Monthly Archives: September 2022

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Is Language a Virus? 

                         Is Language a Virus?

After many years of reflection, I have come to the conclusion that language, the representational system we use to think and talk with, is not the golden egg I once thought it was.
I am not alone in thinking this.
Derek Bickerton wonders if language isn’t terminally dysfunctional because of the way it has led us to take control of the planet with little regard for the damage we were doing to the biosphere. Chomsky speculates that the reason why we have not heard from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is on account of the fact that language is a lethal mutation, and no species capable of transmitting a signal has also managed to survive the side effects of being so smart.
Their pessimism is not surprising. The incompatibility between economic growth and a habitable climate indicates a deep mismatch between ideology and reality that is unlikely to be fixed any time soon. Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary how much things have changed everywhere else, the sway of ancient texts over peoples’ behaviour in some parts of the world, especially with respect to the treatment of women, shows how a few words can be used to crush the reality of living suffering beings.
With respect to global warming, the likelihood that a malfunctioning gene or lethal mutation is leading us to commit suicide as a species seems small since there was not a stable environment across all populations, cultures, and languages in which such a bad gene could have adapted in the first place. But biological agents are another matter. If an alien power wished to invade human consciousness so that it could slowly destroy us (and take over the planet), a virus that led to our obsession with information might just do the trick.
Information is a byproduct of language, and language reduces the abundance of the world to abstraction so it can be better understood and controlled. For us to refuse the promise of mastery latent in information, we would have first had to refuse language, which is unlikely, since it is the representational system we use to think and talk with, and we would not be human if we did not talk. But when you look at what we have done to the planet over the last hundred and fifty years as information moved to the front row of management tools, you have to wonder. First factories, then locomotives, aircraft, nuclear weapons, deep water drilling, IT, big data. A new impunity with respect to nature came onstage when people realized that representation of the truth about something or someone could be just as powerful as the truth itself. Or that if no one actually looks at what you are doing, and is satisfied with a checkmark, not only can you accomplish more work you can cover more territory too. Never before has so much life been brought under human control. Never before has the abundance of life been crushed by so many symbols. It has been an information success story.
But there was a destructive potential in all those checkmarks that few saw or anticipated. Like a virus, once set in motion, language’s representational machine takes over and before we know it there are two worlds — a real one filled with sunlit rocks and water and singing birds, and a virtual one that shows us what to do with rocks and water and singing birds. That tells us how to exploit rocks and water and birds. That suggests a good price for them.
The virtual world is very persuasive. It sweeps you away into an attractive place where everything has been re-vamped so that its usefulness to humans is paramount. It also so overwhelms you with data, you can barely think for all the facts you do not want to know. However, the problem with information is not just the number of words. It is what the words do. Information kills perception. It turns reality into fodder. It virtualizes everything it touches. It is a form of engineering. That means that if we are not careful, it can bury the real world.
The irony of living in two worlds is that while humans did not create either one, we benefited from making sure that the one we need to survive is the one we buried!
Some even believe the real world does not exist.
The whole thing makes you wonder about the purpose of human life. If we are an experiment, but we are at risk of destroying ourselves because we buried the real world, maybe getting control over language is our biggest most daunting challenge?
However, if an alien power is responsible for infecting us with a virus, what is the point of even trying? Viruses kill their host cells.
Not always. Sometimes they can be contained, brought under control.
What language is, may be the most important question we do not yet have an answer to.
How Language Works
It is not easy to see how language works, but close study reveals that it is basically an abstracting tool that is used for communication, a symbolic system for transmitting objective information, the first and only one on the planet (Bickerton 1995, 59). Though it seems to be primarily, or even exclusively, a system of communication, it is not even primarily a system of communication. It is primarily a system of representation, a way to sort through and manipulate the abundance of sensational and intellectual material that comes at us day in and day out throughout our waking lives. It does this by seizing upon the essence of entities, be they cough drops, or marketing strategies, or activities like scrounging, devising a concept for it, then giving the concept a linguistic representation — a word (Bickerton 1990, 13).
The word may or may not have anything to do with the thing or behaviour it describes because language is arbitrary. Linguistic symbols lack any apparent connection to the objects they represent (Bickerton 1995, 19). Nevertheless, they are obliged to sort themselves around a deep-rooted analysis of nature determined by our species biology. This analysis uses binary branching and puts constraints on what can be predicated about what entities – what linguists call the predicability tree. It has never been altered and perhaps cannot be altered (Bickerton 1990, 50). (See illustration) (The tree is about qualities. A quality at the top can be predicated of any class beneath it A quality on the main stem can be predicated of any class beneath but no class above. A quality on a side branch can only be predicated of a class below.)
A more efficient filing system is hard to imagine (Bickerton 1990, 43).
But language does not just provide a map of the world. It provides itineraries too. Once there are enough concepts, they can be strung together like beads on a string. Noun-Verb. Noun-Noun-Verb-Verb. However, for sentences to be born, you need syntax. Argument structure must be mapped onto phrase structure, which means that who did what to whom must be integrated into the structure of Head, Complement, Specifier, the structure of all phrases. Like an internal slot-machine, syntax combines entities with behaviours, adverbs, adjectives and grammatical items to generate an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions (Chomsky). Where did we get syntax? Chomsky thinks each one of us is born with universal grammar, a set of rules which correctly predicts which combination of words forms a grammatical sentence i.e. makes sense. However, others have argued that language changes too quickly for there to be a genetic code buried in our brains, that usage flips around according to different cultural values and personal idiosyncrasies. The latest thinking is that some of syntax is innate and some of it is acquired (Bickerton, 2014, 274).
Language creates a map for us, not of what the world is, but what the world is like, that is, what it can be represented as in words or concepts. “We recreate the world in the image of language” (Bickerton 2014). It also lets us create sentences, and sentences do not just map, they do things — convey information, ask questions, express commands or exclamations, put forth scenarios. With sentences almost every type of relationship in life can be described.
Off-line Thinking
With sentences, a new type of thinking becomes possible – off-line thinking. An infinite number of actions and relations between actions can be mentally represented in the physical absence of those actions (Bickerton 1995, 96). First the brain got colonized by words and after a while, we began to string them together. A million or two years of stringing concepts together and the continued weaving and unweaving of connections between them ………if this, then that, led to the algorithms for syntax, the verbal formulae that allowed us to keep things straight and to think in ways that enhanced our survival. Thinking is basically concept linkage, putting concepts together so that they make sense, so that they make new concepts. Some thought is focused on immediate problems or else involves interaction with other speakers. But other thought takes place wholly within our own minds (wherever they are) and does not involve contact with others or the world around us, at any level. It is off-line, as it were, and ranges freely over space and time. We rehearse actions before we do them. We think up new ways to adapt the environment to ourselves. We construct elaborate plans for the future and remember events long after they have occurred. We theorize about the relations between one situation and another, one concept and another. It is this sort of abstract thinking that led us to build the pyramids, to invent mathematics, to write novels. It is thought freed from the here and now.
Judging by what they have done, there is no evidence that any other species thinks like this.

