Descriptive Language Quotes

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

What the—Have you been crying?" Tohrment demanded. "Are you all right? Dear God, is it the baby?" "Tohr, relax. I'm a female, I cry at matings. It's in the job description." There was the sound of a kiss. "I just don't want anything to upset you, leelan." 'Then tell me the brothers are ready." "We are." "Good. I'll bring her out." "Leelan ? " "What?" There were low words spoken in their beautiful language. "Yes, Tohr," Wellsie whispered. "And after two hundred years, I'd mate you again. In spite of the fact that you snore and you leave your weapons all over our bedroom.

However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.

This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with`disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language.  English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.  It has all grown one way.  The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.  There is nothing ready made for him.  He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.  Probably it will be something laughable.

Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snowdome paper weight that's been shaken. There's a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it's now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris. (p30)

Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.

Tulips were a tray of jewels.

In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the under side, translating them into a new language.

I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware." Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts.

Before we go any further, I must warn you that the things I am going to share with you throughout this interview are very explicit. I can either censor the descriptions, or I can tell you in detail. The choice is yours. But if you want the detailed explanation, then you must be prepared for graphic language. I’m no fan of political correctness, so you can’t expect me to keep apologizing if your delicate, sensitive ears are offended by language.

I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.

When I started reading the literature of molecular biology, I was stunned by certain descriptions. Admittedly, I was on the lookout for anything unusual, as my investigation had led me to consider that DNA and its cellular machinery truly were an extremely sophisticated technology of cosmic origin. But as I pored over thousands of pages of biological texts, I discovered a world of science fiction that seemed to confirm my hypothesis. Proteins and enzymes were described as 'miniature robots,' ribosomes were 'molecular computers,' cells were 'factories,' DNA itself was a 'text,' a 'program,' a 'language,' or 'data.' One only had to do a literal reading of contemporary biology to reach shattering conclusions; yet most authors display a total lack of astonishment and seem to consider that life is merely 'a normal physiochemical phenomenon.

...she felt as if her entire body were glowing with the taste of sunlight, of wind blowing in wide spaces and trees reaching their burdened arms to boundless skies.

Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.

Expansion History, and you came to the description of the triple sunrises you can see when you're hanging in Lsel Station's Lagrange point, and you thought, At last, there are words for how I feel, and they aren't even in my language―> Yes, Mahit says. Yes, she does. That ache: longing and a violent sort of self-hatred, that only made the longing sharper. We felt that way.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport". Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (...) and the architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs. They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of the Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not".

In the absence of a formally agreed, worldwide dictionary definition of 'Quotography' (in 2016), here are my two cents worth: 'Quotography is the art of pairing unique quotations with complementary images in order to express thought-provoking ideas, challenging concepts, profound sentiments'.

The belief that science proceeds from observation to theory is still so widely and so firmly held that my denial of it is often met with incredulity. I have even been suspected of being insincere- of denying what nobody in his senses would doubt. But in fact the belief that we can start with pure observation alone, without anything in the nature of a theory is absurd; as may be illustrated by the story of the man who dedicated his life to natural science, wrote down everything he could observe, and bequeathed his priceless collection of observations to the Royal Society to be used as evidence. This story should show us that though beetles may profitably be collected, observations may not. Twenty-five years ago I tried to bring home the same point to a group of physics students in Vienna by beginning a lecture with the following instructions : 'Take pencil and paper; carefully observe, and write down what you have observed!' They asked, of course, what I wanted them to observe. Clearly the instruction, 'Observe!' is absurd. (It is not even idiomatic, unless the object of the transitive verb can be taken as understood.) Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in their turn presuppose interests, points of view, and problems.

I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality—talk, footsteps, slamming doors—which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.

[... Dance] involves every possible feeling (as potential), because it is of the body, which is lived (inescapably) as a body of feeling. Some of these feelings we can name, and some we cannot, since we associate feelings with language only when we name them. The body lives sentience on a preverbal level. Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence). Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced.

In fact, it could be said that our language evolved for the express purpose of allowing us to participate in that interaction with others. That would explain why it is so hard to talk about whatever it is that might lie beyond or behind the description of the world: our language evolved to represent the description, and not the world itself.

...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.

There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman. I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment. In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

Describing something is like using it – it destroys; the colours wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear. This applies most of all to places. Enormous damage has been done by travel literature – a veritable scourge, an epidemic. Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet; published in editions numbering in the millions, in many languages, they have debilitated places, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours. Even I, in my youthful naiveté, once took a shot at the description of places. But when I would go back to those descriptions later, when I’d try to take a deep breath and allow their intense presence to choke me up all over again, when I’d try to listen in on their murmurings, I was always in for a shock. The truth is terrible: describing is destroying.

The Bible frequently uses symmetries and inversions. By such comparisons (parallels and contrasts) the unique aspects of reality begin to emerge. Comparing two objects makes their differences increasingly apparent. Only then can we ask, “Why does this one have that, and the other does not?” For instance: The phrase, “and it was 6 good” is present on all the days of creation—except the second day. Why? Because, “two” contains potential badness, to a Hebrew. We could not have discovered that insight, unless we contrasted God’s description of the creative days.

…she had a dream, and in that dream Jesus came to her and said, ‘You are from the stars and you came here to heal the world,’ so she made her mom and dad change her name to Starla. I think it’s cosmically perfect, like her, and kind of fitting because her face is covered in a galaxy of freckles.

These descriptions do really state the truth- as nearly as the limitations of language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts-by help of the readers imagination, which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that.

You can start training yourself in this Stoic practice of objective representation right now by writing down a description of an upsetting or problematic event in plain language. Phrase things as accurately as possible and view them from a more philosophical perspective, with studied indifference. Once you’ve mastered this art, take it a step further by following the example of Paconius Agrippinus and look for positive opportunities. Write how you could exercise strength of character and cope wisely with the situation. Ask yourself how someone you admire might cope with the same situation or what that person might advise you to do. Treat the event like a sparring partner in the gym, giving you an opportunity to strengthen your emotional resilience and coping skills. You might want to read your script aloud and review it several times or compose several versions until you’re satisfied it’s helped you change how you feel about events.

The stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth.

To millions of children, a condom is nothing but a balloon.

The truly transformative power of language occurs when these descriptive root terms are used to form words that convey abstract concepts. A three-letter root compound used to name the spine (Q-W-M) is adapted to describe “flexibility.” The root term for a heated pot boiling over (Gh-Dh-B) constructs a word meaning “hot-headed.” A root term describing the process of carefully separating grains (D-R-S) evolves to express “analyzing” or “interpreting.” From physical sources emerge words for the intangible, like the Qur’an’s parable of the healthy tree with roots anchored in the ground while branches stretch toward the heavens.

Science is progressive and self-correcting: no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs. But over a long period of time, a consistent set of observations sometimes emerges that leads to a new framework of understanding. That framework is then given a much more substantive description, and is called a “theory”—the theory of gravitation, the theory of relativity, or the germ theory, for instance.

Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there’s just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What’sToCome.

In light of recent events—genocide in East Africa, the collapse of democracy throughout the continent, the isolation of Cuba, the overthrow of progressive movements throughout the so-called third world—some might argue that the moment of truth has already passed, that Césaire and Fanon’s predictions proved false. We’re facing an era where fools are calling for a renewal of colonialism, where descriptions of violence and instability draw on the very colonial language of “barbarism” and “backwardness” that Césaire critiques in these pages. But this is all a mystification; the fact is, while colonialism in its formal sense might have been dismantled, the colonial state has not. Many of the problems of democracy are products of the old colonial state whose primary difference is the presence of black faces. It has to do with the rise of a new ruling class—the class Fanon warned us about—who are content with mimicking the colonial masters,

Compromised by longing & looking for language to note the differences in the map: the pointed spruces tipped against the moon this time & the water halflit, star-slid—but it makes no difference in the telling.

The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object.

Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it.

It wouldn’t seem at all odd if I were to take in a boarder.” I drew back in surprise. “Oh?” “Yes.” He still didn’t quite meet my gaze, as if half-afraid of rejection. “I’m very particular, though. This boarder will be tall, handsome, and speak precisely thirteen languages. But read more. He must be willing to put up with a roommate prone to nightmares, occasional fits of brooding, and a fondness for chess. Must love cats, keeping odd hours, and sword canes. Do you…do you know anyone who might fit the description?” I caught his chin gently, tilting his head back so he had to look at me. “You know,” I said, bending to kiss him, “I rather think I do.

Where the Israelis find it difficult is actually in escaping the description of the reality as colonialist when trying to do this in Hebrew. Any translation into another language of the Israeli terminology of settlement is bound to expose the colonialist nature of the project.

Something in the world shifted. I know that's a shit description, pardon my unladylike language, but I don't know how else to say it. It was like an earthquake that didn't disturb a single blade of grass, an eclipse that didn't cast a single shadow, a vast but invisible change.

You simply do not understand the human condition,” said the robot. Hah! Do you think you do, you conceited hunk of animated tin?” Yes, I believe so, thanks ot my study of the authors, poets, and critics who devote their lives to the exploration and description of Man. Your Miss Forelle is a noble soul. Ever since I looked upon my first copy of that exquisitely sensitive literary quarterly she edits, I have failed to understand what she sees in you. To be sure,” IZK-99 mused, “the relationship is not unlike that between the nun and the Diesel engine in Regret for Two Doves, but still… At any rate, if Miss Forelle has finally told you to go soak your censored head in expurgated wastes and then put the unprintable thing in an improbable place, I for one heartily approve. Tunny, who was no mamma’s boy — he had worked his way through college as a whale herder and bossed construction gangs on Mars — was so appalled by the robot’s language that he could only whisper, “She did not. She said nothing of the sort.” I did not mean it literally,” IZK-99 explained. “I was only quoting the renunciation scene in Gently Come Twilight. By Stichling, you know — almost as sensitive a writer as Brochet.

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.

Of courage undaunted, possessing a firmness and perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from its direction, careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order and discipline, intimate with the Indian character, customs, and principles; habituated to the hunting life, guarded by exact observation of the vegetables and animals of his own country against losing time in the description of objects already possessed; honest, disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding, and a fidelity to truth so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as if seen by ourselves – with all these qualifications as if selected and implanted by nature in one body for this express purpose, I could have no hesitation in confiding the enterprise to him. To fill up the measure desired, he wanted nothing but a greater familiarity with the technical language of the natural sciences, and readiness in the astronomical observations necessary for the geography of his route. To acquire these he repaired immediately to Philadelphia, and placed himself under the tutorage of the distinguished professors of that place.

The history of ideas, then, is the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconstitution of developments in the linear form of history. But it can also, by that very fact, describe, from one domain to another, the whole interplay of exchanges and intermediaries: it shows how scientific knowledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works; it shows how problems, notions, themes may emigrate from the philosophical field where they were formulated to scientific or political discourses; it relates work with institutions, social customs or behaviour, techniques, and unrecorded needs and practices; it tries to revive the most elaborate forms of discourse in the concrete landscape, in the midst of the growth and development that witnessed their birth. It becomes therefore the discipline of interferences, the description of the concentric circles that surround works, underline them, relate them to one another, and insert them into whatever they are not.

Indescribable’ is the only accurate description of life.

Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in others: Giving orders, and obeying them— Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements— Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)— Reporting an event— Speculating about an event— Forming or teasing a hypothesis— Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams— Making up a story; and reading it— Singing catches— Guessing riddles— Making riddles— Making a joke; telling it— Solving a problem in practical arithmetic— Translating from one language into another— Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. —It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)

Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). .... When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world.

A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!

Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all from this small corner of the earth.

In our analysis of complex systems (like the brain and language) we must avoid the trap of trying to find master keys. Because of the mechanisms by which complex systems structure themselves, single principles provide inadequate descriptions. We should rather be sensitive to complex and self-organizing interactions and appreciate the play of patterns that perpetually transforms the system itself as well as the environment in which it operates.

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice.

But no jagged simile, no disjointed paragraph can come close to describing real pain. Pain is its own language. Each description feels false, decorative, like I'm pouring watercolors into the crater of a bomb site (see, I'm failing even now).

In 1 Corinthians 14:13–17, Paul mentioned that the gift of tongues was used in public prayer for the purpose of edification. Charismatics, however, have tried to redefine the gift of tongues as a special mode of supernatural expression for their personal devotions and private prayers. But notice how different Paul’s description is from that of modern tongues-speakers. First, Paul was not commending any form of gibberish, since he had already established that the real gift consisted of speaking in translatable foreign languages (vv. 10–11). Second, Paul would never extol prayers that bypass the mind, as many charismatics do. That was—and still is today—a pagan practice. In the Greco-Roman mystery religions, ecstatic utterances were commonly employed as a way to circumvent the mind in order to commune with demonic entities. So it is likely that Paul’s words in these verses include a sarcastic tone, as he rebuked the Corinthian Christians for their attempt to imitate the mindless practices of their pagan neighbors.

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the signboard at the coner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge?

José Arcadio’s companion asked them to leave them alone, and the couple lay down on the ground, close to the bed. The passion of the others woke up José Arcadio’s fervor. On the first contact the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin broke out into a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears as her whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud. But she bore the impact with a firmness of character and a bravery that were admirable. José Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the air toward a state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears and came out of her mouth translated into her language.

Our bodies speak, if you would only listen. They speak another language: the mother tongue. It’s half the puzzle, the missing pieces you have been searching for, the how and why behind the symptoms you fixate on, the whole behind the healing, which cannot be found at the bottom of a bottle of pills. But you do not speak our language. My sick sisterhood, whose bodies have been felled by mysterious illnesses, bearing the arcane names of men long dead, to signify their suffering with no cure, no hope. The mothers who long for answers to the questions that their bodies are living, for soul-utions to the protest against this cold, hard world. Into their dry hungry mouths are dropped pills not answers. Prescriptions and descriptions of symptoms – not cures or laws to halt the toxic corporate world that is allowed to carry on felling us like trees in the Amazon… Each woman is an Amazon. But she does not know it. Instead she is treated. Separately. Her pile of notes, her bills, growing higher. Each one believes the sickness is hers alone. Each is sent home, ignored, tolerated. Alone. In the darkness. Until one day Medicine Woman arises within her. And there in the centre of her pain she finds her outrage, her strength, her persistence as she searches for answers. She finds the will to die to this world and the right to live a different life where she is honoured for the value of her soul, not the sweat of her brow. She begins to understand the messages her body is sending… Things are not right. In here… out there. She begins to remember there is magic in her: the power to heal, the power to transform. Medicine Woman rises.

There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men.

I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one these particles, these molecules of texts, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own? I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again. [p.268]

His real gift was as a phrasemaker. “Shakespeare’s language,” says Stanley Wells, “has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language.” Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, be cruel to be kind, blinking idiot, with bated breath, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, foregone conclusion—and many others so repetitiously irresistible that we have debased them into clichés. He was so prolific that he could (in Hamlet) put two in a single sentence: “Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.” If

Some could say it is the external world which has molded our thinking-that is, the operation of the human brain-into what is now called logic. Others-philosophers and scientists alike-say that our logical thought (thinking process?) is a creation of the internal workings of the mind as they developed through evolution "independently" of the action of the outside world. Obviously, mathematics is some of both. It seems to be a language both for the description of the external world, and possibly even more so for the analysis of ourselves. In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents. The very existence of mathematics is due to the fact that there exist statements or theorems, which are very simple to state but whose proofs demand pages of explanations. Nobody knows why this should be so. The simplicity of many of these statements has both aesthetic value and philosophical interest.

We swam in sunshine and in rain; we swam in the morning, when the sea was sluggish as soup, we swam at night, the water flowing over our arms like undulations of black satin; one afternoon we stayed in the water during a thunderstorm, and a fork of lightning struck the surface of the sea so closer to us we heard the crackle of it and smelt the burnt air.

It is important to note that the design of an entire brain region is simpler than the design of a single neuron. As discussed earlier, models often get simpler at a higher level—consider an analogy with a computer. We do need to understand the detailed physics ofsemiconductors to model a transistor, and the equations underlying a single real transistor are complex. A digital circuit that multiples two numbers requires hundreds of them. Yet we can model this multiplication circuit very simply with one or two formulas. An entire computer with billions of transistors can be modeled through its instruction set and register description, which can be described on a handful of written pages of text and formulas. The software programs for an operating system, language compilers, and assemblers are reasonably complex, but modeling a particular program—for example, a speech recognition programbased on hierarchical hidden Markov modeling—may likewise be described in only a few pages of equations. Nowhere in such a description would be found the details ofsemiconductor physics or even of computer architecture. A similar observation holds true for the brain. A particular neocortical pattern recognizer that detects a particular invariant visualfeature (such as a face) or that performs a bandpass filtering (restricting input to a specific frequency range) on sound or that evaluates the temporal proximity of two events can be described with far fewer specific details than the actual physics and chemicalrelations controlling the neurotransmitters, ion channels, and other synaptic and dendritic variables involved in the neural processes. Although all of this complexity needs to be carefully considered before advancing to the next higher conceptual level, much of it can be simplified as the operating principles of the brain are revealed.

Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re­create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, busi­ness enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand. Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifi­cally accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it.

The more I say the more remains to be said … as soon as I speak it becomes quite clear that, no matter how long I speak, new chasms open. No matter what I say I always have to leave three dots at the end. Whatever description I give always opens the doors to something further, something even darker, perhaps, but certainly something which is in principle incapable of being reduced to precise, clear, verifiable, objective prose.

Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language – which is to describe reality – is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance. As a result Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument. Françoise Thom has argued this in her brilliant study La langue de bois.5 The purpose of communist Newspeak, in Thom’s ironical words, has been ‘to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things’.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.

It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.

This little book has been written in the hope that it may appeal to several classes of readers. Not infrequently I have been asked by friends of different callings in life to recommend them some book on mimicry which shall be reasonably short, well illustrated without being very costly, and not too hard to understand. I have always been obliged to tell them that I know of nothing in our language answering to this description, and it is largely as an attempt to remedy this deficiency that the present little volume has been written.

The apostle Paul often appears in Christian thought as the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense. Such an interpretation of Paul became almost canonical in certain schools of biblical criticism during the nineteenth century, especially that of Ferdinand Christian Baur, who saw the controversy between Paul and Peter as a conflict between the party of Peter, with its 'Judaizing' distortion of the gospel into a new law, and the party of Paul, with its universal vision of the gospel as a message about Jesus for all humanity. Very often, of course, this description of the opposition between Peter and Paul and between law and gospel was cast in the language of the opposition between Roman Catholicism (which traced its succession to Peter as the first pope) and Protestantism (which arose from Luther's interpretation of the epistles of Paul). Luther's favorite among those epistles, the letter to the Romans, became the charter for this supposed declaration of independence from Judaism.

For me, gender is a lot like language. Language, too, is a social construct, but one that expresses very real things. The word “happiness" was created by humans, but that doesn't diminish the fact that happiness is a very real feeling. People can have a deeply held sense of their own gender, even if the descriptions, characteristics, attributes, and expressions of that gender are made up by society. And just as with happiness, for which there are varying words, expressions, and actions that demonstrate that same feeling, gender can have an infinite number of expressions.

A meal is sacramental when the rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, sinners and saints share equal status around the table. A local church is sacramental when it is a place where the last are first and the first are last and where those who hunger and thirst are fed. And the church universal is sacramental when it knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture, and when it advances not through power and might, but through acts of love, joy, and peace and missions of mercy, kindness, humility. In this sense, church gives us the chance to riff on Jesus’ description of the kingdom, to add a few new metaphors of our own. We might say the kingdom is like St. Lydia’s in Brooklyn where strangers come together and remember Jesus when they eat. The kingdom is like the Refuge in Denver, where addicts and academics, single moms and suburban housewives come together to tell each other the truth. The kingdom is like Thistle Farms where women heal from abuse by helping to heal others. The kingdom is like the church that would rather die than cast two of its own out the doors because they are gay. The kingdom is like St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee, where you are loved just for showing up. And even still, the kingdom remains a mystery just beyond our grasp. It is here, and not yet, present and still to come. Consummation, whatever that means, awaits us. Until then, all we have are metaphors. All we have are almosts and not quites and wayside shrines. All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way. All we have is this church—this lousy, screwed-up, glorious church—which, by God’s grace, is enough.

If all art is conceptual, the issue is rather simple. For concepts, like pictures, cannot be true or false. They can only be more or less useful for the formation of descriptions. The words of a language, like pictorial formulas, pick out from the flux of events a few signposts which allow us to give direction to our fellow speakers in that game of "Twenty Questions" in which we are engaged. Where the needs of users are similar, the signposts will tend to correspond. We can mostly find equivalent terms in English, French, German, and Latin, and hence the idea has taken root that concepts exist independently of language as the constituents of "reality." But the English language erects a signpost on the roadfork between "clock" and "watch" where the German has only "Uhr." The sentence from the German primer, "Meine Tante hat eine Uhr," leaves us in doubt whether the aunt has a clock or watch. Either of the two translations may be wrong as a description of a fact. In Swedish, by the way, there is an additional roadfork to distinguish between aunts who are "father's sisters," those who are "mother's sisters," and those who are just ordinary aunts. If we were to play our game in Swedish we would need additional questions to get at the truth about the timepiece.

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112) They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity?

Silence is also a form of speaking. They’re exactly alike. It’s a basic component of language. We’re always selecting what we say and what we don’t. Why do we say one thing and not the other? And we do this instinctively, too, because no matter what we’re talking about, there’s more that doesn’t get said than does. And this isn’t always to hide things—it’s simply part of an instinctive selection in our speech. This selection varies from one person to the next, so that no matter how many people describe the same thing, the descriptions are different, the point of view is different. And even if there is a similar viewpoint, people make different choices as to what is said or not said. This was very clear to me, coming from the village, since the people there never said more than they absolutely needed to. When I was fifteen and went to the city, I was amazed at how much people talked and how much of that talk was pointless. And how much people talked about themselves—that was totally alien to me. For me, silence had always been another form of communication. After all, you can tell so much just by looking at a person. At home we always knew about each other even if we didn’t talk about ourselves all the time. I encountered a lot of silence elsewhere as well. There was the silence that was self-imposed, because you could never say what you really thought.

Let me illustrate. This morning I had a fresh mango for breakfast: a large, beautiful, fragrant one which had been allowed to ripen until just the right moment, when the skin was luminous with reds and oranges. You can see from that kind of description that I like mangoes. I must have eaten thousands of them when I was growing up, and I probably know most varieties intimately by their color, shape, flavor, fragrance, and feel. Sankhya would say that this mango I appreciated so much does not exist in the world outside – at least, not with the qualities I ascribed to it. The mango-in-itself, for example, is not red and orange; these are categories of a nervous system that can deal only with a narrow range of radiant energy. My dog Bogart would not see a luscious red and orange mango. He would see some gray mass with no distinguishing features, much less interesting to him than a piece of buttered toast. But my mind takes in messages from five senses and fits them into a precise mango-form in consciousness, and that form – nothing outside – is what I experience. Not that there is no “real” mango! But what I experience, the objects of my sense perception and my “knowing,” are in consciousness, nowhere else. A brilliant neuroscientist I was reading recently says something similar in contemporary language: we never really encounter the world; all we experience is our own nervous system.

Here they are. Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read. 'Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.

There are five, and only five, possible types of speech acts, five types of illocutionary acts.4 These are (1) Assertives (statements, descriptions, assertions, etc.) whose point is to represent how things are and which therefore have the downhill or word-to-world direction of fit↓;(2) Directives (orders, commands, requests, etc.) whose point is to try to get other people to do things, and which have the uphill or world-to-word direction of fit↑;(3) Commissives (promises, vows, pledges, etc.) whose point is to commit the speaker to some course of action, and which, like directives, have the uphill or world-to-word direction of fit↑;(4) Expressives, (apologies, thanks, congratulations, etc.) whose point is to express the speaker’s feelings and attitudes about a state of affairs that is in most cases presupposed to exist already; and (5) Declarations, which, remarkably, have both directions of fit at once. In a Declaration we make something the case by declaring it to be the case. The first four types of speech acts have exact analogues in intentional states: corresponding to Assertives are beliefs↓, corresponding to Directives are desires↑, corresponding to Commissives are intentions↑, and corresponding to Expressives is the whole range of emotions and other intentional states where the Presup fit is taken for granted. But there is no prelinguistic analogue for the Declarations. Prelinguistic intentional states cannot create facts in the world by representing those facts as already existing. This remarkable feat requires a language.5

