/sound/behavior/gesture/sculpture/experience for him or herself) and if any witness/participant/auditor/recipient or reader is in his or her environment they are simultaneously interacting (via translation through their own tools, language, perceptions, sensations, mood, etc) with the actual text, writing a virtual text (translating) of their own.

And it goes on.  And can be done innumerable times, this process, whether using an identical actual text over and over, or simply writing/reading life as it occurs, making it occur.

 

Paul Ricouer:  “stories are models for the redescription of the world.”  Possibly.  Or at least redescriptions (translations) of models for redescription.

Iser: “the relative indeterminacy of a text allows a spectrum of actualizations…literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves…the reader receives it by composing it.”

 

Language, action, behavior as possibilities rather than certainties.

 

So that I can encounter with all I’ve encountered/experienced an actual text by psychologist Jerome Bruner translating these very quotes and contents with all he has experienced and translate it with the multiple translations of family life and being a human organism and novels and pains, poems and stories, paintings and laws, translated with data and education, emotions and animals, translating with you and a computer, internet, digits and bits, translating into…

a great pleasure of reading is writing reading

or, “a writer’s (reader’s) greatest gift to a reader (writer) is to help him become a better writer (reader)”

– Jerome Bruner (parentheses mine).

 

literary texts as “epiphanies of the ordinary”

-James Joyce-

Semantics

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy4 Comments

Semantics

Are words the poison?  The inevitable, unavoidable miscommunication?  75-80% of communication is “nonverbal,” yet according to the American Library Association even a corpse is a “document.”

What is it with semantics?  Is it sickness, like some original stain in brains such as ours – a terminal disease called “fabrication of meaning”?  “Second Sight”?

So that an arm movement, a particular gait, an expiration or whittled scar in rock will all be given significance?  All some addition, complexiting, a superadded content?

What is this penchant?  From where does it come?

It looks like the survival mechanism we think of (signify) as “prediction,” i.e. guesswork.

If we can surmise, invent, fantasize possible leads or outcomes…we’d have a better shot at preparing for it.

We make stories.

Often this is paranoia.

It’s the avoidance and terror of death.

Guess a metaphor for every existing moment, action, thing…and possibly you will survive it…know what’s coming and how to defend against or wriggle past.

Therefore, an alphabetical letter like a post-it note on possibilities, a warning-sign for danger, a diagram of fear.

Her head turns quickly – off put?  Offended?  Alert to me?  Tuned in?

Context.

Octagonal red sign at the corner…I stop.

Top sphere illuminated…I go.

“Crack!” I shift, swivel, flee.

One finger extended, my chest concaves, shoulders furl.

Drip, drip, my mouth begins to salivate.

Anticipation, desire, intuition, knowledge – all spawned in this erratic, sensationalized guessing.

Charlatans and spoofs, all of us.

 

“Interpreters,” “attributers of meaning” – he/she was so wrong, he/she isn’t listening,

hears, sees, feels what he/she wants (or doesn’t want – desiring either way) to.

 

Words are not the problem.  Signs, symbols, gestures, tones and moods – not the problems.

 

It’s the fear of death, our innate paranoia, our strict steeped instinct for survival.

 

Apathy might cure it.  Certainly suicide.  Some embracing of the facts.

 

It remains to be seen.

 

It will look like destruction.

 

These are only words.

N Filbert 2012

Nothing, In General

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

In which case, he writes, for life.  As if asked about nothing, in general.  There never has to be a reason, what is called illusion or delusion, he can’t remember which.  He is at a loss, that much he knows, unsure if “at” is place or time, so often hand in hand.

Writing.

He could just as well be painting, singing, creating some other cultural artifact, and all offered up in an aether, but he’s not.  He writes, for life, in this case, as if in general, about nothing.  Which is everything also, for him – writing, at a loss – the nowhere now here is.

The words, like images, serve.  Serve to draw out and reflect.  Like actions or encounters, self-portraits or redundancies.  In other words, those would be.  In writing he extends his veins and neural works, outstrips his body into text – an alchemy of sorts – and then relates to them as if an other, at a loss, in what he sees, or reads, as the case may be, words as much an image when inscribed.

Which are now here, which were not, because he’s writing.  Which, in fact, he does, at a loss –  moments so much like chaos, say “entropy” – for the offering of something indicative, external, outside – as if verifying a place and a time, i.e. organizing a disorder, finding a nowhere.

Similar to nothing, in general, become something, in particular.  Like an idea, or an atom, an interpreted emotion, or a god.  Each action a creation like an assortment of patterns on chaos.  Like nothing in general, or everything in particular.

At which point, in which case, he writes.

N Filbert 2012

Singing in the Rain

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing4 Comments

“No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions”

-Rene Char-

“There was something tragic in fighting the borders, the heroism of shortcomings, the panic of passion”

-Bruno Schulz via Jonathan Safran Foer-

 

            It may be raining, very gently, while whispering its verdant perfume, just behind me, just outside my open window.  If it’s not, I’m pretending it is, and the world is agreeable.

I’ve been reading an older essay by Susan Sontag entitled “The Aesthetics of Silence,” an article from which I feel a chiding exposure of invented artistic double binds, a renewed challenge for integration and expression (the ways rain shares), and primarily the pleasure of yet another perspective.

Like “the heroism of shortcomings” from Bruno Schulz as carved out of pages by Jonathan Safran Foer in The Tree of Codes – the powers of self-negation and its failure in the likes of Kafka and Kleist, Jabes and Joubert, Artaud and Rimbaud, Blanchot and Beckett and so on.  Those great unsilent successes of botched commitments to silence.

As emptiness might only occur in a context of fullness.

 

Being so glad that I am writing this by hand, as I do with every document I create, usually quite uncertain of what is inside each letter until the systems of nervous muscles begin to work.  The quotes above, for instance, copied from handwritten notecards copied from marginal notes and underlines copied from the midst of other authors reworked texts, and then copied again here with the proviso that perhaps in forming it yet another time, by hand, something missed before gains another change to arise.

I am thankful that writing is quiet.

Although I used to use the typewriter’s beat to edit my lines of poetry.

And I’m sure the background music, passing cars, and sounds of squirrels and wind and children all have their effect.

 

I also appreciate seeing the whole page, battling mood-related or arthritically scribble script versus partial views on-screen and standardized formations of fonts.  I enjoy those bloggers who scan their manuscripts and writings but don’t trust your powers of vision compared to the particular words I end up selecting by the time I reach the machine.  No need to add difficulty to difficulty, in this case.

Still, you’d probably know something more (or at least differently) were you opening up an envelope gathered from your mailbox with this folded up inside.

 

Like silence or a thicket of questions, rain or a grumbling stomach, everything comes round to context.  Persons embodied, embedded in an active variable surround expressing through media, tools, machines, to wherever, whomever, however you are reading, deciphering, translating, decoding, interpreting, creating yet again in another contextual universe of another time.

 

Such a dynamic endeavor.  Our artifacts, messages, calls and displays.

Panicked passion, tragic fighting of borders, heroic shortcomings these.  Aesthetics of silence.  All.

With hearts to sing in our questioning thickets.

 

Sing.