The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Notebook: We all know the mind twister: if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, has it fallen? Does the tree–does the forest–exist? Let’s take it a step further: does anything exist beyond language, separate from the language that describes it? Is the thing itself the thing, or is the language describing it what makes it what we take to be the thing? (After all there’s a neurological parallel here, as Oliver Sacks described it in the fascinating piece for The New Yorker in 1993, “To See or Not To See”–that was the print version’s title–where he explains that what we see is itself a construct that the brain learns to piece together in our early months, before which everything we “see” would be incomprehensible to our understanding of seeing. It would all be disparate shapes and objects that are more like unassembled puzzle pieces than tables, chairs, hands, trees.) Aren’t our entire lives, the entirety of our knowledge up to and including what we call direct experience—which we verbalize to ourselves, but which has no tangible reality until it is told in spoken or written or signed language, until it is shared—made of language? All we know, we know from others: from the language of a companion, a book, a documentary, a history, a testimony. To take an example: Nothing that happens in court, arbiter of so many fates, happens without language in some form. There is no lived experience divorced from it. Even body cam footage that may be without narration is immediately framed by the attorneys within the language of interpretation: were you in fear for your life in that moment. Did you mistake the perfume bottle for a gun. (Not an invention, by the way: that’s how US Marshals gunned down Cory Tanner in Espanola in 2015.) Attorneys hate to put children or any victim of sexual abuse on the stand because the mere act of verbalizing the abuse re-lives it. Obviously it’s preposterous to claim that without language there is no abuse, there’s no killing, no cancer, no joy, no experience of life in all its varieties and extremes. But what I’m suggesting is that the knowledge of those things, what makes them shared experiences, aware to others, what takes them out of the isolation of living them alone (or of being unheard victims, the way Melville in Redburn describes his fear of drowning at the bottom of the ocean, “stark alone, with the great waves rolling over me, and no one in the wide world knowing that I was there”) is language, and only language. In unnerving ways, that makes language in some ways more consequential than experience, if the experience is to be known, if it is to mean anything beyond itself, if it is to make us solidary with it: who among us could possibly know either what Guernica was about, or what horrors it entailed, if it weren’t for the language of Picasso’s “Guernica” (a tapestry of which, last I knew, hung high in or at the entrance of the chamber of the UN Security Council, as a reminder all 15 member nations duly ignore.) For art is the ultimate human language, being universal. But is is also true, as Italo Calvino wrote (in Invisible Cities), that “there is no language without deceit.” 

—P.T.

 

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He that increases knowledge increases sorrow.

–From Ecclesiastes, 1:18.

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