THE LANGUAGE UNDER LANGUAGE

A body of thought has developed that is still largely unknown to many people though it is ABOUT the nature of persons.  Coming out of the realizations of Deep Space (with telescopes we can see to the Big Bang, which is not the beginning of everything maybe, but at least the beginning of our universe) which is actually also Deep Time, and then — not touching but parallel — science-supported ideas about how life kindles, spreads out, is quenched here and fanned there, until it ends up with us, survivors of the group trying to survive as individuals.

These days we don’t talk about monkeys as our ancestors.  Instead we are tracing out the DNA of a storm of species (lemurs, langurs, tarsiers) and clades of humans deduced from fossil remnants that are not always more primitive. 

Tarsier eating a lizard.

I’ve been particularly interested in the point when hominins became humans, so far as we can tell, suddenly able to handle metaphor, code, representation and material objects that can neither be eaten nor used as weapons.  I’m interested again in the point when spoken language (augmented with gesture) began to support coded marks on a surface, written language.  And then for the last time (maybe) the shift to what I’ll call “video,” the braiding together of all art forms into portable depictions without good names — we don’t have the concepts nor the words for them either. Cross-media?

AEON.com is the website for a lot of thinking about this sort of thing, which needs a lot of reflection, digestion, innovation and research.  After all, what language can be used to speak about speech?  It’s not just we all have different vocabulary, but consider the problem of grammar, the arrangement of words into sentences.  It is hotly debated whether a culture invents these or whether by now it’s wired into our genes, just waiting for words.

But most thinkers are weak on the precursor of either oral or written expression, which is experience of the world.  Those who try to keep their ancient languages from disappearing tend to learn them in English grammar terms ("what is the word for X") instead of the subtle variations of words — suffixes and prefixes, inflections — that convey nuance and distinctions, which may not be the ones important in the modern world at all.  In fact, the variations that indicate gender are being challenged and accused of making trouble in the modern world.  

Gendered pronouns are one of the little twists that are hard to learn.  ESL old-timers struggle to assign "he" and "she" properly.  At the same time gays of a certain period will deliberately and perhaps ironically use “she” for “he.”  And at the same time Sioux language uses gender-separation of the whole system, so when “Dances with Wolves” had a female language coach, she taught them the way she spoke Sioux.  Then male old-timers who really spoke the language fell down laughing when the warriors talked like grandmothers.  In French even objects have gender, depending on how they fit into lives.  A kitchen table is female.  A business desk is male.

As we come closer to understanding how neurons create symbolism for the electrochemical code that the world feeds into our perceptions — that ARE our perceptions — we discover that our sensorium (not just the specialized organ instruments like ears and noses) is constantly shaped by the world, which then dynamically becomes the platform for brain operation.  

The human (like all the other animals since the first one-celled eukaryote) only perceives what it has code for, which is constantly changing because a creature is a process.  The world (food and perception) comes in one end, is sorted and emphasized inside the skin (not just the brain) and then drops out what doesn’t seem to matter and even snuffs their record in the brain.  THEN acts.

So differences between the way oral languages treat the world and the way written languages (which are still very young, comparatively speaking -- only thousands of years of writing vs. millions of talking ) record and transmit the world, are so deep that few think about them, and yet the difference is far more controlling that whether one is speaking Blackfeet or French or Morse code.

I know of no situations where writing/reading are learned before a spoken/heard language is learned.  EXCEPT Helen Keller, whose sensorium was severely limited because she was both deaf and blind.  She could not learn EITHER oral language or written language.  She operated on sign language, transmitted by touch.  She learned to read Braille which is a kind of felt Morse code, bumps on paper.

Helen Keller

Wild children, presumably raised by animals, who fail to learn any language (words, that is) during a window of development determined genetically, will never learn language.  Human beings are creatures of relationship.  Without interaction with another human being, we cannot unfold into our true capacities.  In fact, we will die of what is called “mirasmus.”  The interaction need not be friendly and cherishing.  Fighting can keep a baby alive: a child that gets no attention will use violence and provocation.