Unlike most mathematical discoveries, however, no one was looking for a theory of groups or even a theory of symmetries when the concept was discovered. Quite the contrary; group theory appeared somewhat serendipitously, out of a millenia-long search for a solution to an algebraic equation. Befitting its description as a concept that crystallized simplicity out of chaos, group theory was itself born out of one of the most tumultuous stories in the history of mathematics. Almost four thousand years of intellectual curiosity and struggle, spiced with intrigue, misery, and persecution, culminated in the creation of the theory in the nineteenth century. This amazing story, chronicled in the next three chapters, began with the dawn of mathematics on the banks of the Nile and Euphrates rivers.

...my vocabulary was now down to nine words....For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo. A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. I had at my disposal eight nouns, which stood for six things; five of the eight nouns could double as verbs. I retained one indisputable noun and a single adjective which also could be used as a a verb or expletive. My new language universe was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound words, and two baby-talk repetitions. My arena of literal expression offered four avenues to the topic of elimination, two references to human anatomy, one request for divine imprecation, one standard description of or request for coitus, and a coital variation which was no longer an option for me since my mother was deceased.

But as musically evocative as Fitzgerald’s diction is, it’s his luxurious syntax that choreographs the scene. Like the liquid movement of the partygoers, his sentences “swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath.” Fitzgerald’s long, languid rhythms rise and fall seamlessly, then “with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.” His language is as opulent as the women’s costumes and as free-flowing as the champagne, continuing breathlessly to the end of the passage. As readers, we may eventually forget Fitzgerald’s colorful and musical descriptions, but we probably won’t forget the atmosphere of his fictional dream. Long after the last guest has departed and we’ve closed the covers on the novel, something— a fragrance, a snatch of song, a feeling—will remain in the summer air. ATTITUDE

Tegmark argues that "our universe is not just described by mathematics-it is mathematics" [emphasis added]. His argument starts with the rather uncontroversial assumption that an external physical reality exists that is independent of human beings. He then proceeds to examine what might be the nature of the ultimate theory of such a reality (what physicists refer to as the "theory of everything"). Since this physical world is entirely independent of humans, Tegmark maintains, its description must be free of any human "baggage" (e.g., human language, in particular). In other words, the final theory cannot include any concepts such as "subatomic particles," "vibrating strings," "warped spacetime," or other humanly conceived constructs. From this presumed insight, Tegmark concludes that the only possible description of the cosmos is one that involves only abstract concepts and the relations among them, which he takes to be the working definition of mathematics.

... They're really going to mash the world up this time, the damn fools. When I read that description of the victims of Nagasaki I was sick: "And we saw what first looked like lizards crawling up the hill, croaking. It got lighter and we could see that it was humans, their skin burned off, and their bodies broken where they had been thrown against something." Sounds like something out of a horror story. God save us from doing that again. For the United States did that. Our guilt. My country. No, never again. And then one reads in the papers "Second bomb blast in Nevada bigger than the first! " What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled "enemy?" Weren't the Russians communists when they helped us slap down the Germans? And now. What could we do with the Russian nation if we bombed it to bits? How could we "rule" such a mass of foreign people - - - we, who don't even speak the Russian language? How could we control them under our "democratic" system, we, who even now are losing that precious commodity, freedom of speech? (Mr. Crockett," that dear man, was questioned by the town board. A supposedly "enlightened" community. All he is is a pacifist. That, it seems, is a crime.) Why do we send the pride of our young men overseas to be massacred for three dirty miles of nothing but earth? Korea was never divided into "North" and "South." They are one people; and our democracy is of no use to those who have not been educated to it. Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it. When I think of that little girl on the farm talking about her brother - "And he said all they can think of over there is killing those God-damn Koreans." What does she know of war? Of lizard-like humans crawling up a hillside? All she knows is movies and school room gossip. Oh, America's young, strong. So is Russia. And how they can think of atom-bombing each other, I don't know. What will be left? War will come some day now, with all the hothead leaders and articles "What If Women are Drafted?" Hell, I'd sooner be a citizen of Africa than see America mashed and bloody and making a fool of herself. This country has a lot, but we're not always right and pure. And what of the veterans of the first and second world wars? The maimed, the crippled. What good their lives? Nothing. They rot in the hospitals, and we forget them. I could love a Russian boy - and live with him. It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual - but to kill off all the ones who could forge a strong nation? How foolish! Of what good - living and freedom without home, without family, without all that makes life?

Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term ‘self-aware.’ Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls. Tennyson’s figures of speech—the wrinkled sea crawling and the falling thunderbolt—appeal to my senses, bringing the imagined picture into sharp focus. They clarify, rather than blur, the picture. His metaphors and simile, rather than calling attention to themselves as figures of speech, illuminate the scene, bringing it vividly to the eye of my imagination. Tennyson’s metaphors and similes are not only concrete and sensory; they are also precise. Not literally precise, of course. Figurative language, by definition, deviates from the literal. Literally speaking, waves are not wrinkles, and the sea has no knees on which to crawl. But within the world Tennyson creates, the figures of speech are accurate; they follow natural laws. In contrast, a phrase like “her tears gushed like a geyser” is inaccurate. Tears might trickle, drip, even flow, but they cannot gush like a geyser, and saying that they do distracts the reader from the sense impression you’re trying to create—unless you’re intentionally employing hyperbole to accomplish some literary purpose. Figurative

In view of this magical, absolute significance of words, which presupposes that words also imply the objective behaviour of things, the Sophist critique was very much in place. It offered a striking proof of the impotence of language. In so far as ideas are merely names—a supposition that remains to be proved—the attack upon Plato was justified. But generic concepts cease to be mere names when they designate the similarities or conformities of things. The question then arises whether these conformities are objective realities or not. These conformities actually exist, hence the generic concept also corresponds with some kind of reality. It contains as much reality as does the exact description of a thing. The generic concept differs from the description only in that it describes or designates the conformities of things. The weakness, therefore, lies neither in the generic concept nor in the Platonic idea, but in its verbal expression, which obviously under no circumstances adequately reproduces either the thing or the conformity. The nominalist attack on the doctrine of ideas was thus in principle an unwarrantable encroachment, and Plato’s exasperated counterstroke was fully justified.

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

A great deal of effort has been devoted to explaining Babel. Not the Babel event -- which most people consider to be a myth -- but the fact that languages tend to diverge. A number of linguistic theories have been developed in an effort to tie all languages together." "Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis." "Yes. There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself." "Okay, I can see the significance of that. What about the universalists?" "In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not have anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if you can analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain traits in common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits." "Have they found any?" "No. There seems to be an exception to every rule." "Which blows universalism out of the water." "Not necessarily. They explain this problem by saying that the shared traits are too deeply buried to be analyzable." "Which is a cop out." "Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the human brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same --" "The hardware's the same. Not the software." "You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand." "Well, a French-speaker's brain starts out the same as an English-speaker's brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different software -- they learn different languages." "Yes. Therefore, according to the universalists, French and English -- or any other languages -- must share certain traits that have their roots in the 'deep structures' of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the deep structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to carry out certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually lead to the actual patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time, 'programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels." "But these deep structures are so deep we can't even see them?" "The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life -- the deep structures -- so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use Steiner's analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea, and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely.

When writers and academics question the limits of language, it is invariably an exercise that grows from a desire to bring more light into the public space, to arrive at a shared reality that is more nuanced than it was before the conversation began: to focus ever more tightly on the shape, weight, and function of any thing that can be named, or to find names for things that have not, in the past, been observed or been seen as deserving of description. A shared language is essential to this exercise, and observing the limits of this language is an attempt to compensate for them. As Hannah Arendt argued, the awareness of one’s subjectivity is essential to political conversation: We know from experience that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it. If someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.

The left side of my brain had been shut down like a damaged section of a spinship being sealed off, airtight doors leaving the doomed compartments open to vacuum. I could still think. Control of the right side of my body soon returned. Only the language centers had been damaged beyond simple repair. The marvelous organic computer wedged in my skull had dumped its language content like a flawed program. The right hemisphere was not without some language – but only the most emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo. A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. I had at my disposal eight nouns which stood for six things; five of the eight nouns could double as verbs. I retained one indisputable noun and a single adjective which also could be used as a verb or expletive. My new language universe was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound words, and two baby-talk repetitions. My arena of literal expression offered four avenues to the topic of elimination, two references to human anatomy, one request for divine imprecation, one standard description of or request for coitus, and a coital variation which was no longer an option for me since my mother was deceased. All in all, it was enough.