The Properties of Language
Language does not lend itself to visualization or conception, so just to realize that you are using a machine this complex when you speak or write takes a considerable amount of study and self-consciousness. It is “like a sheet of transparent glass through which every conceivable object in the world seems clearly visible to us. We find it hard to believe that if the sheet were removed, those objects and that world would no longer exist in the way we have come to know them” (Bickerton 1990, 5). Even the comparison with a piece of transparent glass is not quite accurate since the world language shows us is not a mirror- image of the real world but “a new parallel world constrained by laws of its own nature just as much as by the nature of the phenomena it represents” (Ibid, 46). Language has its own properties which are imposed on whatever material we decide to talk or write about, and these properties have an effect on the picture words create.
Subject-Predicate Distinction
For example, language artificially divides entities from their behaviour. Despite the fact that everything in the world around us is unified and all in one piece, you can only talk about it as if it were divided up into an agent and a behaviour e.g. the chair sits, the lady laughs. “If there is a behaviour, someone or something must perform it “(Ibid, 211). This means that, as far as we are concerned, everything in the world has an agent within it, an agent which acts. Despite the fact that the world we see with our eyes or hear with our ears is filled to the brim with beautiful objects, creatures and places that are not broken up, that are whole, they are not whole when we talk about them. However, by dividing entities from their behaviour it becomes easier for us to see how they work. It becomes easier to see cause and effect.
Exclusive Class Membership
Another thing language does is institute a regime of exclusive class membership. If you are an eight year old German Shepherd dog, you can only be a big dog or a female or a pet. You cannot also be a five year old Rottweiler or a puppy. For any entity there is a minimal class to which it can belong, but it cannot belong to any class other than one which is bigger than the minimal class. Human knowledge is organized in trees of ascending generality with bigger concepts lording it over smaller ones. This is extremely helpful for distinguishing between (and getting control over) the many different aspects
of reality that exist. If language represented everything in the world as just a slightly different version of everything else, if it were all just a blur, we would not know how to take advantage of the very real differences between other species or things, or to appreciate the importance of details, many of which are often critical. Language’s tight filing system prevents us from getting things mixed up.
Causal Primacy
Another thing language does is make our brains seek out the prime mover in every situation. Argument structure is universal. No matter what language we speak, each verb selects for a certain number of arguments or phrases referring to any participant involved in the action, state or event that the verb expresses. Some verbs take one argument, others take two and still others can handle three. There are also arguments related to time and place. In order for sentences to be made, argument structure is mapped onto phrase structure but it is not just slapped on. It has to be done according to a hierarchy of thematic roles and this hierarchy always gives primacy of place to Agent. The highest structural position in a tree is most commonly given to an agentive noun phrase (Bickerton 1990, 67) This may be the result of observation or it may be purely practical. But by identifying one factor as being paramount, it focuses our attention in one place and keeps us from being distracted by all the other things that are going on at the same time. Language likes to cast things into a single cause and effect relationship.
Displacement
Displacement is another of the design features of language. This is the big one because it lets us represent things that are not immediately present. We do not have to be right in front of the things we talk about. When you write or read, you are free to be anywhere on the globe because where you are physically does not even have to register on your brain if you do not want it to, or if you can afford the conveniences that now exist to avoid it. That’s because of displacement. It is because of displacement that language is symbolic, and it is because of symbolism that we are free to travel across space and time. In our heads. Unlimited symbolism is the Rubicon that separates us from other species. Using a series of links between concepts and links between links, we explore the world recreated by language, the virtual world where everything has been revamped so that its usefulness to humans is paramount. Interior Decorating. Trade Wars. Prison Systems. These phenomena are all topics of thought because of displacement, which allows us to contemplate and reflect on what we are doing. We can withdraw from where we are and consider alternative arrangements. We can go off-line, as it were. Not being obliged to react to stimuli all the time, we can think.
The Problem With Language
It seems like the perfect tool. So why then is it terminally dysfunctional? A lethal mutation? A virus? Language is the perfect servant in many ways. It abstracts information necessary for survival. It is invisible. It explains how the world works. It lets us talk to each other. It is totally devoted to our species. But when you go back and look at the properties of language more closely, several red flags show up.
Subject-Predicate Distinction
For example, the subject-predicate distinction. Language uses words and structures that
impose dualism on their subject matter. This is convenient because it makes it easier to see how things or species function as machines or instances of the laws of physics. It’s an engineering approach to reality that reveals exploitable potential, and is probably responsible for the efflorescence of tools that followed language’s emergence 150,000 years ago. With a machine like language showing us how things work, it is no wonder that technology is such a big part of our lives. As poets can attest, it is hard work to use language for anything else. But harnessing nature for human exploitation is risky. We are not the only inhabitants of the planet, and if we devote our time exclusively to making the earth a nicer place for us, we will probably make it uninhabitable for others, and what about all those other species on which we depend?
Causal Primacy
Another potential problem is causal primacy. If language makes our brains seek out the prime mover in every situation, where does that leave the rest of the crew? If everything is structured as a hierarchy, with one Agent on top, all the other species who made the Agent strong are subordinate to it. This is another angle on the anthropocentrism inherent in dualism. The place where the Agent thrived is subordinate too as well as smaller species who helped the Agent rise to the top. This kind of prioritizing around one factor is a rearrangement of reality that is potentially dangerous on a planet where nothing is black or white and everything depends on everything else. Why? Because it destroys the interconnectedness that fosters life.
Arbitrariness
A third red flag is language’s arbitrary relationship with reality. If I can talk or write about anything independently from where I am standing or sitting at the moment, that means I am not bound by the chairs and tables, the roads and trees of actual places. I am free to go wherever I want to go. I can travel across space and time. We are accustomed to lauding the benefits of having an imagination, because we like speculating about the future and being carried away by stories. But what about the things and people that are sitting right in front of us,? The laptops, children, tablecloths, that novelists and business leaders leave behind? Where are the trees and rocks and landscapes that supported developers as they fantasized? They didn’t just disappear, so where did they go?
This not to say that some writers don’t mention where they are in their writing or closely observe what is all around them as they put thoughts together. But realism is rare among writers (even more among talkers,) and it’s because language lets us fly away from where we are, to other places, other people, other realities. It lets us ignore what is close at hand.
MORE OMINOUS SIGNS
But do these red flags add up to language being terminally dysfunctional, or a virus, or a lethal mutation? What we decide to call language will depend on what the evidence suggests and the design of language is just one aspect of it that is suspicious. Another is the fact that 99.9% of language’s work is not even expressed. It is not externalized. It is internal and we are not conscious of what it is doing to us. We know a little bit about how it frames reality when we speak and write, but what does it do to us when we are not speaking, when we are just perceiving? Do the conceptions we hold dear influence what we think when we spot, for example, dozens of people standing at a bus stop? Or sitting in their cars waiting for the traffic light to change? Of course, they do, but how? How do the ideas in our heads shape the patterns we observe in the world around us? cf. Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind for a delightful analysis of what Sherlock Holmes calls his “brain attic” the place where he stores all the perceptions he has ever had and whose structure shapes the way he thinks about them.
Capitalism Increasingly Abstract
But it is not just what language is doing to us as individuals. The cumulative effect of billions of people using the same abstracting tool to manage their lives — what is that doing? Look at how language has affected the evolution of capitalism, our favourite economic system here in the West. Originally, (when the world was young!) the valorization process instituted by the capitalist economy was tied to the production of useful things. Investors hired working people to produce boots and shovels that were then sold in shops for money, the investor getting most of the profit but the workers at least extracted a wage. Over time, this exchange process has become increasingly more sublimated. Workers still produce boots and shovels (in some places). But in others, they earn a living by extracting value from the circulation of money e.g. banking, insurance, stock trading. Labor stopped being physical and became intellectual with thousands of people sitting at computers where they study flows of data in search of trends or else completing transactions which never once involve contact with physical things. Labor is linguistic. It is deterritorialized, i.e. separated from the land. Words are separated from their referents and money is separated from economic goods. This has the advantage of making it easier to transfer money from one place to another quickly, but it also makes the economy much more complex, too complex for most of us to understand, which means that those who do understand it and know how to manipulate it have an unfair advantage. The financialization of the economy is yet one more, some would say “violent,” instance of the abstracting force of language subjugating another part of life and intelligence. Christian Marazzi and Franco Berardi have written about the mental and physical takeover of work by symbols, and I strongly recommend their work.
Information Consumption
There is also the whole area of information consumption, how much data people consume at work and at home. What effect is reading and interpreting all these words and images having on human consciousness? Americans consumed 100,500 bits per day in 2009 with more than 3/4 of that on radio and TV. That’s 12 hours a day being mystified by words and images! A recent article in Maclean’s magazine says that Generation Z, the group of young people born after 1995 grew up on the internet and so have become accustomed to learning from a screen anywhere, anytime. The top third are better educated than previous generations. SAT and GMAT scores are up – and not surprisingly, they are eager to save the planet. But do they have the staying power, the intellectual determination, to define the real truth of our lives, the misbegotten chaos created by Anglo-American foreign policy since the Second World War and the impending ecosystem collapse, especially when the bottom third of their generation is dropping out of school? They will do the best they can. But is a stupefying challenge. The application of human-centered, linguistic models to the world, by a small number of humans, has had some nasty, unforeseen consequences.
We personally may not feel abstracted. But we have abstracted everyone else.
Large Questions
These are large questions. If we are going to get any control over the precarious situation we are in, I think we need to look at the machine that controls everything we do. The voice that prompts us to act in unrealistic ways, to hurt other people and other species. The program that has sent us down this dead-end path. I think we need to get control over what language does to us. I spoke at the beginning about the possibility that we are victims of a virus, and I hope I have convinced you that the design of language is very suspicious because it leads us to do things that are destroying the planet. I am not denying we do good things with language too. I am just saying the tool itself is devoted to our survival as a species no matter what the cost. If I were going to name one particular feature that has created the most havoc, I would say that unlimited symbolism was fateful because it encourages us to ignore the physical world on which we depend.
Comparison with Animal Communication
But wait a minute, how did that happen? Didn’t language evolve out of animal communication? Though anthropologists used to say that language was just a further development of animal communication systems, the consensus now, among the few linguists who think about it, is that language was a different path, that at some point in our development about 150,000 years ago we began to communicate with displaced reference, and that is what triggered the processes that eventually led to the “advanced” cognition we now enjoy. The invention of symbolic units gave our brains material unlike any they had experienced before and caused them to reorganize themselves around different principles.
The reason why linguists now discourage the search for links with animal communication systems is because they realize how different the two systems are. Animal communication is iconic. Many of its symbols are gradient and cannot be combined to yield additional meanings. They are discrete and bear no systematic relation to each other whereas language’s symbols are not gradient. They can be varied in a variety of ways and have subset, superset relations. They can be broken down into categories which can be broken down further. This is characteristic of representational systems because they are designed to represent objective information, not express emotions like welcome or alarm. This is not to say some animals do not practice displacement or communicate objective information. Look at bees. But as a rule, animals do not change the environment. They adapt slowly by genetic change whereas we adapt quickly. Animals don’t think the way we do – off-line.
From Where did Language Come?
So where did language come from if it is not an upgrade on what other animals do? That is the big question. I think it was an option delivered to us by unlimited symbolism. But then where did unlimited symbolism come from? Did someone invent it? Was it within the DNA of words? How did that happen? There are other black boxes on the planet driving scientists to pull out their hair, and we may have to wait for more analysis of language’s complexity and design to perceive the outlines of what it is. Language can be explained without resort to external agents. Bickerton has just done it. But how to explain its dysfunctionality is another matter.
The idea that it was sent here by an alien force intent upon our destruction is a joke, but it’s a joke with intent. Viruses are small infectious agents. They are invisible. They reproduce rapidly. There are a huge number of different kinds of viruses. They can be found everywhere. They lack key features like cell structure so they are not alive, but because they share other features of living organisms they can be described as organisms on the edge of life. Perhaps language is an organism on the edge of life?
In the meantime, the civilization we have constructed under language’s guidance, the niche we have made for ourselves, is deeply flawed and unsustainable. We’ve got failed economic policies, wars and racism coming up the wazoo, and we are sliding towards ecosystem disaster. There is plenty of blame to go around, and it boggles the mind how so many thieves think they are doing the right thing. If we were smart, we’d bring back the guillotine. But there may be no need to look for ulterior motives. The people and machines responsible for destroying what used to be the future are simply exploiting something that is as normal as breathing– the impunity to the environment (and others) that is built into language’s design. It lay waiting for us to really use it, and now that we have, it has proliferated like cancer having a field day on a broken soul.
Is there any way to get control over it? I think there is, but it involves the resurrection of something that has been buried ever since we started to read and write – direct perception. Where we really are is in the universe. It’s plenty big enough to control language, and if we just had a way to keep it constantly before us, no virus would have even a little leg to stand on.

Berardi, Franco (2012) The Uprising, Semiotexte, (Los Angeles)
Bickerton, Derek (1990) Language And Species, University of Chicago, (Chicago)
Bickerton, Derek (1995) Language And Human Behaviour, University of Washington Press (Seattle) Bickerton, Derek (2014) More Than Nature Needs, Harvard University Press (Cambridge)
Chomsky, Noam (2010) “Human Intelligence and the Environment,” http://www.chomsky.info
Kingston, Anne (2014) “Get ready for Generation Z,” Maclean’s, July 15, 2014
Konnikova, Maria (2013) Mastermind, Viking (New York)
Marrazi, Christian (2008) Capital And Language, Semiotexte (Los Angeles)

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Things Are Not Us But They Are Like Us

It has been a while since anyone said that ordinary things like cups or shoes have magical powers to enlighten us about the universe.

Initiates to the Eleusinian Mysteries knew that ears of grain symbolized the fertility of Earth, and religions have always had sacred objects – shrouds, masks, menorahs – that had hallowed significance for their followers. But it wasn’t until 1945, when Heidegger uncovered what he called “the fourfold,” that someone observed that the ordinary objects beside us bring critical aspects of existence together into an imminent whole, and should therefore be our standard for what is real.

Familiar things like jugs, bridges, shoes were not just useful tools. They were not just pieces of equipment to be employed for a job and then put back on the shelf or thrown away. They had what he called a “staying” power, the ability to make us gather around them and focus on their integrity, their presence, and above all, their hidden dimensions. When this non-practical aspect was beheld, he argued, utilitarian goals were replaced by a feeling of embeddedness in a reality enfolded by four realms of
significance. Earth. Sky. Divinities and Mortals. Things do not just serve us. They serve Being, which means that if we want to know what existence is, we should let things be what they are, and try to fathom their deeper meaning.

This awakening to the metaphysical aspects of the furniture of our lives got lost among all the other questions raised by Heidegger’s thought — his critique of modernity, his attempts to resurrect Being, his anti-semitism. But “things” actually became more important to him as time went on, and as he sought alternatives to the dismal wasteland created by American and Soviet technology. Unlike earlier, when he maintained that humans were necessary for reality to exist, he began to think that “things” had a thing-hood of their very own, independent of whoever made them or how they were used, and that this thing-hood offered a way out of the world as presence created by modern technology.

I didn’t know anything about Heidegger when I started to experiment with perception back in 1963. When I first began to think about “things,” I was totally unconscious of philosophy, and given my bent towards classical music and poetry, would probably have had a difficult time understanding it, in any case. I was an undergraduate at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, an intellectual hobo obsessed with “seeing” because my family had recently decamped to Jamaica, and I was still recovering from the shock of moving from a quiet, well-organized Canadian suburb to a beautiful but raucous tropical island. I was also a musician, having recently given up long-held plans to become a professional violinist. While happy to have finally made a decision about what to do with my life, I was feeling a lot of uncertainty about the world and my new direction. Would I still want to play Brahms if I studied chemistry? What would happen to my “soul” if I gave up classical music?

I had been inching closer toward “things” ever since I saw all sorts of “new”
things in Jamaica – palm trees, breadfruit, cowrie shells, dreadlocks, tin drums, patties, saris, Austin Minis. The island was a mishmash of races and nationalities long before ethnic diversity became PC in the north, and I was surprised by how much I liked living in a place where everyone looked different from everyone else. Though my life was very protected — never once using public transportation— I was fascinated by what I could see from my mother’s car and wished that I could somehow enter the space where everyone else seemed to be living such a noisy, emotional life. I was too young (and too afraid) to go out on my own, so instead of breaking free, I looked at the things on the other side of my cage and tried to figure out where they came from. Who brought them here? Where were they made? What did people do with them?

Later on, in Sackville, where I was far away from big cities and traffic and alien cultures, “things” became even more compelling when, in the stillness of a small town in an underdeveloped province, I saw their edges and corners against the backdrop of the huge Bay of Fundy sky.
It was suddenly as if they were on stage in New Brunswick, the main show. After class I would wander down dirt roads and let myself experience the life that was there. I found the remote stillness of the Tantramar Marshes fascinating. Ploughs, wooden fences, farms, fields – then silence as the marshes spread out, like a distant country, a dark glistening plain lying next to the horizon. The skies were beautiful. As I walked in and out of town, I felt like an intruder breaking in upon glorious scenes of peace and tranquility and I would often stare at them for long periods of time trying to soak up their meaning. There were rarely any people or signs of people. Maybe once in a while an abandoned house. Or a car.

