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January 05, 2009

on language, stuff, and stephen fry

(writing after not for so long feels the equivalent of left hands all.)

listening to stephen fry's thoughts on language the other day made me feel absolutely great in a way that had to be taken note of. (if you didn't read, or more importantly, listen to it yet, i'm not gonna lie to you: you'd be better off there than here.)

in short, the piece in question here was a rallying cry for language in its joy and surprise and vivaciousness and the sheer pleasure of it. here's one of the core things: you don't eat just for nutrition, you take pleasure in it. you don't have sex just to procreate. why would you take a similarly coldly utilitarian view of everyday language? also the gentleman spoke of (with much more craft and clarity than my words here) and against smug pedantry and the prescriptivist bent to impose and regulate is to control and extinguish language, deny its whimsical autonomy.

what i felt listening to it (the battle-cry part) was, in a very real way, the most deeply touching, motivating elation, this strange combination of feeling of kinship and allegiance, elation, a strange kind of pride, an energy. a good, compelling speech making a stand (even for a topic nobody's currently at war on) and delivered with sincere belief and — a kind of depth that distinguishes the superficial emotion of pushy angry rants from good oratory — stirred me. i mean really, significantly made me feel fantastic and changed the course of my day.

the reaction seemed both a familiarly quotidian Thing of emotional mechanics, and at the same time a strange, vulnerable, transgressive way of communication. like You're Not Supposed To Be Serious Like That. there's the honest appeal, the unironic standing for something .. and then there's the eloquence part, which begs to be unpacked.

i leave mr fry here for a few words more broadly on this.

on seriousness: language that's simply serious enough to be the primally evocative is not .. very fashionable. it's the domain of the teenager, the drunk and the demagogue. and for this it's like we're collectively missing an awesome trick. a badly thought-out evocation's eigenvector sincerity makes us scoff, and we're rooting for failure if someone tries. (and by "we" i mean "me", trying to find an angle to make fun of anything.)

and on eloquence: if poetry, and possibly oratory, has what can be likened to the direct sense-appeal that runs around consciousness like the sensuous draw of rhythm and harmony in music, the stimulation of modern visual media, the lure of empathy and synecdoche and suspense and whatnot in narrative art — in short, the appeal to parts of us deeper and faster than the known mind can hold, examine and tranquil — it is in how when we give attention to language, we process the fuck out of it beyond its face denotation. in image recognition studies, hundreds of images shown within a space of seconds still yield a majority recognition rate later. likewise with language it is the bouquet complexity of mind-echoes, the systems-overwhelming pace of the quick cut, the rhizomatic, lightning-branch reach of the flash of recognition: we take in a scene in a blink.

what to make of this? more, how to break out of the habit of expending minimal effort in expression?

i recognize there's no point or structure here. that sort of being an emblem of the problem.

Posted by matti at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)