They're Just Words Anyway

Do you ever get so tired sitting at your computer that you don't have enough energy to get up and get ready for bed, so instead you just sit there for half an hour, playing text twist and being tired to the point of immobility? Well, I'm there now, so I'm going to take the next half hour or so to write down a thought I've been having (the act of which will be delightfully ironic in a minute).

I was listening to Talk of the Nation or something on the radio on the way home from work earlier this week, and the show was about weblogs. The guest had just done a study on some aspect of blogging, and he was arguing that rather that being a fad, it was going to settle itself comfortably into the fabric of our culture. He said this was because it fit in with the human need to express ourselves - to externalize our thoughts. People have always kept journals and loved to tell stories and share experiences, and here blogging is another channel through which that need can be satisfied.

Okay, great. That concept intrigued me enough to occupy my mind for the rest of the ride home - the externalization of thought. I was thinking of how I needed to share this idea with my creative writing class, and how we could relate it to the poetry and stories we'd been studying, this idea that here were not just words on a page, but the manifestations of the contents of some one individual person's head, the result of that human urge to connect and communicate.

Maybe a day later, I read an article that complicated that whole idea, but complicated it in a way that infinitely pleased me because nothing really worth thinking about should be simple enough that it can be entirely digested in a twenty-minute car ride (unless it's a to-do list or a grocery list - any kind of list, really - which is perfect for those little slivers of mental down time). So anyway, this article. It was about two philosophers studying the relationship between the brain and the mind, that is, they are interested in how the functioning of the brain organ, the tissue and neurons and blood and guts, is involved in the thoughts that register in the consciousness, the images and sensations that define reality for each of us.

It was a great article that delved into the past, present, and future of this brain/mind puzzle, but one paragraph in particular struck a chord. In it, one of the philosophers (Paul, was his name - the other was Pat, they're married and Canadian and it's all quite idyllic and pretty to think so and all that) emphatically rejected the idea that language and thought are one - that the language we use reflects thought's innate structure. I think this idea jumped out at me because I remember over and over again sensing this same disconnect - between the structures of thought and language - but had never been able to articulate it so well.

Particularly, I remember sitting down to write papers in college, and having an entire concept plotted out in my head - whole webs of interconnected ideas ready to demonstrate my erudite grasp of the material, and always ending up quite disappointed with the way the language inadequately expressed what had been the contents of my head by clumsily forcing the delicate, living, malleable ideas into rigid sentences and paragraphs. It was difficult to prioritize what part of an idea should come first and which should follow, when in their though-form, the two were inextricably woven together, and articulating the dynamic nature of their relationship was the whole point. But to verbalize it, I had to freeze it, in a sense, which killed it, kind of the way they say you have to kill something to dissect it, which is why you shouldn't analyze the poems you really love. Anyway, the thing that frustrated me about writing these papers was that as vivid and precise as language can be, each word is still a discrete point, each sentence must by definition be finite and independent, and sometimes that's just not good enough. Where my thoughts (the worthwhile ones at least) tend to have breadth and depth and generally operate in three-dimensional space, language seems very flat and 2D - like you get forward and backward, but there's no room to expand around that space to fill out the gaps.

So, I wondered, where does Paul's insistence that language does an inadequate job of accurately reflecting our ideas as they exist, whole and perfect, in our consciousness fit in with the apparent necessary externalization of thought that the guy on NPR was promoting? Why are humans apparently addicted to the use of this fundamentally flawed and ultimately impotent machinery? I figure it's probably because this language is the best form of communication we've got at the moment, the best we've ever known. So we make do (due? why do I feel like I've never actually written out that phrase before? Oh yeah, it's late and I'm tired), and expect that other people will humor us, smile and nod even when they don't know what we're really getting at, and hope that at least the general drift will flounders its way across the vast expanse stretching between our consciousness and the next guy's.


Postscript: So, as I reread this before I post it (fishing for those egregious typos and spelling mistakes that only seem to show up in posts written after midnight) I've started thinking about what would happen to literature if language suddenly became obsolete? Without the need to do the whole externalization of thought thing - if we can just do a direct connect instead - would written language die out entirely? No more books or poems produced after, say, the year 2426 when we finally figured it out? How sad. I mean, where would all the English teachers go?)

Post Postscript: I don't usually write long, serious posts like this. And do you know why? It's because I'm usually not confident enough in my ability to articulate the Big Idea I'd want to write about in a way that was at all transparent and communicable to a reader; I recognize and yield to the very phenomenon I just spent this post trying to describe, because I'd rather appreciate the thought as it is - kept whole and perfect in my head - than see it mangled on the page. And maybe that's the way it should stay. Hm?