words such as buzz or murmur that imitate

"Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact."
--Willa Cather
I wonder if any of us can remember when we learned to read. It's a memory I wish I held, but can't seem to bring it up in my mind fully.

Perhaps because it was more structured, I can remember learning the meaning of pieces of words--roots, prefixes, suffixes (Conjunction Junction on Saturday mornings, not withstanding)--and the power of the order of words. I remember learning how to curse. I do remember learning to write, I even remember learning how to write in "cursive style." In notebooks with rows of two solid lined pages with the dashed line in between. But I do not remember the moment I learned to read or to recognize words on a page. I wonder if anyone who learns to read at a young age can. I wonder if it is possible to remember what it was like before words had context or if that is something that disappears seconds after language is understood. All I know is, the moment letters put on a page came mean something to me is unknown.

I've been playing most of this evening with Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus (clicking on the images will enlarge them for a better view of the text). It's not new, I've known about it for a while, and have played with it now and again, but, today, for some reason, maybe because my brain has been more frazzled than usual, I found myself in front of its tentacled connections for hours, fascinated with the word play.

I've often enjoyed toying with language and words. But I am especially fascinated by the language of thought and perception, their interwoven nature, and their visual associations. How lists of ideas and events, and even physical sensations may be associated with images and words; or sounds and words, or words and other words (ditto/Dorito as a friend has placed in my mind recently). I wonder why there are times words form visual associations other than the letters they use to form themselves. And what happens inside an individual's brain that makes these associations, it's not necessarily simply how something is read or misread, or misheard. I believe there is more to the fragmented narrative of our brains.

What I love, today especially, about Visual Thesaurus is how successful it is at pretending to achieve the randomness of human associations (or perhaps that is because they are not random after all?). It does not simply list synonyms and antonyms, its programmers were much more clever than that. It takes words and offers phrases that are not casually referenced and go beyond a computer's usual linear connections, mimicking the chaos of a human brain. And you can click on the associations endlessly, each time finding a changing relationship, between words, with new words and phrases; they shift, meanings altered, contexts lost, refusing conclusion.

so it is the basic law of life

A friend recently sent this bit of text to me, and I had never encountered it before. As with all things mysterious about the brain and its functions, I was truly tickled by it:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,
it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a
wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the
frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The
rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed
it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn
mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but
the wrod as a wlohe.

Ah, chaos. If only the mind could find a set of keys so easily in a disheveled room as it can read the above paragraph. I am struck by redundancy. I notice, when reading--for any reason, be it pleasure, a subway advertisement, or to edit--it is one of the first things I pick at. But, generally it appears to me on a less intricate level. Never so much to the letter, as it were. Having never been good at math, I find the fact that my brain is so good at structure--planning, dates, organization--odd. It seems to come from some unknown piece of myself, yet it is one of the first things people notice about me.

In any event, the trick to the above (though there really isn't one), is that a good reader is able to successfully comprehend the text as written because only the internal letters have been randomized. Essentially, there is a logic to the disorder (there is enough information for one who has some essential knowledge) the mind is able to reconstruct the information so that it makes sense; it can extract, deconstruct, and rebuild before you even realize it has done so.

And amid another twist of connections, this evening's conversation, that at some point turned to the events of September 11 (I may dare touch on the novels that have appeared recently about this date, but I am not certain I can do so without some personal regret for it), brought to mind the children's book Unbuilding by David Macaulay. Macaulay is a fascinating artist and author who is known for is intricate explorations of the mechanics of everyday things. Macaulay's work, though written for children, is extraordinarily complex. His line art is minute and exacting in its detail. He takes items, usually architectural in nature (though also the human form), and he explains their essential being. For him, the forms he examines must be deconstructed in order to be understood--order to chaos for comprehension. Unbuilding takes the Empire State Building and undoes it. Bolts and all; in specific sequence.

There is a spread in the book (and also on the cover) that is a view looking downtown from what appears to be about 40th Street. And the Twin Towers, in their linear certainty still stand. Later, in a similar spread, they are obscured by clouds, and the Empire State Building is half dissolved (and there is one last image of this at night). I remember having the random thought after the first tower fell that, it couldn't stay that way. They both had to fall. To have one and not the other, would have been some kind of cruel rearrangement.

To those of us
who don't always
appreciate things
until they're gone

[the dedication for Unbuilding, published 1980]

words redux

Not quite the same topic as previously posted, but, thoughts on the use of words, nonetheless:

The Power of Words - The New York Times

the great foes of reality

Recently got into a discussion about the importance of words. It was a really difficult debate for me, because, on the surface, I'd like to be the last person on earth to sit on the side of words being less important than other forms of communication and expression. But, perhaps my problem with the other side's argument "there is no form of expression more important than words," is that it renders everything that surrounds the words meaningless. Certainly the power of being able to express yourself verbally can't be denied, but the ability to do so doesn't simply rest on knowing the right words. I don't think the person was necessarily trying to simplify it to that extreme, but to some extent that was what they accomplished. My point was that words are meaningless without context that anything can be said, nice or not, but if there is no context and if there is no understanding, or if there is no wish to understand--even the most well-intentioned, well-considered words are rendered meaningless. Since words are a human creation, and humans are inherently imperfect, so, too are their words. And so too are people's use of them. And that's why they are simply one of a dozen tools that must be used for true expression.

Now, I'm not necessarily only referring to the spoken word here. The same kind of too-clever transposition of words on a page can (and does) have the same effect as listening to a language you don't speak. An author might write a beautifully turned phrase, or use a unique form of sentence structure, however, if not done with skill or understanding of the basic rules and form of language (and often if it is) the words become complete gibberish--even to those who are familiar with a variety of writing styles and those who open their thoughts to such thought play. Say, for example, someone who might want to read Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo, but find themselves returning again and again to authors similar to John Cheever or Charles Bukowski--all four of those writers are phenomenal wordsmiths, with writing styles that run the gamut. For me, authors who write in prose style similar to Pynchon's are often, to my eye and mind, too oblique. I actually find what happens, instead of actually reading or becoming part of the story, is that I instead wind up getting distracted by the words themselves, and how they sit next to each other. I begin looking for what the author was trying to accomplish, rather than what he is trying to say. And when this happens, the only thing that I see is how hard he is working to find the right word, rather than telling me a story, or communicating (there have been quite a few more articulate articles about this type of thing). I don't know, I think I may need to consider all of this some more. It's a very complicated discussion.

related links:

World Wide Words
Choice of Words
WordSpy
___________________
"Words are Sweet Sounds for Objects Unreal" by Justin Simoni. Copyright © 2003-2004