December 2, 2080, closed room in Houston.
An astronaut is back from a three-month voyage in space. He talks to the NASA men at the table.
“…See
it, wasn't just a planet. It was somewhere that made no sense at
all. There were...things there, but I couldn't identify them. I couldn't
put names to them. I thought it might be a puzzle. A game. So I just
started walking. I don't know how long I walked. You tell me I've been
away for three months. All right. I can't put any sort of time stamp on
it. One thought came in on me, over and over again. I was in a different
universe. And if it was organized, I couldn't find the pattern. So for a
very long time I rejected the whole place, the whole setup. That was my
main experience. Who would ever imagine being in a locale where things
were so strange he couldn't find a single word to convey them to anyone
else? And then, finally, I remembered something from years ago. A play
being performed by crazy actors. They spoke in a language no one had
ever heard of. It went on for almost an hour. I felt very angry. A few
minutes before the end, I was hit by lightning. I suddenly understood
everything they were saying. I don't know how. And I couldn't translate
it back into English. I just understood. It was a one-time
experience. And that was what it was like, being in that universe. When I
remembered this, I felt a shift. I knew where I was. I knew what was
going on. I knew that universe. But I can't sit here and tell you what
it was. That seems impossible to you. But it's true. I'm stymied. One
thing I can say. Everything I once thought I knew about beauty...that's
gone out the window. I've realized there were certain rules embedded in
my mind. Maybe principles. Principles of harmony, symmetry,
balance. Organization. I was living according to those rules or
principles all my life, in all my choices, and now they're gone. They
don't exist anymore. When they evaporated, I was able to understand what
that universe was. All at once. On the trip home, I started to
draw. You've seen my work. You've looked at it, and you wonder whether
you can use it to decipher what happened to me. But you can't. I was
just inventing out of a vacuum. A wonderful vacuum. I was working from
nothing, a void. I'm not asking you to understand it. I don't feel you
need to. I just know I stumbled across something. I never wanted it or
looked for it. You've told me the drawings mean nothing to you. That's
fine. I didn't do them for you. All the vast telemetry we have? The
codes and symbols and shorthand, the measurements? The markers and the
baselines and the scans? I'm not interested in them anymore. I don't
have the slightest bit of interest.”
There was silence in the room.
“Sounds like you got religion,” one man said.
“I feel,” the astronaut said, “like a tiger who just walked out of the zoo.”
Security men stepped into the room. They had their hands on their holsters.
But the ops chief held up his hand.
“It's
all right,” he said. “We're fine. This man found something. Let him
go. No one will understand him. We're protected. We're all inside the
protocol.”
There is the little-known work of philosopher/linguist Ernest Fenollosa, the author of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry. Fenollosa
analyzed modern Chinese words back to older pictographs that minimized
nouns. Instead, these ancient pictographs, at one time, presented a view
of reality that was far more dynamic and shifting, in which action was
the main event. The subject and object of a sentence were themselves of
lesser importance, and were related to one another by their mutual
participation in that action. “To be” verbs---is, are, am---were just
dead ducks. Irrelevant.
Suppose
we had a language in which every noun was also a verb, in the sense
that it threw off rays and curves and vectors of action and energy.
What would we have then?
We might, at the extreme, have an endless supply of dynamic universes. No potted plants.
We
would be communicating with each other in a way that instantly gave
birth to possibilities beyond current meanings embedded in our style of
speaking and writing. The implications of each word of text would jump
and leap. Instead of peeling off layers to get at the precise definition
of a word, we would automatically be proliferating it.
Language,
created by consciousness, also feeds back to it. And this feedback
informs our way of viewing reality. The structure of language becomes,
in a true sense, a monitor on what we can see and what we can't
see. What we can imagine and what we can't imagine.
It's
as if a psychologist, running one of those old inkblot tests, told the
patient: “Guess what? There's nothing wrong with you. Forget all that
nonsense. Look at these shapes and imagine anything you want to. Tell me
what you invent. Then I'll do the same. Pretty soon we'll be speaking a
different language, and we'll levitate out of this worn-out reality...”
Then
they start speaking in a different way. They’re out in open
water. Their operational concept of Understanding is undergoing a
revolution.
They're
experiencing sensations of flying and soaring. These sensations are
feeding back into their body processes and into their minds. The hard
wiring is giving way.
You
could say they're astronauts training for a mission in which they'll
encounter an intelligence that's completely alien to Earth.
There
are analogues to what I'm discussing here. For example, microtonal
music. You tune a piano so that, altogether, the 88 keys display the
range of sounds contained within just one octave of a conventional
piano. Going from the lowest note to the highest on the microtonal
piano, you hear thin slices and gradations of notes that cover, all
told, no more ground than one octave of a normal piano.
You sit at the microtonal piano and you play. And play. And play.
You listen to what you play.
At first, it's repugnant. It's not only dissonant, it's absurdly muddy.
But
after a few months of playing that piano every day, you begin to hear
something. It comes through. And the sensations it brings might remind
you of places you've been, experiences you've had. But they go further,
into a void where new sensations and meanings you can't name are
possible, are happening. Are real. Eventually, super-real.
These
sensations flood your endocrine system, and new proportions and
sequences of hormones are produced. You experience feelings you'd
forgotten or never had before.
The spectrum of feeling and thought expands.
Your whole notion of what you can experience and understand changes.
Your imagination is gearing up.
You
never seriously considered there could be seven comprehensible sounds
between any two keys on an ordinary piano. Now, you're not only hearing
them, they make sense. They convey emotion.
This
would be like saying that, between each pair of words in a sentence,
there are seven other words, and every one of them is an action verb.
When you understand that expanded and exploded sentence, you can talk to an alien from another universe. He can talk to you.
After
your first conversation, when you walk out of the facility where he's
under heavy guard, ride the elevator up to the parking lot, and drive
through the gate, you look at the desert and you see things you never
saw before.
You
understand why magic was hard to do. It was all supposed to be taking
place in a tight reality of unbreakable connections. Impossible. But now
those connections have snapped. The landscape, any landscape, is much
more inclusive and malleable.
You're
reminded things were this way once: wide open, free. And now processes
in your body open up. There is a reason for them to change. They secrete
information and energy that have been dormant for a long time. Dormant,
because there was no use for them.
The
cells in your nervous system wake up to a remarkable degree. They've
been waiting for this moment. They turn off the perverted game show
called Life they've been glued to for 40 years. They project rays in all
directions. Your physical aliveness shifts up exponentially.
Through
the walls of the holding facility behind you, you can see the
alien. He's nodding at you. Yes, he's thinking. You're on the right
track.
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Gab at @jonrappoport)
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