Under the weight of all this natural life and beauty, I began to
wonder if I too was not just a thing?

I too would live and die and go back to the soil just like these fences and ploughs and dilapidated farm buildings. I might do a little writing or work in a hospital. But after that, what was there? Why were we here if all we did was grow up, eat a lot of food, get a job, make money, grow old and fall apart? Surely there was more to it than that? It could not be that this was
all there was. Not when everything is so beautiful and when we feel so much?

Another question that bothered me was the difference between nature and
“civilization.” How could it be so silent and gorgeous out here on the marshes where nature was slowly passing through the seasons (and water was slowly seeping into the soil,) and so noisy and crazy back in the Women’s Residence?

What was the connection between these two venues, these two theatres? How did modern life get to be so different from nature? I knew about evolution and the long story of our branching off from other primates, then other hominids, then homo Habilis, Erectus, Neanderthals, and finally Sapiens about 200,000 years ago. But this was a different question. This was about the distance between us and nature and why the two worlds had spread so far apart. What was the meaning behind our having developed the know-how to build cars, heat homes with oil, erect tall skyscrapers, create atom bombs? When nature was already super intelligent, it seemed dangerous to be departing so radically from the rest, and I felt a real sense of dread about the future. The world always seemed to be careening towards some kind of brink — nuclear war — race riots. Was it because we had overstepped important boundaries, and now we could not go back? Were humans dangerous? But maybe I was missing something. Maybe the answer right in front of me but I just could not see it?

I took a look at what was right in front of me, and what I saw was a beautifully integrated scene subtly interwoven into a tweed-like blend of shapes and colours and illuminated by a gentle light – rocks, twigs, stones, clumps of grass. They looked back at me but did not say anything. The impasse was mutual. With the exception of Loren Eiseley, the books I had found in the Mary Mellish Library did not say much about rocks and twigs.

The Experiment
So what was I to do? Since “things” were all I had, maybe I should look at them more closely? They were in the same predicament that I was – upright and naked (figuratively speaking) on the surface of the earth with no hot wires to Central Office. Could I use them to figure out what was going on?

You can see where thinking perceptually prompts you to cross some boundaries. The world is not divided up according to academic subjects or owners or brand names or time on the bestseller list. It is not riddled with abstractions that take your attention away from what is close at hand. It is free and whole and irrefutably present, and it is all you can do to take it in. Observe it. Respect it for what it is. Appreciate it. To do anything more aggressive would be to take it apart, to cut it up, and that takes your attention away from seeing what it is that you are in, in the first place. To perceive, you must stay silent because that is the only way to hang
on to the prize of being where you actually are. Not ideas but the thing itself.

One day, I decided that if I could just see where I was, I would have a better sense of what was going on. The situation was obviously too big for me to fathom, so the best I could hope for was to get an angle on it. Catch a sighting. Sneak up on it. I knew from experience that life looks different depending on where you are located (and whether or not you have eaten breakfast). So to get a sense of the whole that I was in, maybe I could bring my knowledge of different points of view within the universe all together in one place? How would I do that? I pick one thing and look at it from as many points of view as I could think of.

I know this sounds implausible. How could a thing show you where you are in the universe? Don’t you need something more technological for that? But it rested upon three assumptions, all of which were reasonable and that made perfect sense to me at the time.

One is that things are worth looking at in their own right, independent of their usefulness to me or anyone else. Instinctively, I knew this, probably because I grew up in a family of artists who were always oohing and aahing over some new find and asking me to admire it. Our house was full of treasures we had bought or found, and there was an unspoken rule that no one ever threw anything away because it might mean something to someone. It was not difficult for me to think that something I held in my hand that could have telepathic powers.

My second assumption may be a bit harder to digest. I decided that I was just another thing. I could talk and move and play the violin, but in terms of physical integrity and location there was not much difference between me and a thing, and I would become a thing after I died. So if I could just get over my pride in being human, I had a mirror to my own physical location. Just as a thing had tops and sides, I too had tops and sides. Just as a thing could sit on a table, so could I. If I was in the universe, so was a thing. We both existed on the surface of Earth, so if I wanted to see where I was, all I needed to do was look at a thing because where it was, I was too.

Finally, I assumed I could imagine Earth and the universe. This was the most challenging of my conditions, and I prepared myself by remembering places I had been and looking at what James J. Gibson calls “aids to comprehension” – space art, drawings, maps (there were no photos of other planets in 1963). The proportions had to be accurate so I took note of sizes and distance and tried to learn as much as I could about the composition of planets so that I could see them in my mind. All I had were travel books and magazines like National Geographic. But I made an inventory of all the places I knew existed – deserts, mountains, oceans, jungles, forests, then planets, comets, galaxies, and the immense distances between them. I put them all together into a file in my mind I called “the Universe,” and added images to it when I came across something particularly memorable. I wanted to feel them at my back when I looked at a thing so that I could see where it was.