As research on language gets deeper into the neuron substructure, more dense in understanding of how we manage sight and sound for contact and expression — the deep importance of empathy — at the same time there are more things to express, more phenomena that need names, stranger people to understand.  It is surprising how many people have invented languages, not just Esperanto but constructed languages for constructed worlds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages  sorts them into three categories:  auxiliary, engineered, and artistic (including fictional) languages, and their respective subgenres.  Do you speak Vulcan?  Maybe Kesh, which is Ursula LeGuin’s devisement.  Of course, we raid each other’s language all the time.  There’s never been a better word for empathy than Heinlein’s “grok.”

http://nautil.us/blog/how-the-languages-in-game-of-thrones-defiance-and-thor-were-created

Going in the other direction, there are movements to clear out the underbrush and the over-elegant locutions, throwing out all the jargon and adverbs.  For some cultures this is quite offensive — vulgar and brutal.  For others, it is the essence of clear meaning, esp. in the context of science.

For some sciences — maybe the pejoratively labeled “soft” sciences — the metaphors and the primary place and culture to which they refer ARE the point of their discipline.  Getting the exact right word for a specific animal or plant in a known place at a particular season is crucial.  Most of us know about the many words for kinds of snow that northern peoples use.  Recently I ran across a semi-invented vocabulary about lawn grass for use among suburbans.  If you know nothing about snow— I mean have not EXPERIENCED it in all its states, the names for snow won’t hold content.  The same for suburbia where the grass is differently perceived than anywhere else because it has so much attached symbolism about prestige and pride.

For me, the task of writing (both fiction and nonfiction) is about prying under the rocks of assumptions in order find a more primordial set of perceptions, sometimes rather creepy-crawly ones.  To me, the more important development in terms of language on the Blackfeet rez is not the name for this or the words for numbers — though those are good things.  Rather it is the focused study of the complex place and entwined lives that exist there.  

Wading in a stream, sampling soils, describing geological forces, observing gophers or even the rez dogs, will create an interface of understanding.  I’ve begun using the self-invented terms of “in-skin” for the feelings of the gut and mind and “out-skin” for the sensorium evidence that “being there” produces.  There’s a lot more for “Skins” to learn out walking that either sitting in a classroom or driving around in a pickup blasting music.  But those are good, too.  Take in the world!  

In order to really participate in Bundle-Keeping, every animal skin must have a meaning you know in your muscles, so that if it is your turn to dance, you can become that creature and call on their gifts.

IT'S QUEER THAT YOU'RE SO NORMAL -- OR . . .

Something like the man in the Moliere play who was shocked but pleased to discover that he was speaking “prose” without even knowing it or trying to do it, I discover that I’ve been exploring “queer theory” at least part of the time.  Not just peculiar or odd, but a category invented fairly recently so as to think about the atypical.  Formally defined.  Mostly sexual.

“Queer focuses on "mismatches" between sex, gender and desire. Queer has been associated most prominently with bisexual, lesbian and gay subjects, but analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, intersex (physically both sexes), gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery. [I notice pedophilia is not mentioned, though in other queer places there are discussions of paraphilias, like glove fetishes. Silence means a third-rail: touch it and you're dead.]

“Gay was mobilized as a specifically political counter to that binaried and hierarchised sexual categorization which classifies homosexuality as a deviation from a privileged and naturalized heterosexuality. Queer marks both a continuity and a break with previous gay liberationist and lesbian feminist models.”

“Queer theorists challenged the validity and consistency of heteronormative discourse, and focused to a large degree on non-heteronormative sexualities and sexual practices.”  And NOT hierarchical.

Heteronormative, but maybe 12% or so are not.  We just didn't know until DNA.

So most of this thought is about escaping the social categories of male over here and female over there and perverse in the middle.  One is supposed to pair off (not triple off) with the opposite sex wherein the man is two inches taller, two years older, and has two more degrees than the woman.  It’s a given that gender identity is more than coitus in the interest of fertility, though most non-thinkers don’t seem to figure that out.  They are so hypnotized by what goes where that they can’t think of any other issues.  Like desire in all its colors and all its specificity.

Mary Strachan and Bob Scriver,  1962

So let me throw in a few loops of the rope:  I fell madly in love with a man twice my age or almost.  I was 21 and he was 47.  Was it a kind of late onset pedophilia?  Which one was the trophy?  Or was he a daddy, though I sometimes bathed him like a child?

Desire was enough for a decade, but it was not the only boundary crossing.  We were differently educated -- not the subject, the "Method" -- literally.  We were in a reservation world where things were dominated by the two races and their uncomfortable mixes.  Sex was in there someplace.  He became highly successful, praised, courted, and Gulliver-style confined by a host of small obligations and deadlines.  All the while he gave me protection, guidance, instruction and validation that made me stronger and freer, more desirous of freedom.  We were doomed.  Queer?

