Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 3)

This is my vision—maybe my illusion; at any rate, this is how I imagine stuff works inside my head. There is an amorphous, amoeboid thing, a feeling, that emerges undulating out of some foggy corner of my brain, I know not from whence it comes; it is a notion, strangely-shaped with subtle topography—sometimes pockmarked, jagged, sometimes glossy and fluid—ridged, channeled, crevassed. Its hue is a sunset or a dawn, a tinge in variation, like an octopus changing its color. This feeling is complex—ineffably so.

Then the words come. They come like shipping containers; they come to package the feeling. Words are envelopes, packets, parcels, bags, boxes and crates—a whole diction of vessels of standardized sizes and shapes. With luck, there is a lexical package that closely matches the feeling’s multiplex form, fitting it as best it can. The better the word, the better it conforms to the feeling’s shape, thereby retaining and transmitting its essence.

 But in every case on some level, the process of packing feelings into words makes the feelings lose their subtlety, their complexity, their absolute authenticity. Feelings are infinities, and words, by virtue of being finite units, leave something out that existed originally. Words are necessary however, because despite the net loss of meaning, once feelings have been jammed into words, we can think.

~

I imagine that this idea, this cramming of feelings into words, eventually feeds back into itself and stabilizes, and I think the feedback loop that emerges can help explain how we learn language and develop the capacity to use it as a tool to think and communicate, thereby gaining efficacy in the world.

 After a long period of using certain words to describe certain feelings, we grow accustomed to them; that is, our feelings are affected by the containers (the words) we pack them in. They emerge in our brain not as impossibly fluctuating dynamic entities, but as quietly undulating things pre-molded into the shape of their packages, into the shape of the words themselves. In this sense, thoughts and words become one in the same. I’ll call this the process of normalization, and it’s the birthing rite of thoughts.

 After sustained use of words our feelings are no longer ineffable infinities, they become verbal and thinkable—they become thoughts. After normalization we mean what we say and we say what we mean.

I want to mention here before moving on that I think genuinely new ideas, creativity, poetry, inspiration, innovation, all come from this pre-verbal place. These things are born of feelings, of pure unarticulated meaning. Es decir the Muse resides in feelings but must be tamed by thoughts, that is, by words.

In the next post we'll try and figure out how the process of normalization plays into learning another language...what fun!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3 ***
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement