When Languages Fail Us

by Rucha Lim

Allow me to divert from my usual ranting on what has been identified to me as orthodox religion and the utter (and with great irony with reference to our lingua franca) banal state of the understanding of what I (perhaps wrongly) believe is an outdated concept of “God.”

As I write, I must acknowledge the source of the imagery, which I am to use.My favorite author, Haruki Murakami, entitled one of his novels, “Dance Dance Dance.” There is a part in the novel wherein the character, amidst all the strange things going on in his life says that he “does his best to just dance along.” Many of the things he encountered, he could not understand. The world continued to turn, just as surely as time flowed, and so all he could do was “dance” the best way he could to what life brought.

I am reluctant to use dancing as a metaphor for living as I have no terpsichorean ability whatsoever. I believe the metaphor however, to be quite effective in communicating what I wish to communicate. Dancing is useless in the sense that it does not necessarily assist in survival. Perhaps our ancient ancestors can attest to this if they could. Why then did it survive? Evolution (that applies not just to biology and genetics but also anthropology) would hold that practices which provide no benefit to survivability dies of their own accord. The laws of nature, in its parsimoniousness, would have what is unnecessary eventually eradicated. Why then, did dancing, from the most primitive times, flourish and even evolve into the wild shaking and gyrating that it is today?I can think of one possibility. 

First, we must look at the original function of the dance. Though I am no anthropologist, I believe we can infer that the ancient dances were mimetic. Ancient dance moves were the same movements done in hunting, harvesting, washing, herding, and so on and so forth.Thisdirects us to their function, that they were instructive. Dances were signifiers that all too often also functioned as narratives. As we know, narratives can tell us about how a certain people viewed the world in their time. What we sometimes forget to ask however is what the narratives told them about themselves. 

Think back to the fables told to most of us when we were children. They were clearly didactic. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” taught us how lying can be bad. “The Tortoise and The Hare” taught us the folly of arrogance and the value of perseverance. What we give importance to is not the signifiers they used but rather the signified, the meanings they wished for us to convey. Such is the function that can be traced back to the fabliau. It’s much simpler to tell children stories and fables rather than having to explain to them the complexities of things. 

So here we have a message, an understanding, which we wish to communicate. We wish to make our understanding intelligible and so we express.These expressions however need to be grounded on something.I could continue writing this essay in the form of dbfkjsnvvdhf andfdskj afhndskvjs aflndvsjafpoa sdnflsdknfslk and just hope that you completely understand what I want to say but that would be highly unlikely.

We need to establish a consensus on what things mean in order to efficiently communicate. When a person says “yes”, we want to be able to trust that “yes” refers to an affirmation and not a negation. These consensuses came to us in the form of languages. To quote Stephen Hawking, “Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible.” We learned to codify our understanding into texts for the purpose of communication.

Texts however have their limits. They communicate ideas in the languages available to authors in their creation. Recall however that components of languages are signifiers and not actually signified, in the same way that the word “cat” is not an actual cat. There is always a gap between signifier and signified, image and understanding. A problem arises however when this gap is no longer recognized, when signifier is equated to signified. This is what Roland Barthes called, the “myth.” In the words of Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message” in the sense that the medium has become the message. 

The oldest epic known to humanity is the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. In this ancient work, we find themes that we are all too familiar with such as anxiety of death and the desire to be remembered.  In the Bible, we find many didactic passages that hold true in our time despite it long preceding us. It becomes a great loss then, when we practice a fetishistic reverence of these texts, placing them on pedestals without actually tearing into the essence of what they wish to communicate.When their meanings are expressed, all too often, the image itself has become the basis and the process is disregarded.

It is difficult to distinguish then, the natural from the naturalized. Again, we must keep to mind that the naturalized stems from natural phenomena. We humans have naturalized ways of dealing with nature. We crafted weapons and developed techniques and methods in order to help us survive.They are our own creations and we also learned to give them significance.

