The sun was relaxing into the horizon Embers glowing behind blue-black hills I walked through my neighborhood as the grizzled vet of this shitty part of town every neighbor in my building has changed at least once, twice or three times, some of them But the five-year and maybe-lifer me strides across the grass freshly cut and smelling it The heat shimmer that rose from the parking lot is long gone and some chill is in the evening Autumn watches us from over those hills Gently nudging through time
Autumn watches, gliding in from the west and her mournful aria will soon shake loose the leaves from my maples will kill the ants that worked so hard in my yard will give way to Mother Winter harbinger to the high unholy queen of this land bursting pipes and cracking concrete with nothing behind the eyes but reality and I walked through my neighborhood in shorts and the whisper of that chill danced over me
The moon hung in sharp contrast, lit up against that indigo sky I carried my quarry past four dining room chairs arrayed near a dumpster thought about picking them up but I don’t have a place for them Seemed pretty nice to just throw away
And a garage door was open to the evening, no car parked in it Just a cube of white-yellow light beaming into this dimness I walked past it and just peered to the back wall that sheltered the apartment behind it Knowing that a lifetime happens in there Friends and lovers and accomplishments and deaths are all past that door, through the tunnel of pale light that I will never know The square of light facing the street and far past my imagination
Tomorrow morning I will smoke on my steps I will see my across-the-street neighbor Jim He’ll be smoking weed and sitting in a wheelchair I might walk over and see what’s on his mind I probably won’t
I came home from work and went to my desk. I have an old-fashioned computer desk in my bedroom, with drawers and a desktop computer and a monitor and everything on it. I sat down in my chair. On the corner of the desk to my right, I noticed movement. It was a little jumping spider. He jumped, or maybe hopped is the better descriptor, he hopped 1-2-3 times away from me. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a jumping spider, but they don’t look all gangly and gross. They look like a PR group tried to re-invent spiders to make them look cute or something.
So he hopped his little centimeter long hops, and then was on the side of the desk. I leaned my gargantuan, planetoid head around the corner and looked at him. He hopped around the corner to the back of the desk. I get that he wants privacy. I’m rooting for him. I hope the cats featured in the banner above don’t merk him. I certainly won’t.
About an hour later I met a different spider
I was outside smoking and I felt something on my forearm. I looked down, and a tiny little spider was crawling on me. By tiny I mean like the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Very small guy. I watched him negotiate my arm hair for a couple seconds. Must have seemed like the flora of an alien world. I considered just ignoring him. I’d never feel it if he bit me. But I thought about it some more, and I didn’t want him getting the lay of the land and crawling into my ear or nose and then into my brain. He’d end up controlling my body like a ratatouille. I’d be the immense slave-beast to a tiny arachnid, living out whatever his eight-legged will would be, with him so diminuitive as to elude detection by even the most sophisticated brain scanning devices. Can’t have that.
With my other arm, I activated my hand. Took my thumb and forefinger and made the most gentle little pincher I could manage. I hope I don’t kill you by grabbing you, I thought. I plucked him from arm hair forest and took him into the airspace above. Turning my fingertip pincher, I saw he was alive still. He was on the platform of my pointer-finger-fingerprint, and I decided to flick him away from me with the broad surface of my thumbnail. I tried.
He hung in the air a couple of inches away from my finger and did not fly away. The crazy sunnuvabitch had done it. He’d planted a little spidersilk anchor on my finger. He was being held on his little web string in the breeze, many times his own bodylength away from my finger. Clinging on.
How the fuck, I thought. That was less than a second.
I started to bring my hand toward my other hand, not sure how to outmaneuver this guy, really, but I had to try something. Then the rolling hot breeze picked up and I think it severed his spiderstrand from my finger. I’m like 70% sure he flew away in a slightly stronger breeze. I think I saw that.
And I wish my tiny, brave explorer well. I hope he crushes it out there in the apartmentscape where I live. He’s certainly not going to give up without a fight. Orders of magnitude separate our size, intelligence, presumable significance. But he webbed me and held on against my will.
And he is definitely not inside of my skull controlling my brain right now.
Unrelated, but if you have any flies or ants or anything just laying around please mail them to me. The fresher the better.
Alright BeardBiteManners, today we’re gonna take a deep dive into architecture and settle once and for all, which is the best architectural style of all time!
So, first of all, what the heck is architecture? Wikipedia defines it as the aesthetic, structural, functional and stylistic choices used in the creation of permanent places of dwelling, commerce, or recreation for humans and also Greta Thunberg is a fat whore. Keep in mind, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone.
So what does Beard Bite Man think of architecture? It’s how buildings look, you clod! Here’s the rundown, ready or not, on the top five architectural styles of all time!
5. Brutalism
Brutalism generally took the form of governmental or giant corporate complexes post World War 2. Oft criticized now as “ugly” or “blocky” or “kinda like Minecraft”, these right-angled titans represented a sort of function-over-form simplicity. Both the Soviet Union and the United States did little bumps of brutalism, assuming that utilitarian life on earth would soon give way to the stars and space travel, once their empire triumphed. Instead they just turned into government housing where unspeakable crimes went unnoticed each day but I do kind of like the no-nonsense look of these big guys. Yeah, it’s the projects…now. But when spacemen were going to zap aliens with their ray-guns, life would be uniform and simple here.
4. Victorian
Uh-oh! If your house is haunted, it’s probably Victorian. Made to look church-like, with accoutrements and flourishes tackily pasted on every corner, this was the place to be if you were a brainless timber baron who thought that phrenology was cutting edge science. All wood and pointy, this kind of structure has nothing do with a man’s insecurities about his own penis.
3. Cave
Sometimes you gotta dance with the one that brought you. Caves were our first buildings, and I think we should honor that.
2. Mughal
India is a sub-continent, a world unto itself. A civilization outdating our Western understanding of the world by a good millennium. Monuments and lore dating back to time that dwarfs our American creation story that took place in 1776. Billions of people live there, and they sweat and strain and hope for a better future, just like you or I do. An elaborate history completely removed from my own understanding. A beautiful religion that stares into fractal recitations of our own reality and sees it all as temporary. Also, their buildings are like….whaaaaat?! Dude, the Taj Mahal looks like a boob, straight up, I’m not even joking.
Ranch House
This is the real thing. Who doesn’t remember riding your bikes with your friends into the yard and then leaving them lay there?! A completely kids-only night. Maybe you’ll eat some pizza in the basement, maybe you’ll summon the devil. Who even gives a fuck? Ranch house is the best kind of house. You kids better be in bed by 10 PM and we said “Fuck you, you stupid asshole,” as we did Mario Kart 64. The mom said “Are you swearing at me!?” and then I said “No, retard,”. But the retard part was like way softer.
Jack and George were going fishing. Jack, being the older brother, lead the way. George, wanting not to be a burden and to prove he was big and strong, took longer strides than normal to keep up. They each had a fishing rod slung over their left shoulder and a tacklebox hanging in their right hand. They walked a narrow but well-trod path through a pine plantation. They were headed to a little backwater in the big river. Some days you could catch bass, but more often bluegills were biting. And bluegills were fun to catch because they fought real hard for how small they were.
“I hope there’s not a lot of bugs,” said George.
“Probably won’t be,” Jack said. ” There’s a good breeze going, and mosquitos don’t like flying in the wind.”
They kicked the last few orange pineneedle clusters away from their path to come upon a steep hill. A descent of spiraling brambles waited. Nearly to the river. “You want me to grab your stuff?” asked Jack. “No, I can do it,” George said.
And they crouched and slid down the hill, finding worn rocks and surface-peeking roots as their footfalls. Spirals of thorny and angry red plants caught their shirts and shoes, but they made the greasy descent. They had to stop sometimes to un-catch their fishing line from a branch. But they made it to the river bank.
Jack took a second to revere it. The river murmuring, reflecting the sky, dragonflies skimming the surface. He didn’t have and would never gain the language for it, but he held this as a holy moment. George looked to Jack briefly, then crouched down. He opened his tacklebox and considered what lure to use. He wanted to use the one that looked like a frog. A big fake frog, because he had heard that’s what muskies bite. But he knew his brother would ridicule him for it, so he settled on a worm-looking thing.
With a “Zzzziiiinnnngg!”, Jack threw his lure into the river. He cast it sidearm, so as to avoid the trees. It plopped into the water. He ratcheted it back toward the shore slowly. George flipped his fake worm into the water, underhanded. He plopped it closer to the shore so as to not cross lines.
“No bugs so far,” said Jack.
“Yeah,”
So time went. The brothers cast into the river. Nothing was biting. The good breeze had a touch of Autumn rolling over the water. Summer was nearly over.
George cast his line into a shallow part of the bank. He tried to reel it in but the reel had no response. It was stuck. He cranked the lever but it just spun for nothing. Fuck. He tried to move the rod into different angles, reeling at differnet speeds, trying to free himself, but it was not happening. “Jack,” he said “I’m stuck,”
“Alright, no problem,” said Jack. “Gimme your pole. Just walk out there and unhook it. It’s right by the shore.”
George ambled along the shore, following his line. He traced it down into the water, and pulled it up.
He drew the string up with great effort and a putrid dead man rose to break the water’s surface. His hook was stuck into the empty eye socket of a rotting human corpse. George shrieked a mortal shriek, kicking his body away from it. His fishing lure was caught in the rotted skullhole of a corpse.
The corpse sat there, putrid, lapping aginst the rivershore. Fish hook and all. George panted, Jack tried. What words can be said?
The green grey zombie sat beside the river. Jack said to his brother “Don’t think that has anything to do with you,” If it wasn’t you, it would have been somebody else. No reason to feel bad about it,” The summer gave way, low in the desperate people’s vocabulary. Almost funny lowness.
They kicked more dead pine needles on their path home. “I’m going to see this when I’m trying to sleep,”
I’d like mornings more if there wasn’t such an expectation I woke up today and it was bright outside I was worried I’d slept through my alarm I don’t work today I had a sense of relief The earth turned enough to show me the sun again and I was worried Came back from the strangescape of dream to find mother earth glowing and I had a sense of alarm
The self is mostly autonomous Walking anodyne and senseless Pressurized and worried The mind is pitilessly subsumed with bills and contracts and leases and the prestidigitation of a hollow sucking wind Empty ghost in the rafters of my soul saying This should be worry This should be concern
My pink-goo-brain has been coerced into panic at a sunrise But then again screens amuse our boredom and cars will soon drive themselves leaving us free to do what we will I click a few times and products are delivered to my door what more could we ask for? what kind of luddite would trade away Netflix? What must the prize be? Agency? Clarity?
Stewing in dissatisfaction, I sat in my car and smoked a cigarette. A woman walked to her mailbox, grabbed her mail, and walked away. She read a letter as she walked. Probably some problem. Some expected bad news. Why would you read it as you walked? But,
Her hips swayed in time with the breeze, her sundress over her curves. She walked away from me with ass swaying, exposed shoulders. I wonder what the letter was about. I can’t imagine what she read, striding down sun-dappled sidewalk in this summer. She could probably tell me hundreds of stories. The leaves were shaking in the breeze to match the birdsong.
I’m no longer a little boy turning over rocks to find bugs. I’m no longer an angry misanthrope, breaking peoples’ lawn decorations. I can’t remember what the skeleton key was. To see, understand, and form a way of living. I am a man with no idea what to do. I’d like to find the secret, the antidote to this dystopia. In the meantime, I’ll watch this stranger walk the sidewalk with her nice ass, and think “This is close.”