The Result
My preparations were a bit strenuous, but the actual experiment turned out to be a lot easier than it sounds, though why what I did worked is still a mystery to me, and I wish someone would explain it to me. I seem to have found a way to access another viewpoint on the world, another dimension. Basically, all I did was keep my eyes glued to a small stone I picked up from the road, and think carefully about and where it was in relation to other places I knew existed at the same time. Where the stone had been and what it had witnessed over the decades and centuries. How it fit into the larger context in which we all lived. I used the stone as anchor point and reached out in my imagination to bring in faraway cities, countries, landscapes, planets, galaxies. I lay images of all these places on my stone, one by one, in ascending distance.

While imagining Europe and South America was not that hard, because I had been to Europe and experienced what it felt like to be on another continent, the effort to visualize places like Jupiter or the Milky Way taxed my brain, and I had to stretch my imagination to its limits to see landscapes that were alien and had unfamiliar chemistry. The effort made me totally allocentric. and I lost my sense of self.

My brain staggered under all the data I had given it, and I knew I could not hold it together for very long. But I laymanaged to maintain it for a few moments and then something happened I could not have predicted. The framework through which I looked at the world around me suddenly expanded. A door suddenly opened. I no longer existed in a space with just three dimensions. The sticks and stones around me were no longer just by the side of a road outside of Sackville. They were in a much bigger space — a huge magnificent, terrible space with corridor after corridor of light and power streaming down on tangible surfaces like a thousand spotlights. It was as if everything around me had a dusty yellow plastic covering I did not know existed removed, and was now reborn into another reality, a bigger reality. An extra dimension had been added to the place where I was, and objects projected and receded with a sharpness that stunned me with their unbearable presence. I ceased to exist as a person and became the area that surrounded me which was huge, vast, infinite. I was an atom, an electron, a proton, a point in empty space. The world had ballooned in size and I was just a little spot of consciousness the size of a berry.

How do I know it was another dimension? Because height, width and depth were no longer there. The framework through which I normally saw things was missing. The world was totally un-enclosed, and I felt exposed to the universe as if I were naked on a stage. In fact, that is exactly where I saw I was. On a stage before an audience I could not see. The world was actually quite fierce, and I’d been a fool to think I could handle it.

Heidegger thought the fourfold. Earth. Sky. Divinities. Mortals. He got the metaphysics of it right. He just did not perceive it.

The difference between thinking something and perceiving it is very great. When you perceive something you see an order that was previously invisible.

I put the stone back down on the road and let the marsh air bathe me with its gentle touch. What had I done? Why does everything look so different now? Have I just had “a vision”? But what was it? Everything is the same, just bigger. I was in a bigger place than I thought. And more beautiful.

I tried to calm my thoughts as I walked slowly back to town. Closed doors and windows nodded kindly as I passed by. As I neared the campus, I thought about telling people what I had done, but then I could not figure out what to say. That “things” were not as dull as everyone thinks? They could help you see where you are? I could feel the foreheads wrinkle. I decided to keep it to myself for the time being. However, I was still a student and as soon as I returned to class, multiple currents of talk and debate on every other topic but perception soon swept me away. Within moments I had forgotten what I saw. And though it would return to me at night and I would lie in bed wondering what I had done to find the world so liberated like that, so free and gorgeous, the difficulty of finding the right words to explain it was insurmountable. I would lose my train of thought, and sleep would soon overtake me.

Afterthoughts
Many years have passed since I looked carefully at a rock near the Bay of Fundy and having studied and repeated what I did many times, I now have two thoughts.

My first thought is hopeful. The shift from mid-grade realist to involuntary mystic was a shock, and I have more respect now than I had before, for people who claim to have witnessed something abnormal. Where we are is very, very strange. There are so many things about it that we do not understand, it is wise to keep our minds open. The universe has hundreds of dimensions, and we humans normally only perceive three of them.

But I have also come to realize that the reason why my little experiment worked is because I was working with “things.” Things are not us but they are like us, which means they can stand proxy for us and still not lose their independence, their separateness.

My little rock was totally unchanged by my switching places with it in my mind, and after I put it back on the road, it continued its existence as an object on the surface of Earth in a tiny piece of New Brunswick for many years. It is probably still there. Even if I were able to smash it into a thousand pieces through the mental force of my thinking, those pieces would still be sitting by the side of the road because that is what things do. They are here beside us. They don’t disappear within sixty or seventy years the way we do. They continue. Not forever. Eventually they break down into their chemical elements and are absorbed into another thing – the atmosphere or the soil. But that just confirms my point. Things are different enough from us to be separate, but they are like us enough to be here on the surface of the planet. That means if we want to figure out what is going on, we should study them.

