The evolving animals of the music of our words
Communication as context collapse, context erasure, and world-finding
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
— WB Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.
Given that my entire life is geared around various kinds of communication, I often think about the inevitable arising of communication’s shadow, miscommunication. You know this as well as I do: so many complications arise from misaligned perceptions. Here is a contracted summary of some of my thoughts on the subject, starting with a little sci-fi.
Philip K Dick tells a story, The Preserving Machine (1953), about a man who “like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome.” Doc Labyrinth, the protagonist in that tale, had seen cracks forming in the world; and those cracks, to him, closely resembled the cracks that had marked the sundering of the ancient world; “it was his conviction that presently our world, our society, would pass away as theirs did, and a period of darkness would follow.”
One of the great things about reading old books and stories is that you see how others have interpreted their times in such a way that matches how we see our own time. Perhaps the all-too-pervasive sense of endless decline and impending doom is not quite what it seems. It is certainly not unique to our own experience. I recently rediscovered a similar echo-matching in Dostoevsky’s Adolescent (1875). Through one of his characters, that wonderful writer suggests that “the present time is a time of the golden mean and insensibility, an inability to act, and a need to have everything ready-made. No one ponders; rarely does anyone live his way into an idea.” Sounds familiar, yes?
Well, anyway, this discovery of surprising echoes of the present in the past is not the main thing that came to mind while I was reading Dick’s story recently, probably given the various miscommunications I’ve encountered in recent weeks. What grabbed me was the rather mad and misguided answer that Doc Labyrinth concocts to deal with an early-onset apocalypse in an age of decadence.
Noticing that music is one of the most fragile and perishable things, Labyrinth makes a machine—a preserving machine—that can translate musical scores into unique animals, one animal per score. Feed an etude by Chopin into the machine; out comes a chopin bird, chopin iguana, or something else chopinish. Feed a Bach fugue into it and you’ll get yourself a bach beagle or a bach beetle. The idea Labyrinth lives his way into rests on an unquestioned evolutionary principle which in turn rests on an unspoken philosophical conviction: beings wish to persist in their being. To be is to be bound to the conatus essendi. I know some evolutionists would object to this principle because it implies teleology but it holds in Dick’s little story.
Despite his obeisance to evolution, Labyrinth doesn’t foresee that each of his new animals will evolve. Evolution means not just preservation, after all, but adaptation. The animals of the music survive less by perpetuating stability than by changing. They change shockingly quickly, even disconnecting completely from their origins. As a consequence, when Labyrinth translates the evolved wagner animal and the evolved schubert animal back into music, what he gets is not the music he tried to preserve but something else. The music has changed. It is a much worse kind of music. Ugly. Unlistenable. Ruined music. Meaning has so badly decayed that it has become unmeaningful.
There’s much to ponder here, including how Dick preempts the notion of a remix and prophesies the way technologies operate along evolutionary and not entirely rational lines. Technology develops according to rationalisation, says Friedrich Jünger, not musicalisation. But I want to briefly reference this story as an analogy for those communication acts of preservation that we daily participate in. We speak. We write. We post things. In the digital realm, which many of us have incorporated into our being-in-the-unworld, we see our words floating on a sea of code. The code is hidden, of course, but it and the entire world of entwined code it is connected to functions pretty much like Doc Labyrinth’s machine, severing origin (music, reality) from result (animal, speech).
Engagement farming, the act of posting inflammatory statements in the service of gaining traction and social capital, is perhaps not always intentional. Sometimes someone will post something on some online platform that’ll be like starting some kind of existential forest fire. They’re just words but, my goodness, the blaze will burn oh so brightly. Entire worlds might burn down because of the animals of the music of our words.
I’m sure you’ve had the same experience I have in one form or another. I’ve sometimes said something I perceive to be mild, although interesting enough to me to seem worth saying and sharing, and soon enough a swarm of words carried by code will descend like flies to feed on the carcass of my tiny microblog. The power of the tongue, St. James reminds us in his little biblical spiel on communication, is quite something. Like the rudder of a large ship, a word can be small but sufficient to change the course of that enormous vessel. You think your day is going one way. Then, you say something, and the result will be that your day goes someplace else. Or maybe it’s what someone else says that’ll have your ship run aground.
The experience of the wording of our thinking can be like translating music into something that isn’t music. Consciousness becomes words, and words become independent entities evolving into meanings unconnected with our original thoughts, disconnected from being itself. Utterances become wild animals, naturally adapting to the environment, even if adapting means turning against their origin. The result is not always context collapse, the flattening of multiple audiences into a single context; typically, the result is context-erasure, meaning that words become like numbers: symbols of pure potentiality, meaning whatever you take them to mean, meaning even what was never originally meant. Like the animals Labyrinth’s preserving machine creates, the words we release into the world become little invitations for a particularly manic eisegesis.
I’m reminded of TS Eliot, who writes this in his Four Quartets:
“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,~
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,`
Will not stay still.”
Our words won’t keep still not because we have put them down but because we have. The paradox is that it is precisely our attempts to get the word out that brings about so much misunderstanding, and this is aggravated by the unworld; that is, by the modern destruction of context instigated by oh-so-contagious idea that we can divorce mind from being. We try to say what we mean and that’s why what we mean escapes us and others. How does this happen?
There are many reasons for this. One reason, and perhaps a way the analogy I’m setting up here fails, is that words are static things and the world isn’t static. Abstractions seek concretion, even if concretion is removed from the thing that sparked the original abstraction in the first place. I might mention communication while thinking of a newspaper but perhaps this calls to your mind some other kind of communication, a radio broadcast or blog.
It’s pretty standard these days to separate language from being. This is something I like about using PKD’s Preserving Machine as an analogy. It renders with tremendous clarity something of how the translation of thought into words into meanings-not-meant happens.
Words wander around the world detached from presence. The word has become unflesh and it has moved into the neighbourhood as a ghost of its former self. Words are, when separated from being, the mere ghosts of our thoughts. In this digital age, this has gotten worse than it was in the age of print, which was arguably, at least in some ways, worse than the age of orality—at least insofar as separating words from being is or was concerned. Intention is always, after all, enfleshed. And so it is no surprise that when intentions and communications are placed in different realms, in entirely different categories of being, communication quickly becomes miscommunication. You say what you mean, and that’s why what you mean comes out wrong. You say what you mean but your saying betrays you.
We speak into a world in a state of decay, too, as I suggested above; the context we communicate within is so turbulent that it’s no wonder misunderstandings proliferate with so little effort. Perhaps, then, my earlier sidetrack was not so irrelevant after all. There is no stable horizon according to which our meanings could or should be interpreted. This isn’t a once-in-a-while thing. This is all-the-time.
Here I am, leaning into this simple fact. We are all engaged in generating a sort of endless churning up of an endless field of context collapses and context erasures. I don’t believe for a second that this is unavoidable but that doesn’t mean that we can’t, individually, find ways to stop perpetuating inflammatory misunderstandings. Philosophical hermeneutics arose when signs were already emerging of a world in which the animals of the music of our words would run so wildly. Previously, straightforward hermeneutics preempted this by trying to anchor meaning but philosophical hermeneutics came up with the disturbing conclusion that our anchors themselves won’t keep still.
And so the question remains: how can we find our way back to understanding in an age of discarnation? I’m not here to disentangle the very knotty problem of what all of this entails. But much of what I have said already preempts a kind of answer. One aspect of the answer is this: immediacy is almost certain to be part of what inspires misunderstanding. Another aspect of the answer is this: we should assume that every little figure originally had some ground, even if said ground is lost to us. For instance, even if we are unable to access the intention that gave rise to the communication, we can at least assume that there was an intention; and, also, that the intention was not necessarily hostile. What’s not apparent may be what’s most important. What we don’t see may be what counts most.
Here’s a last thought to consider to help us gain some sense of the invisible ground that moves the figures. This is the question: What of being shows up when speaking happens? Of course, language is not, in the end, detached from the real. It cannot be. Language is that which can, if we are attending properly to it, help certain aspects of the real become manifest even beyond each individual utterance and each individual speaker. I’m suggesting trying to consider statements made by individuals as manifestations of being even before considering them as signs of what those individuals think. This may sound bizarre, and maybe it is, but I still think it’s worth a shot. At the very least, this would help us to see words less as knives and arrows than as lenses and windows. Even if there is some malicious pretext behind certain words, this way of reading may help us see past pretext into context.
In Russell Hoban’s Pilgermann (1983), we have an example of this way of reading. Here is the backstory to the text I want to quote. The protagonist of the story, Pilgermann himself, has, with his friend Bembel Rudzuk, created a tiled, patterned landscape. The pattern they’ve made—a design that the “action” of Pilgermann’s mind reveals to him—is simple. It contains both stillness and motion. Everyone who looks at it encounters something slightly different, although usually something profound. The pattern’s name is Hidden Lion, not because it looks exactly lion-like but because there is something of the energy of the pattern that manifests the energy of a lion—a lion like CS Lewis’s Aslan, which shows up as the Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973) in an earlier Hoban novel or as Jim’s Lion (2001) in a later story also by Hoban. Here communication (the tiles) is less about pedantry than about resonance and reminder.
Hoban writes that to “visualize a pattern, whether in a drawing or in tiles or even to see it with the eye of the mind only, is to make visible the power in the pattern. Because of the scale of Hidden Lion the power was very clearly to be seen from the top of the tower; it was like the power that surges beneath the skin of a strong river.” Then, Pilgermann’s friend Bembel Rudzuk suggests the following:
“This motion that we see is the motion of the Unseen. … This power that we see is the power of the Unseen, and it is both conscious power and the power of consciousness. Here already are two of my questions answered: motion is in the pattern from the very beginning because the motion is there before the pattern, the pattern is only a mode of appearance assumed by the motion; consciousness also is in the pattern from the very beginning because the consciousness is there before the pattern, the pattern is only a kind of window for the consciousness to look out of. Although serpents, pyramids, and lions seem to appear in the pattern, that is only because the human mind will make images out of anything; the pattern is in actuality abstract, it represents nothing and asers no images. It offers itself modestly and reverently to the Unseen and the Unseen takes pleasure in it.”
Consider the mind as that which is receptive to the Unseen. Consider that the world is a broken theophany. Consider that our broken speech, as tied to our imperfect and incomplete consciousness of things, which is tied to our imperfect but still wondrously musical embodied being, is an aspect of this broken theophany. Consider that every one of us is walking around speaking of that which is manifest to us. In speaking, we are revealing ourselves but we are also revealing the world to itself and others to themselves. Language is world-haunted, even when it has been unworlded.
In reading or listening, we encounter not just what a person means but what we take them to mean, as well as, if only potentially, why we take them to mean what we do. When someone says something inflammatory, it has helped me to consider what they’re saying in the light of being itself, as an intensification of some aspect of being that has become, for reasons I do not know, apparent to them. The pattern they have just called my attention to is not the whole story but a part of it. The motion beneath the pattern, revealed by the pattern or word, is unseen—perhaps even Unseen.
Does this solve miscommunication? No. But it does make miscommunication much more interesting by suggesting that my job and yours is probably less to engage in a war of words than it is to seek out the meaning of the whole. The first question is always: What is the truth in being? Only then can we answer the second question well: What is the truth in what is being said about being? Even reading someone’s angry rant online can become more tolerable when this approach is adopted. I joke to myself that it is worth noticing that the other person, being poor, may have only their memes to offer. And I should try to tread softly because I tread on their memes.