Taalverwarring

Saturday, 27 March 2010

Here are the last three drawings that I made with the Stabilo Woody pencils:

It seems time for something different. But since I have no clue what that might be, I will clean up my desk today and share with you some of the stuff that is on it. Here is a design for a T-shirt:

I am confronted with this text several times a week while working on the computer. It is one of those texts that in my opinion deserve a second life outside the jargon that they are used in. But I say this mainly to myself, of course. I am still in a state of body and mind that I consider below zero level, but there is not much what I can do about it. At least not anything that I know of. I sleep a lot, but that doesn’t really changes anything. One of my best friends like to say that ”Leven is wachten”.
When you translate that in English you get: ”Life is waiting”. There is a second meaning to this One-liner in English that is not there in Dutch. It says that Life is waiting for me, in stead of the other way around.
When I feel like shit, these kind of esoteric wordgames always start to run on my mindcomputer. It seems that language leaves enough space to find a secret or second meaning in almost every saying. I even seems that this other meaning is already in the language, and that it can only be discovered. Some years ago I spend a lot of time to ideas like this, but after a while it felt like a dead end road, and I had a hard time remembering that other people did not see language in the way I did. I didn’t want to isolate myself from the people that I live with, so I gave up trying to exploret these ideas. But like I said, every time when I loose my lust for life, this language thing pops up in my mind again.
I am not the only one who (sometimes) thinks that there is more meaning in the language that we use than the people who use it put in it. But I have never heard or read of anybody who shared my ideas about this phenomenon. If it is a phenomenon. It might very well be nonsense.
I once read a mathematician say that the rules of mathematics are often not understood fully by the people who discover them. Let alone by the people who use them. I like to think the same of language. Maybe language is not created at all, but discovered. And the meaning that we find in language is related to our level of consciousness.
Ideas like these need hard proof. I don’t have any hard proof. What I do have is a list of examples and a bunch of vague theories. One of the theories is that language is using us, in stead of the other way around. Maybe language is the only living thing in the Universe. Maybe we are products of language. And maybe the process has reached the point where language can take over. Our ego has served its function, but it is no longer needed. Language writes us out of the story.
Here is a song that reminded me of one of the (many) language related theories that I have (but don’t belief in). It comes from a cassette that probably is a one-of-one. All that is written on the tape is “Niettemin 84/85”. That was the title of a theatre production, as I just discovered with the help of Google. The four songs on the tape are about kobolds, who (in these texts) live in our head. This idea is an old and interesting one. In our modern culture we thin that we are the only inhabitants of our body and mind, but there is reason to think that we share our body and mind with other beings.
Anyway, here is one of the songs from the Niettemin cassette, ”We zitten in je hoofd”: