Tag Archives: linguistics

W. R. Rodgers and Rumi On Language

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Language is my forte.  To a fault, in some sense, “too much of a good thing” at times.  But I’ve learned that words can be hollow, merely formulaic to manipulate people into mirroring my performance-art of an inauthentic life.  The W. R. Rodgers poem excerpt I shared yesterday so elegantly described how language can decay and even die, becoming what is called a “dead language.”  And Rodgers singled out politicians in the cited poem, accusing them of falsifying language to accomplish selfish ends: 

Words are “now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.” 

(PLEASE NOTE, AM HAVING TROUBLE WITH EDITOR; COULD NOT ITALICIZE ABOVE QUOTE)

This morning I discovered relevant wisdom from the 13th century Persian mystic Rumi who emphasized the importance of living a dual life, abiding in and respecting the “false” world that Rodgers had in mind and another where authentic moments are available here and there.  He described this “in-between” residence as a “small market between towns.”  He presents a solitude that one will find there, which the mystics and many artists are very familiar 

A small market between towns 

There’s a town where the soul is fed, where love hears truth and thrives, and another town that produces lies that degrade and starve love. Your voice is a small market set up between the two towns. Goods arrive from both directions, flimsy, fake items and honestly made, wholehearted tools and wares. Some travelers immediately know which is which. Some voices open a shop and spend sixty years cheating customers, gossiping when they leave, and flattering women to get their attention. Others weary of the marketplace altogether and rarely go there. 

Rumi 
Version by Coleman Barks, in “The Soul of Rumi” 
HarperCollins, 2001 

Ideologues are Scary!

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Another young man has been arrested for allowing Muslim extremism to enthrall his grasp on reality. conspiring to bomb the White House because of the government’s attacks on Islamist extremists. Christopher Lee Cornell looks like another typical American young man who for has stymied his personal angst and alienation by affiliating with Muslim extremism. News reports are often reporting similar stories of young men…and women even…who are trying to join Isis or other Muslim extremist groups. Alienation and anger appears to describe most of them.

But just because of anger and alienation, why would anyone have to glom onto any idea as “crazy” as violent extremism and bring upon themselves and others so much pain? It is as if they sell their soul to gain something they believe in fully, with all of their heart and life, even to the point they are willing to die and to kill others. Their desperation takes “belief” or “faith” to a level that is beyond the pale. This development in ours and other cultures illustrates the appeal and the danger of ideas. Investing inordinately in any idea, or set of ideas, often brings the temptation of taking these ideas too seriously, very much related to taking oneself too seriously.  When one does this, he/she has become an “ideologue” which Eric Hoffer described decades ago, “The True Believer.”

But this illustrates the specious nature of all ideas. Yes, we look at this young man and other extremists and shake our head and call them “nuts.” But even our middle-class, educated, and “christian” ideas merit scrutiny occasionally.  For an “idea” is not the “thing-in-itself” ,but is so often taken to be.   When this happens, we have failed to follow the Buddhist wisdom, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

Of course, I am not exempt from risking this peril. In this venue I trot our “ideas” myself, ideas reflecting a belief system and personal identity which I take very seriously. I myself am full of ideas and certainly have made an investment in them. But now I am old enough that I see very clearly these are only “ideas” and therefore merit caution lest I take them “too” seriously. And if I should do so, it will because my ego is influencing to overestimate by wisdom. You will know that I have done this when you discover that there is a Pay Pal button on this page with a request for donations! Or, when you discover that I have somehow found out your mailing address and are suddenly harassing you with this “stuff” in your mailbox. Or when you somehow hear that I’ve been arrested for “seet preaching” this stuff on my neighborhood streets, perhaps with the additional charge of “public indecency!”

One has become an ideologue when he/she takes “pet ideas” and puts so much energy in them that perspective is lost, failing to realize that these ideas are important to him/her but will not necessarily be important to other people. When that happens, these ideas….many of which might even contain “noble truths”…can become a hammer that is used to bludgeon other people and convert them to our way of viewing the world. The root issue of an ideologue is profound alienation, so profound that there is an inordinate need to proselytize and get others to believe the same way so to alleviate our existential loneliness  Ideas, though an intrinsic part of what makes us human, often become a weapon with which we brutalize other people, often under the guise of some “ultimate truth.” The classic ideologue has in mind making others join his “tribe,” with the ultimate goal of conquering the whole world. This mind-set in my youth was often expressed with the call to “win the world to Jesus” which I now realize was merely a heart-felt desire to make the world “just like me.” And that desperation cannot be blamed on Jesus, or even the Christian tradition. It must be laid at the foot of our “human-ness” as the human need for affiliation, if unchecked, can lead to extremism.

Loneliness is painful. And subscribing to the prevailing ideas of our culture is important in our youth and helps us achieve an identity and take comfort in belonging to our tribe. But at some point we have to grow up and be willing to look at our ideas…even the one’s we deem beyond question…and begin to seek affiliation with some “thing” which if followed can lead us in the direction of being more inclusive in our approach to life.

(An afterthought: Just moments ago, I came across this wisdom from Stephen Hawking in a post on Face Book: the greatest danger to knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.)

 

 

 

Words can Kill…or at Least Deaden!

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Blogging the past three years has been such a wonderful experience for me. One of the nice things is that it has put me in touch with interesting people from around the world people who have books, movies, and experiences to share and thus broaden my life.  But yesterday, I received a comment via email from a “real-time” friend who I only recently met which further stimulated my thinking about words and their relationship to reality; or, the converse of that notion, “words and their lack of relationship to reality.” This person is a local artist/musician and is preoccupied with a similar concern of mine—words and their “meaning” they have in the depths of the heart, a “meaning” which is completely missed if we live only on the surface of life and take words…and the rest of our experience…only on a surface level. The following is an excerpt from Martha’s email:

A book I look at from time to time by Leonard Shlain would no doubt interest you, Lewis if you have not already read it! “The Alphabet vs. the Goddess” where this binariness is explored throughout history. He presents things in a left-brain right-brain paradigm and would probably agree that labeling was the end of beauty. I am fascinated by brain scans of children when taught that a color has a name. Can you imagine simply experiencing the color blue, all through your body and senses, before you were told that this experience was associated with the label “blue?” The scans show the brain tingling in all its parts and portions, lit up! When scanned later, once the label “blue” is assigned, the brain activity becomes very localized to the verbal areas, and I dare say, the experience is also tempered down. I just don’t want anyone’s light to be under a bushel and my mission in life is to wake up those experiential aspects that true artistry awakens, no matter the medium. (http://marthashepp.com)

 Martha’s thoughts brought to the table an additional dimension to my post of yesterday, illustrating how that there is a sense in which words can kill…or at least deaden…and keep us on the surface level which in the Christian tradition is known as “the letter of the law.” The brain scan research she referred to is just stunning.

Martha’s observation brought to my mind a marvelous poem on this subject by Carl Sandburg, a poem which captures poetically the “diaphragms of flesh negotiating the word”–attaching a subjective experience to a word which has currency “out there”. But this experience, there on the threshold of consciousness, introduces us to a “verbal order” (i.e.l patriarchy) which some of us spend the rest of our lives finding the courage to lay aside…in some sense…and allow the words to have meaning again.

 PRECIOUS MOMENTS by Carl Sandburg

Bright vocabularies are transient as rainbows.

Speech requires blood and air to make it.

Before the word comes off the end of the tongue,

While diaphragms of flesh negotiate the word,

In the moment of doom when the word forms

It is born, alive, registering an imprint—

Afterward it is a mummy, a dry fact, done and gone.

The warning holds yet: Speak now or forever hold your peace.

Ecce home had meanings: Behold the Man! Look at

          Him! Dying he lives and speaks!

(NOTE: If you check out Martha’s web site—where you will find some of her art and clips from her music…make sure you read her “Artist’s Statement.”)

Steven Pinker and Human Opportunity in Science

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Steven Pinker is a psychologist and linguist who I feel is one of the best thinkers present in American culture today. In a recent edition of The New Republic, he argues that science has given us an opportunity to totally change the world for the better and that in spite of how it often appears, great strides are being taken toward that end.

But, in this article (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities), he commits the sin of irreligion, that being the sin of approaching reality with a perspective other than that of “literarylew.”! He argues that science is creating opportunities for us, opportunities that are often gravely hampered by childish, self-serving obscurantism often voiced most vehemently by the religious. He argues that this “dishonesty” is often present even in science itself when scientists are unwilling to be self-critical about their own pet theories. Here is one paragraph in which he makes this point:

The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and super- stitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.

The acquisition of knowledge is “hard.” I would attribute this to the phenomena of resistance, that tendency to not want to see things other than we see them already. And he clearly sees the relevance of this to science, the tendency for scientists to succumb to “subjective certainty” and fail to look critically at their own perspective.

And though he does not spell this out as pointedly as he could, the same could be said of religion and faith. Yes, spirituality also usually falls victim to this human need for “subjective certainty” and we end up believing only what we want to believe, not daring to consider what is obvious to everyone else—our faith is only a form of self-indulgence. And when faith devolves into that narcissistic morass, it fails to offer a redemptive influence in the culture. One writer, George Marsden, described this as the “cultural captivity” of religion. And, if one reads the gospels critically, one can see that Jesus saw this clearly about the religion of the day, calling them “hypocrites” which actually means “actors.” Those whose faith is wholly in the grip of contemporary culture can only be “actors”, having a “form of godliness but denying the power thereof.” Thus I close again with the pithy observation of Shakespeare on this note, “When love (or religion) begins to sicken and decay/It useth an enforced ceremony/There are no tricks in plain and simple faith/But hollow men, like horses hot at hand/Make gallant show and promise of their mettle.”

“Mind Your Words”

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Freedom from the past, or anything else for that matter always comes in the very instant you stop thinking about it. (Mike Dooley)

That notion will give you pause. It does me. This is basic, garden-variety Norman Vincent Peale who I used to disparage so readily. But, I now see so clearly how the trajectory of my life has been guided by self-talk, that subtle pattern of speech that we don’t really pay much attention to and do not think as being important. But it is. I think it was Jesus who said, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Another thoughtful person whose name escapes me said, “Our thoughts become us.”

Technically, this means that if I wake up in the morning and think like Donald Trump, I will become a very wealthy man. Well, I don’t take it that literally but I do believe that if I suddenly had the focus that he does on the financial world, and had his keen insight into its machinations, my financial circumstances would probably improve. But, “Oh me of little faith.” I think it is a little late for that kind of transformation and that is not really where my values lie. But, I do think it is important to pay attention to the thought patterns that we allow to predominate and work on changing those that might be counter-productive.

Two other thoughts on the power of words merit attention. Shakespeare noted, “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so” and Henry Ford, of all people, said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, either way you are right.”

 

“The Giant Sucking Sound” of Words

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You ever lost a job? You ever been “let go”, or “not needed any longer” or “fired” or “down-sized.” It is not fun. I’d like to recommend you read a blog from (http://architectofthejungle.wordpress.com/) which describes the writer’s emotional turmoil to her husband having been “down-sized.” And in her description, she demonstrates her skillful artistry with words which is my real focus here. She uses imagery that evokes experience. Words can readily “denote” in which they merely convey information but only in a prosaic fashion. And prose certainly has its place in language. But when you run across someone who can write with artistry, he/she plies wizardry and can evoke from the depths of your heart an experience which is an essential part of words being, “fitly spoken.”

When she heard the words “down-sized” fall from her husband’s lips, she reported she felt, “as if I’ve been plunged into a dream state, sucked in through the lips of a horrible word. I’ve never thought of words as capable of gobbling me up, but some of them are just that gruesome, just that hungry.” She then writes of the fear of disappearing, “entirely into the belly of this most hideous modern verb.” And she describes how this emotional experience resonated with the whole of her life and she realized that in some fashion she had been living only on the periphery of life, noting “to this day, I hadn’t known (a truth) that only lived in my head. How could I have known it (this truth) yet to make its (truth’s) heroic descent into the whole me? I couldn’t have known….I feel the truth had entered an undiscovered region.” (Note: I have deliberately edited selectively here to make my point about words and truth. Please read her blog to get the context.)

