Meme Dispersal II

This entry is self-referential. And also heavily influenced by Rumi, Douglas Hofstadter and office politics.

I could probably write pages and pages about language. Which might be lovely and meta and self-referential and ironic because, well, I mostly dislike language. During my brief foray into the land of internet dating, I actually spent some time trying to accurately describe myself for the "About Me" section. And one thing I wrote was that I like words but dislike language. Which is so very true. So many things about my relationship with language are paradoxical. I'm a good writer, but I mostly hate writing, except sometimes I have to get the words out and they have to be exactly right and there is something, I don't know, almost cathartic about doing so. Except cathartic isn't really the right word, because when I write, the sense of release isn't quite as intense as the word cathartic sounds. Or I don't experience enough joy at the release or something. Hmm, maybe I should look up cathartic in the thesaurus (or Visuwords) and try to find the exact, right word for what I experience when writing. Except thesauri are often dangerous for me, what with all those lovely, shiny words all nestled together like chickity chick chicks under their mamas feathery belly, just waiting to distract me... but I can probably handle it. Oh! Did you know that cathartic is used medically to refer to a purging of the bowels, so writing is sort-of like taking a shit? Hmm, what an interesting metaphor;I wonder how far I can take it? So the words are what remain of things I can't digest, or that I don't need to digest? And I excrete them through my finger-tips and/or pre-frontal cortex? Digestion itself is such a great metaphor. You can do all sorts-of things with it. Except it is not even really a metaphor, in some ways, because you actually have millions of neurons in your intestines, so that you can actually know things with your gut. For real. Not speaking metaphorically. You can literally know things with your gut. Hmm, I wonder how many neurons are outside of the brain? Because even if it is only like a tenth of the neurons in your brain, it still has major repercussions for how we conceptualize mind and body, so that your whole body, is in a sense, your brain, or your brain is just a part of your body... Wait, why do I have this thesaurus? Oh, right, I was writing something.

The above is why I have turned in every paper I have ever written in grad school late. Usually days late. Because language and I don't really get along. Despite the fact that I write well and love to read and want to kiss individual words, language actually traumatizes me a little. I mean, how the hell am I supposed to pare down my actual, extravagant experience of the world into something I can stuff into tiny, tiny squiggles which I then give to you so you can de-squiggle and un-pare them and arrive back at my original experience so it becomes part of your experience? How? How how how how how? Is what I have to say even worth the time and effort?

Wouldn't you rather go dancing?

The truth is, I am right-brained, dancing mystic living in a left-brained, disembodied, secular world. And I have to write email messages. E-mails! Which people then take seriously and get upset about that one clause I used and take that clause really fucking personally and want to talk to me and my supervisor about the repercussions of that clause (Yes, this entry brought to by office politics). I don't give a damn about that fucking e-mail. I would rather talk to you on the phone. Or in person. Or hand-craft a letter to you, embossed with artistic nudes and decorated with washers I found on the street. Or take you out to coffee and talk about what it is like to be alive. Or teach you to meditate. Or play with you. Or dance with you. But no. I've got to send you an e-mail message apologizing for my last email message.

I've forgotten what the initial point of this post was, so I shall stop. Words no work anymore.

How I Spent the Last Hour at Work.

Since I am a dork and enjoy playing the game of Telephone almost as much as I enjoy pondering the fallibility of language, I am madly in love with the Lost in Translation web app created by Carl Tashian, which translates a phrase back and forth between several different languages. "The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original...Something is lost and sometimes something is gained."

I decided to "babelize" some of my favorite quotes. "Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why," from Vonnegut becomes, "Here that interests them, hung before amber. Because it does not have, it is." I kind-of like it.

Andrew Bird sings, "In time you need to learn to love the ebb just like the flow." Lost in Translation replies, "In the time you must learn, because one sufficiently appreciates the later river like the river." It's like something a zen robot would say! I know what I am going to be for Halloween!

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake" from Fight Club becomes "They are not pretty and only tape." Hmm. True dat?

Marianne Williamson calls us to awaken with the words "It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us." Ten translations later we arrive at, "It is our light, not our density, of that scares to majority we." Actually, I think it is the presidency of George W. Bush that scares to majority we.

Joseph Campbell tells it like it is when he writes, "I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive in our bodies." This babelizes into "Task that, observes the interior in true, a experience of being the alive creature who our experiences of the duration in the only physical surface that resonances in ours to being the greatest piece of the secret and the truth, since then that really we create the enthusiasm, to be alive in our bodies." Wait, where can I get the greatest piece of the secret and the truth?

Maybe these are too complex. Let's keep is simple. Let's try the classic "There is no spoon." End result? "It has spoon" Well, there is only one thing to say to that. Whoa.

Get Your War On and jokes about metaphors? I am a lucky girl.

Clickity click to make the image bigger.

My lovely metaphova

Lately I've been carrying around bits of poetry like a secret. An unfinished secret I can't share because I don't know where the edges are. Scrawly scrawls, testaments, and pictograms tucked away into books I haven't read, mixed in with notes about pointless meetings, hovering behind the creases on my forehead. The sense of burgeoning returns. The sense of coalescing.

Perhaps it started as I drove away at dusk, asking myself "What I am doing?" Of course, I am always asking myself that, over and over again, with every breath and every unexpected shift in energy. But this time the words were clear and crisp in my mind. Like autumn. "It is just autumn, it is just autumn, it is just autumn" beats something inside me, something looking for reassurance. And when I got to the coffee shop there was a picture of a woman who looked like me on the Dia de los Muertos altar. I tried not to stare at her too much as I attempted to read. Her picture, at the back of the altar, was underneath a sign that read, "Do not light a candle too close to the wall." I can't even light a candle for my doppelganger.

But wait. That is not really where it all began. I want to tell the story of the beginning; I want to find its pulse. I want to feel the beat of the beginning under my fingertips, under the curve of flesh over bone, skin on skin. The shimmery movement. Except the pulse that I feel doesn't seem to be the right one. Perhaps it is a question of beginnings. The human desire for a starting point. My desire for this to be a story, and I, presumably, to be the protagonist. Or the narrator. Maybe it is simply the power of narration that the postmodernists and the neuroscientists blink at, somewhat blinded, pupils tightened, mesmerized by the glare.

What it really comes down to is that I cannot settle on a metaphor. Hell, even "settle" is a metaphor. The verb has 32 different uses, didya know that? Including "to become pregnant; conceive." So, I cannot conceive of a metaphor. I have been carrying around my scribbles, my metaphors like ova, awaiting fertilization. Carrying metaphova around like a secret. Waiting for something to germinate. But it appears that I am not, metaphorically speaking, getting any. So my lovely metaphova can only wait in the mottled light of my ribcage, curled in on themselves like a fist. They can't implant themselves in anything fleshy or bloody or smelling of the earth.

My metaphova. I have been thinking about the stillness near the ground. I have been thinking about tectonic plates. Of things slowly shifting beneath my feet, even though I am standing still. Of things carried by currents. Of currents. Of sea ice breaking free from the Arctic shelf. Of the movement of icebergs. Of icy landscapes bearing silent witness to the sky.

I have been thinking about all the things with wings. All the things with wings. All the things with wings. I have been thinking of birds nesting along my spine, once at each chakra. The hummingbird at my sacrum, the bluebird in my heart, and so on. And the tiniest bird in my mouth, nestled in the curve of my tongue. Breaking stems off my words for bedding. Being fed with each kiss.

I have been thinking about the people I buy birthday presents for. How I want them to nest along my spine, too. I guess in some way they already do; that is where the dreams of them reside. The dream of Chris curled up with the bluebird, the dream of my mother curled up with an egret. The mixing of the material with the immaterial. The mixing of metaphor.

I mean metaphova.

Whatova. This took so long to write that I don't even really feel this way anymore. Except, maybe, for the bird on my tongue part.

This blog entry brought to you by my current song obsessions.

What I think about at coffee shops instead of doing whatever it was that I went to the coffee shop to do.

Warning - I am a dork when it comes to language and embodiment. Read on at your own risk.

So I was sitting at Epoch and they started playing Modest Mouse. I started thinking about how Modest Mouse makes me feel a sense of unidentifiable longing, how it sounds bittersweet. Which then led me to thinking about the word bittersweet. It is interesting to describe a sound as bittersweet, since it is a word derived from the sense of taste. But really the meaning of the word comes from using taste as a metaphor for experience - how an experience that feels/tastes bitter can actually simultaneously feel/taste sweet. So I made a brief attempt to find other words like bittersweet, which led to the discovery that one of the definitions of bittersweet is "A dark to deep reddish orange," which I didn't know. (Interestingly, if I had to pick some colors for Modest Mouse, they would not be red and orange. Green, maybe?) Which is now adding the sense of sight to the word "bittersweet," in addition to the sense of taste, which I am now using to describe a sound.

Which then brings us to the lovely doorstep of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who argue that language is inherently embodied. We use our experience of our bodies to construct language which we then use to create metaphors about our experience of life, feelings and thoughts. Meaning that language is fundamentally about the body, not about the mind, as we tend to think. Meaning we can't understand our minds unless we first understand our experience of our bodies. (I wrote about this over here and here, if you want more language and embodiment dorkiness)

So, in summation, life is bittersweet and I want to go dancing. Which is what I have been saying all these years. Which is what I am always trying to say.

"Our primary relationship with language is not with its literal meaning, but rather with its emotional texture. As young children we were sensitive to this emotional texture long before we had begun to master the actual meaning of words."

From A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation