"in the beginning was the word." - john 1:1
"language is a virus." - william s. burroughs
so let's begin by first briefly formulating the lala-land of linguistic delusion and the hyperdimensional monstrosity that dwells there...
1) identity/essentialism. the verb "to be".
in all its forms, the verb "to be" essentially indicates judgment, or a sort of a timeless label, a divine pre-order, a diagnosis or an expectation, a fixed preconception or an externalizing/objectifying of a subjective attribute (e.g., our human brain perceives such and such nuances of colors, instead of certain colors being immanent qualities in objects themselves).
the moment something is, time suddenly pulls a break, it already is and no longer becomes.
2) subject-predicatism.
our belief in 'free will' mostly stems from the fact that we say "i am", "i do", "i see the wall" (as opposed to "the wall happens to me", or in contrast with Chinese where order goes object-verb-subject, more indicative of an event than an action), etc.
it also carves a certain cause-effect linearity, one attuned with an image of a static world in which movement is 'caused' or 'made'.
3) paradox of dialectics and biting one's own teeth.
we are accustomed to think dialectically, to define things in terms of opposing or complementary relations. a certain habit to interpret. something can be different only in relation to something else from which it differs, even when the two have got absolutely nothing to do with each other.
for example, most people would think about homosexuality in terms of heterosexuality, i.e. substituting and juxtaposing man in the place of the woman, sexually or otherwise, and rarely does it occur to people at large that the two might be completely different things that cannot be so compared.
the Aristotelian either/or and its negation, where we have an idea of non-being, disorder, etc., where we would perceive non-being not as a being which is not the one we expected, but as lack, as "less"; likewise disorder not as an order which is not the 'human' order we expected, etc.
4) expression, meaning, common sense.
we are completely oblivious to the fact that before language becomes meaning, its the physiological bodily expression of sound, or the laryngeal muddle of noise which 'means' only in the context of its utilitarian convention, or otherwise 'the word is not the thing spoken of' just as Korzybski's slogan "the map is not the territory" goes.
but then, before we speak of something there is the preceding unspeakable first-order affect of the thing further expressed through the symbolic convention of approximate meaning... so a certain two-way feedback becomes apparent here, which inclines us to question the extent to which the word/meaning has taken precedence and reverse penetrated into the unspeakable domain of direct experience, and thereby conditioned the border control legislation of allowed template form, variation and nuance of emotional response and expression, as well as consider the fact and significance of our reactions to meaning ('semantic reactions') and emotional responses to ideas which often make absolutely no fucking sense at all (national pride, justice, etc.)
now, unlike all else that is a synchronous expression or extension of bodily flows (language was first music and poetry), language is as if, on the contrary, imposed upon the body and in some oblivious 'zombie epidemics' way separating itself from it. like some sort of a parasite which grew upon and from the body, and by colonizing the brain via continually establishing its neural image in a synaptic network of strengthening connections, violently enforcing its unreality upon it.
5) spatialization of time.
we do not think time in terms of motion and movement, rather we have imbued time into space in a numerical representation of quantitative time (or dividing 1 infinitely) in a linear succession of per-second photo snaps.
but the experience of time (as determined by, e.g. the pace of metabolic rate and such), or the duration (to use Bergson's term) of lived experience presents a whole new ocean of difference altogether.
to appropriately quote Samuel Beckett in his 'exhaustion' of meaning into space:
And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that's not like me, but, how shall I say, I don't know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don't know what that means but it's the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.
as shall be further on elaborated upon, matter, space, or the objective, is that which differs from the qualitatively subjective (irritation-constriction) in being a numerical dimension of quantitative homogeneity, or otherwise infinitely divisible and measurable in degrees of extensity.
we have been so deeply buried into space, it inevitably leaves a certain gap of neurotic craving and anxiety, of emptiness and lack, which naturally we try to fill externally.
if our idea of time as a discontinuous succession connected/connecting points, of a past budding into present and towards future, and of the past as such no longer present, were so applicable to us (or any living matter), that would suggest we have to, in each second, die and reappear anew, clean-wipe amnesic in the next moment of the second that follows.
the totality of our past, cumulative in its nature, is always conserved in its virtual entirety as the whole of memory (evolutionary, genealogical, etc., to the very actualizing present), of our heart as it remembers to beat, our body as it remembers to function, etc.
[that's gonna be much longer and laborious than i thought... under construction and to be continued, meanwhile anybody who has the inclination, feel free to add/question/discuss/suggest/reflect/...]
