Language and Writing

"How strange it is to be anything at all" -Neutral Milk Hotel, "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"

One thing that marvels me about language is that there is any language at all. I mean, it's an top-down and a bottom-up phenomenon - requiring both a society of authority and a thousand peers with which we must learn to communicate - that has essentially existed continuously since the dawn of humankind. The human brain has evolved to be able to handle this form of communication, the initial mutation-driven leaps to which - however gradual they might be - must have been totally crazy. In our nigh-unfathomable leap from the proverbial swamps, this is perhaps the toughest change for me to explain, understand, or even begin to wrap my head around.

From where I'm currently positioned intellectually, I can't even begin to get into the scientific intricacies and prerequisites necessary to understand the origins of language at a state-of-the-art level. It would take years. So, unfortunately, I'm in this rut of vague wonderment, stuck on the ground.


But I do write a whole lot of stuff down. And one of the startling aspects of writing that is enough to literally get you out of bed to contemplate is that - when reading an extremely-well-constructed thought or scene or bit of dialogue - you are transported into the writer's very schema of language. Like, I always hear people talk about how you're inhabiting the mind of a writer, and that is staggering on its own terms. But even more so: This language that we inhabit for much of our days, in conversation, in symbolism in ads, in essays, in comforting-hands-on-shoulders, in pauses (awkward and pleasant alike) that our brains conduct like rests in a symphony.... This language that we inhabit, that we cannot escape? Someone has invited us into their own personal home with their own language and instead of feeling invaded or feeling like an invader? We feel comfortable, as if the writer's schema of language, denotation and connotation, is our own. Mi casa su casa.

And for me, the kicker, the punchline, is that the author that can (and indeed, as taste demands, must) perform this sort of magic can (and, again, must) go still further. An author - from start to close of a piece of writing - must change over time (either subtly or not-so-subtly) the schema of language most amply suggested by that piece. In fiction, a character has ventured somewhere from start to finish and been altered in the reader's mind solely by this virtue alone; a character's name cannot mean the same thing from start to finish if the character is at all non-trivial. "Holden Caulfield" is iconic as a signifier and might signify something to the reader even before the first reading of "The Catcher In The Rye" but just as surely, its significance must change as one reads through the text, every experience until the end of the book altering our perception of Holden. And the aggregate of these changes (most of them gradual and subtle) constitutes our experience of Holden. Over the course of "1984", Big Brother goes from faceless always-watching entity to sadistic authoritarianism personified. Madame Bovary goes from "someone to understand" to, arguably, "someone to loathe", or, inarguably, "someone I, the reader, have now experienced the choices and life of." Places, people, things, processes, words that characters use, mechanisms, governments, businesses, all these things the writer asks us to imagine in his own form of language and then manipulates us for potentially thousands of pages right along these hooks.

And then, zooming out a bit, I'd note that writing makes these changes very deliberately, as the very essence of the craft. If I can hook you by hitting common referents and having you identify with my schemas of language? If I can get you into my room of language? My mission then becomes to reel you in and show you how the room changes as I deem fit. I am a wizard of this room that I have invented, limited only by my own powers of imagination and craftsmanship to alter in a designated sequence.

And if you can accept that, you may also consider that every method of writing becomes, in part, then, the subtle reconstruction, manipulation, and deconstruction of this room I've initially constructed. The success of a piece of dialogue often hinges on how successfully it changes and reinvents the language used by characters both before and after its utterance. Musical prose creates a musical pulse or impression in the schema of the writer. And so on, to every method and to every school of thought and to every tic and to every heated argument about style passed between sophisticated critics and never uttered in public.

And, tying this back to the beginning, note that words in the language at large of course change in denotation and connotation over time, and we as an aggregate of readers and writers and talkers and listeners must in small ways adapt our terminologies and respond in turn by subtly changing our own schemas as our understanding of the world and our language changes over time. A piece of writing then becomes in design and function a metaphor for the invention of language itself, the wonderment of its captivation the same as a magic word that bends the world to its will.