Language, but no words

"Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language, but no words."

Tomas Tranströmer

To record

As of April 26, 2011 the blog has grown to the following proportions:

11, 121 words in posts (1, 181 of which were taken from an Environmental Theory paper)
3, 495 words in comments (from 8 participants-- Thanks guys!)
1, 167 words in responses to comments
193 in "About the Project"

totaling 15, 976 words.

By accident, I found

Not as an end to the project, but to portray how far it has come now that it is time to present, I would like track its movements since its birth.

Seeking to study language, I started with silence, supposing that if I separated myself from language I could better see it, or even achieve a state completely outside of it. I soon realized this to be a faulty platform, and ended up learning quite the converse. I found I could not escape language, in its spoken or unspoken forms, and that my very worldview is built from it. (see "Of the essence!"). I could neither sustain the practice of silence in a culture that demands my social participation in speech. I realized if such a state "outside of language" exists, I was not likely to reach it with such compromised attempts. Fortunately, my defeats were also small successes in disguise. In recognizing language as too pervading a contender to eliminate from my life, I could instead become its disciple, and fine-tune my ability to listen carefully. What I learned was mostly through its paradoxes and surprises.

I had wanted to know: how do our uses of words affect our sense of connection to reality. In every selection of words expressed, an infinite number of other words are silenced. I had suspected that through the filtering process of verbal communication, something was lost. Several days ago after being stuck in an aggravating traffic jam I heard and realized the positive connotations to the words spoken: "It was just an accident. It's been cleared up." I knew in that instant that words are shortcuts to feeling fully, and allow us to bypass difficult truths of the human experience. Because we use words for a variety of purposes beyond to communicate what the words themselves say, we are not held accountable for what they may imply. I have seen throughout the course of this project that indeed words make worlds. I propose we be held accountable for them.

We use words to fill spaces, to seek affirmation, to turn the ears of another into a sounding board in which we experience ourselves. We use words as a diversion, to silence some things while drawing attention to others, such as in an awkward encounter. We use words to include and exclude our fellow humans and creatures. We use words to objectify living things and justify our damage to them. We also use words to represent our love, but they are not our love.

We use words despite the impossibility that nothing will be lost in translation. Misinterpretation is an inherent part of communication and the pure intention behind the employment of words is tinted by the process of articulation and receiving. We use words even though they make suggestions we hadn't considered, and the listener will surely be shaped by subconscious associations.

In some cultures and ages, words were sacred, and through song was the universe created: "Perhaps a diluted use of words in a culture in which they are no longer sacred makes for a diluted sense of reality." (see "Of the essence!").While they connect those who speak and hear them, they disconnect speaker from the immediacy of the subject, instead suspending the speaker in a Hyperreality of meaning, snaring her in a web of concept.

Luckily, we have language, all kinds of language, consonantal and speechless, that do not avoid the matter as words do but share it: flickering eyes, a long pause, an airy index finger, a stillness that says "storm", the mosquito singing gratitude in your ear, the rattle and bell of a streetcar, clocks and other conventions that instruct us through our days... There is no such thing as silence. We are always being spoken to.

Apology of the Blog

It has been brought to my attention through a few arching of eyebrows that a blog is a questionable medium for an Honors Thesis. Here I defend the choice.

Never having been asked to do a thesis before, and not entirely sure what one was until it was upon me, I searched high and low for a suitable project. I knew that Loyola's Honors Program had in the past encouraged many creative approaches to theses that were relevant to the students' diverse areas of interest and expertise. I knew that I wanted to do something interdisciplinary and cumulative of my hodge-podge education, synthesizing my studies of Spanish, English, and Environmental Studies (amongst the liberal arts cornucopia). I chose to examine language, and knew I needed a medium that could mirror this subject.

I chose to undertake a blog, without much prior experience, because I felt it had incredible potential as a medium for which to explore language and that could speak to the nature of language itself. The same potential could not be harnessed from other mediums I considered, such as the traditional 30 page paper, with format carefully designed against mutations, necessary meanderings of thought sheared and spontaneity suppressed. And I'm not much for interpretative dance.

I liked the blog for its transparency, that the unfolding process could be seen, not just the end result. Whereas a dissertation paper is presented as a single conclusive gesture, one fell swoop of "Ah Ha!", the blog, which builds with multiple posts over time, is exposed in all its palpitations, all its frustrations and questions, its nuanced shifts in perspective and small triumphs. Though displaying equally my moments of clarity as my uncertainties was daunting, I felt that language too evolves over time, without direct route but changes course under many influences, and so a blog was fitting. And unlike a thesis paper which may crust over forgotten in a filing cabinet upon completion, a blog like language has no completion, and may be constantly renewed when its waters begin to stagnate.

Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of a blog that makes it analogous to language is that it is formed through interaction. A thesis paper is a mostly one-sided affair, in that it traditionally has one writer, interacting perhaps with multiple sources, but is to be read (unless published) by a select few. Like a successful blog, language is a collaborative affair, and is owned by no one in particular but created constantly by many. And so I wished also for my project about language to be, a product of an exchange of ideas with many authors. In accordance with the Greek origin of the word thesis, which is a "setting down," I wanted to set down but a platform for discussion, an arena for interaction that would include many participants--a thesis as a simulation of language.

Unfortunately, with this expectation for the project I also experienced its shortcoming, or my own shortcoming as a novice blog-starter. While the blog did receive comments from at least 8 other individuals, whose contribution and insight I was thoroughly grateful for, it did not "take off" as I had in my imagination hoped for. I may have invited contributors a bit too late, and my delay is a testament to how intimidating it can be to be so open with your embryonic thoughts so exposed. Whereas paper-writing is a safe-zone between yourself and one or a few individuals (in the case of an Honors thesis, chosen and presumably trusted individuals, as we selected our thesis adviser), in staging my thesis in an immortal public medium, it is ever-open to the criticism and private judgments of others. Which can be unnerving.

It therefore took me a couple of months after beginning to take the plunge and make it public, which could have worked against it. I suspect that after having written several posts and then inviting others to read it, I gave the impression that the project was sailing along fine, when actually the converse was true and I needed their input to achieve the vision I had of it. It is possible that had they been present at the moment of its birth, they would have felt more connected to the seeing through of its development. Regardless, though the deadline is near for the evaluative purposes of a university requirement, I am glad to know that my project will still be out there, full of potential for more growth. Just like language, as long as there are partakers, active or passive, there can be no end. And although the project did not manifest as I had planned, I am satisfied with what it has become, as its own organism, with its own plan. Like vines that stretch to grow to the sun, the blog responds to sparks of curiosity, and grows in pursuit of them.

As far as the informality factor that is often a point raised against Internet writing, that what is posted is anonymous and indiscriminate, too lax in procedural academic rigor to offer anything of solid substance, I can only leave to the discernment of the reader. Certainly different people may reap more or less from it, but I do suggest that as in any pursuit of understanding, one will only take from it as much as he or she chooses to engage. As for my part, I would claim to be anything but the master of this material, and only share how far I've come in seeking to understand something as intricate and all-pervading as language. My hope is that in providing the platform that I have, far deeper inquiries into the nature of language can be made by others, sparked by either excitement or aversion to even one or two of my words. It is not my main concern that many others find resonance in my musings, as much as that the conversation, of agreement or opposition, finds its way into the open.

Some may see a blog as only a nook-and-cranny in the vast dimensions of cyber space, lacking the tangibility and material preservation of a "real" thesis, and likely to be lost. I was able to create wormholes from the densely populated planets of Facebook and Blackboard so that many could travel Into the Sieve. And the blog welcomed cyber space voyagers from France, Chile, Puerto Rico, not to mention several states of America (and hopefully more to come!). And if their stay in what I "set down" was good, I find it less important to prove if it meets the qualifications of a "real" thesis or not. Perhaps it can be more than that. Perhaps it can be language-making.

E.T. Final Paper

This is my final paper for the Environmental Theory course I took this semester, taught by Chris Schaberg. Though it is not directly related to other topics touched in this blog, I decided to post it at the suggestion of both my professor and thesis adviser, and saw after some thought several connections. The assignment differed from other papers I have written in that it was to be presented, and so written to be read aloud and heard. Now that I have presented it orally, my hopes in posting it here are that some of those who heard it can now also read it, and maybe even be affected by it in a new or stronger way. Maybe the words will be heard differently with the eyes. The other connection I recognize to the blog material is the dissection of the simple words of children upon which the paper is based. One of the essential aims of this thesis project has been to strip down words, to see them naked in their full meaning, to hold them to what they truly say. Finally, echoing back to the post "Language Frames Ecological Relations," I urged that with our words we ascribe our fellow creatures respect and agency by making them the subjects and not objects of our sentences. We have much to learn from children, who know to do this without telling.

[Captiv]ated Children

Briana Renfrow

A trip to the aquarium, for most “well-adjusted” adults, is a mundane activity, nothing out of the ordinary. The experience is pre-packaged to include entrance, instructive tidbits to ponder as you move seamlessly from tank to tank, the occasional “ooh” and “ahh” at a particularly striking display of color or teeth, the opportunity to have a photo taken with your torso transplanted on the body of a mermaid, perhaps a stuffed otter and some ice cream. The aquarium is the Disneyland of Nature, and thus regarded as the perfect place to introduce your child to the wonders of the animal world.

As a child is taught to accept captivity as a norm, to be excited but never troubled by the forced meeting of species that takes place at an aquarium, there are moments in which something curious occurs. It is in these moments that a child in his or her innocence will ask a question or make an exclamation, simply, about that which she sees. Suddenly the flow of continuity shatters, seeming normality dissipates as the unadulterated observations of a child uncover ignored grotesque incongruities of the scene, and so stalls the anthropological machine.

The intention of this paper is to explore these moments of intensity and friction, the disruptions that occur when a child says precisely that which he or she is not supposed to say, which is, perhaps, precisely what needs to be said.

“Run away! Run away!”

A child will pick up more quickly than any the very condition of captivity. While we as adults look past the glass to the image on the other side, our senses so accustomed to peering through illusory screens, the child most wise points to the very cage. Perhaps it is her identification with the lines and limitations, both physical and imaginary, which she encounters in her days, that causes the girl to sigh at the sight of the red-tailed hawk, “He wants to fly away.” Perhaps it is this same restlessness of a tethered bird which causes the young boy to squeal, “He’s trying to get out! He can’t get out!” when his mother says of the otter “Look, he’s playing.” The tank is not a window, but a mirror. The child wishes to assign the creature he sees agency beyond that which is possible for him or it—the agency to be free, wild even. And the child’s startling proclamation brings to the surface the strange irony that we too, are captive in the aquarium, in pockets of air amongst the water, and in our contraptions of artifice. The child is right to conspire escape. The toddlers, knowing best, often do, booking it through Adventure Island, dipping under the belted stanchions that divide neat lines to wait for a turn at the sting ray pet pool. Their parents struggle to detangle themselves from the redundant zigzagging ropes before chasing after them.

“Who catched them?”

The child not only questions captivity but pinpoints the captor. “Who catched them?” she asks, as if to say “Who could do this?” The appropriate answer is not an invisible institution that we can shrug to, or the anonymous authority that rules public spaces—an environmentality if you will—but a singular Captor, a Who, that is you and me and every human being. In her simple question is also the recognition that this aquarium is not a microcosm of Nature as it presents itself to be, in all its crafty set design, but that these creatures came from somewhere else and are here imprisoned. Seeing the red-tailed hawk perched atop a replica of a wooden shack you’d find “down da bayou,” a boy asks “Who put him up there?” and again “Can you get him down?” I cringe as I repeat the story I’ve been told. That’s Hazlot. They found her with a broken wing. She can’t fly. She’s tied down so she doesn’t hurt herself trying. No, I can’t get her down, that’s where she stays. Suddenly there are too many eyes in the place. I am the Captor. I am naked in my white collared shirt.

The Disneyland of Nature leaves no room for stories of captivity that would involve a free agent (in this case, a hawk) being brought in if not for its own good. It was rescued. It was endangered. It needed our intervention. The Disneyland of Nature neither has room for death nor decay, which may jeopardize its mythology. Employees of the aquarium have been trained to inform husbandry via radio in the case of a sick fish. We are to report “This is Volunteer to Husbandry. There is a package in the Mississippi Gallery.” A staff member shows up with a net, sweeps the struggle from sight of the visitors, and walks away nonchalantly, swinging a plastic bag containing the “package” in hand. What is behind the glass is carefully cultured as the Ideal, and Death is vigilantly omitted as to not spoil the experience:

“Just like a reflection, we can never actually reach it and touch it and belong to it. Nature was an ideal image, a self-contained form suspended afar, shimmering and naked behind glass like an expensive painting” (Timothy Morton 5). When Nature no longer serves this aesthetic purpose, it becomes garbage. We must dispose of the evidence as to not betray that perhaps we cannot always succeed as caretakers of our inmates. And the package becomes not food for other fish, but human waste. Fish food itself actually works in the reverse. Upon being asked by a girl at the sting ray exhibit “What do you feed them?” I replied automatically “Dead fish.” I did not expect her response: “How’d they get dead?” This time, I had no good answer. The child intuits the foul-play that happens behind-the-scenes, even when what is on display colorfully aims to pacify.

“We’re having a staring contest.”

The exhibition of live creatures, carefully labeled and separated from the viewer by glass, constructs a subject-object relationship. The human peering at the contained animal becomes a spectator as the fish becomes a thing, a prop for entertainment, and known only from afar by its aesthetic form and scientific name. A child in the cognitive stage of development of constant-anthropomorphizing, sees no such distinction between itself and other nonhuman beings. Caged or not, the alligator is not an object, but an equal subject, not just to be stared at, but staring back. “We’re having a staring contest” is to say “I acknowledge the consciousness of this strange stranger, and it acknowledges me.” Though the perceptions of Agamben’s tick, an alligator, or jellyfish may be vastly different than our own, the child sees that we share this world as equals, that together we play life, and that we touch.

A boy tentatively dips his hand into the sting ray pet pool. He is afraid, reasonably so. To touch a sting ray is not just to feel the surprisingly smooth and cool flesh of a strange stranger, but to come into contact with all its histories in natureculture. It is the pop culture man killer. It is the ideology of human domination and domestication of other species. It is corporate sponsorship and scuba diving. It is curiosity and fear. It is an evolved shark and a culmination of deep time. It is a delicacy. It is the reduction of language, how we do not know it past its name. The man killer hovers below the boy’s hand, and stays, as if it is enjoying the petting. The boy laughs in delight “This one’s very friendly!” His mom answers “Did you name it?” as if only this could legitimize such a bond.

Maybe there is something to a child’s insistence on naming everything he meets. He does it as if to elevate to the status of an equal the species he meets. The animals in the aquarium that receive the best care—the otters, alligator, and birds—all have been given names. All other fish in the aquarium are seemingly dispensable. Perhaps in making use of the “apparatus of anthropomorphism” as Bennett calls it, we could “re-people” the world, bow to the blowfish as a Buddha.

“Is it real?”

Again, I am faced with a deceivingly simple question. My first response is “Yes, of course it’s real.” But then I pause. What is it that I am being asked? I suppose I first must understand what a child’s perception of “real” is. Does “Is it real?” mean to say “Is it alive?” Or perhaps not, because that question implies the possibility that the unmoving animal in the tank could be dead. This could be what the child is inquiring, expressing mistrust in the Captor’s ability to keep such a monster alive. But there seems to be more to it. In lack of a synonym to “real,” becoming less and less sure that I could define such a word, I can only rephrase the question as its opposite. The child must mean to say, “Is it fake?” or “Is it a simulacrum?” or “Is it artificial?” The questions quickly spiral out of control. While the very large white alligator at stake here is most certainly not made of plastic, to what extent can it be called real? Or anything in the aquarium for that matter? If all the habitats are plastic, all sea water created on site with a complex mixture of chemicals, and food stock stored in a sterile lab, not to mention that nothing the creature does shouts “wild,” how is it not artificial, a product, an imitation of a “real” alligator? The child lifts the skirts of the American ideology that Jack Turner says “establishes reassurance through Imitation.” Her undergarments are rose-colored, but need replacement.

Even so. I cannot help but hear a faint echo, a chorus of whispers, the voices of Morton, Haraway, Price and Bennett that would seem discontent with this conclusion. Perhaps the issue at hand is not whether or not the creatures of captivity are real, or if captivity itself is completely futile. Haraway and Morton would agree that though the captive creatures are products of natureculture, they are part of the interweb of beings that is encompassed in the mesh, and Bennett and Price may even interject that even if they were made of plastic or dead, the very molecules vibrating in them, as well as all other molecules, ideas and perspectives they connect to, bear impact on the histories we live and inherit. What can be taken then from the child’s uncertainty about what’s in the cage is just that: an uncertainty or discomfort, an indigestion stirred by dissatisfactory relationships with our fellow meshmates. Haraway may have put it best that we must nourish that indigestion, revert to the fickle tummies of children as they encounter the world for the first time and find they cannot just stomach it.

Of the essence!

"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression in their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection: The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached...Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose...We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."

-Edward Sapir

This is the opening quote to linguist Benjamin Whorf's essay "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Language to Behavior," a text we read recently in my "Lost in Translation" course at Loyola with Robert Dewell. In this segment of our linguistics course, we addressed issues in translation as related to cultural perspective. But beyond this, through Whorfian thought we probed how our very language structures reflect our perceptions of time, space, matter, gender associations, etc. After breaking down some English idiomatic expressions, it became very clear that our cultural metaphor for time is something linear, but also fleshed out in space, a substance we can actively move forward through, or, conversely, something that moves towards us. Expressions such as "We are coming to the end of the year"/"The end is coming" or "We are approaching the end of the year"/"10 o'clock approaches" replace time metaphorically with location. The idea of time as a sacred commodity is also uncovered through our words "waste of time", "running out of time", "spend time", "give me your time", and though the expressions may seem innocent enough, there is much truth to this being the attitude of our culture. My time is precious. It is of the essence.

These suggestions of our worldview being tightly wrapped up in our language do not bear full meaning until cross-comparisons are made with other languages. According to Whorf, "the three-tense verb system of SAE (Standard Average European, i.e. the "romantic" languages) colors all our thinking about time." In class we learned of an interesting torque to the SAE idea of facing the future with the past behind you. In the Aymara culture, to gesture to the future one points to what is behind his back. He is facing his past, for it is what he can see. The future is unknown, and lurks indiscernible.

Other languages, such as the native Hopi language Whorf studied, do not hold temporally demarcated tenses, and so neither have a conception of time demarcated as such. The Hopi rather than viewing time as a chronological motion, perceive time as a "getting later", or an ever-accumulating present:"if we inspect consciousness we find no past, present, future, but a unity embracing complexity. EVERYTHING is in consciousness, and everything in consciousness is, and is together" (Whorf). The departures in the grammatical structures of time, reflect departures in conceptions of time, and therefore departures in worldview as to the best way to perform life within those parameters. "To us, for whom time is a motion on a space, unvarying repetition seems to scatter its force along a row of units of that space, and be wasted. To the Hopi, for whom time is not a motion but a 'getting later' of everything that has ever been done, unvarying repetition is not wasted but accumulated. It is storing up an invisible charge that holds over into later events" (Whorf). These differences may be clues to causes of cultural tension and prejudices. Our views of progress and efficiency will differ vastly, and we will be quick to point the finger at those operating in "Caribbean time" for being what we'd consider lazy. Perhaps they are just moving at the tick of a different clock, or no clock at all. And who's to say which is better?

If you have traveled and waited with a French or German tourist for a bus that does not arrive on schedule, you know well the outrage and personal affront that is felt when these differences in cultural concepts of time collide. How dare they steal my time! But maybe to the country hosts, moving slow in the heat is just fine, time to them is not that not that precious commodity, quantifiable as water in a glass, or a pound of rice but rather an ever-present we share...


Discussing these ideas with friend, as a writer he expressed a particular curiosity when it came to verb tense. He pondered: if you were to speak always in the present, would your perception of time change? Would it be possible to break from these paradoxical categories of past, present, future by changing speech? We have established that language affects worldview, at least according to many philosophers and linguists. It is also deemed to be true in the field of psychology that positive language creates a positive person. In short, thoughts, words, create worlds. Could this too be true for time?


In David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, in the chapter titled "In the Landscape of Language" the "Dreamtime" of Aboriginal Australians is described: "It is a kind of time out of time, a time hidden beyond or even within the evident, manifest presence of the land...It is that time before the world itself was entirely awake (a time that still exists just below the surface of wakeful awareness)" (164). It is in the Dreamtime that the Ancestors sing the world into existence, and it is through the recitation of these songs by their descendants that the world is created anew.

I briefly refer to this here for its relevance to differences in perspectives of time, and how those concepts of time are carried through language. Not only do the Aborigines also hold an idea of the past layered under/in/throughout the present, but it is through the power of song that the world was created in Dreamtime, and through language that the singer is transported to Dreamtime, or rather Dreamtime rises in the present and is again. Words are powerful, create. And perhaps a diluted use of words in a culture in which they are no longer sacred makes for a diluted sense of reality. Sing, sing.

Push button to close door

I like to think about settings in which speech will always be utterly awkward. The other day it struck me as I waited for the elevator in Monroe Hall. It seems that elevators are something for which the establishment of a social conduct was attempted, but we could never quite get right. No one ever really knows exactly how to carry themselves in relation to others when it comes to elevators. There are many dis-coordinated shuffles, apologies and hesitations--who is to board first? first one waiting, or first approaching when the door opens? It is a wonderful little dance of our absurd species. We enter after some fumbling of feet when the lift has alas arrived, only to stand with equal discomfort in the silence, each itching to leave the space, staring sideways or at the numbers above, pretending to look bored or preoccupied, each painfully aware of the other they are entrapped with..

The chosen one asks which floor, or is demanded of without invitation. Do you hold the elevator, throw your body between the slowly crunching metal doors when you see someone making a mad dash? Or have you had enough of the waiting? There are those who know each other, however loosely, that must acknowledge each other briefly before lapsing back into the silence that overtakes the place. It is either that or drag the conversation painfully on for an eternity until you reach the fifth floor. The silence seems most mutually uncomfortably comfortable. For those that cannot bear the heavy air, there are equally awkward jokes, short forced chuckles that echo dimly off the low ceiling.