Baskets

Baskets

Samuel Bird

I kicked the round river rocks that broke free from the dried clay down the road as I walked down it. The mid-summer high-altitude sun streamed down through my long sun bleached hair and tanned face. My eyes were squinting to not let in too much light, but they were beginning to have a brightness of their own. The violence and vitriol, the depravity and desperation of my youth were fading from me. Having turned nineteen only a few months prior, the memories of homelessness and the taunting of my parents as I left home were still fresh in my mind. My organism had seared memories into my mind of brutal striking and wailing to make sure I was prepared for the next time. It kept that memory of wrapping my hands around my stomach and touching my fingers on both sides to make sure I fought to eat. It reminded me that the faces around me were a threat since they had always consistently been so. This was nothing new to me. Life was never about happiness, but about carefully timed survival and seeing how little of oneself could be left behind in the traps and horrors that came along. With this normalcy, a new idea of life stood in beautiful contrast to a new life. I was well-acquainted with barely surviving, and now this new life was possibly before me. It was not a given surety, but something about my future seemed to have more of what I desired than the past did. I would never again, or at least infrequently, have violence inflicted on my person. Meals would be a struggle to come by, but they would come. Perhaps even those faces that were the launchpad for violently hurled words could become a place of refuge that reminded me of someone who had become the home I had searched for. Maybe, possibly, and perhaps I would even have a place to live that was safe and secure. A tear dripped down my sunburnt cheeks at that thought. Something powerful and life-affirming welled up in my chest. The slight ways that I had been able to improve my situation, leading to the inference that I could do so again awoke something in me. The possible became something to have faith in and something to believe could come. This brought a depth of internal strength I could not muster otherwise. What was this feeling of a bright future that made me feel sure I could secure it? Had my kind found a word for it? I ran it through my head until I realized I was running past the obvious. This was hope. 

When you are young, you hear about all these words and concepts. Love, faith, and even hope are taught to you via definitions and examples. Still, words like hope seem light and frivolous as in to say, “I simply hope I get this small thing.” This is a far cry from the deeply enlivening phenomenon that I had experienced. Life is more than just the acquisition of the right words in the right order, but the realization of each word and the stanza in which it belongs. Teach me love, and yet I will have to wait until I learn to pull someone’s soul into mine. Tell me what faith is, and yet I will need to find where I meet that highest of values to have faith in. Describe hope, but it is dead to me until I see its absence. We then hear these words as if they were an essentialist form, but we only relate to them as a subject. Think of your last argument. If you follow the ideas you both have until you come to the exact point of disagreement, it will often be the case that you are each using the same word differently. We could then make a dictionary full of definitions to make one right and one wrong, but what words will arbitrarily be what? Then, we would have to worry about whether there could be a concept that doesn't have a word to fit into it and the speaker is left with conceptual isolation. Rather, each word could instead be used to paint a picture of that which is ineffable. And why is it ineffable? Words are baskets. 

The worlds, inner and outer, are full of phenomena. Each is demarcatable from the last, but then again we can always slice it smaller or compile that idea with others. We then struggle to have the “one” entity to define. Assuming we could find the right distance to see the worlds, we would struggle to make absolute demarcations between phenomena. Darwinistic evolution is a great example of this as we must find a line to decide when an organism speciates. Aside from the ability to interbreed, all other metrics and lines would be arbitrary. If we then used that, would a given mating pair be speciated if they are infertile or tend to not be able to make offspring because of genetic differences? Think of rocks. You can have anything from a pebble to an asteroid. It can be filled with diamonds or sandstone. The world is then not made up of forms of things, but unique instantiations. Each unique instance may share qualities with other instances, but it is still unique not just in its separate existence, but in the qualities only it possesses. Like a fingerprint or a snowflake, no two instances share all qualities. So then, do we grow our words until the lexicon can describe each individual representation? No, as the patterned and simple representation of facts makes it accessible to us. What we must understand is that outside of our minds, wildly and nobly, aspects abound that are outside of our grasp. My eyes can only see a short spectrum of wavelengths. My ears can hear only a few notes. You may say we can build instruments to make that which we can’t sense into a medium we can sense, however, we are in trouble with the first things we suspect even to make a hypothesis. In the mind and world are unique instances. They each in turn have associated concepts that they lead to. Few of those have words that they lead to. For this reason, I find words fail me. Close friends have complimented me on my ability to take an instance and place it into words, but I am aware that I am doomed from the outset. An array of falling ideas fall toward a series of baskets. Some are well suited for a particular one and land in the middle. Some barely make it and land on the side. Some still land in the space between the baskets. Subjectivity is inherently lonely as you and I can’t step from our minds and join each other. However, we are even further limited by the use of any medium of communication like words, to express ourselves. Like all pursuits, this makes it perilous, but the other option is to not engage with existence. For this reason, I suggest we be aware of our linguistic inferences we make with every statement. For example, as emotions are a series of memories made into inferences, I can use the suggestive properties of music to say something nothing else could. 

