World from Words

I've been reading a few pieces recently - notably Raimond Gaita's piece in Meanjin and a piece by Will Self on the BBC website.  Both deal with language, and its absence.  Both talk about with the way language - or its lack - defines or flattens our own worldviews.  We are so close to words, they are so powerful, that a few new words into your understanding and wham, out puffs the world, larger and better and more complex and more beautiful than it was before.

That is the power of words.

Raimond Gaita's focus is on the university, and about its scholarly limitations when it has been so enshrouded managerial newspeak - where students are now customers:

It is no small matter, the ubiquitous success of managerial newspeak in the characterisation of university life. Students who learn to speak it, confident in no other language with which to express what it can mean to be a student, will not have the words with which to identify the deepest values of their education and thereby to claim its treasures as their inheritance.

An example will illustrate the point. Recently when I gave a public lecture at the Melbourne Law School, in which I lamented the ways managerial newspeak had estranged politicians, civil servants, school teachers, academics and others from the deepest values of their vocations, a student said at question time that he did not object to being described as a customer in his dealings with his teachers. In fact, he went on to say, he welcomed it because it enabled him to hold them to account if they did not deliver the product the university had advertised.

... I suspect that the student in my example welcomed being described as a customer because customers know—or can set out to know—how to demand value for money. Customers typically know what they want and what counts as getting it. The trouble, however, as I hope my example shows, is that students are initiated into things they don’t understand and which take time to understand. If they are well taught, they discover worlds they had never dreamed of and whose exploration requires disciplines that, at their deepest, can never adequately be captured in the forms they fill out at the end of the semester to assess their lectures and lecturers. When we describe students as customers we do not create a suitable means to enable them to hold their teachers to account. We make many of their teachers servile because they become fearful. We then betray the trust of the students and their teachers.

Well, just quietly, fuck you, managerially-newspeaking universities - and yes, my current one is no exception.   To now gain the higher benefits from your education requires a complete rejection of the values which underscore the university from which you are getting that education.  Your systems and your financial bottom line are not the most important thing here.  Your ability to change the minds of your students, to wake them up, to tap into what they yearn for - that's the most important thing here.  But I can't say that anymore, can I?  Because the university and the culture have removed, stone by stone, any lanes that lead to the space where everybody understands why this is true.  All there are left are empty floating grey bubbles where all the words once were.

Strange times we live in, folks.

It is no coincidence that my university is a lot sexier than it was when I first started there back in 1998.  New, sexier buildings ... but do I detect a faint dumbing down of the syllabus from when I first began back then?  Uh, duh.  (And even back then the dumbing down had begun).

And so I have decided in this little corner of Discombobula that in retaliation I am going to soon begin a series here on words that puff out the world from the small little corporatised bullshit we've become accustomed to into the bigger space that we feel it is.  Words that have fallen by the wayside because they're too big to tweet, too complex to learn in under five seconds, too sexy to fit into McLanguage. 

Are there any words (or phrases) that you hold dear, that you have come upon in your life, delved into, swilled around in your mouth, and had puff out into your world?  Words that have enriched you, made everything feel more mysterious because with your learning them an entire city has fallen onto your horizon to be explored?

Because that's the power of words.

In My Language

I've just come across this video by Amanda Briggs, a non-verbal autistic woman whose video sheds some real insight into her world.  Wow, we live in some amazing times.  The first part of the video, she says:

... is in my "native language," and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.

Here's to an expansion in all ways of what gets considered and appreciated as personhood. Here's to multi-linguality :)

The Filters of Culture

Been thinking about filters lately.  Filters in different forms.  Not so much your common water filter or your pool filter because ... well, they're not really all that exciting.  The filters that hinder our views and determine our paradigms - these are maybe as unexciting to some (definitely far more scary), but for me there is something about being reminded that I do not see everything which gives me some sort of comfort, somehow.  It is as if it balances out one of the more terrified voices of The Cast of Thousands which insists, in PTSD fashion, that I must stay vigilant at all time, and see everything.

Reading across the interwebs recently has brought me across several different examples of filtering.  I recently read an interesting account of a writer's group in Tennant Creek, in the Northern Territory.  Composed of indigenous and non-indigenous writers, it was interesting to read about the different focusses in the writing - the indigenous wrote mainly about the land, and the non-indigenous about their feelings, their place in relation to the world.  Ktima Heathcote writes:

The Aboriginal writers mainly wrote about the land, their country, as so evocatively expressed by Maureen O’Keefe and Valerie Nelson, two writers from Ali Curung, a community about 170 kilometres south of Tennant. Unconstrained by the straitjacket of ‘correct English’, there’s a natural rhythm in the way Aboriginal writers express themselves. Sure, it’s raw technically, but the power and beauty of their words is undeniable. Like the surrounding countryside, harsh and uncompromising during drought, green now due to rain, their voice seeps into your skin and ignites an ancient, almost forgotten part of you.

The non-Aboriginal writers of the group showed more structural complexity in their work, focusing more on feelings and how they see themselves in relation to the world. It’s an avenue not commonly explored by Aboriginal writers out here, but excavating memories and personal experience for their rich emotional content is starting to fuel the work of established writers such as Rosemary Plummer and David C. Curtis, both of whom are NT Literary Award winners. Holt said at the time of the retreat she loved the fact that ‘there were whitefellas as well as blackfellas’ in the group. It made for the most enriching experience of literary cultures; using language as a means to move forwards together. She believed the idea of having a well-planned and inclusive writing retreat in an area often overlooked by funding bodies would create a kernel of hope for the literary minds of this region. And she was right. Less than a year later, in July 2010, Barkly Writers’ Ink was born. With the aid of an Arts NT Community grant of $5000 came the opportunity for a core group of writers from the Barkly to meet on a regular basis to write, provide support and professional development, network, mentor each other, and learn about the craft of writing and the publishing industry.

I am a white honky Melburnite, who has never yet made it to the Top End and is thirsting to. That is where you go in this country to find Aboriginal culture because, quite frankly, the first 150 years of genocide was so successful that you will find very little on the eastern seaboard unless it's in small enclaves or being sold as safe art in souvenir shops.

My homeland has long held a duality for me ~ it feels like home.  It has sunk into my bones, so that I feel as if I could blend into the bark of a eucalyptus just about as easily as a kookaburra does.  The ground stirs in my guts.  But I don't know it in my ancestral bones.  The culture I come from clings to the outsides of the continent, scared of it, lives largely apart from it in urban centres.  The differences in indigenous and non-indigenous approaches to the different ways of viewing ourselves is so linked to the history of our country.  The blood from that genocide surely still cries from the ground, making us non-indigenes uneasy about our  place here in our home.  We view it as alien, hostile, inhospitable.  We do not yet know it intimately.

I think also the differences highlight, as Mark Vernon suggests in his post What is Lost When We Learn to Write, the differences between an oral and a written culture.  It is ironic that this is reflected in a writing group in Tennant Creek, but the vestiges of an oral culture still remain.  How could there not be a noticeable difference for a culture which sang itself across the land, which survived for hundreds of thousands of years on such a dry continent, which knew where to dig for water and food.  Knew that the land was full of good bush tucker and beauty.  A beauty which the white honkies couldn't even really see for decades, their eyes filtering beauty via visions of the motherland, of the deep greens that come from a colder climate and more rain.

The more you abstract things out there - into words, into books - which I love, and am grateful for, and adore - the more you give a tiny little piece of yourself away, a piece which was yours when you were the book, and the land was the page.

There's been a conversation going on at Pilgrim's Moon about Can You Create True Community Online?  And here again, I see the same thing at work - because communicating online is also another filter.  In the comments to that post, WOL made the observations that:

No matter what kind of interactions people have, both sides are at least one “remove” from each other–Don’t we always edit and “spin” our face-to -face interactions with each other? Don’t we always have ways of re-inventing ourselves to suit our needs. If you met Dolly Partin without the wig and makeup, you’d probably never recognize her. That’s a kind of filter. — filters between ourselves and the world — I think the online community thing is the same idea, only with one more layer of reality filtering.

That old cartoon of dogs at a computer comes to mind — one tells the other, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Because you are not interacting face to face, and you don’t have that immediate feedback, because there are so many barriers between you and who you are interacting with, I think people tend to be more candid, more “up front” because they don’t have that instant visual feedback. I think the internet has a way of lowering inhibitions. People will say things on the internet they would never dream of saying in person — cyberbullying is a case in point.

This is always the challenge - learning to understand what we are ignorant of.  Those technologies and methodologies and all the other ologies which have brought us so far and made life so much easier in some ways ~ they have also filtered our perceptions, changed our paradigms, and in some ways removed us without our knowledge from the simple, beautiful earth and from each other as co-sharers and carers of that earth.  The way back involves learning how to be rooted in the earth, knowing our dependence on it, on the simple, beautiful ways, the ones that cannot be spreadsheeted.

The Limitations of Language

How often do you get surprised by your own words?

I reread my blog post from yesterday, and felt with a bit of a sinking feeling that maybe the tone I thought I was conveying was not, I don't think, conveyed :)  (I am feeling rather paranoid at the moment though, so who knows?  I am worrying far too much about what other people think, and second-guessing everything, which is a pretty ridiculous way of giving away your own power.  Much better to take that energy worrying about other people and putting it into being wary of my own immediate perceptions.  That sounds like a negative, but it is not - questioning my limited perceptions is often illuminating and sometimes I even get surprised by the joy that comes from that.  It takes me out beyond myself, into the field).

But anyway, where was I?  It is an interesting feeling when you reread something that you wrote in a lighthearted, slightly self-deprecating (I am Australian, after all) but ultimately positive mood, only to discover on your second reading that maybe it reads more small-minded and cynical and negative than you actually felt or intended.

Does this happen often with you when you write?  Or even when you speak?  Are you sometimes surprised afterwards at how people respond (or don't respond) to what you thought was plainly conveyed?  Human interaction is an art, after all.  And writing as a method of communication is a sort of strange thing to do, when you think about it.  Funny little scrabbled bits on a page or a screen are a step removed from conveying them ourselves.  And even conveying them ourselves ... well, when you think about the complexity of it all, to convey something from my mind to yours involves not only my ability to use the right words in the first place, but to get those words out past my face and body to you in a way that you get where I'm coming from.  The chances of you picking up on my slightly raised eyebrow, or my quirky use of a word that in my family had a slightly different connotation than it did in yours, is complexified by the fact that I remind you a little of your auntie who was mean, compounded by the fact that you are distracted by your iPhone pinging and that you don't understand why I'm talking about this particular thing because you have forgotten my comment about it yesterday, and if you remembered that then what I am saying right this minute would take on a completely different complexion.

Really and honestly, connecting with each other - even in person with all of the non-spoken body language that according to some conveys as much as 90% of our intention - is an art, and a hit-and-miss affair.  It requires time and questioning, silence and processing, a reasonable memory, focus and patience, shifting gears and changing lanes and using your indicators.  And even then we can't ever really truly-rooly completely understand where another person is coming from or who another person is.

Which is a fearful thing.  Other people can be hell, but even on good days they can often be scary to us, incomprehensible, even the ones we love, especially in the uber-fast turbulent world we all find ourselves in now.  But yet for all of that, the person in front of you being able to hurt you, misunderstand you, abuse you, is a mystery.  They are dark and beautiful and deep, of far more complexity and beauty than they often know themselves, or that your fears or your media want you to believe.

Because ultimately, despite the fact that we are all separate and isolated, out beyond that where the silence is, there we are all one, no matter how fucked-up with fear and greed it gets.  And science and the spirituality of all religions are in agreement on that one.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

~ Rumi

Cutting Down on Swearing

I've been reading back on some of my old blog posts. Gee, I'm an angry old woman, aren't I? :D

And I swear way too much. And it detracts from what I am saying. And it is, after all, a bit childish to swear ~ unless you do it with finesse, in very small doses, when you just must be emphatic in that particular way.

So that's it, kids. Please, pull me up in the future if I'm getting too potty mouthed. I have decided to turn over a new oral classy leaf. From now on, I hope that I will only say fuck when it is really necessary. Because really, honestly, I think I could cut out 70% of the times I say fuck and still be able to say fuck for 30% of the time with probably even more efficacy.

:)

Pic: Alanapost

Word

You have become conscious of your preference for second person present tense lately.

You had to look up second person present to see if it was what you meant. You have a good, confident command of the English language. You don't, however, know how to explain its elements. You don't know what conjunctives are, or parsing, or split infinitives, but you know that you perform these actions all the time anyway. In hindsight, your learning of the language seemed to come naturally to you. There must have been dreary lessons in grammar in primary school at least. You don't remember them. Maybe you drifted off dreaming daydreams, like any smart child should. Perhaps it was all of those years of devouring books as a child. You seemed to learn about the English language by reading. An Enid Blyton book in an afternoon. You seeped the language into your bones, from whence you then vomited out Grade 4 "put this word in a sentence" exercises where one word in one sentence stretched out into little mini stories for each word. You imagine you gave your Grade 4 teacher a few laughs reading little mini stories from an Australian child that sounded as if they were writen by a 40 year old Englishwoman.

