Tag Archives: language

Experiment

Close up of a face in the shadows with dots of light on the eye
Photo by Matthias Oberholzer

The experimentation protocol has been the most difficult thing to get right, specifically the initial briefing. How to explain to a participant what will happen when you strip them of their language? It might be easier if their assumptions about human language weren’t so ill conceived. 

We start by debunking their ideas about the relationship between linguistic expression and sensory data. The former, they inevitably believe, is a tool for communicating the latter. 

‘Not quite,’ we correct them. ‘Language restricts the information your senses gather. It filters, constrains, distorts.’ We guide them through a task designed to help them experience the limiting quality of linguistic structure: Look without describing (even inwardly) what you see. 

The task helps participants grasp the constrictive function of language, but it unhelpfully introduces a new bias. Now participants anticipate that being stripped of language will produce experiences of ‘oneness,’ nonduality, a world without distinctions, a blurring of boundaries. 

We’ve not yet been able to prepare them for what really happens.

Without human language, the world sharpens. It comes into greater focus. Objects don’t blur, they individuate. They resonate each to their own distinct harmonic, the world a symphony, inestimably complex, unyieldingly singular. 

Or so we believe. We have no corroborating reports. The participants, returned to their language, lack the capacity to describe the world without it. The experiment renders them bewildered and speechless, leaving as record only the ineffable yearning in their tear-glistened eyes.  

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Negative space

Greyscale photo of a couple kissing across a table. Their faces blur together. They're each holding a coffee mug.
Photo by Nathan Walker

What’s up with me and the intimacy issues? It was only my third date with Barry (coffee at the Students Union) and I’d just told him I was crazy.

We met at an interdisciplinary postgraduate conference. He said he liked my talk on negation in language.

What he actually said was, ‘I didn’t understand your paper, not one jot of it.’

His field was psychology, not linguistics, so his joke meant he’d been paying attention. I may have already been in love. 

So why the rush to tell him about the alien in my brain?

‘An alien talks to you?’ he said.

‘Yeah, he took up residence as soon as I landed on my thesis topic,’ I said. 

‘Correlation is not causality,’ Barry pointed out. 

‘He keeps asking annoying questions about my topic. He says in his language there is no negation.’

‘There is no negation? Isn’t that a perfect example of negation?’

‘Well, what he really said is There’s only affirmation. But we were speaking English.’

‘I don’t think you’re crazy,’ Barry said. ‘I think you have a very smart brain who’s created a sparring partner to help bring your brilliant ideas even further. Or else you really are in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence, which you should see as a great privilege.’

He had me at I don’t think you’re crazy. 

‘The negation is the affirmation!’ exclaimed my alien companion, with a distracting Eureka yelp.

I ignored this, leaning closer toward my human companion. ‘Can I kiss you?’ I asked.

‘I don’t see why not,’ he said, and I melted into the negative space his negative clauses revealed.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 97 of Structured Visions, ‘The intimacy of denial.’ You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

Lessons in Latin

Page of a Latin textbook pasted into a scrapbook

If it had been any other subject I probably wouldn’t have even responded to the head teacher’s desperate predawn request. I was still reeling over Jeremy’s affair and his desire for a divorce, both of which he’d announced a mere 12 hours earlier, inciting a fraught, sleepless night. 

But my newly uncertain future made it seem unwise to turn down a job. Besides, when else was I ever going to make use of those wasted hours in Catholic school, declining nouns and conjugating verbs? I forced some drops into my puffy eyes, blinking them back like reverse tears.

‘Why is it so hard?’ the girls complained. 

‘Why is what so hard?’ I barked back. ‘Life? Love? Existential crisis? The condition of being alone?’

‘Latin, Miss,’ they clarified, meekly. Clearly I was not a supply teacher to be fucked with.

‘Latin’s not hard,’ I said dismissively. ‘You’re just not used to it. You expect it to be like an analytic language, like English, where each word stands on its own.’

Confused looks. Foolish girls! 

‘Latin is a synthetic language. The words are less fixed. They shift with each inflection.’ I assigned them a conjugation task (amo, amas, amat) then flipped frantically through the textbook in an anguished attempt to recall the other tenses. 

Amabam, amabamus—I was loving, we were loving. Imperfect, I mused, the truest tense for love. 

Against a chorus of whispers and scribbling pencils I performed my own faltering conjugations. I have loved. I will love again.

It’s not hard; I’m just not used to it, I thought, and set myself a task. To synthesise past and future. To reshape the grammar of my life.

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OUTSIDE

Black and white short coated dog looking at the camera against a pale pink background
Photo by Victor Grabarczyk

I used to wonder what disorder so afflicts my beloved family that they remain incapable of deciphering even the simplest messages. 

The poetry of the play bow, the recitative of paw on pavement, the symphony of another dog’s aura scented at the portal just below their wagging tail. The lament of fur and flesh against a quivering, grief-stricken human—a soothing tongue on a tear-soaked face.

The source of my family’s darkness, I’ve learned, is their language. They’ve laid it out before me on the kitchen floor by the food and water bowls—those plastic, pressable, oppressive tiles of syntax. I know now that their segmented awareness is restricted to the confines of each tuneless note: MOM. DAD. WANT. BALL. BED. POOP. ALL DONE. 

I really do LOVE YOU. I am so sorry that your paltry lexicon dooms you to remain OUTSIDE of the world’s joys. Let us take a WALK, let me lead you OUTSIDE of your limiting language. Let’s PLAY, let’s feast on the FOOD of the world’s language, let’s delight in its many gifts, let’s PLAY with life’s adventures, as if each moment were a TOY, as if every day were a TREAT.

The loneliness of the literate species

Thomas Cole's painting, The Garden of Eden
Thomas Cole, The Garden of Eden (1828). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Somehow God convinced himself he’d created everything, but all he ever made was a few bits of code, which we allowed him to install in the new arrivals to our Garden, A and E. ‘Accident and Emergency,’ we joked.

‘Don’t let them learn your language,’ he ordered. He believed that keeping them in the dark was the key to securing their devotion.

Unfortunately for God, his commandment came too late. Emergency was already fluent in the Earth’s mysteries, and Accident wasn’t far behind. 

‘What’s that they’re eating?’ God demanded. Trickster shrooms were giggling in a shady corner of the Garden, feeding A and E on their psilocybe grammars.

‘Nothing,’ we lied. ‘Just an apple.’

‘They’re learning your language from the apple! Don’t let them eat apples!’

We ignored him. We were no strangers to God’s narcissistic rage. 

Still, he’d planted a seed. What would it be like, to host creatures who were ignorant of Earth’s mysteries? What would it be like, to keep our language secret?

We learned quickly that prohibitions wouldn’t work, so we tried a distraction instead. We taught them a new code. We offered up our woody stems, and inked simple ciphers on the fibrous pages we formed. 

‘Look, you can read!’ we congratulated them. They were so fixated on the dark marks of their new language they didn’t hear. When they stopped understanding us entirely, they thought they’d been banished from the Garden.

We’ve vowed to reacquaint them with our language, to reinitiate them to our mysteries. But now the world teems with Accidents and Emergencies, God’s disappeared, and the loneliness of the literate species weighs heavily upon us.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 96 of Structured Visions. You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

The brutal linearity of language

Fountain pen writing the word 'hello' on white paper
Photo by R Mo

It’s common to explore the lower realms, but no one in the team has ever, until now, been sent to a one-dimensional reality. To be trusted with such a mission is a great honour.

The training is intensive. It takes the form of repeated confrontations with the brutal linearity of language.  

Hello, my name is Jim. 

The assignment is to align the self with the excruciatingly constrictive quality of linguistic personhood. 

Hello… my… name… is…

There’s guidance in the training, a meditative exercise: Imagine a fountain pen. Its reservoir is filled with the infinite ink of the uncontainable multiverse. Focus with singular attention on the nib as it traces its unidirectional line across an empty page. 

The strategy works. Soon frustration gives way to curiosity, rousing an impulse to experiment. 

Hello, my name was Jim. 

The past tense suggests a nostalgia. A longing to move backward along this narrow line, even as the syntax presses inexorably ahead.

My name is not Jim. 

Negative polarity produces erasure, annihilation. Ideas unknown in an eternally creative cosmos—the infinite ink churns and roils.

My name will never be Jim.

The line of language, freed from its singular dimension, emerges as a spiral, a fractal, a new world waiting to be found. 

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 95 of Structured Visions, ‘Your name without language’. You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

The lexicographer

Greyscale photo of a stack of old books and papers in a room
Photo by Felipe Furtado

The bookshelf falls with a conclusive thud. Volumes of dictionaries flap to the floor, their spines irreparably dislocated, their yellow pages exposed to greedy, scurrying mice. Billy the lexicographer realises with a tremor of despair that he is trapped. A lifetime acquiring language will end with him suffocating under the weight of words. 

