The words get in the way

I love words. I spend hours each day voluntarily mucking around with them, shifting them, inverting them, and putting them in disguise. The right words (whether my own or others) give me a physical thrill, and I can read a beautiful sentence dozens of times and not tire of it. I learned to read when I was three; I do not remember a time when I did not know what letters and words meant and did.

But I know that words are slippery, manipulative little devils as adept at changing reality as they are at passively reflecting or revealing it.

How good are you at drawing likenesses?

No, really. When you sit down to sketch a face, does it look like a real face, or a representation of a face?

The most likely explanation for this that I've read (and 'fess up, most of you (with the exception of two or three readers who can draw) can't draw a lifelike face anymore than I can) is that the words get in the way. We look at the face; we think, 'let's see, the eye goes here'; and then, instead of drawing the eye the way it actually looks, we draw "AN EYE," the simulacrum of an eye. The label EYE prevented us from seeing the eye that was there, and instead, we drew the eye we imagined.

~~~Andrea Promotes Herself to Neurobiology Professor~~~

Different parts of our brains are responsible for processing different kinds of sensory information. You knew this already, yes? There is a part of the brain that processes visual information, another part that processes auditory information, another part that processes tactile information, and so on. The part of the brain that processes language is Broca's area.

As befitting such a complex job--you need to know what words mean, what they look like, how to put them together, what words sound like, how they attach into sentences and paragraphs, and so on--it is in the frontal lobe. Yes, that's right--the part of your brain you are probably familiar with as the root of "frontal lobotamy," because in that procedure, it was the frontal lobe that was damaged. On purpose. To attain mental health. (Doctors.)

The evolution of the brain went something like this: the hindbrain, responsible for basic motor functions like regulating heartrate and breathing (way at the back of your head), came around the time we were all reptiles. When mammals appeared, so did something called the paleomammalian brain (which regulates social, emotional and sexual behaviours), just in front of the hindbrain. Later, primates added the cerebrum, where information processing takes place. Our own ancestors modified the cerebrum with a highly convoluted neocortex and, finally, the frontal lobe, which is what allows us to imagine the future, appreciate our mortality, control our impulses, solve problems, become socialized, and speak.

The new structures did not replace the old structures, but were simply added on top--like getting a set of speakers for your stereo system, or adding a video card to your PC. We still cart around those old reptilian brains in our skulls. And the old mammalian brains. We couldn't live without them. We still need to breathe, balance, feel things, and negotiate complex social relationships. In fact, the love a mother feels for her child is located in the reptilian hindbrain--right along with control of breathing and pulse, and nowhere near complex abstract thought. (This explains a few things.)

(A few more links on brain evolution, if you're interested:

http://www.primatesociety.com/Into/survival/timeline/textEvol.html

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d_05_cr_her.html)

~~~Andrea Takes Off Her Neurobiologist Hat, Whereupon it is Immediately Squashed and Incinerated by Real, Actual, Employed Neurobiologists~~~

Yes. Well.

Anyway, the point is this: the part of our brains involved in processing and producing language is very, very small, and it is, evolutionarily speaking, new. Yet we walk around all day and night experiencing ourselves as a constant internal monologue: "I'm cold. I'm freezing. I'd better get a sweater. Ah, that's better. What a nice sunset. I want a snack. I'd like chocolate but I should probably eat some produce, and those peppers are going bad. Still hungry. I'll get a cup of tea. That'll distract me. Wow, what a gorgeous sunset. I love this song." The actual experiences are almost immediately bypassed in favour of the words used to describe them. But, just as the words used to label body parts interfere with our ability to draw them, the words used to label our experiences can interfere not only with the way we remember an experience, but with the experience itself.

Buddhists call turning off the internal monologue "achieving mindfulness" or "being present."