I’ve been driving 13 hours straight. The road, act of driving, part of my muscle memory now. I could close my eyes and feel the curvature of the interstate, make the corners, see the reflective green signs through my closed eyelids. This is nothing new. I’ve been driving all over the continent for decades. The berms, embankments, left-lane exit ramps are all second nature to me. I know them like my tongue knows my mouth. Drove so long today, drove so long in my life. There is a sort of meditative trance. The radio becomes white noise, mixed into the engine and the high-pitched whistle of the tires on the road. Metronome of striped lines before me. I’ve been driving for 13 hours, and a lifetime. My head is clear. Automatic behavior frees up the head.
Hemmingway said writing is easy, you just sit at a typewriter and bleed. Most anything is easy with that attitude. If you learn to sit and bleed you can work wonders with what is offered to you, always. You can hit the road in cold black night, and watch a day be born. The sun passes over you, and glares into your rearview mirrors after 13 hours.
I’m alone and still but I’m moving fast. It’s meditation and progress, sure, but every hotel room is the same. Every city looks the same. A city tries to exude character but they all have gas stations, McDonald’s, monuments, people, ugly dead grass medians, bridges, inside jokes. I wake up and forget where I am. I drive away.
Tomorrow I’ll be somewhere I’ve never been. A new place. I will forget it. I will drive to another place, feeling mostly the same.
The cruel plane of sand baked in the midday sun. Stark and still, the desert was motionless. A man on horseback pointed a gun at a man standing nearby.
“The war-dead of Antietam are calling in your debt,” the man on horseback said, ” And the living wish to see a deserter hanged.”
The standing man replied ” What debt can I possibly owe the dead? Their spirits have flown, and no acknowledgement can be made of my payment. The living surely can have no quarrel, as they fared as fine without my presence as they would have with it. Please, let me go.”
“I have no interest in silver-tongued philosophising or legalese,” said the horsebacked man, “My employers have been assured I will capture your body, one way or another. You will either lie on the dirt, and I’ll tie you up, or I’ll pull this trigger and you’ll lie on the dirt quicker. Then I will not have to tie you up. The only difference to me is what renumeration I will receive.”
The desert was hot and still, and heat shimmers danced on the horizon.
“Those men from Antietam want to watch you kick and dance as you’re hanged. It’s a hundred more dollars for me if they get you alive,” said the horseback man.
The standing man looked down at the sunbleached sand and put his hands in his pockets. “Spare me the shame,” he said “And shoot me dead where I stand. I have twenty dollars in my pocket, and I have a cabin with a new saddle sitting on the table there. A mile due south of here. Take what you want, and spare me the shame.”
The cactus blooms and the pale sand waited.
“As you wish,” said the horseback man, slowly squeezing the trigger.
I’m reading a letter from my ex-wife. The back of the envelope, where the little triangle of paper seals it shut, has a stain of lipstick. She kissed the envelope there where she sealed it. I can see all the creases and contours of her lips there, bright red.
I’m reading the letter and it is in her hand, hand-written, the words ambling along in black ink, her handwriting is almost lyrical with the loops and exaggerations and a kind of whimsy that she always tried to have.
She says she’s doing well, and that they are trying for a baby. She glides her hand across the page and tells me they went to The Bahamas for their honeymoon. She wishes me well, and asserts that we’re amicable and friends. The loops on her cursive letters seem drunk. She then writes smaller, more secretively.
She hopes I’m okay. She thinks I’m an awesome guy for another woman. She says she hopes we can see each other again. Just drunker and drunker she goes, putting her lips on the envelope and then actually walking it out to the mailbox. What a regretful night.
I take a drink of coffee as I walk the letter to the garbage can in my kitchen, and try to think of new ways to live.
The Stylites were Christians who would build a tall pillar and sit on top of it until they died from exposure.
They would build a like 20 foot tall column and then just sit up there on top of it and scream stuff about Jesus and then not eat, except for the stray fly or seagull that they managed to snatch out of the air. It was a form of asceticism that was very public. They eschewed the very basic human needs in order to demonstrate Christian Ideals.
There are documented cases of these Christian zealots sitting up on these towers and never coming down, asking for people to understand the true meaning of their performance art. Removing themselves from the material world in a literal way. I’m not sure it’s the best way to martyr yourself. But it is a way to do it. Certainly you do no harm unto others, removed from the goings-on, up there. Free to think and watch and listen. Pooping over the edge, probably.