You don't know what the drawing power is of second person present for you at the moment. Perhaps it is a way of distancing yourself from yourself. The writerly version of sitting down in an empty chair and talking to a part of yourself. Of externalising your inner child. From here, sitting across from yourself, you translate yourself into a wrtten account, and it feels good, somehow. Some days you think it is lying. Other days you think it is grace. You think that maybe this is what God does with us, somehow, writing us out in her own hand, shooting himself through all of our actions and lives and messes so that something good is made out of them at the other end.

You wish, when you get up in the mornings, you could dress yourself in your words, like a veil, or a beautiful dress. Drawing attention and hiding at the same time. Sometimes you feel like a fragile word that has looked itself up in a thesaurus and discovered the other meanings of itself. You feel like a couple of your serifs have been broken off in the reading.

You really must get yourself out amongst other words, where you can form sentences with each other. It has never been good for you to be this solitary; it could drive you mad if you let it. The pre-illness you of 15 years ago would be shocked to see you still sitting here so solitary, self-absorbed, mouldy.

Perhaps you need to sit down with you circa 1994 and have a good chat :)

You are not so sure how much of the sentences you are writing at the moment are authored sustainably. You are not sure of much at all, truth be told. You think this is partially because you have had far too much time to stare at your own serifs, the bit lopped off of the 'e', the wonky way the 'S' leans to one side. You could go mad, looking at the creepy way the 'v' is almost crashing into the preceding 'e'. It is a silly sort of gazing that takes you away from the knowledge that every other word in the world also has lopped serifs. Too much of it puts you away on the shelf, preserved. You are so glad you are going to visit Jane tomorrow.

You like the way you learnt the English language. Somehow you learnt it without being able to name its elements. You think you were thinking too much about boys in high school to do such things, even though you got good marks in English with ease.

You think that a certain freedom and playfulness comes from swimming in life instead of splitting it's eternal infinitives. You can become impaled on iron conjunctive hooks, feeling sorry for yourself, self-absorbedly boring, if you're not too careful.

Latinus shatimus

I was transcribing an interview in Capitalist Hell yesterday, an interview with a doctor. I don't know why he was there. Some kind of malpractice charge or something.

Anyway, in the process of the interview he mentioned the word sputum. And I thought, that word makes me want to hurl. It is so graphic, so descriptive of gooberly saliva. Oh, yuk.

Latin words. They are good at describing clinical conditions, but when it comes to describing body parts - well, it's all a bit cold and medical, isn't it? Latin words remind me of shiny metal tables in morgues. Of bodies that are dead, their spirits departed. Not bodies that live and move and have being. Except for one word. It really is such a good description of the body part it describes. And that word, my dear friends, is scrotum.

Such an unattractive word. Such an unattractive body part. So. Words that sound how they should. Do you have any favourites? Another one of mine is blathering. I love that word. It reminds me of like giant soap suds coming out of your mouth and floating all over the room, filling it up with pointless but harmless bubbles of nothing.

And curmudgeonly. For some reason, I always think of Chesterton when I think of that word, and a book of poetry of his I have where he is sitting on the front, all portly and ... well, looking kinda curmudgeonly (although he was much more than that).

And solitude. When I think of that word I think of physical and psychological space, peace and gentleness. The very opposite of loneliness. I think of giant big rocks tethered to the ground, of wet soil after the rain. I love solitude.

And I really love the phrase, My football team is sitting on top of the ladder and hey, guess what? The team who won the flag last year is a team that we have a bit of a psychological advantage over. So woo hoo for Empire sports to get me through the Winter. But then, that's not a phrase, is it? That's a delightful bunch of sentences to curl my toes.

Speaking of Winter, I found myself anticipating it a bit yesterday. Because as much as I hate the lightlack (hey, I just invented a word!), I do love the cosiness, the warmth of being inside, the charm of Winter. There are charms, definitely. Like soup and ugg boots and blankets and hot chocolate and crisp blue skies. All the seasons have their place.

Unlike the majority of Latin words except scrotum (don't mind me, I'm just indulging myself in the utterly childish enjoyment of writing the word scrotum on my blog. There it is again. Scrotum). Hehe.

No wonder Latin is dead. The only time it comes alive is in describing unattractive body practices or parts. Latin's got no soul :) Try singing the blues in Latin. Doesn't work, does it?