Now part of me wanted to ask, “Now how in the hell can a mere world like ‘down-size” create such a tumult in someone’s heart?” Sure, it is a scary notion as no one likes losing his/her job or having one’s spouse suffer the misfortune. But, to be “sucked in through the lips of the word “down-size”???? And, how in the hell could you even come up with the notion of disappearing “into the belly” of any damn word???? And, how could this anguish lead to a descent into “the whole of me” and “what in the hell is ‘the whole of me’”? The “whole of me” why, shit, I am just me, there is no “whole of me” other than just me. Why not just say, “This really rattled my cage!” Or, “Gosh, this upset me.”

But, she was being a gifted writer and she used words and images which conveyed nuances which just grabbed me, much like she had been grabbed by her husband’s experience. Her words “evoked” an experience with me which is what good writing will do. A simple narrative merely narrates and gives report but a “word fitly spoken,” a dynamic, vital, breathing word will always evoke and penetrate the heart. (I heard someone quote Kafka last night in a movie, “Literature is the axe that cracks the frozen sea inside.)
And we all need to be “sucked through the lips” of a word or words every now and then. If we listen, and if we read and read carefully, we will learn things which that “giant sucking sound” has to offer.
Let me share a little bit about T. S. Eliot and his awareness of this compelling, chaotic beauty of language:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(From Burnt Norton in The Four Quartets)

 

Language and our Unity with God

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I’ve always loved words and early in school discovered I had a facility for them. I had no understanding of it at the time, but in my early development I was experientially discovering that our alphabet is “26 toy soldiers that guard us from the rim of the abyss.” (Nikos Kazantzakis) My memories of those years, especially in the first grade where these “toy soldiers” first befriended me, are kind of murky. But I know that it was a stressful time.

Late in grade school the French language came to this little central Arkansas country school. Now why in the hell it was French I’ll never know. I suppose the legislature appropriated money for the schools to help pull the state out of the stone age and a government bureaucrat told the school board, “Now you’uns need a fur’en language.” The superintendent must have said, “Why hell, Why not French?” So I fumbled with the French language and was fascinated that in another country, far off from my little provincial world, people made different sounds for things that I used English for. I was bewildered. And I guess this was the dawning of some suspicion that reality might not be as rigid as I had been taught, that there was more fluidity in reality than my tribe really wanted me to know about.

So I took French often in high school also though I really didn’t learn much beyond “Paylay vue francay” and “Ooh ay la bibliotech?” And I continued in college as I had to meet a language requirement but still did not become fluent in the language. I found it interesting but could never immerse myself in it, I could never “think” in the foreign tongue, and so fluency never came my way. And since then, I’ve dabbled in Greek and Spanish and have read extensively in the field of linquistics. But when I have traveled abroad, I’ve always had to rely on “the kindness of strangers” or my wife’s greater finesse with other languages.

But instead of my awkwardness and lack of finesse with other languages, over the decades I have come to love words, to love language, and to delight in learning intricacies of other languages. Swimming in the blog-o-sphere has whetted my appetite as many new friends have introduced me to foreign concepts and provided criticism of own “well-worn words and ready phrases that built comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken).

I’ve said all of that to get to this: Twenty-five years ago I had the first real glimpse into the heart of language, seeing for the first time how it is not merely something we use but is something we breath, something we live in, and something that shapes us. I was reading about an oriental philosopher…or perhaps Alan Watt (as those were my “Alan Watts years) and the author pointed that in a particular Eastern language one who observes a book will say, “The book is seen,” whereas in the West we will say, “I see the book.” This anecdote so vividly illustrated how English reflects the Western detachment from the world and the tendency to, therefore, see the world as something to deal with objectively. This facilitates seeing the world as something to possess, something to exploit, something to “develop.”

And it also explains why Western Christianity has this view of God as someone who is “far off”, so removed from human life, and so inaccessible. Yes, Christians teach that in Jesus God was “made nigh by the blood of the cross” but their belief system reflects the insidious belief that he is still “far off” and needing to be appeased by believing and behaving the right way. They don’t understand that “the kingdom is within.” They don’t understand their unity with God.

Meaning and Meaninglessness in Spirituality

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Richard Rohr writes powerfully and eloquently about the need to live in the domain of “duality” and recognize the specific relevance of the notion in the realm of spirituality. We do “see through a glass darkly” as the Apostle Paul once noted because this world we live in, which we daily imbibe (usually without any conscious awareness) is made up of infinite complexity, teeming with paradox stemming from this “duality.” One simple example is merely a favorite notion of mine, “We are not what we know ourselves to be. We are much more than that.” But being mere mortals, clothed in flesh, we have had to carve for ourselves an identity fashioned from the ephemeral so that we can function in this beautiful world, a world which…ephemeral thought it might be…is God’s creation.

As we pursue this path which Rohr and others suggest, we must “wrestle with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot) and thus we dive headfirst into this maelstrom of ambiguity, confusion, doubt, and fear. This is because, here in this land banished from conscious awareness by our “common-sense” day-to-day world, we discover “meaning” and learn that “meaning” inevitably taunts us with “meaninglessness.”

Let me explain why with a simple philosophical maneuver. Imagine a world in which everything was colored blue. In that world, “blue” would therefore not exist for “blue” has no meaning without its complement, “not-blue.” Asking someone to pay attention to “blue” would be like asking a fish to see water.

And the whole of language lies in a similar matrix. However, I must insist that I don’t spent a lot of time wondering about the meaning of most words that I use! If I did, I would soon be swallowed up by an abyss and cease to be functional! I thank the good Lord for this neurological gift as some are not so fortunate. But some words I do deign to explore…to name just a few…god, love, truth, and “right”… and most importantly, in my case, deign to explore the word “Lewis”, the origin of Literary “Lew”. With each of these terms, which I have deemed significant, their complement (including opposite) has to be considered in order for the words to have meaning.

Let me close with an excerpt from W. H. Auden about this treacherous journey. The “Star of Nativity” is speaking his Auden’s Christmas Oratorio:

All those who follow me are led
Onto that glassy mountain where are no
Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread,
Where knowledge but increases vertigo;
Those who pursue me take a twisting lone
To find themselves immediately alone
With savage water or unfeeling stone,
In labyrinths where they must entertain
Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

Pupplies and Flowers all Over the Place

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It was decades ago when a young tyke’s mother shared these words that her son had just recently spun together. I was just stunned as the image was so compelling and this was made even more so by the fact that the lad was no more than three or four years old at most.

This child’s world was still pristine and on a particular morning he had awakened to an intense awareness of the world’s beauty, later describing it to his mother as “puppies and flowers all over the place.” Now when I heard these words, I had long-since been jaded into submission by my culture but these words were evocative, they were “words fitly spoken” and they reached into my heart. They still do today and I have a hunch they will do the same with some of my readers.

I can faintly recall some of that pristine beauty of the world but only faintly. Very faintly. I think that very early on I had that beauty taken from me; or, to be honest, I willingly abdicated and opted to imbibe of the “well-words and ready phrases that built comfortable walls against the wilderness” that my world offered. It is always easier to do that than to maintain one’s reality, stick to an inherent virtue, and be true to one ’s self.

And look what that kid was doing that morning. He was having an intense, subjective moment and he was able to capture it and put it into words. That was a poetic moment. And here I want to share Archibald MacLeish’s description of poetic moments like that:

WORDS IN TIME

Bewildered with the broken tongue
of wakened angels in our sleep
then lost the music that was sung
and lost the light time cannot keep!
There is a moment when we lie
Bewildered, wakened out of sleep,
when light and sound and all reply:
that moment time must tame and keep.
That moment like a flight of birds
flung from the branches where they sleep,
the poet with a beat of words
flings into time for time to keep.