Sunday 4 March 2001

Pic of the day: Yes, I've actually been outdoors! I don't just sit here and think all day long. Sometimes I take a long walk, and think differently.

Break the languages!

Strangely, one of my favorite songs is "Words don't come easy". I know this one from the radio, I've never seen it in shops. I can understand that. The simple language only strengthens the impression that this song is a true confession...

Words don't come easy to me,
How can I find a way,
to make you see, I love you,
Words don't come easy
Words don't come easy to me,
This is the only way
for me to say, I love you
Words don't come easy ...

Words - F.R.David

***

Of course, words do come easily to some people, and among them me. Too easily, it may seem. There are actually differences in the way people think. We may imagine, when we are young, that all others are like us. This is not so. Some people think largely in words, others think in other ways, for instance pictures. I used to think almost completely in words until sometime in my 20es. By then I started to flex my brain in new directions: Thinking in music, in sketches (never managed detailed pictures) and dimensional structures.

In part my new thinking came from learning about meditation, which I had only the vaguest idea of before. In part it may have come from getting to know a young girl who could speak with her eyes. (No, I have not told you that story, and I'm not sure I should. It's no one I have mentioned here before.) But in part my new attitude may have come from learning more languages.

When I was a child, I thought that all languages were alike, too. I thought that you could take a sentence in Norwegian and translate it into English; you only had to find the right words. But eventually I learned that the right words do not always exist. And when I tried to learn a bit Finnish, I got a lingual system shock. Despite being a neighboring country, Finland has a rather alien language. They have a lot of forms that I did not even know existed. Scratch that, I did not even know these forms could exist. It was no longer enough to replace a word with a whole series of other words, like you could often do with English. No, you had to re-think the whole thought.

And I realized that our language shapes our reality. And especially for those of us to whom words come easily.

***

During the last decades, our world has been reshaped in so many ways. We have seen our planet from space; we have lived in the shadow of the Bomb. We can watch what happens on the other side of the world, and talk with friends on other continents as if we were in the next room. A child of 10 years today knows more than Platon about the fundamental facts of the world. (Special thanks to Delphina for bringing up Platon, though in all honesty I had thought about this just the other day.)

Yet our language is, by and large, that of our ancestors. A language shaped by the needs of shepherds and grain farmers, and the occasional fisher, smith, whore or poet. They knew nothing of Internet or even radio; and very little of serial monogamy, gay pride and health insurance. Their world was a simple one. Not easy, far from it, but simple. They had to relate to a village, perhaps a town; but it was a village and a town where people had the same faith, the same rules, the same values, the same mythos. Not to point out that, when we go back a bit, they were just plain dumb. They did not stop to consider that lamb were just a special case of sheep; or even that "went" was the same verb as "go", only at a different time. They were indeed mind-bogglingly ignorant. But it was a time when life was nasty, brutish and short. You did not have time to think things through.

So, let's sum up. Language shapes our thoughts. And our language was made by dumb people. That is to say, we speak dumb languages and think dumb thoughts. With our hands we use tools of the space age; but in our minds we wield the tools of a distant past! We brave the cosmos on a timber raft; we repair our computers with a bronze axe. Is it not obvious that we CAN NOT achieve our potential as long as we remain caught in the language of a dead and forgotten past?

I urge you, if you value freedom in the least, learn at least one foreign language. The more foreign, the better. Keep learning it until the day dawns where you search for a particular expression in your mother tongue and cannot find it. And look at things, try to hold an object in your mind without describing it silently to yourself. Listen to a piece of music or the sound of wind through the trees, and feel without telling yourself what you feel. Learn some mathematics. Grow aware of the impotence of your language. The lack of precision, the implied lies. Your soul is in chains: Break free!

(I guess I might mention lojban, but that could really scare people.)