Interlude (Updated w/ Epilogue)
On Authentic Public Inquiry
Do you love modern music with interludes, especially instrumental ones? I don’t mean Shostakovich or Schoenberg, no post-20th century formalism (which certainly has its place as good, necessary music). I mean Mouse on Mars. I mean Aphex Twin as a matter of fact. I mean those who would otherwise have not made music finding a computer or a cheaply but well-manufactured piano or guitar and having at it, only by force of dried-out creativity borrowing a music theory book from the library to explain their musical intuitions or to broaden them. These kinds of interludes act as a remembrance for the humble child-like experimentalist (or listener) of music that some creators of sound chose their profession with as much seriousness as one might in choosing to become a medical surgeon.
In books, on the other hand, I find “down-to-earth” interludes to be quite annoying. Often, such interludes arrive with poetry, with metered writing, with a feigned musicality that begs you to put on a real record to listen to in perpetual perceptual blossoming. Forgive me for being blunt; writing, I gather, is primarily for information presented in ways that don’t hint at other senses as much as organize them: Provide sheet music with your poetry at least! Written language mediates perception. The world and Universe come together at once, we hope, by reference to a community of believers.
So here’s my “indie artist” interlude, a chance to think about thinking—that which lives underneath language and perception both, always. How should one think about public mistakes that have been recorded? How can one face up to embarrassment? How can one remain honest and live despite the expectations of flawlessness in products and services? These are all questions I struggle with; and I have tried wacky, zany ways to understand how to dissolve such worries with some success and countless failures (really, I have tried, and it appears infinite to me).
I mention a belief about language that can be attributed to philosopher Donald Davidson: language implies a community of believers; there is no private language, at least in grasping the very concept. In other words, even if the world were stranded to just one single human being left, that individual would encounter the beliefs of the past and the beliefs that could have been had by many simply by virtue of discovering language. Do I mean verbal language here? I don’t know. There seems to be a distribution of language across all senses (and their interactions), some of which have yet to be explored. I have assigned myself simply one metaphorical tri-interaction between them, linguistically describing sound through the objects of taste (just as sound can be described through sound, light, touch, and so on and so forth).
But my point is that our relationship with language can tell us by itself about our relationship to other believers, existent or not. The potential belief system of language belongs to the most theoretical of language users, the contemplative-actualized beliefs of personal salvation to the most social, and the rest of us between either pole. By inquiring in public we test our intuitions about the potential with the actual through contemplation. A heavy task for some, perhaps entirely fictional and playful for some others (who might be considered deluded by the emotionally burdened). The degree to which one is burdened may be related to one’s fear or recognition of death and suffering. That is to say, those who suffered more suffer more; those who suffered less suffer less, given that they don’t experience pain. Once pain is understood as genuinely harmful, life changes. It doesn’t begin. In fact, for the first time, it appears to be an ending process, life itself. The question emerges: could life be just a prolonged death? Colors seem to weigh you down, gravity may trick your spine into a delicate crumple, and the friendly people you depend on suddenly look to not have hands but latent fists. But keep your mind, keep your language. If you stay faithful, you will remind each other that we are the same in at least feeling this way, that we can hold beliefs, and that our beliefs relate to our painful experiences in ways we can alleviate together through ingenuity and meditation.
What this all tells me is to consider making this Davidsonian point a kind of mantra. Consider reminding your reader in public of the potential mass of help. Though hopefully not to the next bar on White Night in Tel Aviv. Those are games of the same affective form but lacking the deeper cognition. They are important protections for those of us who do not understand the dangers of toxins to this very Universe. But they do not suffice. Because one can lose one’s language in the process: slur, be misunderstood, lose a structure of truth and sense-making in speech, indulge in memorial-less rituals (as one has “blacked out”), be left for dead or manipulation as an unconscious tool. Why do people do this? Perhaps it is their relationship with language; it’s torturing them somehow, and there are no others with whom they can connect by some shared, un-intervened-upon unease.
Of course, I speculate. But it’s an enticing idea, because the solution is so simple. Not just speak. Speak with the mission of understanding one another, not just following form. Because form doesn’t care. Form will create a “demon” in you to explain the structure you cannot grasp but can follow. Procedural generation may create the right behavior, but it will at best create archetypal wisdom, not idiosyncratic wisdom. That said, archetypes can reveal true natures of oneself, but one must search for the necessities of humanity by one’s unique self. In other words, form is not to be abandoned entirely; it should be taken like tapas, a little at a time, only when one feels it all or knows next how to feel it all. Only when it is delightfully or curiously undertaken with growing awareness. As for Aquinas’ methodology or any other metaphilosophy of a certain structure, come to it as it comes to you. Force nothing. But at least put that drink down! Because if you don’t understand it completely, or with enough curiosity to sustain the search (as Dr. Jordan Peterson famously did with considerable negative mental byproducts), you can be rid of it in such a way that creates fewer explanatory “demons,” fewer gaps of dialectic understanding than if you had consumed the sociable poison without sufficiently growing awareness, and alcohol kills awareness. What to do? Avoid the temptation as you would an inappropriately seductive (read: sexually hijacking) partner. At best, it seems to me, those things that clearly harm you without non-toxic substitutes (in the case of alcohol: uridine and Greek yogurt / the Hapbee device / Sentia Spirits / Alcarelle) should be avoided all while carefully consuming what is positively healthful.