And I picture a detached, awake stylite laying on his back, emaciated but thankful, watching the clouds as they slowly change shape against a blue sky. And he’s laughing about how simple it all is. He’s laughing and he’s grateful up in his tower.
I got a vaccine the other day. It was to innoculate me against The Deadly Wuhan-Coronavirus, COVID-19. Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? It’s a disease. It’s been around for a little while. Caused a bunch of problems. Just been a real bear. Cratered the economy, sent psychological shockwaves through whatever normalcy our society once had, murdered hundreds of thousands of people. COVID-19. You’ve heard of this, right?
So I went to get the vaccine. They give them out at Wal-Mart now. I got the Johnson & Johnson version, which is a one-shot, all-inclusive needle poke. And this vaccine is different. Vaccines of the past contained dead or weakened cells of the disease they were meant to protect you from. So you’d introduce the weakened contagion into your body, and your immune system would basically figure out a gameplan on how to beat this fucker down. But the COVID vaccine is an…uh..mRNA vaccine. Which is a brand new thing. Instead of pumping you full of beat up COVID cells, it teaches your body how to make the proteins that are found in the virus, and then your body learns how to combat them from that. Your own body creates a simulacrum of the enemy and then kicks its ass. Wowzers.
I went to Wal-Mart. I went to the Pharmacy area, because that is the medical part of Wal-Mart.
It is also pertinent to mention that I never had a smart phone until about 5 months ago. I had one of those little burner prepaid drug-dealer phones for most of my adult life. A TracFone that was about the size of a graham cracker and only needed to be charged once every two weeks. It had no camera, no internet access. If a text was too long, it would break it into multiple parts. Our modern smartphones started to become commonplace in or around 2010, and I purposely spent a decade not getting one because I didn’t like them. I mean, they’re neat and everything. But anytime a person has like, 30 seconds where they are not required to be doing anything, they pull out their phone. They don’t even know why they are pulling it out. It’s just the boredom cessation machine. Why look at the sky, or be quiet and think? Twitter is in your pocket and just a moment away…
So I had this piece of shit phone for like 13 years, and it became kind of a joke among my friends and me. I could send and receive texts, assuming they had no images or internet links. I would T9 my response back to you. In November of 2020, TracFone sent me some messages that were like “We are no longer going to be supporting your stupid phone. You have to buy a smart phone.”
I would prefer not to, but okay.
So I got one, some cheap beater phone because I am not one to need the newest and greatest thing. I got a crappy smart phone and went about my life.
I was in Wal-Mart. The medical wing. An older lady in front of me was also there for the vaccine. She talked to the pharmacist and then took a seat. I told the pharmacist I was there for the same reason. She told me it would be a few minutes, but to please stick around the area.
I stood in the little truncated aisle there. The shelves were full of Slim-Fast, and keto diet bars, and fat burning pills. I idly passed the time reading the packaging for banana flavored protein shakes and trail mix that would induce ketosis. After about twenty minutes, I got the shot. They took me into a little cordoned off booth and jabbed me and then I left.
Upon coming home, I fired up the old desktop computer and went to facebook. The first ad that popped up in my feed was for fat-burning pills. Let me repeat that the first ad that came up was for fat-burning pills.
I have never searched that, I have never clicked on links related to that. But somehow the Internet knew that I was standing in that aisle for like 20 minutes. Not just the store, but the place I was standing. The four-foot wide enclosure where products like that are sold. My new smart phone was broadcasting that I spent some time looking for fat burning solutions while I was idling there to stave off the plague.
People just act differently when they know they are being recorded. There is an aspect of performativeness, and therefore something dis·in·gen·u·ous. We all realize we are being constantly recorded now, whether by choice or by passive surveillance. This was not the reality that I was born into. And I think one of the strangest parts of it is that we don’t all completely hate it. We would like a document, a proof of our having lived and existed. To have some kind of an imprint on this world that ripples and looks back at us. To be seen and understood but this shit. This ain’t cuttin’ it. This is cynical.
