I have been thinking about language as a tool or human technology for some time now and reading what others have said about it, the philosophers, visionaries and poets. Often I am so excited by these new ideas I have read that I can't stop myself from recounting them in detail to my patient companion at breakfast or on our morning walk across town. I say 'patient' because while this is the forest that I love to wander in, hers is quite different, it is full of stories and images which she weaves together in paintings. I cannot begin to fathom how she does this, but the paintings keep appearing like daily miracles before me. I suppose she feels the same way about my idea paintings.
And so we have worked out a way to sing our own songs to each other that is very companionable. Occasionally, it becomes a dialogue. Recently, she suggested illustrating a book with a painting of each of the thinkers surrounded by their icons of their ideas. Marshall McLuhan looking back at a Gutenberg style printing press from the buzzing voices of electronic consciousness; or Henri Bergson holding high a lantern as he peers down the narrow tunnel of human knowledge and wonders if that is all there is, or Simone Weil contemplating the beauty of a boat turned into the winds and waves and balanced by a solitary figure leaning on the tiller. I cannot imagine what she would imagine in her illustrations but there is something deeply true about the way the ideas are spun out of images of concrete human experience--the experiences of those thinkers.
Yesterday at supper, after a long bus ride into Abu Dhabi and then back again, I explained with some glee my day's research into theories and thinking about the origin of human language.
There is the continuous model, I said, where human language evolves over time from similar vocalizations in other species, and then there is the discontinuous model, where, according to Noam Chomsky, a generative grammar appears all of a sudden in human genetic evolution, rather like a crystal forming. Chomsky thinks that grammar is underneath all languages, that it is intrinsically human and that is essentially different from animal sounds. There is still a debate and no real way to say either way. Its a bit like playing hockey with an imaginary puck: it could be here, it could be there. I don't think Chomsky is on the right track, I went on, because human language is much more complex than something which can be explained only by genetics. You can't begin to understand human language without taking into account communal and cultural evolution (yes, thank you Julian Jaynes). It doesn't simply just appear as an ability in the vacuum of an abstract individual human; it emerges from the more and more complex engagements of human beings with each other. It appears because they begin to do it among themselves.
My partner looked at me vacantly, as if i were describing the fine points of transmission maintenance.
Look, I said, why is it that you can trust a cat's purr or a bird's preening chirping to mean exactly what it says, but you cannot trust a human being saying 'I love you' in the same way? Deception, self-deception and pretence those human skills of relationship--that is the real context for the origin of human language. Language allows us to extend ourselves in ways that are not instinctual and predictable but rather original and creative (I will give you this sharpened stone in return for that spear) and constantly shifting; and therefore it creates a complex network that is not symmetrical and balanced like the beehive or the ant hill but like...well human society chaotic and brilliant always appearing to hurtle out of control. We are a mess compared to bees or ants because we are so mobile, our words link us to things and to other people in ever-expanding, complex ways.
What about the Kildare, she asked?
The Kildare?
You know the bird that acts wounded and seems to offer herself to you to catch in order to lead you away from her nest. It's called a distraction display.
And that is why thinking out loud is so important.
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment