NOTES ON WORDS

6. It isn’t too hard to ideate a theory of meaning.

If I need a theory of meaning I could just reiterate a few salient points that have been knocking around my screen for a long time:

a) The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, when translated via the mechanics of meaning, into words, represents dilution.

b) When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.

c) The meaning of something is inherent in its exact mode of expression.

d) Meaning is not a delusion unlike Time.

e) Meaning is an emotional import given mere exo-skeleton with words.

– These statements seem to state the obvious and are largely not original but that doesn’t mean they are not true. My next point is that:

f) Meaning is an effect of differences in sound combined with differences in idea.

g) If all these statements are simultaneously true, something “polysemic” has happened.

h) It may be that for something to attain meaning it must journey from Sheer Signification to (in)significance.

Note:

Point (f) that meaning is an effect of differences in sound combined with differences in idea seems to suggest that meaning is quite superfluous; but it has to go deeper than being a mere “effect,” has to correspond to something in the human surely. I’m not proposing a return to the conception of the linguistic sign as “transcendent referent” like pre-Derridean philosophy just think meaning should be more than an effect. Meaning is indeed the most meaningful thing, if you permit the neoplasm, the tautology. The word for meaning has a meaning too and it is meaning in and of itself. Meaning should be deeper than trickery, than post-modernism, than surface being depth andcetera.

10. There is no such thing as immutable truth.

My ex gf when I was at Warwick University said “there’s no such thing as immutable truth.” Yet reading Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I discover him saying philosophers do believe in a kind of truth that is fixed and static, timeless and eternal. I think of the idea that my dad delimited to me when I was young:

“there’s no such thing as almost infinite.”

You could say it is timeless and eternal, that truth; but you could also say what my ex gf means is that the language used to say it is plastic and malleable. Still, I like to believe that beyond the language the meaning of the words is eternally true and immutably so.

It might even be seen as the moment I first showed a philosophical turn of mind. We were driving in the car, and I was in the back seat, and though I knew it was a mistake, said that something was “almost infinite.” My dad jumped on it and said “there’s no such thing as almost infinite.” I did know that and felt a fool for the clumsiness of my expression, for the people that were there must’ve got the impression that I didn’t know what my father said, whereas in reality I had spent long nights considering the edge of the universe and what lies beyond the edge. I misrepresented myself, in terms of self-promotion, and found a difference between identity and persona, what I think and the careless things I say, thought and expression in other words. The mistake I made I never wished to make again, which was selling myself short.

12. Science and art still differ on the matter of truth.

They have different sensibilities. In science truth is to be falsified through which nothing is 100%, only ever 99% at best. In poetry however there is truth-to-itself through which anything can be true if well-made enough. Poetic truth is like the truth of the individual, constituted of its own inner nature. This came up in my dissertation on the work of David Morley, years ago. I was instructed in that by Dr. Tony Sharpe of Lancaster University.

In my dissertation I argued that we come to a work of art presupposing many binary oppositions. These might include:

inside/ outside a convention;

science/ art;

High/ Low;

honesty/ craft;

narrative/ confessional;

and I argued that a great work might start to undo these binary oppositions. But still, where science and art differ is in the treatment of truth. A poem could say “Barnes has scored a chicken” and if the poem was well-made enough, it would be true for the duration of the poem. If a scientist said “Barnes has scored a chicken” it would only be a percentage of truth, never 100%.

26. The symbol [R] represents the stance, the large-R, Romantic stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

My usual example of this is to connect the words “drip drown dream dragon drop” but never before have I expressed the truth that it is actually easy to conjure examples of word-combinations that nobody has before. The polkadot dancers left the door fleering in a leery way and to be quixotic hitched a ride on the cosmic wave south where a mouth lay in wait, open as a gate, until the hexagonal sun set, dreaming in ink.

When I say these words have never been organised before I must temper that by saying there are super-computers who can put every word, letter, sentence, book, paragraph in every order, like the machine in Gulliver’s Travels. But presumably that would run on indefinitely instead of providing a single sentence. Whatever the case, there is a debate in Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco as to whether or not the super-computer in question has ruined the heart-purifying permutation games of the Cabala or whether in fact computers can be spiritual – and the answer is it is subjective.

I think of exemplums like [R], like the number “!00%” - and like my old Nirvana barcode; like James’s notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet, even the plus sign for an ‘f’ in the line “I have a scar+ that is red and black” – as somehow escaping the totalitarian machination, as somehow representing hope, but they may also be accounted for by the super-computer.

However this is a specious imputation. It is not that we are up against an Evil Empire and must usurp literature from the hands of said supercomputer. It is just a marvel of technology that everything we can think of is accounted for – everything that is, in my list, apart from the suit. The computer won’t have done the suit. It escapes. In fact you could say the supercomputer cannot compute the suit.

31. Love is grouped with language not God.

Teenage philosophers sometimes group God and love together in the cynical sense that (as they say) both are illusory. However, I think it more sophisticated to group love with language. As WH Auden said “love is a choice of words.” So this I would say is an essentially pragmatic option.

