Speak to me digitally

Nothing's been happening here for a while. Was to busy moving to Portland and redefining the parameters of my life, externally and internally. But now starting to feel somewhat settled and normal. So I can perhaps collect some more mind-droppings over on this page sometimes.

Reflecting on language today, and how it influences thought. As regular and habitual language users, we are mostly unaware that the concepts we manipulate in order to fit everything into categories of stuff, are fairly arbitrary. We divide up the world into manageable bits, pixels, approximations of reality that allow us to talk to each other and problem-solve. Then we confuse the concept for reality itself. We first decide that there is such a thing as “God”, or “drunkard”, or “freedom”, with a set of characteristics, and then we attempt to fit the world into our existing labels. But it’s an analog world – a continuum of complexities, and we go about relating to it with our digital-like tools. We are comfortable in the known world in which we can call things by their names. Why do people sometimes want to know what a foreign dish is called before they taste it? Why do some people read the card with the painting title in an art museum, before, or instead of, looking at the painting? Confronted with the unfamiliar, we grasp for a category to put it in. Jodie Foster in Contact was ejected into outer space, where her verbal mind was short-circuited, and what she was seeing had no pre-existing labels. She could not say what she was experiencing. They should have sent a poet, she said.

Wouldn’t poetry then be rather like ascii art?