There is also a still deeper reason for which a growth in the tensions in the human universe - and indeed not despite, but during the simultaneous spreading of universal-ethical principles - can be presumed. The ethically-normatively charged word "human" functioned linguistically as an honorific adjective so long a one demarcated it against other adjectives which seemed to indicate the merely historically determined, abolishable and to be abolished distinctions between humans; in the language of ethical universalism "human" always meant something nobler and higher than words like Jew or Greek, Christian or heathen, black or white, communist or liberal. If all particular counter concepts in respect of the universalism "human" cease to apply, the word "human" will no longer constitute an adjective, that is, it will no longer point to a higher quality, but it will be converted into a noun for the description of a certain animal species. Humans will all be called "humans" just as lions lions and mice - mice without further national or ideological differentiation. It may sound paradoxical and yet it is so, that man differentiated himself from all the other animal species exactly because he was not merely man free of all other attributes (i.e. without any other predicate or complement). Not only did culture come into being through the overcoming of bare humanness and the gradual attainment of historically determined attributes, but also altercations and the struggles between humans gained, thanks to the presence and the effect exactly of these attributes, emotional and ideological dimensions which went far beyond the what is merely animal. That is why it is not excluded that the reduction of man to his mere humanness will inaugurate and will accompany an epoch in which humans will have to fight against one another for goods which are absolutely necessary for the naked survival of the animal species "man" - in the worst case for air and water. In accordance with a well-known paradox of historical action, the imposition of universal ethics will then bring about effects entirely different to the originally intended effects.

In 1931, amid that incredible transformation, a brilliant young Russian psychologist named Alexander Luria recognized a fleeting “natural experiment,” unique in the history of the world. He wondered if changing citizens’ work might also change their minds. When Luria arrived, the most remote villages had not yet been touched by the warp-speed restructuring of traditional society. Those villages gave him a control group. He learned the local language and brought fellow psychologists to engage villagers in relaxed social situations—teahouses or pastures—and discuss questions or tasks designed to discern their habits of mind. Some were very simple: present skeins of wool or silk in an array of hues and ask participants to describe them. The collective farmers and farm leaders, as well as the female students, easily picked out blue, red, and yellow, sometimes with variations, like dark blue or light yellow. The most remote villagers, who were still “premodern,” gave more diversified descriptions: cotton in bloom, decayed teeth, a lot of water, sky, pistachio. Then they were asked to sort the skeins into groups. The collective farmers, and young people with even a little formal education, did so easily, naturally forming color groups. Even when they did not know the name of a particular color, they had little trouble putting together darker and lighter shades of the same one. The remote villagers, on the other hand, refused, even those whose work was embroidery. “It can’t be done,” they said, or, “None of them are the same, you can’t put them together.” When prodded vigorously, and only if they were allowed to make many small groups, some relented and created sets that were apparently random. A few others appeared to sort the skeins according to color saturation, without regard to the color. Geometric shapes followed suit. The greater the dose of modernity, the more likely an individual grasped the abstract concept of “shapes” and made groups of triangles, rectangles, and circles, even if they had no formal education and did not know the shapes’ names. The remote villagers, meanwhile, saw nothing alike in a square drawn with solid lines and the same exact square drawn with dotted lines. To Alieva, a twenty-six-year-old remote villager, the solid-line square was obviously a map, and the dotted-line square was a watch. “How can a map and a watch be put together?” she asked, incredulous. Khamid, a twenty-four-year-old remote villager, insisted that filled and unfilled circles could not go together because one was a coin and the other a moon.

See? I long to be your spiritual guide. I really do, and I will. Love is my motive, rather than any elevated belief in my own knowledge, contemplative work, experience, or maturity. And may God correct what I get wrong. For he knows everything, and I only know in part.1 Now to satisfy your proud intellect, I will praise the work of contemplation. You should know that if those engaged in this work had the linguistic talent to express exactly what they’re experiencing, then every scholar of Christianity would be amazed by their wisdom. It’s true! In comparison, all theological erudition would look like total nonsense. No wonder, then, that my clumsy human speech can’t describe the immense value of this work to you, and God forbid that the limitations of our finite language should desecrate and distort it. No, this must not and will not happen. God forbid that I would ever want that! For our analysis of contemplation and the exercise itself are two entirely different things. What we say of it is not it, but merely a description. So, since we can’t define it, let’s describe it. This will baffle all intellectual conceit, especially yours, which is the sole reason I’m writing this letter. I want to start off by asking you a question. What is the essence of human spiritual perfection, and what are its qualities? I’ll answer this for you. On earth, spiritual perfection is only possible through the union between God and the human soul in consummate love. This perfection is pure and so sublime that it surpasses our human understanding, and that’s why it can’t be directly grasped or observed. But wherever we see its consequences, we know that the essence of contemplation abounds there. So, if I tell you that this spiritual discipline is better than all others, then I must first prove it by describing what mature love looks like. This spiritual exercise grows virtues. Look within yourself as you contemplate and also examine the nature of every virtue. You’ll find that all virtues are found in and nurtured by contemplation with no distortion or degeneration of their purposes. I’m not going to single out any particular virtue here for discussion. I don’t need to because you can find them described in other things I’ve written.2 I’ll only comment here that contemplative prayer, when done right, is the respectful love and ripe fruit that I discuss in your little Letter on Prayer. It’s the cloud of unknowing, the hidden love-longing offered by a pure spirit. It’s the Ark of the Covenant.3 It’s the mystical theology of Dionysius, the wisdom and treasure of his “bright darkness” and “unknown knowing.” It takes you into silence, far from thoughts and words. It makes your prayer very short. In it, you learn how to reject and forget the world.