I use stories and words to explain my philosophy, but not too well. Sharing complex ideas can be difficult and certainly dry. To make them beautiful, I’ll invite my reader into a world, a journey, and with characters. This adds a layer of beauty and a chance for people to read what the story does not say. After all, I have found the best readings of a work are when you take from it what the writer didn’t put on the page. I have found this to be effective and beautiful enough that it is something I continue to do, but it is not without its problems. In my mind is a visual, concept, or series of events. I wish to take them from my mind to yours. I take the idea at hand, and I shove them into words. I then take those words and share them with you. I then hope you relate to those words in a way that you can derive the intended message. There is no doubt that much will be lost in each step, but hopefully, the end result is a similar version of a given concept shared between both of us. There I sit with a given thought. I think it and think it well. I run it through and process it until it is clear and distinct. Now I can just bundle it up and share it with you right? No, I have to then find out how to take each more atomic part of the idea, place it into words, make a sentence, and then a complete idea. Each idea then needs to in part and whole not betray the idea at hand. I then have to watch for what emergent properties my language could have. Maybe I want to say you look pleasant, but the way I say it or the illustration at hand is counterproductive to my efforts. As the atom (or perhaps quarks or something else) are what comprises reality, concepts are the basic units of the mind. As science works with the material, philosophy works with the conceptual. I have argued this at length, but I find this process to be prelinguistic. I can at least say that I do and you saying you don’t probably just means you assume everyone is just thinking like you do. A common mistake of the mind. You may cite the burden of proof, but that seems made up to me. How then does this conceptualizing turn into language? 

What is in a word? Certainly not a horse or an instant of the concept. If I say horse to you, no instant of a full and physical horse blossoms from my lips to meet your ears. What you do receive is a series of five letters. Two are vowels and three are consonants. I may have a particular horse in mind. Perhaps Cash, a fifteen-hand high sorrell foxtrotter gelding I loved and trained some years ago. In reference to him, I signify the right letters into that word in our shared language. However, I still have Cash in mind, while you have some essential notion of what a horse generally is. Any image in your mind is filled out to you in terms of its color. With language being the effort to share meaning via concepts as language, I may want to be more specific. I would tell you he was a rich dark red with near black hair toward his hooves that made him near bay colored. I could tell you he was a muscular monster who could bound up a steep mountain with incredible alacrity. Each of these adjectives and nouns would call in a more precise image in your mind, but you would still be surprised to meet him and find how jovial his personality was or how much he loved a good carrot. No instance of a word alone could display him, and even the most complex series of words would not be Cash. At best they would show how I saw him. So have words failed us?

Our finite but powerful mind seeks to know a possibly infinite universe. This results in us not being able to conceptualize every fact, but rather have models for them. I see the commute I took into work today as a series of turns and staying put on the road. However, the world around me is much more complicated. I drove past houses of people I never met, businesses I never went into, or churches I have no idea what they profess. Even if I went about memorizing every personal and enterprise, I would find myself not knowing where each door in the buildings were, what color the drapes were, or where they kept their snacks. When I was child, I was mesmerized at how much I could think I knew something, and then just didn't. I would guess how many of an object were in a room and see how different my perception was. It became clear that there was a disparity between my perception of the world as a model and how the world was. It goes the other way. My mind is incredibly complex. Thousands of thoughts on millions of things. Some are visuals or auditory which are massive in the data they possess. This slew of thoughts then seeks to find its way out into the world as it sought to bring the world in. 

Can I think of a better example of words as baskets, failing to capture concepts and unique instantiations? This article. I have been writing it for over two years and each time I throw out what I have. Pages of notes with different handwriting and style from many moments of quick moments trying to linguistically capture, not being able to capture via language. This particular iteration was only able to get past my strict evaluation by my giving up on the pages of notes that I had, and hoping what I sought to say would be heard in your ears without my utterance. Like many people, I struggle to capture the cruel irony I place myself in, however, it became obvious that an article that talks about words failure to deduce exactness would possibly struggle with so. Still, there is much room for the engaged existent being to be and do. You will note that before I had the word hope in the forefront of my mind, I didn’t wait for conceptual or social affirmation via words to validate this experience. It was, no matter how words failed to express how it was. That time of my life is sacred to me. With nothing more than will and engagement, I brought about a life that I am happy with, though I have begun to realize I didn’t need all the trappings of wealth. Even now, 2,565 days later, I am brought to tears by this time in my life. What was it? How did it happen? How can I capture it mid flight, cage it, and put it on paper for you? In the end, words fail me. Perhaps it is for the best, as words were not existence, but an expression of it. As the sentence that I came to in deep meditation seemed to say more than I can now: “It all is.” And, might I add, I am hopeful about it.