Letter #172: Strange Talk

Language is Vision

Ascendant Descendant.

Your email reminded me of that wonderful Ted Chiang novella “Story of Your Life.” That’s the one that was made into the movie Arrival, which was also quite good. Not to give too much of the story away, but it involved some visiting space aliens who try to teach some earth scientists their language. The language is so different from anything we have on earth that when one earth scientist learns it, she sees the world in an extraordinary new way.

I remember a hike we took many years ago — before we knew of the Chiang story — when we discussed this very idea. You talked about the fact that there is no such thing as an exact translation. You quoted the old saying, “A translation is like a woman. If it is faithful, it won’t be beautiful. If it is beautiful, it won’t be faithful.” And you said that even the English word rabbit and the French word lapin might not refer to exactly the same thing. I believe it was at this point, I challenged you to a duel.

More seriously, I do find this idea weirdly offensive to my sensibilities. In the same way I dismiss the notion that morality is relative, so it is hard for me to conceive of a reality so different from the one I know that I simply can’t see it. A rabbit is a rabbit, even to someone careless enough to be French.

Recently, I read two books that included ideas beyond the natural. One was The Others Within Us by a therapist named Robert Falconer. Falconer practices a kind of therapy in which the patient divides his psyche up into various characters. The therapist works with these characters to free the patient from self-destructive thoughts and habits. He wrote the book after he decided that some of these characters were not native to his patients but seemed to have come from elsewhere to inhabit them. They were, essentially, demons.

The other book was Rod Dreher’s thought-provoking Living in Wonder. It’s about bringing spiritual enchantment back into the world and re-opening our hearts and minds to the existence of the supernatural.

In both these books, the authors are careful not to align themselves with any specific explanation for odd phenomena. But in both books, there came a point when my mind simply refused to engage. When Silicon Valley bros get together to summon UFO’s they believe to be visiting entities from another dimension, or when therapy begins to sound like an exorcism, I roll my eyes so hard I have to fetch them out from under the couch. I’m a practical man. A rabbit is a rabbit.

But. That life-changing Owen Barfield observation in Poetic Diction — that idea that the ancient word for spirit and breath did not mean spirit or breath, but meant both at the same time — that idea that the supernatural dwells within the natural — that is a language I might learn to speak.

Love, Dad