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my parents’ house was on top of a hill a sand mound surrounded by farm fields in all directions and at night sometimes you could hear packs of coyotes high-pitched yelping and barking and yowling the sound travelling clear through the night as they danced and celebrated a fresh kill a rabbit or a barn cat meat shorn from bone as the pack yipped in country dark soybean fields thin legs and thin snout stained red looking black from the moon they ate and chittered the kill over rural Wisconsin
I was at my parents’ house for some reason, not sure why Maybe just a visit It was 3 AM and I woke up on the couch I went to the back porch to have a cigarette
The lights were on and illuminated part of the backyard I slid open the sliding glass slider, stepped out as I drew a cigarette to my lips, then slid closed the slider behind me.
And a coyote howled at me
I knew it was at me He saw me and gave this piercing and baleful howl To me Loud and high and strident
The blood in my fingertips retreated back into the torso and my pupils sharpened hard and quick as I watched the boundry where the porch lights ended and the wild began Some primacy took me as I watched the edge of my world surrender to that thing in the darkness
I never saw him His howl cut to my animal-man instincts He left without incident Running over croplands and sniffing for prey Ever under moonlight
After about two minutes of terror I lit my cigarette, and my parents’ obese Orange cat jumped onto the porch He looked at me with huge eyes “The fuck was that!?” I don’t know man He figure-eighted my legs a couple of times “I’m glad you’re around”
The next day I put on dress pants and sat in a cubicle to earn money. I wanted to tell somebody the story, but coyotes are everywhere.
I am now going to attempt to communicate with you about communication. I have absolutely no qualifications but I do have some beer, so let’s see how this goes.
Language! What is it? Your first reaction might be that it is the way in which people communicate with one another. Like, I want to tell you something. I want some thought of mine to enter into your thoughts. The way I can do that is by saying it. But, also I can write it and have you read it. Like I’m doing right now. Look at me putting my dumb little thoughts into your brain. Every word you read makes me do it more.
I can say it or write it and the message more or less makes it to you (more on that in a bit). But it is strange that there is any correlation between the spoken and written words at all. There is no intrinsic reason a relationship between the two exists. People were making mouth sounds and agreeing upon a common meaning of those sounds long before we made written language. I mean shit, even animals can vocalize to each other to convey different messages. Prairie dogs make unique sounds to warn of different types of predators that they spot. They chirp a pattern to let the rest of the colony know they saw a hawk, or they squeak and then chirp to indicate a coyote.
A Squeakchirper
And you don’t have to be a prairie dog expert like me to observe this. Household pets vocalize to communicate all the time. A cat hisses to show it is pissed off, and it will do a cute little trill to ask for some belly rubs. A dog’s bark sounds very different depending on if it is asking for you to throw the ball or to warn you if somebody’s at the front door. We Humans can understand these vocalizations instinctively.
So there are these seemingly biological vocal indicators to convey meaning. Humans are no different. We gasp when something startles or scares us. We yell and get loud when trying to intimidate. Same shit. But because humans have big brains, we took vocalization and coupled it to our social interdependence and developed it further. We turned it into a technology. By agreeing on the meanings of different vocalizations, and having the capacity to recall them and the frontal lobe gift of abstracting for the future, we could do something other animals couldn’t do. We could inform others of experience beyond instinct. We could take our problem-solving, prediction engine mind and bounce it off our fellow caveman. To see what they think. Sounds became more nuanced and specific in their meaning. Mouth noises settled into a schema; a framework for understanding of the world.
Schema! (I apparently just like this word a lot lately because I used it in my last post but anyway who gives a fuck) Schema is your model of the world. It’s the framework for which life comports itself to you. Here’s my best example of what “schema” means:
When I was 11 years old, my family went for a walk. The neighbor’s dog was on a tie-out in the yard. He was a big black lab. My three year old brother saw this and said “Look, a bear!”. In his schema, a large black animal that looked like that was a bear. He did not know dogs might be like that. We told him it was the neighbor’s dog. His schema grew to include dogs into that type of creature. Language depends on a common baseline. We assign labels like “bear” or “dog” in accordance with our schema.