Wittgenstein said a lot of the problems of philosophy are created by misunderstanding the logic of language and hoped to elucidate these problems. A lot of problems in life not just philosophy - are also down to communication. So, believing, on top of this, that love is aligned with language not God, I hope to improve my language-use – to open communication – and I think this comes down to care. Taking care, engaging brain, needn’t make you a fastidious middle aged man, but a happier communicator. And after all lack of communication is saddening, isn’t it? Like when as a child Valentine’s Day passes you by without anyone telling you it is Valentine’s Day. It’s saddening and sadness is a terrible emotion whose waves seem to stretch before and after time. All told then to remedy sadness, communication should be focussed on.

34. There is more than one sense of the word “perception.”

The word “perception” has different meanings that are not utterly distinct but related. First and foremost is the Primary Meaning: the activity of the sensory organs in a neutral state. This is hearing, seeing, tasting, touching and smelling. The next is the Interpretative Meaning which is meant when someone says “my perception of events was such and such.” It is an analytic interpretation of what goes through the senses. The next is the Subjective Meaning which is akin to Belief and also Opinion. It is meant when someone says “in my perception, so and so.” As stated these senses of perception are not utterly distinct but related and it could be said one builds on another; even that taken as a process there is a procession from information to knowledge to wisdom. That procession from information to knowledge to wisdom could double as a process of abstraction, through which something concrete becomes something abstract. You could also say it templates over the paradigm of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Perception, in short is a catch-all, umbrella term that when opened up carries multifarious meanings that slightly differ in emphasis. At least, this is my perception of the word “perception.”

37. Some coinage seems universal and pre-existent.

Once upon a time, a while ago, I invented the word distractionary to contain such neologisms as comnambulism, meaning online sleepwalking, as funger meaning hunger for fun, as filence meaning delicate speech, as amazeballs to replace archaic ‘gay,’ as emocracy, meaning rule by emotion, as agovernment, meaning the opposite of government, as gravitolution and evity which might go without saying, as co-imagination, as in to be diagonalised by omnijective interface of random access co-imagination, which is not fun, and I thought isness was another one, as in music is penetration of isness, but it was already done in Joyce, whom it seems knew a lot of these, and I have just recollected another, not just “indwellable” meaning the opposite of indomitable, when it comes to cinema, but the word ‘entropy’ spelled backwards, as if to frame the first, unformulated spark of appetency in Nothingness, preceding Creation, yet again, even though the universe was born in silence not appetency as far as we know.

39. Some poetic effects have no name.

My undergraduate dissertation was an immanent, Kantian critique in mimicking the methodology of David Morley’s series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception. The micro-analysis focussed on the line “the heart trammelled and rammed on the anvil bleeds visions.” I worked out he was using the anti-dactylus, two soft, one hard; and not only that but the stressed syllables in that metrical pattern all rhymed on a short A. The effect is kinetic; and there is invective monotony written into the line’s musical configuration; but apart from that it is nameless, nameless in all the array of hyper-specialised tools of sustained critical micro-analysis. I found this surprising because the effect seemed form at its most mathematically precise but then again considering the line belongs to a bilingual, gypsy shaman narrator, we might not be surprised that the metre indicates something that is outside a tradition.

40. Time spent reading in hushed library corners pays off.

Professor Squillegybob says: “The Great Gatsby could be an infradiegetic heterotopia pertaining to panchronic, panoramic overview like a chronotope turned euchronia, unless this represents a word-world gone polysemic with the multifarious possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy through whom the esemplastic has fled away with the quadlibetical.” That’s not to be confused with my brother Dr. Bob who would say the above sentence is nonsense, just an attempt to bamboozle the reader with fastidious loquacity, with fanciful magniloquence, with profuse verbosity, and that it is better to keep things simple, to try and not use as many long words as possible. Indeed the more I know the meanings of words like “infradiegetic” the less I know the meanings of small, simple words like “in” and “of.” There was a chap at school said to be the cleverest of all of us and he said “sometimes I forget how to spell ‘is.’” It seemed like a highly intelligent thing to say considering we were less than ten. It is possible, meanwhile, to go through a course, doing more reading than they can even throw at you, absorb all the hyper-specialised terms and still forget how to spell “Winnie the Pooh.” Winnie the Pooh is said to be where the English store their best philosophy. We lack an immanent, Kantian tradition but have things like Winnie the Pooh instead. It wasn’t on my reading list when I was at University but my father did read it to my siblings and me as children.

41. Language contains fossils.

The word “went” is not past participle of the verb “to go” originally, but the verb “to wend.” It is thus a fossil; and language is full of them, fossils, coins, corruptions, dead metaphors the brain is built of, ossifications, word-shades, word-frequencies, ghost-vowels, consonantal masses. The English language is worth billions of pounds, the creative industries second only to the financial markets for bringing in wealth. This was one of the salient points of one undergraduate poem portfolio that took the form of defaced bank notes within its plot. I handed it in the Professor Paul Farley and he gave me a First for it, and it would’ve been even better had it contained something a government super-computer that can put every word in every order wouldn’t have thought of.

