It is desirable to bear in mindâwhen dealing with the human maker at any rateâthat his chosen way of revelation is through his works. To persist in asking, as so many of us do, âWhat did you mean by this book?â is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means.
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.
There are words we use to describe this quality:
alive
whole
comfortable
free
exact
egoless
eternalBut in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it.
The meaning of objects is harder to grasp than that of words.
Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano.
What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.
In building connections, [articulation work] builds meaning and identity, sorting out ontologies on the fly rather than mixing and matching between fixed and stable entities. Articulation lives first and foremost in practice, not representation; as its proper etymology suggests, it's a creature of bones, not words. When articulation fails, systems seize up, and our sociotechnical worlds become stuff, arthritic, unworkable.
You've been taught to overlook the character of the prose in front of you in order to get at its meaning.
You overlook the shape of the sentence itself for the meaning it contains,
Which means that while you were reading,
All those millions of words passed by
Without teaching you how to make sentences.
To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again."
Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better timesâa demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer.
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get oneâs meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.
Albert says that people have âfree will.â Barry says that people donât have âfree will.â Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by âfree will,â on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase âfree willâ at all.
A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual âlanguageâ is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word âhorseâ, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the signâs legibility lies in its difference from other signs.
The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.
Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs - but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesnât come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.
"But when we give up symbols and opinions, arenât we left in the utter nothingness of being?"
Yes.
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
"Do you understand all the symbolism?"
"Not really, besides its being Venus and Cupid."
"I didn't even know that, so you're one up on me. I wish I'd read more about ancient mythology," she continued. "But actually, I like looking at things and not knowing quite what they mean."
âIt is demonstrably true that things cannot be other than as they are. For, everything having been made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose.â â Professor Pangloss
If one says âRedâ (the name of a color)
and there are 50 people listening,
it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds.
And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.
If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary.
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.
Who decided that the American public couldnât handle âa soft and fitful lusterâ? I canât help but think something has been lost. âA soft sparkle from a wet or oily surfaceâ doesnât just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, âthe fitful luster,â of, for example, an eye full of tears â which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than âa wet sidewalk.â
Itâs as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poetâs ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.
There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call âinherent meaningâ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is âIs-nessâ meaning. Inherent meaning is a wordâs identity, and reference merely its resumĂ©, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. âIs-nessâ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing â the word â appear to be many things â its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.
Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand âfeltâ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that âjerkâ and âtwerpâ and âpunkâ and ânitwitâ and âdorkâ and âassâ and âgoonâ and âtwitâ and âdodoâ and âbumâ and ânerdâ and âdunceâ and âturdâ and âboobâ and âchumpâ and âbitchâ and âbastardâ and âprudeâ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add âturkeyâ and âsquirrelâ as well?
Half a century ago, Stern discussed this attribute of an artistic object and called it apparency. While art is not limited to this single end, he felt that one of its two basic functions was "to create images which by clarity and harmony of form fulfill the need for vividly comprehensible appearance." In his mind, this was an essential first step toward the expression of inner meaning.
How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?
Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessityâhis words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself.
AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful.
âŠJust as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldnât tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art.
This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.
The poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance â not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed.
People who make works of art, whatever they might be, have gone to great trouble to make something unique which is embodied in the form that it is, and not in any other form, and that it transmits things that remain implicit
...Works of art are not just disembodied, entirely abstract, conceptual things. They are embodied in the words theyâre in or in paint or in stone or in musical notes or whatever it might be.
One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its âimportantâ words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. Thatâs the idea behind Amazon.comâs âStatistically Improbable Phrasesâ:
Amazon.comâs Statistically Improbable Phrases, or âSIPsâ, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!âą program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
Her poems, [Kay Ryan] says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation." An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as "It's always darkest before the dawn" or "Why did the chicken cross the road?"
"I think, 'What about those chickens?' " she says, "and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés."
Our memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings.
More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest.
These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.)
The body image is informed fundamentally from haptic and orienting experiences early in life. Our visual images are developed later on, and depend for their meaning on primal experiences that were acquired haptically.
The word âmeaningâ has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.
People also speak of âthe meaning of life.â That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply âmeaningnessâ only to the sorts of things one could describe as âdeeply meaningfulâ or âpretty meaningless.â
With collecting comes the need to record. A specimen without a label is simply a (sometimes) pretty object. Without its associated data it is scientifically worthless.
The diary provides the mental infrastructure that stimulates the mind to remember.
What Mick Southern taught me was both the imperative to and the means of writing scientific proseââif itâs not published itâs not done,â as a later adviser put it. Mock showed me that the rather dry technical requirements of scientific writing did not necessarily mean that elegance, humor, and even wit need be excluded from the scientistsâ products.
A three-layered process of documentation:
(1) First, there is the field notebook. This is where the actual numbers are recorded, together with passing observations relevant to the interpretation of these numbers.
Paper is still proving more durable than electronic data.
(2) The journal is a parallel record to that of the notebookâa daily account of events, thoughts, and observations.
(3) Last of the three strata, then, are the publications. Traditionally, in science, these are articles in academic journals leavened with chapters in books. To be successful, a young scientist need aspire to no more than these two forms of output together with their oral versions at interminable conferences and meetings of learned societies.
There came a time in my scientific development, however, when other forms of publication became important: magazines articles, and writing books.
In these journals lay the incidental details by which a book can be differentiated from a set of scientific articles. Such incidental details can become ends in themselves.
Journals are memory prompts and perhaps capture exquisite (and not so exquisite) moments of experience.