Alison:
<snip>
There are things that are not purely 'linguistic' or that are pre linguistic
that in-form the linguistic entity. The conceptual architecture for example.
The social context. [CW]
It seems to me that both of these are crucially linguistic phenomena. The
physical context - the mute matter of existence - of course impinges and has
its own formative influence, I guess, but that also is so conditioned on
what our perceptions are of it. Not that I'm saying all is language, but an
awful lot is. [AC]
<snip>
I'm leery of attributing _too much_ to language. Our perceptions aren't, I
think, primarily linguistic. Not everything is representation - a picture of
a fish, a sign for or symbol of a fish - just as not everything is container
and contained. There's a danger, I think, that one focuses on purely
linguistic polyvalence (*the working classes are revolting*) at the expense
of systems that are more genuinely open, that may rearrange themselves (just
as the brain's connectivity is more genuinely open) and in which language is
just one component amongst several. I'm saying, in other words, that poetry
is partly language and partly other things.
You said you didn't buy Kapuscinski’s *Shadow of the Sun* because it was too
expensive. You may, though, find it in a library - if there is one nearby,
you make the effort and the librarian chooses to purchase it. I have an
unread freebie copy passed to me by an erstwhile Penguin employee. Douglas
Clark, presumably, won't be reading it after seeing what was (for him) a
devastating review. And so on. These various influences and constraints
involving economic and literary (or 'truth') value, paths of distribution,
individual volition and so forth seem to me partly linguistic - but partly
not. If none of Kapuscinski’s books had been translated into English we
might not have been talking about them at all. But even that isn't a purely
linguistic effect: they might not have been published in the first place.
By 'conceptual architecture' I meant something that may not have come
across. How different would Burroughs' 'frozen moment' have been if it had
been held not by the tines of a Western fork but between a pair of
chopsticks or as a sticky ball between the fingers of one's right hand?
These different ways of eating may incorporate different attitudes to
difficulty, selectivity and tactile intimacy. Do they affect the image or
its reception and/or creation? How we perceive and then conceive of
direction, dimension, speed et al moulds our thinking and feeling (it seems
to me) and in ways that affect how we create and experience the visual and
the aural as well as language. We can think and feel _outside_ language, in
other words.
CW
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