42. Language is a creature.

I read in The New Scientist that we developed language on the basis of meat; that we grew our brains by eating meat; that we then needed to spread information about farming, hunting, killing, cooking and eating meat – so developed language.

One of my Professors, Prof. John Schad of Lancaster University, says “language speaks Man.”

Another, Professor David Morley of Warwick University, says “language is a word-world where words are a species.”

My friend Paul the poet and I think that “language is the emotional condom of the world.”

Part of that is that the pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, when translated into words, via the mechanics of meaning, always represents a dilution.

50. Truth is aligned with psychic pleasure.

So far this seems to be about me trying to catch up with my circle of intellectual friends from London, who all started reading Philosophy at school the year I left town and went to another school. I am, that is, hot on the heels of the scholars, and would like to take things further. Maybe I would start learning about “Impartials” like undergraduates at Lancaster University? Maybe I would realise I need to read some indigenous philosophy if I am to deal with events in the mystical realm that happened in my own country? Maybe I am to recognise the Nirvana barcode is a fallacy and I am not to redo it? Maybe I should open up on why the word “philosophy” is built with the word “philos” meaning love? For after all isn’t love how we are programmed to function?

Well, Kant says love is Nature’s trick for ensuring reproduction, the colours of the flowers attracting the bees and so on. Auden says love is a choice of words. Love used to be aligned with madness, fever and intoxication, but became more pragmatic, more to do with language in the Modernist era. Martin Amis says love is Man’s highest emotion; but a female poetess I saw live took a much more biological view and said love is a kind of banana custard, presumably meaning semen. I suppose if it were “trust” or “respect” of wisdom rather than philos meaning love, it wouldn’t be as strong; and also that it remains love because very often it is passed down, inherited, and love is the function through which we have offspring after all. I suppose it is also love because philosophy treats a subject in as high a way as is possible. The verb with which the wisdom is treated is very often love.

My father, for example of wisdom itself, used to say love is the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without which it can stop; and that was the lesson of his tale about some great grandparent on my Finnish side dying of a broken heart. I suppose if he just dictated the wisdom in that case it wouldn’t be as good as it is when you bind it to life. He never used to say the wisdom out-right just tell the story of a Finnish great grandparent who on seeing his daughters scattered and sent off to different homes after a Russian Invasion, died of a broken heart. “You can die of a broken heart,” he said. “The heart needs hope in order to survive,” he continued. Thus the wisdom is bound to life. The definition of what love is is embedded in and derived from the narrative that is being passed down. He also therefore passes down the wisdom of binding wisdom to life. I use this example of wisdom in a passage on love because it is wisdom about love.

My answer to the question is already given which is that philosophy is about treatment and treatment is about love but it’s also because it’s about being a good human, loving thy neighbour, making the world a better place, a subject conducted between individuals that love their work, and ideally, hopefully love each other as parents love their offspring to whom they impart their wisdom. Wisdom, in short, is something we pass down, and passing down is for families, and families are made of love.

There is also the idea that truth is co-aligned with psychic pleasure. That it is the fakes and frauds that lead to pain. Truth after all is what the philosopher may be after. He seeks to extirpate every trace of falsity from his myriad mind, and develop a stance.

101. Excerpts From ‘The Book Of Words’

Words, words, words. What are words? These are words.

Words in this epistemology I would say are useful tools associated with the instinct to survive.

Man is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across metaphysics and words make connections between first and third persons.

Words are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in order to make life easier.

Words are, well, ONLY words.

“MAYFLY” I say the word ‘mayfly,’ phonetically, sounding out its every vowel-sound alphabetically.

The word ‘Entropy’ spelled backwards, i.e. y.p.o.r.t.n.e could frame the first, unformulated spark of appetency in Nothingness preceding Creation, or else have no meaning under the sun in which case I’d say that is Tucker’s constant.

Neil Curry says “if two people can agree on the meaning of a new word, it becomes a real word.”

‘Indwellable’ might mean the opposite of ‘indomitable’ when it comes to the medicine man’s medieval cinema screen empoldered from the harbour in Iceland.

Neil Curry also liked the bit in my essay on Norman Nicholson where I wrote “You can find freedom from accepting limitation.”

Sometimes I drive a stolen, Dream Factory car for whom punctuation is merely brakes, bird with the skin of snaking in the Lakes.

Music, Magic and Mystery make the three M’s of words.

I think I might write A Trance of Stalks by Professor Quentin Ponsonby, when I am bored.

The distractionary may contain the metallurgical origins of birds, whom it seems speak, in gagazookzook and bongateebingbong.

I think poetry is more like Man interpreting God and music more like God interpreting Man.

I like my lines of shining conveyance to be free to connect in all directions.

When two words thought to be mutually exclusive connect in Holy Orbit it forms an Image.

I think in painting and poetry alike, sensation precedes thought.

I think in music meanwhile chain is made from same as key.

“Noetic” meaning “of the mind” is my new favourite word because its suffix ‘ic’ reminds of Icarus who flew too near the sun.

There are many other words with the same suffix like demiurgic, caustic, Homeric, pragmatic, atavistic, telluric, but ‘noetic’ is my favourite one.