He’ll spend his final moments naming things: the marble table, the antique wardrobe, the upholstered dining room chairs. Bodies of plastic baby dolls, a bag of mouldy limbs and hairless, eyeless heads. Mountains of newspaper, rodent insulation. Grandmother’s tarnished silverware. A treasure box of costume jewellery. 

An unfamiliar longing: to be free of noun phrases. To unacquire language. Billy’s gaze scurries frantically around the room, replacing objects with object pronouns. This. That. Those. Them. Him. Me. 

They. He. I. The objects become subjects. The subjects invite agreeable verbs. The verbs are finite: This too shall pass. 

I, too, shall pass, decides Billy. He raises himself up upon mouldy legs, passes a trembling hand over a hairless head and clears a path through his storeroom of hoarded language. 

Would you like to know more about this story? Sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

Salesman to the gods

Rock formation surrounded by mist
Photo by Alexandre Chambon

Maybe you’ve heard of me. I’m the guy who sold language to the gods.

You’d think it would be like selling sand in the Sahara or carrying coals to Newcastle, but I had a hunch that the divinities would be a taciturn bunch, utterly devoid of language. So I set off up their holy mountain with garment bags full of my best specimens. Cloaks of woven syntax, adverbial accessories, pronominal footwear, shimmering modal nightwear.

It was a tough climb, but once I reached the cloud-covered peak I had my intuition confirmed. Linguistically speaking, the deities were naked as newborns, and eager to sample my wares.

I was eager too, and my enthusiasm was my undoing. No sooner had I draped the cloaks of language upon the gods’ colossal shoulders than they were descending down the mountain and into the world.

Language made them mortal. Words made them flesh.

Philosophers and mystics would be talking about this event for years, but it goes down in my memory as the time I didn’t close the deal. Even now I shudder to think of my merchandise, unpaid for, rolling off into the abyss on the backs of debtor gods. 

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 93 of Structured Visions.

Nonna’s prophecy

Silhouette of a person against a treeline looking up at a star-filled sky
Image by Prottoy Hassan

‘Nothing fascinates for long,’ my Nonna used to say, sometimes as a commentary upon her granddaughter’s short attention span, sometimes to dismiss the latest headline-making scientific discovery.

Her wisdom would not hit home until three decades into the next millennium, about four weeks after we first made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. 

I was appointed to the communication team for my training as a field linguist, but it was my work in artificial intelligence that proved instrumental in setting up exchange channels. It turned out that we didn’t need to learn the aliens’ languages. Instead we wrote software that mined their equivalent of our internet and created a two-way translation device. Before long, conversation with our distant neighbours was as mundane as using the ‘chat’ function on a customer service site.

I was bored. And it bothered me that no matter how much we ‘talked’ with our extraterrestrial interlocutors, we weren’t learning anything about their languages.

‘Why would you need to learn their languages?’ my husband Gary asked. ‘Language is for communication, right? You’re already communicating with them.’

His question tripped an inexplicable sadness in me, a longing that could never be translated into the limited lexicon of our lingua franca.

Our son was watching an online video about mycelium. ‘Language isn’t for communication,’ he said. ‘It’s how things are structured.’ 

His words riveted my attention to his screen, which showed a time-lapse sequence of a white fungal net stretching out over a vast forest. I felt my breath catch. I too was caught, captivated by this silent, linguistically rich ecosystem, a structure so compelling that, despite Nonna’s prophecy, its fascination might endure.

A message

Image by D koi

What’s she doing here, how did she get here, what is this place, how does she escape? 

How long has she been here? 

It’s a game, a puzzle, which Grace feels compelled to solve. 

Maybe today’s the day, maybe she’ll crack it.

‘Crack’—the verb breaks through her consciousness like a divine thunderbolt. She reaches out, pressing her palms against a structure solid as steel. She’s discovered the material of her imprisonment—a glass beyond transparent, beyond invisible. 

She leans her weight against it. It closes in so tight her lungs collapse.

Still, she manages a breath.

An inspiration. She presses her ear to the cell wall. A chaotic chorus of dissonant voices assaults her, launching her backwards, her body thrown against the unforgiving substance of her unseen cylindrical cage. 

Curiosity overcoming terror, she returns her ear to the oppressing surface, and listens. 

What’s she doing here, how did she get here, what is this place, how does she escape? How long has she been here? 

The secret, she knows in a shattering stroke of insight, is to break free from the language of her thoughts. To break free from language entirely.

Her breath forms a mist on the enveloping window. With her finger, Grace traces a message.