weird weirdness can always be found within the urban dictionary.
'to knowledge your knowledge, you will deal equally with everything within your cipher, which gives birth to wisdom that is showing and proving. everything is everything, which equals one. equality gives birth to wisdom, and mathematics do not lie.'
i cannot tell if the above was a submission that went through a translation bot first, or if someone, somewhere, sought to convey meaning with precisely this string of words. i've been thinking about this lately—the relationship between words and meaning (we in the industry actually call it semantics)—for various reasons. one such reason is my wife, who is now engaged in a fight to the death with a master's rhetoric program; you would not believe the depth and reach of some of the books in her pile right now, and on the most abstruse topics. another such reason is this collection of goods, any one of which takes frakking forever to compose, takes away the easy option of just saying what i mean, and makes me think directly about what it is i mean to say.
is it even possible for a human to think, without thinking in words? ideas are, as i construct them, really effing abstract; however, for the idea to be useful i need to understand it myself, and/or convey it meaningfully to someone else—requiring words, which are if not totally concrete, then at least far less abstract than the original idea. is it like converting from analog to digital, where no matter what, you lose something in the conversion? or maybe the recipient of the converted idea has a corresponding upscaler built in, so that they may fully reconstruct the original? do our brains contain codecs for meaning?
i understand this is all very aimless and lah-dee-dah and will sound horribly pretentious at your end, and that's not my intent. honestly i sat down tonight and was just going to post that urban dictionary link and have a little chuckle. i have no idea where all this came from. but now the idea is in words, and i have conveyed it, dig?
'language is the liquid / that we're all dissolved in / great for solving problems / after it creates the problem'
(modest mouse)
p.s. 'mathematics do [sic] not lie.' (you had me at mathematics.)
Hmmm…to think without using words…an interesting idea. I will start this today.
lah-dee-dah reminds me of "Ah-da-da-dah, like this in the background. What the fuck is it with you? What don't you fucking understand? You got any fucking idea about, hey, it's fucking distracting having somebody walking up behind Bryce in the middle of the fucking scene? Give me a fucking answer! What don't you get about it?"
You're a nice guy, Mister Anthropic, but we are so done professionally. Seriously. No, no, no Bruce! Let's not take a break, we're doing it right now!
CHRISTIAN BALE you have me confused with someone else, also you need to stop hitting the bottle so early in the morning.
Li-Young Lee, poet extraordinaire, says poetry is like a cathedral in that, as cathedrals cordon off large empty spaces to allow us to appreciate those spaces, poetry (and presumably the words of which the poetry is comprised) cordons off, or at least outlines, that thing inside us that poetry is meant to make us aware of.
Words and meaning are necessarily related, and interrelated, if only because they allow us to better grasp meaning even though in so doing they necessarily restrict and distort that meaning. It's just that, even after the restriction and distortion, we still understand the meaning better than we would have otherwise.
Or that's what he says. I think it's true in communicating said meaning, but not as true in experiencing the meaning first hand for oneself. This is why I generally hate to talk about or have others talk about good art. I know what I've seen/experienced, and your trying to replicate that in words isn't helping any.
And you thought YOUR post was pretentious.