A bear.
A black lab and a black bear are both quadruped mammals with a similar headshape and snout. But the English language distinguishes them because it is useful to do so. This is pretty easy to understand. But what if our language just had one generic word for a creature that fit those criteria? What if we did just call all black labs “bears”? Would we treat them the same way? Would we believe these pooches to be more dangerous than they are?
The fact that we have different words for different animals is pretty simple and obvious. It makes sense that we have a shared schema that overlaps almost completely in regard to things like that. But what about when we apply language to less tangible, well-defined things? If I talk about an abstract concept like “fairness” or “love”, how can I know if your schema and mine are similar enough for effective communication? Or, what if my language simply doesn’t have a term for what I’m trying to express? If I can’t define it in direct and simple terms, does it really exist?
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis! A tapir named Sapir and Lieutenant-Commander Worf from Star Trek once proposed a theory of language and/or philosophy. The gist of it being that whatever your native language, it heavily influences or even defines what types of thoughts you are capable of having. You probably imagine yourself thinking in words and sentences. At least, when you’re paying attention to your thoughts. Can the machinery of your language accurately convey everything happening in your mind? Are you limited to expressions and terms you know the meanings of?
“Preposterous!” you say, brandy and spittle leaking out of the corners of your mouth. Adjusting your distended cummerbund as you shift in your high-backed leather chair, you assert ” My brain does all my thinking, and there is no limitation. Language is merely the tool I use to express my thoughts. It has no dampening effect on the types of thoughts I can manage.” You harumph yourself back into the chair, and fart what you had hoped would be a silent one, but it’s actually quite loud, rumbling against the leather.
But consider this: Not every language uses the same color words. Native English speakers have quite a suite of names for colors at our disposal. Beyond the typical ROYGBIV, we have cerulean and periwinkle and a whole host of minor distinctions. The types of colors that only appear on paint swatches, so your wife can get annoyed that you don’t care if the baby’s room is painted “sunshine yellow” or “vanilla yellow”. But linguists and anthropologists have noted that most cultures develop names for colors in a predictable pattern, and we do not all continue making as many distinctions. Some cultures, largely the almost-uncontacted and indigenous tribes, assign only “black” or “white” to color. It’s dark or it’s light. This seems to be the first distinction we make. The third color, if it shows up, is red. Some peoples have two colors, and some have three. But if they have three, it’s probably black and white and red all over. Many languages do not make a distinction between green and blue. They are simply different shades of the same color. Think about that the next time you’re laying on your back under a tree, watching the leaves bounce in the breeze and you can see the sky beyond them. Same color, basically.
Pioneers of Linguistics
Some aboriginal Australians do not have words for “left” or “right”. They use cardinal directions instead. The Guugu Yimithirr language has no subjective “left” or “right”, but they will say something equivalent to the more universal “Hey, can you grab me that pen on your South?” or “Hey, you’ve got a booger hanging out on the West side of your nose.” Obviously this manner of speech requires you to have an internal compass at all times. We English-speakers certainly do not have this feature in our language. This seems to me to be evidence of language shaping thought in a subconscious, basic way.
The 2016 movie Arrival takes this Sapir-Whorf football and runs with it. The main character, Amy Adams, learns the language of an alien race. These aliens are fourth-dimensional beings, who do not experience time as a succession of moments, but simultaneously know everything that happens in their lives. By learning their speech, she becomes a fourth-dimensional being and her own lifetime becomes one great continuum that she can freely move back and forth in. It’s a cool movie. This is kind of stressing the potential of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it’s fun to think about. Language as a program that unlocks a new dimension of understanding. Woah, dude.
Language is the software that your brain hardware runs. It is the script that defines your sentience. As the great punk rock icon Noam Chomsky once put it, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Um, okay. I’ll have whatever he’s smoking.