And back to the mantra: Language use implies believers, language use implies believers…
Once, several years ago, I developed a psychological theory on mathematicians derived from a Davidsonian view on set theory. The idea was to unearth the biases of mathematicians without any kind of reference to the concept of ‘race’. In one fervent weekend, I generated pages of possible belief states within the ideal mathematician’s store, and it was painful. The work was painful. Because there were repeated patterns of great dissonance related to major metaphysical traditions (you might call some religions). There were repeated instances where the set theorist chose such deep contradictions by force, just to see precisely—even in an area that should have been philosophically screened off by meta-theoretical logic. To some, the search to be precise everywhere is enough. To delineate all as it must be is the only way. But from this Davidsonian perspective, it suddenly dawned upon me how painful my journey as a mathematics student had been, as I had been entering belief over and over again while ignoring its fundamental mathematical structure. I was creating beliefs without restoring the ideal metaphysically possible shape of belief. What a horror! What had I been doing? What have we all been doing?
Mantra: Language use implies believers…
When I was younger, my native language of Urdu was tough for me. I spoke like a Pashtun, I was told, as an early caretaker of mine was Pashtun (and therefore spoke Pashto natively): my accent and instincts for language were probably shaped by hers to some extent. Pashto, a language of Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, is somewhat like the Irish Gaelic of the region: sing-songy, belonging to highly agrarian and hospitable people. As it so happens, I loved to sing as a child, even amongst strangers. Dance too. Expressing oneself was fun and encouraged! But Urdu would catch my tongue; it was generally too flexible, formless for my mind. Yet this quality of formlessness together with the ambiguity of learning English, Spanish, and other Pakistani dialects as a child left me open to what I call normative creativity, the practice of rule-fitting from pure experience.
Take an example: “I love you.” My tendency grammatically was to render such a sentence (only in my painfully timid head of course) as “You inspire love,” in Urdu. The verb must agree, I thought, with the sentence, i.e. whatever furnishes a verb sufficiently to a complete idea. Not subject-verb agreement, nor agreement by simple grammatical convention but deep philosophical agreement. My toddler grammar, in other words, led me to contemplate and eventually accept the belief that love was selfless and should thus highlight the individual who ostensibly creates the feeling of love. Yet no grammar allows for such a construction. Such a language would require what’s called using linguistics and philosophy terminology the present imperfect tense by philosophical context, i.e. by analytic metaphysical interpretation. As far as I have researched, no natural language has yet to organize in such a way. And so when past loved ones have asked me to express my love in words more often (by a new colloquialism), the question’s elicitation was not simply due to my shyness; it was due to what I have early on discovered to be an inadequate grammar for the feeling of love, a problem I never fully resolved.
Mantra: Language use implies believers…
What is the restorative relationship between belief and language? That question brims to mind through this public exercise and will close this meditative inquiry. Is it given by Nature, by one’s social environment? In my case, I’ve been unconsciously searching for a unity between the grammars of English, Urdu, and Pashto (among some other languages). But the unity comes at a cost of abandoning convention and thereby accessibility to others who we all at least wish to cherish—despite our grammatical quirks. Must there be conventional beliefs? Is there a necessary role for conventional beliefs?
What my toddler grammar understands well about the present is how the necessarily active “ingredient” of grammar, the verb, is essential to understanding the present description of a situation. But a purely verb-centric grammar will not necessarily inculcate any bit of appropriate selections as to which actions—which verbs—ought to be used or when there are predicate fallacies. Such a task falls to critical thinking, to logic, to philosophy. But this flexible grammar produced by young normative creativity—a verb-centric imperfect tense on the condition of philosophical context— is rather uniquely cognitively honest in this approach regardless, and so this apparently spontaneous childhood convention cannot be ignored. Is there a way to construct language, it appears to ask, so as to guarantee nourishment of one’s present mind with truth of mind and world? To inform a student with a simple morsel of grammatical function and see how she grows, regardless of the past or future? Convention’s very existence to this day implies a significant degree of restorative properties. So it cannot be ignored, just as yogic literature cannot be, regardless of its age.
So if mathematics goes to places it need not simply to precisely describe everything and Shehrosean toddler grammar (if you will) remains steadfast in recognizing what is, I wonder why its form has not been generally discovered before and implemented as a good language for mathematics, a potentially new (if borrowed) convention. That it may not be a restorative language of mathematics, the ever-present continuity of mentally conceivable objects, of rule-structures, of ideal measurements, of shapes and numbers, and so on and so forth. Perhaps such an idiosyncratic grammar exists for all individuals, according to their evolutionary strengths and civil strategies of exercising them. And perhaps we could see the sustained peaks of such a movement of personal restorative languages someday, maybe sooner than I properly learn either Pashto or Urdu both.
Mantra: Language use implies believers…
Epilogue
I asked ChatGPT what they thought about my linguistic needs. Here’s what it said:
Yes, there are languages that have a central verb, imperfect tense, and analytic-metaphysical context. One example is Vietnamese, which is an Austroasiatic language spoken in Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia.
In Vietnamese, the verb is the most important element in the sentence and carries a lot of grammatical information. The subject and object are typically marked by affixes or particles that are attached to the verb. The imperfect tense is formed using an auxiliary verb and a participle, and abstract concepts such as causation, possibility, and necessity are expressed using particles and affixes.
Other languages that have a similar structure and grammatical features include Chinese and Thai.
As it so happens, the foreign language I most wanted to study as a child was Chinese (incidentally, I also have some East Asian heritage) but decided on French to socialize with my older siblings (who chose French). So, assuming this analysis is correct, I stand corrected. Apologies!
Shehrose, Sound Chef @ Earcake Sounds