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. 'Queer' then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.”   WHAT normative?  On a rez in the Sixties?  The norm was a choice between hunkering down and uproar.  And suddenly -- fame -- there was a huge discrepancy in economic viability:  he could buy a ranch.  I barely had enough for gas to drive back to my mother’s house in Portland.  I hocked my engagement ring, the one my mother-in-law obsessed about for fear the diamond would get lost out of it.  That upset him, but he wrote the letter of recommendation that got me the animal control job.

The next non-normative was that we remained attached, much to the disgust of the fourth wife.  He had had female intimates before me which conventionally should have ended with marriage, but they didn’t.  So that was his norm.  His first wife followed the conventional pattern -- animosity and remarriage.  His second wife had broken off finally, but her sister and brother were more bonded to him than ever.  Atypical.  The rez people observed this.  Whites said, “These artist people have their own rules.”  Indians said, “All white people are crazy.”  My family knew nothing about it -- a good thing.

Though we were differently educated, both of us were in the arts:  Bob, music; myself, theatre.  That helped give us a little extra room.  I was taking OTC pills called “Scope” as though they were aspirin.  Probably most of the effect was placebo, but when I googled them just now, the pills turned out to be scopolamine, a member of the same family as powerful mushrooms.  Maybe I could have gotten into more serious drugs except that real wickedness always eludes me.  THAT's queer.  Near the end I took Bob’s Nembutal one night which scared everyone and the doc gave me Benzodiazipam (Valium) which just put me to sleep -- very nice.  That was the extent of my drug experiments in a time when many around me were hooked.  (Oh, I forgot.  When I was supposed to be losing weight, the doc gave me speed.  I never renewed the prescription.  I was speedy enough already.)

I wrote lists of what I took to be facts, using green ink and block printing in spiral notebooks.  Green ink is supposed to be a sign of something.  I suppose block printing is as well.  Then I went back through the list and challenged each assertion by flipping it over.    Edifying.  Painful.  An auto-therapy.

Recently we’ve learned about epigenomics, environmental impacts, the constant evolving of the brain’s structures, and mosaic genetics, which means that not all the cells in one body have the same DNA.  There may be bits of an infant that was carried years earlier, there may be bits of a twin that never developed, and some might have come through something like transfusions.  Many of us are chimeras and never suspected it.  Might have felt it.

Kylo-Patrick R. Hart

I’ve just been quoted by a cultural critic:  Kylo-Patrick R. Hart wrote “Queer Males in Contemporary Cinema: Becoming Visible.”   He is chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at Texas Christian University. This book follows two streams: explicitly gay movies and movies that are moving and tender, but the gay subtext is unstated.  If you aren’t looking for it, you might not know it’s there, but you may feel it and respond to it, subliminally.  (Oh, there’s another one of those words!  Don't we EVER know what we're doing?)

Troy Garity and Lee Pace

Hart quoted a review I wrote of “Soldier’s Girl,” posted Sept. 19, 2011.  I like what I wrote well enough to quote it a bit:

“Gender binaries have become so troublesome that social philosophers have begun to reflect on them.  When I say “trouble,” I mean murder.  People are murdered because they don’t fit our notions of gender binaries.  I’m pondering “Soldier’s Girl,” which is a movie version of a real event in which a soldier was bludgeoned to death as he slept -- by his fellow soldier, his dorm mate.  The killer administered capital punishment for loving a person who crossed the binary division -- not just a cross dresser but a transsexual person in the process of going from male to female.  Post-surgery, the relationship would no longer have been 'homosexual.' ”

“Leggo words, assembled from particles, are unfortunate predeterminers.  “Homosexual” is as misleading as “atheist.”  Both are stuck together from pre-existing concepts and both over-control the discussions.  It is possible to be homosexual while being strongly “male” and possible to be deeply religious while not believing in God (theism).”  Morality should not be based on word particles.

This is what Hart quoted:   “Pole-in-the-hole is not all there is to sex.  REAL intercourse in the sense of physical intimacy is skin and brain: a million little physical, mental and emotional transactions of sensation that enmesh and bond and console.  Otherwise, it’s friction followed by a sneeze.”

The filmography in this book is very useful.  I’m adding some of it to my Netflix queue, but I’ve already seen a dozen of the 35 films, some of which are classic.  (“Red River,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” “From Here to Eternity,” "Boys Don't Cry.")  We all love these boys -- you know the ones I mean.  Even the ones who aren't male.

John Wayne and young Montgomery Clift

Slightly older Montgomery Clift

James Dean

Hilary Swank