Words refer to things. It seems such an innocuous thing to say and yet this apparently simple ‘fact’ transforms the advent of language into a kind of big bang, both a beginning and a catastrophic rupture in the history of our species, and in the history of every individual human being who comes to speak and think in words. It’s enough to make one giggle!
Let’s start with the advent of language as a beginning. In the eyes of many, it marks the birth of homo sapiens. Language is a new kind of technology that appears to enable us to exert influence over things that are not present. We can ask another human to move through space and fetch us something that we are not currently directly in touch with via our physical senses: ‘Please, get me an apple from the fruit bowl next door!’ With the same fellow human, we can hatch a plan to bring about a future event that we are only in touch with via our imagination: ‘Let’s make a crumble tomorrow with the apples that are left!’ Words seem to enable us to transcend the limitations of our temporospatial context and to control the world in which we find ourselves. Anyone who has witnessed the delight that a newly verbal child takes in pointing at and naming features of the world appreciates the intoxicating – and illusory – sense of control that accompanies the acquisition of language. If I know the name for things, I can ask for what I want even if I cannot point at it. Language can point at anything anywhere anytime. A god-like power. Tee-hee!
But now for the advent of language as catastrophic rupture – a little dramatic, maybe, but let’s go with it for now…Before language, what was our relationship to the world of space and time that language supposedly helps us to reach beyond? Can you see the problem? Space and time spring into existence with the advent of language. Words suddenly mean that here is divided from there, now from then, inside from outside, me from you. We begin to experience ourselves as separate observers, brave adventurers and discoverers of the strange world that surrounds us rather than participants in a given world of which we form an integral part. With language, dualism is born, the categorical world of the signifier and the signified, of this and that, of me and not me, of the map and the territory, the body and the soul. We ‘discover’ a world of things extended in space and time, forgetting in the process that these things did not exist as such before the act of naming. If we can imagine ourselves beyond this fall into language, we find an unbounded experience of the world in which we are directly in contact with and part of everything, where the distinction between organism and context dissolves to create a unitary, undivided whole – the eternal now. We find freedom.
To the extent that this imaginative leap is not available to us, in terms of our conscious experience, we remain in our fallen state, a state in which everything is experienced as a category, a fixed and separate thing, knowable only in spatial temporal terms. Like Humpty Dumpty after his great fall in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, all the kings horse and all the kings men (i.e. temporospatial power) cannot put us together again. It is as if from the moment we acquire the strange ability to talk about the world and about ourselves and the apparent power to influence the world by using words, to the extent that we buy into the story our words start to tell, a wall inserts itself between ourselves and everything else. We discover not only that there is a world ‘out there’ that is separate from ourselves but also that there is a vast region inside us which cannot speak itself and which we cannot ever know or, at any rate, that we can never know in the sense of ‘knowing’ that was born with language. It is the discovery – and in a sense the creation – of our utter isolation and solitude. So it is that, in this moment of catastrophe, of identification with the storying of our own language, there is born an intense yearning to know, to be able to put words to everything that, for the time being, is shrouded in darkness. And this yearning is paradoxical because there is a sense in which it is a yearning to transcend the limitations of language through language, to put Humpty Dumpty together again when it is only within the smoke and mirrors of words that this human egg has come to experience itself as ‘broken’.
From another angle, though, language puts us in touch with our uniqueness (our solitude and isolation by another name) and creates the possibility of something called connection. If it were not for the fall into language in the first place, would we ever have consciously experienced connection? If our contact with the world had never been broken off by the fall into language, if it had always remained continuous, unbroken, then it could not have been experienced as contact at all. We would simply be without knowing that we were. This can be fruitfully related to the Christian concept of felix culpa (‘fortunate fall’), which considers the fall into original sin that resulted in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as ‘fortunate’ because it paved the way for humanity to experience the redemptive love of Jesus Christ. Translating this back into philosophical terms, we can say that our fall into language creates the artificial experience of dualism, dividing the human subject in an illusory way from the object that is the world and that this artificial experience is what we refer to when we say ‘consciousness’. This consciousness both cuts us off from the prelapsarian Edenic state in which we knew without knowing that we knew and opens up the possibility of knowing that we know and of a conscious sense of awe and wonder in the face of the mystery of existence and the unanswerable question ‘Why?’ Why should there be anything at all? And with this possibility arises also the possibility of redemption, of a chosen letting go of the artificial dualistic temporospatial distinctions that arise with the fall into language and an embracing of a monistic sense of everything, everywhere, all at once, of our participation in the eternal now. But unlike in the linearity of the Christian version of history (the blissful prelapsarian state, the fall into original sin, the coming of Christ, redemption from original sin, blissful heaven for those who have faith), here we see that in truth we have always been participating in everything, everywhere, all at once, but that we needed to fall into language in order to be able to see this. We must first identify ourselves with the dualistic story of our own languaging in order to be able to disidentify ourselves from it, to see it as story rather than as truth, so that we can then fall into truth, our participation in the unitary nature of all experience. At this point there are no words…
Even so, on we go!This piece started with the apparently uncontroversial statement ‘words refer to things’. It was uncontroversial, I assume, because this is how most of us experience language most of the time, as a tool for pointing to and influencing things ‘out there’ in the world. And even though, by now, I hope this view of language is feeling at least a little problematic, it is undeniably the case that language can work in this way. We can say ‘pass the salt’ with a reasonable expectation that the salt will be passed. But there is another orientation to language and to the world that we call poetry, which works quite differently. Before the poet puts pen to paper, the world of the poem does not exist. The poem does not, therefore, refer to something outside itself. It is not an attempt to say anything other than what it is and that thing that it is, is necessarily unique and unrepeatable. In its own terms there is nothing outside. The poem refers only to itself; it exists as pure story. When writers are asked to explain their work, many respond by saying that the work means exactly what it is otherwise it would have been something else, or that they want every reader to be free to have their own experience of it and for that to be what it means. When writers describe the process of writing, it is also striking that there is often very little sense of authorial control, no sense, again, that the writer starts out with an idea about what it is they are trying to say and then just says it. Rather it seems that the poem arises out of a paradoxical and profound act of listening to what the poem wants to say, almost as if it is the job of the writer to get out of the way to enable the poem to be born. What is it that gives birth to the poem? Ultimately, it is the same thing that gives birth to every single living thing – a unique and evolving relationship within the ‘all’. Each time the poem is read it becomes something new again as it is brought into a reciprocal relationship with another unique reader who is themselves transformed by the encounter. And so perhaps even if it is true to say that ‘in its own terms there is nothing outside the poem’ it is not true to say that the poem has no relationship to anything beyond itself. A good poem does not refer, it resonates. It pulses with the music that permeates the universe. Language, and the consciousness it enables, is not only a snake that seduces us to fall into tragic atomised isolation in space and time it is also the dragon fire in whose flames we can be reborn as a phoenix, a unique poem, one more uniquely resonant incarnation of the infinite interconnected universe. So, maybe all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were not needed at all. Humpty Dumpty didn’t need putting back together again because he never really fell.
Yes To All Of It 