To borrow from Sartre, to give signification is to deny everything else. To define is to separate. To say that I am me is also to say that I am not you or anybody else. To give significance to something is to give attention and meaning to something amidst everything else.It is therefore, a choice, one that can be conscious of. How easy it is, however, to default and look at things in over-simplified ways. To do so is no grave sin. We look at things simply because we want to acquire a sense of security. We want to make sense of the world in a way that we can easily handle.In the words of Voltaire, “Doubt is an unpleasant condition.”And so we rely on myths in order to easily get by.Myths act as the touchstones of our understanding of things.Voltaire continues however, that “Certainty,... is absurd.”

The ancient Romans believed, as per the writing of Ovid, that spring and summer, the seasons of life are when Persephone is with her mother Ceres and that autumn and winter, the seasons of death are when Persephone is with her husband Pluto. It was what they could default to, as the revolution of the Earth around its orbit was yet unknown to them. We may not view myths and legends as serious etiology these days however we are still captivated by them.  We are not confined to their intended meanings. We hold them in wonder because they are testaments to humanity’s creativity. We have all our wonderful ways of putting a spin to things and we have given them names like love, hate, irony, passion, tragedy, comedy, and so on and so forth.One does not need to believe in order to appreciate. Why, the atheist Richard Dawkins’ favorite piece of music is Bach’s “The St. Matthew Passion.” 

We do not necessarily need to “burn our idols” as one drunken friend once told me. Rather, in the words of Joseph Campbell in “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” what we must seek, in narratives across all cultures is not the differences of images used but rather, their similarities and what they speak of us all as the human race.They touch on the level of things ancient, sublime, the grand inner workings of the human condition.I need not know the technical complexities of music to be moved by Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8. These texts are timeless and classical in that they move us on a level so deep and in a manner so parsimonious that they easily evoke our consciousness into the realm of our abstract essence.

Our languages, myths, and symbols are simply our tools with which we are able to interact. They may be crude and inadequate at times but I am not condemning them. Rather, I believe it would be a challenge of creativity in how we would be able to use (and possibly improve) these tools given to us in spite of their crudeness. I just find that it is necessary to know that we are ultimately free from our own creations however influenced we are by the forces that drove us into making them.This freedom gives us the power to change the way we see and construct our worlds. Again quoting Stephen Hawking, “It [everything] doesn’t have to be like this [I like to think he speaks of what Marcel called “the broken world”]. We just have to make sure we keep talking.” And by talking he does not mean breaking down into verbal nihilism or being reducing all things into talking, what he means is we must just keep striving to communicate as communication is what “unleashed the power of our imagination” and perhaps in doing so, move into a purer level of experience.

And now I return you at last to my metaphor of the dance. Each dance move is an emotion, a feeling, a reaction to the sounds of life expressed within the limits of our human bodies.Each of us hears different aspects of the sounds, naming different things as music. And we dance to this music in different ways, some stiff and rapid, others slow and flexible, and so on and so forth. Sometimes we can choose to not dance at all but we miss out on a very important aspect of living – intimacy. There are not many expressions that express intimacy as much as the dance – when bodies move not only to the rhythm of life, but also to each other.We touch each other, fully appreciating the presence of the Other and offering ours in return. At times we step on each other’s toes, or accidentally hit each other in our wild movements. Our dancing can disturb, or provoke, disgust or arouse, create spite or happiness.We learn to slow down and adjust our pace for others. Sometimes we just get tired of dancing and stop. But we have to keep dancing. To dance is to find and interact with the Other. I like to believe that in our differences and inadequacies, we can strive for harmony with each other.

We are homo sapiens sapiens. What has allowed us to thrive is our ability to communicate and build societies. It should not be then that what has allowed us to survive will be what will cause our downfall. As they said in one of the lectures in RSA, “We need to rethink the human narrative.” We have all the material we need to revise it. Zeno’s paradox states that in between any two defined points is infinity. Between 0 and 1 is 0.5, and in between 0 and 0.5 is 0.25 and in between 0 and 0.25 is 0.125 ad infinitum. Reality, in its finiteness, holds infinity.And human knowledge of this finiteness continues to approach infinity. How many permutations of meaning can we potentially get as we arrange the finite holders of infinity in life?Why,∞!

Think about it, and let the music of Pink Floyd carry you.