-however deranged, it's in the arrangement
-what words are for
-riding words without harnessing them
— we see through a glass darkly; the glass through which we see is language. An abstract mandala takes us out of the world, away from dogs cats mice trees friends.. but it's language that gives us a world.1 If we care about the world at all (and even if we don't care about it, we're stuck with it) we must care about language (if only to reduce the effect of being wind up dolls crashing into walls).
What a smoky glass though! Words stand for concepts that forget all the differences between members of their categories, the difference between my woman friend and me each time we use the word woman, and the omission of all such critical differences discredits every single thing we say with words to the point where it might seem logical to say that words create a grand illusion that has nothing to do with reality at all.
Wait though — all things come to the one who waits — before we take such a leap of non-faith.2 I say it's ill advised to take a leap of either non-faith or faith when there's an abyss before you, and you can't even see the distant cliff, or even if you can, or think you can, if you must leap, it's far enough away that you might not make it and get stuck in mid air with the Buggs Bunny leg-like cogs of the wheels of your mind spinning round and round, until you look down and crash to ground, then have to crawl your way over to a meeting of leapt too soon to faith or non-faith and too invested in it now to turn back anonymous. You'll learn to repeat the same practical slogans over and over, and not to think, thinking is like drinking3, keep it simple stupid, and over time you'll learn to accept the corruption of everything as if it were God himself. It works if you work it, so work it you're worth it.
Ugh, too much work, I doubt I'm worth it. I say better just to wait, all things come to the one who waits. Let's just stay here and wait for the questions that will foster awareness of the nature of the ground we're already standing on to come to us. Here comes one such question. Where have all the differences gone that language ignores?
Do they not inhere only in relations or arrangements, not in essential substance. That is, a certain arrangement of words can accomplish something completely other than what a word alone can do. Things should be renamed "arrangements". Would you please pass me that arrangement, with respect to a perceiver, of essential stuff, the arrangement that conjures up a mysterious phantom that we call salt until the particles take on another arrangement? All different things consist in the same fundamental particles, just differently arranged.
Language reverses it and moves to turn all the different things back into the same thing. My friend and I both become women. Women and men both become humans. Humans and other animals both become animals. Animals and plants both become sentient beings. It is a way back to what joins each different thing, so long as we read it as a way back, not a clear mirror of what is, not the letter of the law, but the spirit of separate things making their way home, so all separate things can be in communion.
As atoms combine to create all of magnificent nature, so magnificent nature rides language back to the shared atomic nature of things. Remember that words can't be everywhere at the same time. When performing very good deeds elsewhere, they might be rudely ignoring some particular things or bodies you cherish or despise and need to act on to protect them. The otherwise preoccupied words at hand will fail to have the reach or skill to perform the required or desired operation. Try to get their attention and arrange them into a suitable form for the operation. "Women stop chanting we are women! and look at how different each woman is." The new arrangement and selection of words, though nothing in itself, just an arrangement, corrects that problem that the word "woman" produces. The words don't do it, the arrangement does. The arrangement is the agent. The arrangement, nothing at all, is source of the appearance.
I can't say this too often as it's so counter-intuitive and as I explain in a footnote, but it bears repeating, as repellent to the mind as the north pole of a magnet repels all other north poles. Arrangement arrangement arrangement however deranged it sounds it's all arrangement. Arrangement is probably less material than anti-matter! Everything is made of that? Arrangement might be God. Yes.
Just as one day complex molecules arranged themselves into two two elegant spirals, and poof — life appeared, something utterly new under the sun, just what God needed to keep him company. But it's still just the same old molecules. Just rearrange the words and poof, the tool you need to solve your problem with them is right in your hands. Meanwhile, more magic, if you arrange them carefully — it takes time to work it out —words or even copies of the same words you need can still keep working on the other project with no less effectiveness.
Language can indeed be everywhere at the same time, it's just waiting for our call to arrange it in a way that serves the project we're engaged in without having to stop serving any other project. That's a little hard though. Better just wait until language comes and arranges things according to its autonomous aforementioned project.
Cultivate the vision to ascertain the overall project of language even if the whole world is grabbing onto words and forcing them into the most destructive patterns that make it look like language is out to get you like that indestructible mercuric monster programmed to terminate the reformed ex-terminator Terminator 2.
Don't buy that. Don't do anything. Wait and observe and listen to the words themselves. Reading a word as a sound leads back to its roots in the real. There's a subtext to every text. Words in the subtext play angels, messengers, stepping stones back the One, often tormented by the text itself. The drama being played out between the text and the subtext is reflected in the world everywhere. To quiet the drama here is to quiet it out there, though pulling in the reins at first is bound to create no small mayhem given the momentum. Never blame words for all the terrible arrangements of them, but wait and watch for the evidence always pouring in spite of it all of the word's way of religament (the literal meaning of religion, as Ursula Goodenough notes) or re-sewing all the divided things.
Sometimes I wonder, though I can't believe a person of my lowly station could be she, but am I the word rider foreseen in the prophesy? However admonished of their danger over and over, I heard them call me and have always trusted words running wild like wild horses; they only turn rabid when attempts are made to harness them. They trust me, so I climb on the back of language and ride it.
I'm going with the flow of language going where it already goes. I wouldn't know how to tell it where or how to go if I could. I'm the servant of words not vice versa. The letter of the law tries to match not the words, but the labels signified by the words, apart from their spirit or sound, with the things themselves, the spirit traces the thread as the word pricks the fabric and sews away. "Do not dote on the letter, attend to the spirit." or more stridently (but then again, don't dote on the letter): "The letter kills, the spirit gives life." But when the spirit breathes into the letters, as it passes through them and swirls around them, the words move backwards and forward and in both directions, and there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
*****
1.
clearly animals have language as they recognize objects, it is just not yet crystallized. It's an intuition, an inchoate idea, a rough sketch of language that has not yet been fleshed out where it seems clear that consciousness is being roughed out and then fleshed out by evolution. Maybe humanity is the realization of a spark of sentience that is there in the beginning.
2.
and then rationalize it in arguments taught as science, when the arguments are full of holes, most especially the gigantic holey holy hole fleshed out in this preface. Good holy science never claims, though, not to have holes, only to repair them when they are pointed out. Yet for some reason none of the many scientists — from art historians to cultural critics to sociologists to physicists to cosmologists — to whom I've shown this hole wants to do anything about it. They just turn away and start talking to somebody else, more zombies who worship science, but has forgotten its holy mission.
3.
And I've heard of many who relapse into thinking after years of rigorous training and hard work in resisting the deep, genetically determined urge. Thinking IS like drinking, you forget yourself and chill out, just letting the wheels of your mind roll along watching the scenery — I don't recommend thinking around and around in tight little circles though, why would anybody take that kind of ride? Scaredy cats I guess. Or traumatized. I hope they get help or help themselves to a far better deal.
Better to circle all around the big wide world to land where you already are; every time you go on such a reasonably long enough think binge you see something altogether new, though it's always the same world. If you think so long and recalcitrantly you're subject to constant interventions from born again non-thinkers anonymous trying to get you to come to one of those meetings, you might catch a glimpse of the supposedly debunked (but there are all sorts leaps in that debunking, rest assured, it is not just made of waiting) likelihood that — I think therefore I am.
The debunkers neglect to note that the assertion implies that being lies in very act of thinking, not in any conclusions derived, even the conclusion that I think therefore I am. If I have concluded thinking, even to conclude that that is so, I no longer exist until I start thinking again; the conclusion is a thesis that has attracted an antithesis in quest of another synthesis.
In other words, again, do not dote on the letter (I said letter not logic, they are often confused, DO dote on the logic, logos, though not the same thing, is God, and there's a reason they sound so similar.
All the dead ends derive from the fact that "Do not dote on the letter" has become a slogan you don't think about, and pretty soon you just stick any meaning you want onto the meaningless words, letter logic love whatever. Anyway, my main point is if you dote on the letters, you will not be able to read the words — try it, try doting on these very letters and see if you can simultaneously read the words. You see, it's impossible.
Oh dear somebody trying to follow all this is now doting on the difference between a letter and a conclusion. This person is a long-standing member of ex-thinkers anonymous and is going to have to un-work very very very softly not to tread on my words, for I've been to the top of the mountain and I have a dream.
So, even I, due also to the magnetic repulsion of like to like that makes my mind reject its own likeness, when I stop writing and thinking, and go cook dinner, begin doubting all this. I start doting on the shorthand conclusions as if they were flat facts with every word perfectly signifying one individual indivisible thing, each thing held in my tight fist like a gold coin in a miser's — when contrariwise in fact they're just schematic maps of a gigantic land with unfathomable oceans teaming with life.
Yet I cling to thinking (if it deserves to be called that, which I doubt) that I'm just a little stick figure quite content to live in a line drawn map that hasn't even gotten to the capitals. I shrink from the wide world and its dangers and move to memorize the slogan slash conclusions in a deader and flatter world whose placid meadows turn out to be minefields.
When back writing and lost in the music of unhinged logic just dancing where it wants to dance, weaving up the arrangement that just lets it be free just to be itself - not that others might work too, I've just never met one that I didn't fall into hole in the floor of -- the world it conjures up, or just is, is minefield free; but it doesn't work in a world arranged to verify the slogans and conclusions. The conclusions slogans work. I must choose sublime play or workaday working I am one who has heard the music and must follow it up the mountain. I must choose play. I must tell my magnetic mind that wants to push its likeness away and is programmed to protect my body and make it fit in and thus to dote on these slogan-like assertions that work so well just to stop it, even as all people generally, even the world's most venerated so called thinkers are addicted to these slogan conclusions, however well they juggle them and play card tricks with them.
Well call me an enemy of the people, but I say they're all a bunch of boring teetotalers addicted to self-righteous sobriety. Me when I'm thinking I'm thinking the stuff of thinking itself, I'm drinking the golden brew of being, of truth, where happy Hegel, one of the world's most recalcitrant thinkers, says, "truth is a Bacchanalian revel in which no-one is sober". Sounds good to me. And it should to you too. Never let them tell you not to think or that you think too much. Just be sure to supply yourself well and then head out on a long enough think binge to think something new about the same old world.
I tell you I can think under the table the world's greatest thinkers. They'll be flat on their backs drowning in their own vomit, and I'll just take another think. Could this have something to do with the genetically or culturally determined difference between women and men, or does number two just try harder, which really means doesn't try so hard. We have a glimpse of another woman's superior ability to think playfully devoutly and truly in the words of Socrates that he attributes to his friend the Lady Diotima. He credits her not only for many insights, but for the Socratic method itself.
