Language

This is from a tweet: knowing about architecture means buildings are legible in a different way; knowing about plants and birds makes hikes more stimulating, playing music makes listening to it richer, etc. However, it clicks with me from another perspective. To understand or to know the world better, we have to know some details and have to know it in one or many more abstracted ways. Yes, the world (so vast in both time and space) to us (so tiny, life is so short) is always abstracted one way or another for us. For example, the capitalism is an abstracted construct in the real world. It is there for real and abstracted. Sometimes, we know it. Sometimes we know its name only. Sometimes we do not know its name yet but just feel its existance like the elephant to the blind. ...

Again and again Bachmann shows how “the flawed language that has been passed onto us” can lead us to question what we know to be real, our own suffering selves included, and she asks what it means to grapple with these antinomies of world and word as public and political matters, not just private ones—indeed what it means to be a writer at all. “If we had the word, if we had language, we would not need weapons,” she said in a 1959 lecture. Having lived through the war herself, she meant it. ...

The title is a line from Lynn in the 2017 Thai movie, Bad Genius. “Don’t you see – even if you don’t cheat, life cheats you anyway.” When I learn English, the literal meaning is easy to get but the subtle culture and personal feel is hard to grasp. This can come to the difference between two persons. What do I know what you say means the same as I say the same words and sentences? In this sense, the language is not static as a book waiting to be read but a two-way interaction between you and the world. This can be rephrased as another line: I know what I give you but I do not know what you receive. ...

“In modernist art, obscurity can be a conscious strategy. It is one of the ways in which the artwork can avoid being consumed too easily. Poems need to thicken their textures and scramble their syntax if they are not to slip down too easily, which is the fate of the commodity. Everyday language is no longer a medium of truth. It has grown stale and threadbare, and only by wreaking violence on it can you force it to yield something of value. Literary modernism sends language on a spree, but that’s because it is so distrustful of it. Jameson has some comments here on Benjamin’s idea of an ur-language, an original speech in which things speak their own names. Then comes the Fall, in which the bond between word and thing is broken. Words become arbitrary signs of things, and language degenerates into a Babel of tongues. ...