Wiccans call it "getting to Younger Self."

~~~Andrea Puts On a Pointy Black Hat~~~

Rather than dividing consciousness into an Id, Ego and Superego (a la Freud), or Conscious and Subconscious/Unconscious, wicca as I am familiar with it divides the mind into a Talking Self, Younger Self and Deeper Self.

Talking Self: The monkey brain, right up front, that never shuts up. The part that takes every object and every experience and turns it into words so fast you don't even realize it's happening. The brain that is so busy analyzing it never sees.

Younger Self: The mammalian and reptilian brains, deep in the back, that think and experience in emotion, colour, sound. The parts of your brain that are incapable of analysis and so must, necessarily, deal in primary, unmediated experience.

Deeper Self: Jung's collective unconscious, essentially: the group mind. The interesting thing about wicca is that this is included in the self. As in deep ecology, the boundaries of the self are not thought to be at the edge of the skin or some arbitrary distance beyond it defined as "personal space," but to also include those things that one has a connection to, whether a family, a home, a nation, a community, a religion, a place, and so on. Which defies the standard definition of "self-interest," and on purpose, too.

A lot of magic is simply a collection of tricks to get the Talking Self to shut the fuck up for five minutes in a row.

This is harder for some of us than others. You know, those of us who are excessively wordy. Not that I know anyone like that or (ahem) am like that myself.

I say that wiccan spells are analogous to prayer, and that's true, with one all-important exception. Prayers are words. Spells aren't. In spells, words are chosen carefully and used sparingly, with full consciousness of the warping effect they can have. A spell or ritual is essentially a carefully constructed experience which depends on colour, sound, scent, image, and so on, to communicate its intent. You're bringing the rest of your brain in on the action because, while the different brains definitely communicate, their experiences are different and they don't necessarily agree with each other. Your hindbrain knows things and feels things that your frontal lobe simply can't; and once the frontal lobe has had its way with your hindbrain's primary experiences, they often can't be recognized.

Trances and divination are the same. One finds a way, by any means necessary, to get around, over, under, through Talking Self to Younger Self.

The world looks like a very different place when I'm not seeing it through a haze of words.

The whole sensation of experience is different when Broca's Area has been unseated, if only temporarily. I have, once or twice, used the opportunity of a long meeting in which I had nothing to contribute or a presentation to enter a mini trance, and then had a question directed at me--and the difficulty of understanding, first of all, that the sounds had meanings, and I was expected to do something with them; and then determining what those meanings were, and what meanings I should be directing back, and how; and the sensation of those words coming from a long way away, as if I were unconnected to them, and the sounds coming out of my mouth were unconnected to me, was odd, though not unpleasant. (Fortunately, the answers seemed to work; no one has yet given me a "what the fuck are you on" look.) Even the feeling of speaking is different, as if one's mouth and tongue and throat are thick. Speaking is effort.

~~~Andrea Takes off the Pointy Black Hat (which, fortunately, remains in one piece)~~~

The strange thing is that when Broca's Area grabs the reins again, the horses are easier to manage. One might assume that once you've gotten around, behind, under the words that their inadequacy might be too glaring, their ability to manipulate memory and consciousness too galling. Instead, their other attributes--their sounds, their rhythms--become easier to apprehend. The right word isn't the one that glitters on the surface of the neocortex like a diamond, which Broca's area can easily interpret and respond to. The right word is the one that uses every ounce of heft, every glottal stop and slice, to drive a spike into the hindbrain. Or, as le Guin wrote, once your mind enters into the true rhythm of a story, it's impossible to choose the wrong word; one rides the wave of the mind.

Of course, the horses want to go somewhere different than you do. But once you know this, once words are no longer seen as passive sounds but as active constructs that chip and chisel at the edges of our experience and memories and meanings to force them into boxes, it is easier to, at the very least, choose the most appropriate box. And keep a sense of the edges of the object which do not precisely fit inside it.

When Frances was a few months old, and before this blog went public, I wrote a post called "ten things I never want to forget." One of the ten was "My hand once covered her torso."

My hand once covered her torso. My hands, like my feet, are on the small side; and once, a flat closed hand placed on her back would cover her from neck to legs.

I remember that. I remember thinking it, sitting in the glider in the dark, her sleeping head nestled on my shoulder. I remember the fine, wispy dark blond hair clinging to her sweaty scalp. I remember the cannonball butt of cloth diapers on small babies. I remember her legs curling, just under my breasts; I remember carrying her around the house, her head in my elbow and her feet in my hand. And I remember those tiny feet, that each of them could be encompassed by one closed hand.

But her hands--how did they feel, clasped around my finger? How big were they? What was the precise roundness of her cheeks? I remember later on, thinking that they were like baseballs, but not then. How did her cry sound? How did her back feel, when I lay my hand on it and noted its size? How smooth was her skin? Later on I described it as velour, but then? She was always slim; did her shoulderblades poke my fingers? When I rubbed my fingers against her tiny ribs, how small were they? The hollow between her ribs and her hips--was it as soft as it is now? So many edges that didn't fit in the box; what I have captured by that one phrase feels complete, but it's not. It's not even a snapshot.

Worse--what of that memory is real, and what is invented? I remember pressing my hand to her back and marvelling at its small size; I remember the angle of my hand, the angle of her head, her back rising and falling with her breath as she slept. But did that really happen? Or do the words I put to that experience encourage me to fill in the blank spaces with imagined details I could never actually recall?

Words feel complete, but only because we erase what isn't captured by them. We structure our lives and store them in memory as words. They are efficient; they collapse a lot of meaning and experience within a small space that can be stored in a handful of neurons. But their very efficiency is their cost. In the end, all we have are the words. Between the microscopic flecks of almost-matter that words are, are the yawning chasms of empty space--what words miss. What's lost. What they twist and misrepresent.

But knowing this, I can choose which words to remember; and choosing which words to remember means choosing which memories to keep, and which to let go. If I remember those evanescent moments of joy from Frances's infancy, like sudden shafts of light in a dark room, it is because I chose the words to fit to them. I chose the moments to remember, and I chose how I wanted to remember them. By selecting the words, I selected and then rebuilt the moment, altering a documentary photograph into a flattering sketch.

Posted by Andrea at March 27, 2007 6:45 AM under Witch

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