phaedrus

John

Prarying too much to Lord Bacchus does affect one's concentration and results in working on a bloody sunday

Here's my post again for clarity: "I consider language the product of specific thought processes (i.e. a type of thought)." I mean that language is the product of a type of thought, not that it was a type of thought itself. It is through thought processes that language is expressed.

Could you offer an brief elaboration on what are the "types" of thoughts that result in language. You could also take a look at this paper....The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon

I don't disagree with this (see above). However, Penny also says I think there is a great deal of use in such an exercise and consider it nigh on essential to investigate thought's feedback loops - e.g. thinking aloud enables one to externalize the thought in a different manner than mere inward contemplation. I also believe that thoughts and fears (primitive thoughts?) can exist completely independently of language - witness localization of speech areas in the brain.

If both are entwined to a great extent, how different could the "thinking" be say if one does it a language like "english" and say in a differnt language (their mother tongue perhaps and just "think" in a so-called natural language.....Do we "think" in languages like "english" only when we have to communicate in that particular language?

jp

phaedrus

Amos

......., would it be al right to say that language is the verbalization of thought? If so, it is a product of convention (agreement) and our voice box ("adamps apple") is used to interject reason into our stream of words. If so, glossolalia would be non-rational speach and therefore "God's" language that is free from the unfluence of our rational [Adamic] nature/influence.

That is exactly i wanted to discuss when i asked the question "do we need language to think". Now, why have you associated "rational/reason" with words, dont we need the same for normal "thinking"? And why a "god's" (sic!) language? And why would our non-linguistic thinking be "non-rational"? Intuition, feelings, emotions cant be expressed exactly in gobbledygook right? Can an experience like....sitting in the verandah of a house on the top of a hill station, feeling the cold breeze and warm sun on the skin and taking in the breath-taking beauty of the mountain while sipping on cup of coffee and reading the word/thought play of eco......be called non-rational?

Accordingly, if thinking is not part of our God identity (or freethinkers could go heaven) would this not mean that language and thought are mutually exclusive for if they were not freethinkers could become soulffree and fancyfree in which case marauders would be allowed into heaven.

Heaven......now that is something camus commented on Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?

Luiseach

Yes, that's a wise alteration to my statement. We are trying to make sense...

Okay, let's start at the end...

V. What the Thunder Said

'After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
the shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.' (Waste Land ll. 322-30)

I've always felt a stab of sadness when I've read these first lines of the last book of The Waste Land, because the tone is world-weary, futile and nihilistic. The narrator seems to be talking about human existence as 'much ado about nothing,' if you know what I mean. Sure, he's looking at life in a pessimistic manner...seeing the glass as half empty rather than as half full...but at the same time, he is drawing attention to the absurdity of life, the strife and trouble, the unnecessary suffering. He's reminding us that we are only here the once, and that our dismissal of our own finiteness/mortality is what contributes to the pain of the world.

The next two stanzas, where the speaker goes on about heat, thirst, hostility, barrenness 'But there is no water'...this is again a reflection on the spiritual and intellectual desert of the human world. This was Eliot's abiding worry about the modern world. In his works of literary criticism, for instance, he emphasises the importance of remembering our past traditions...otherwise we are culturally starved and forget/miss the significance of things due to our ignorance.

Let me jump ahead a stanza to this bit:

'What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal.' (Eliot, Waste Land, ll. 366-76)

This is a visionary moment in the poem, perhaps experienced by the soothsayer of the text - Tiresias of ancient legend (the blind man who 'sees' the truth). He questions his vision of bleak, dry, arid existence. He predicts the 'falling apart' of civilisation, when he exclaims 'Falling towers.' It's almost like a vision of hell, with hordes of hooded people swarming like insects over empty horizons. Lifeless. Inhumane. Cruel.

In Eliot's footnote to this section of the poem, he says the following, which is quite helpful: 'In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book), and the present decay of eastern Europe.'

So he's overlapping three levels of meaning at one go, which makes for a complex, intertextual read, but also adds nuances of meaning which are lost on the first reading.

The allusion to Weston is significant. I'll need to get the exact title for you, but her book is a history of the 'Matter of Britain' (Arthurian legends, in other words), and the Chapel Perilous is where the questing knight must face the questions that will either lead to the Grail or result in complete failure.

So, we have in the next stanza, the allusion to the dark Chapel:

'And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.'
(Eliot, Waste Land, ll. 379-84)

I've always found the image of inverted towers ringing 'reminiscent bells' rather creepy. I'm reminded of the British tradition for funeral processions...where the hearse is paraded to the church with bells ringing the right way, and when the hearse is being taken away towards the cemetery, the bells are rung backwards, in downward-reaching notes. It's a horrible sound. As for the the voices emerging from empty cisterns and wells, we can recall the Celtic belief in magic wells, in water as the source of life, prophecy and the future. This 'lack of water theme' is persistent in Waste Land.

And the narrator expands on the theme of the Chapel Perilous here as well:

'In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.' (Eliot, Waste Land, ll. 385-90)

Once again, empty holes, dry grass, old and forgotten graves and bones. The wind howling through an abandoned chapel. All very bleak images of loss, cultural aridity, and spiritual emptiness.

Whew! Okay, 'What the Thunder Said' is a long-ish part of the poem; I think I'll deal with the rest of it in another post. I'll look forward to contributions to this analysis. I'll be able to expand on some of my comments later...as it stands, I'm not overly satisfied with it yet. We need to dig deeper. Like Derrida says, we need patience to watch a text unravel....so we have to start somewhere, with the first layer of text, before we can re-read to see the contradictions and ambiguities emerge.

I wanted to respond to this before I go, however. You quote the first line of the Waste Land, and it is a significant one. As a matter of interest, the line is a direct allusion to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written in Middle English, and focusing on the issue of pilgrims travelling together towards Canterbury in the Springtime, which is symbolically a season of re-birth, hope, awakenings, fruitfulness and joy.

Strange, though, how Eliot twists the meaning of Chaucer's original lines. Whereas Chaucer emphasised renewal in the Spring, Eliot describes this stirring of life as 'cruel'. Why do you think this is so?

Amos

No, we don't need words to think and we can enjoy all/many things in life without words! In fact, in the hight of ecstacy we often find ourselves without words. If, later, we regain our faculties we can try to express the same and use words.

The best response in show of gratitude I have ever seen was from a late teenage girl who stood up 'against her own will' and against the will of her sister's who was trying to hold her down. She wanted to tell us something, that was obvious, but she just could not find the words and she never did say said a single word. In the end, she 'said' the most because the expression on her face said it all. It was a priceless response and was understood by all that were present. It was just unforgettable.

Never mind the 'gods' language. I just threw that in to show that non-rational speech is possible but I will remain "senseless." God here just means "non rational" as opposed to "rational" or "irrational." It is just that some Christians get carried away with this and call it God's language. In fact, some say that without it you don't know God.

Intuition, feelings and emotion can be expressed verbally but we have to use our faculty of reason to this. Don't forget, we don't have to verbalize our thoughts before we can act upon them.The order of the world is shaped by the living and not by the death. In my opinion it is wrong to struggle against death but instead we should become part of the flow and be transmigrated in it. It equals no soul, or soulfree and fancyfree.

King's Indian

Hello, Luiseach.
No apologies necessary, I’ve had to take a couple of days off myself to let my body clock catch up.
Just to remark on a few points you've made in later posts.
I agree. I wonder, though, if you have any thoughts on the suggestion that deconstruction happens to language on the inside?. Even further, that what we may witness as deconstruction is language happening to language?.
As you may guess from my questions this is my position. Just as physicists have moved away from their billiard-ball view of atoms to seeing fundamental particles as processes that can only be defined in relation to other processes, so might language and consciousness be seen as aspects that are not second-order descriptions of reality. Rather, they are necessary conditions of it (I suspect sufficient as well ).Simplification is necessary, but I think I may have been over-simplifying Derrida’s position that I referred to in “Grammatology”, (Although it made sense locally, It wouldn’t be my creed. Yours neither, I think). If I were to re-write that now, I would make the point that in constituting real life as a text, we are not just re-presenting it. This would just make language secondary, a falling-off; necessary in describing what is not directly present to us but an accident that happens to reality. In my new formulation, real life would already be a text, but not just one text amongst many. Re-presentation could not be rigorously separated from presentation. Language and reality are not in any anterior-posterior relation, but aspects of each other that may be an exemplary case of self-reflexivity. I’m going to address these points in an OP (if that’s the phrase) that I’m working on to follow up on one of John Page’s statements. It’ll take a while because. as you may imagine, it’ll be a bugger to make myself even semi-coherent. If you have any thoughts about the above, however, and when you have a mo, I’d welcome them.
Take care.
KI.

Amos

Hello Luiseach and thanks. Yes, that's a good idea. Let's remove all contradictions and ambiguities and rebuilt that poem from the ground up.



Yes, and he is also shaking our high and low points in life ("prison and palace") and adding them to the "waste land" to indicate that they, too, have become part of our "dying slave" to make room for the "rising slave" . . . with a little patience.

The next stanza deals with the vanity of our human endeavors that are now always paired with dryness even on our lofty mountian tops. We can't seem to sit, stand or lie to find rest for our troubled soul that now seems like thunder without water.

But wait, "who is the third who walks always beside you?" (359)
This third person is always "ahead up the white road" as if it was an indication of hope towards a better future. This "gliding image" is wrapped in a brown cloak as if it was faith now giving rise to the question who this second person is that walks "on the other side of you?" This insight brings about the "maternal lamentation" of the next stanza (I like the phrase "maternal lamentation" as a variant of 'involutional melancholia.'

Right on. Here it comes the moment of realization that turns his old world (Gerontion "great age") upside down as was predicted by Tiresias. Compare this with the abandonment of the spire ("The Spire" Faber and Faber 111 chapter 6) after he looked down on his life (the tower represents his life) and saw "a dimishing series of squares with a round hole at the bottom which was nevertheless the top." This "bottom that nevertheless was the top" here was the inversion of his faith with the now the "empty chapel [wasteland] that was only home to the wind" (387).

I like the inverted towers image, the reminiscence of tolling bells, empty cistens and exhausted wells. No more water, no more glory and no more music! Somber and dry was the narrator's outlook on life when "the woman [playfully] drew her long black hair out tight" (she was playfully fully in charge of his destiny) and now gave new light to the life of the exhausted ego identity in that "violet hour that brought the sailor home." Notice that in this "violet light" he could see in the dark and therefore the baby bat image. Nice imagery don't you think? The "the old man with wrinkled breasts" is the exhausted male and female identity of the conscious mind (our Adam and Eve). Both exhausted and passified for sure but I do not see it as sexual but just loss of ambition or zest for life due to the prevailing doom and gloom. (221-).

Ah but wait "in the faint moonlight the grass is singing over the tumbled graves," chapel etc. and it is upon this song that he will built his life anew in the second go-around. "Stirring the waters hither and thither with her foot" is equal to "in the faint moonlight the grass is singing" don't you think?

The cock crowed here too and then in a flash of lightning the rain began to fall. The turmoil in his head ("monkey's make noises overhead") was silenced like a jungle crouched in silence. There was peace in the valley and then the thunder spoke the three "da's" wherein the first is unconscious surrender, the second is the key to enlightenment and the third is the calming of the storm. Do you know what these three "da" words actually mean?Don't forget the purple color of Lilac's as a sign of Advent. It shows promise and perhaps you have noticed the last line "Shantih, shantih, shantih" as being the equivalent of our "peace that surpasses human understanding."

The "twist" is just a matter of perspective because renewal is at the cost of dying. Let's say that in "The Waste Land" Eliot looked at renewal from the dark side like Matthew did when satan tempted Jesus in the desert while Chaucer looked at the bright side and depicted Jesus as the honored guest at the wedding in Cana. These two are also identical but seen from opposite perspectives wherein the author of John presents us with the New Testament freedom from religion while in Matthew he adamantly defended the Old Testament slavery to sin that was built on Judaism. Notice that right after this Jesus went to upset the temple which was equal to his personal allegiance to religion.

The city that we once built is equal to our curriculum vitae and is cherished and adored by us all but must be turned upside down and abandonned as if since it has become our waste land. It is unreal to us now, but ours just the same because we once were like a Phoenician and "handsome and tall as Phlebas" was (321).

John Page

Phaedrus:

Glory be to Bacchus that lubricates out thoughts! I looked at the paper you linked to and the sentence that stuck out for me was "We assume that mental representations have a structure not wholly unlike that of a sentence,....". I do not share this assumption. I think our mind represents its environment (to itself) using the spatial and temporal relevance of electrical and chemical signals (Words cannot convey the horror that lay before me etc...). In order to optimize our physical behaviour, the brain analyzes and projects external events and it is this mental behaviour that I would term "thought".

Thought is mental activity about situations and the events surrounding them. Thoughts can be viewed as being at different levels of abstraction - e.g. we can have a thought process that deals with addition upon which is (or may be) dependent the concept of multiplication.

I do not know how to deconstruct the process of thought. I figure this is difficult or irrelevant. Given the homogeneity of brain cells I believe that thoughts are ongoing 'plastic' processes that will be very difficult to type. Current success seem to be tracking brain acitvity related to a particular topic, what I'm saying is that (some) areas of the brain will likely be re-usable on a dynamic basis to synthesize thought about a topic that may draw on processes dealing with sound, light and other sensations. Thus, the areas of the brain that deal with so-called higher-level thought remain impentrable to a purely topic-based investigative approach.

As to language between humans, I think one of the reasons we're having arguments about deconstruction is human languages' lack of clarity and deficiency in richness compared to actual experience. Probably a poor analogy but let's suppose that with laguage we are trying to stuff a full screen movie down a 9.6Kbps line. As a result, I think it is inevitable that langauge processing is (mostly?) after the experience or thought that is to be conveyed. To me this is consistent with the wide variety of human languages that all seem to be about the same reality.
I agree there can be instances of "internal rationalization" and am a little familiar with the sensations reported of simulatneous translators and those who say they "think in English" for example. Let's say thought process A results in a situation (that a control process *we* call "we") want to communicate. Process B then formulates the language specific response which is checked by thought process C (the "other" we?) to see if that's what we really want to say. To process C it going to appear as though we are thinking in the object language.

I caveat this simple model and agree a little with Penny. I don't think memories are substantially language-bound. However, I believe when thoughts of the past are invoked (which appear to us as fixed memories) the act of replaying them unfolds verbal associations to which hooks were embedded during that thoughts occurnece.

I aplogize if some of my thinking is unclear, its probably because I'm hypothesizing somewhere over the horizon. Hope it makes sense.

Cheers, John

King's Indian

Hello, John.
I want to get as much of your points raised (even if as allusions) to the thread that I have now offficialy given the best years of my life to (which will have "parsnip" in the title, by the way).
However, a quick reply to a couple of your points: I agree. I also feel the same way about the word "prejudice". I think they must be. I'm thinking of all the things that, as a native english speaker, really floored me when approaching the study of other languages. Gender, case- or person/tense markings (extreme in Latin, where changes in word order doesn't compromise meaning), and russian's stipulation that numbers are used with the genitive (five of parsnips). Equally fascinating is that when one looks closer, it doesn't appear so simple: English does mark case, but in things like pronouns. And in english we say "hundreds of times". Again, I agree: any way of understanding reality will have to include an explanation of this sort. However, I think the process must be reciprocal. Otherwise, parsnip has to, ultimately, refer only to the inert veg lying in the middle of the greengrocer's astroturf-covered table, not the thing that I boiled and ate tonight, nor to the noble beast that roams in herds, terrorizing the crofters of the Scottish Highlands. Your definition of communicating material reality is too much like the meaning of "pound" in "five pound note": the note's use as money relied on the fact that you could go to the Bank of England and ask for five pounds of gold. Each one used to have it written on the side,"I promise to pay the bearer on demand...". But to have meaning, one can't have that final reference, because the fact is, even before we can have our moment of ambiguity with noses and parsnips, I still have to understand your frame of reference as I am doing here and now, without you here pointing at everything. Hmm. Not sure if I've made my point to my satisfaction, but this will be the sort of thing raised in my thread that is draining my life like a succubus.
Be that as it may, I will post it tomorrow, and you will see what prolixity I'm really capable of. 'Til then,
Take care,
KI

John Page

:notworthy
"Yes," said Piglet, "but what about Eeyore's birthday present?"

"Agreed, it is the sharing of a common external reality, including cultural references, together with a common brain physiology that enables us to have a somewhat common frame of reference at all." replied Christopher Robin, without saying where it was he went in the mornings.

Cheers, John

phaedrus

John and Amos .....will get back after few days....workkkkkkk