My discovery that things can be used to perceive where we are bowled me over, not because it put me in touch with God or whatever, but because it let me in to the universe. Things are compasses to the universe if you know how to look at them in the right way. Of course, the reason why they can do this is because they are in the universe, so they are really just mirroring back a situation they are already part of. But their constant availability and their fundamental neutrality means that they do not interfere with the connection between their existence and the universe, the way we do. They are not living, suffering beings with a point of view. They are things.

What this means is that we have a tool to get our bearings. We have something to release us from the claustrophobic, sometimes barbaric, multi-layered chatter of human life. We have a doorway into the nonhuman. Of course, we go back to the nonhuman eventually because that is what death is. And you could say that we already have a doorway to the nonhuman in the work of scientists who probe the galaxies with their instruments and bring back physical data.

But by using a “thing” to see where I was, I got out of one place and into another bigger place. I experienced the annihilating power that everywhere surrounds us, without using a machine and without dying. I experienced it myself, which means I got a taste of the mysterious power and beauty we are up against. I saw myself how small we really are.
Not only that, I saw that we are on a stage. There is a set-up. This would be hard for an instrument to detect because it involves the sense of being watched which can only be felt by living creatures. There might be a way to digitalize the sense of being watched, but it still wouldn’t be the same because computers are not sentient. They are not mortal.

This is the difference between science and naked eye physics. There is material that each method grasps that is beyond the other. I cannot see neutrons and electrons, but nor can electron microscopes see what I call the set-up. Humans are still good for something.

My second thought is darker. It is that language is a problem. I couldn’t see the set-up before I did my experiment because language had hijacked my perception. My perception did not adhere to what exists. Now it does.

This is a difficult observation, too complicated to go into here, and I apologize for introducing an idea which I am not going to explain. Let me just say that language is probably a virus. It is at least “terminally dysfunctional,” to use Derek Bickerton’s phrase, given what we have done to the planet under its guidance, and we are only now beginning to understand its effect on our brains. I intend to say more in the future about its ambiguous presence in our lives.

So if language is a problem and things are doorways to the universe, how do my two thoughts fit together?

I can only say this because I looked at a thing in relation to the universe. But switching places with the rock exposed me to something too huge for language to represent. By looking at a “thing” in the largest context I could imagine, I freed myself from the framework through which I normally see rocks and roads and motels by the highway, and let myself into the real distances and real powers that are “out there.” The yellow plastic that I saw was language. Language is necessary for me to have a self, to get control over my life, to live in a community. But out from under it, or away from it, the world is no longer divided up into rocks and trees, classes and universities. It’s united in one huge phenomenon that dwarfs me and makes me feel very small.

What my experiment near the Bay of Fundy showed me, was that if the perceptual experience is big and powerful enough, language stops functioning. Faced with something it cannot represent using the concepts and grammatical structures that are its usual currency, it seizes up. This is good news if language is a virus because it means we have a counter to its insidious control over our brains.

Finding the words to say this much has taken me many years because what I uncovered defies quick verbalization. I had to figure out how to explain it before I could talk about it. That took considerable reflection on language and perception, as well as lots of research. But now that I have studied them both, I can share what I found with others.

What I uncovered when I looked at the little rock in New Brunswick is the presence of the universe here on earth. I call it “the universe on earth.” It left me speechless. Stupefied is a better word. It totally changed my perspective, and made me extremely suspicious about language. It also made me curious about the set-up. Who or what is watching us? I think its gaze is benevolent, but I am not sure.

If people want to find the universe on earth, they should become less cavalier about the “things” in their lives, and start taking them seriously as a form of being. This could have a beneficial effect in many ways, not least on how we treat the planet, but on how we feel about ourselves too. We are not just machines. We can see something that machines cannot see. We can see the set-up. The world is not just a material place. There is something else going on here that is very strange, and things allow us to see it because they are compasses to the universe. They show us where we are, and where we are is so astonishing, language is stunned into silence.


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The Set-up – definition

What is the set-up? It is a deliberate arrangement that developed out of the mind of the universe to support the evolution of life. It follows physical laws. It is very beautiful. As life evolves, it becomes more conscious, so the goal must be for the universe to become conscious of itself. As carriers of consciousness humans have to work within the limits the universe imposes on everything. If they try to defy those limits there are negative consequences, but if they work within them greater consciousness is achieved. When the set-up is perceived a beautiful order become visible that is not only gratifying to acknowledge, but also makes it easier to accept the limits of physical laws.

The universe gave us language to help us survive the set-up it created for life. However language without perception is dangerous because language is an abstracting machine; it is not required to touch base with the planet. This can lead people to make plans that are not realistic i.e. in accordance with the laws. Language needs to be counterbalanced by perception on a regular basis; otherwise, it becomes a vehicle for doing harm.