Words, Words, Words

The more the words,
the less the meaning,
and how does that profit anyone?
(Eccl. 6.11)

Last week I was struggling to write a personal statement for my next batch of applications. It was frustrating. If you don't believe me, I recommend you write 500-1000 words describing your motivations and goals in undertaking graduate study in philosophy. It can't be done. This is because things like deep-running delights and obsessions simply don't go into short synopses: every time I try to write my way around "why I want to be a philosopher", I feel the reality squeezing out between my fingers. Or (to recast an image from Bill Watterson) writing is like catching snowflakes in your hands: delicate, weightless realities instantly become cold, inspid, featureless drips. It is impossible to write two accurate words.

Conclusion: language is deception. Some of the lies we call metaphor, other lies we call hyperbole, and even dull people who manage to avoid those run against the inescapable lies of omission and imprecision.

Now, don't get me wrong: I love language. It's nuanced and entertaining, and occasionally profound and important. Half of my job is studying language. I've on occasion thanked God out loud that we get to communicate using language, of all things, with all its arbitrariness and ambiguity--in the list of absurd and marvelous human facts, language comes second only to having bodies.

But like having a body, using language is a hindrance, too--sometimes catastrophically so. If you haven't read The Phantom Tollbooth (shame on you! Go read it immediately!), The Everpresent Wordsnatcher is a Very Dirty Bird who takes the words right out of your mouth: he makes anything you say mean exactly what you didn't mean for it to mean. And he's never far off. It's because of him that I have to approach blogging with a hint of irony, and he's why it's difficult to take the prospect of professional philosophy too seriously.

The wordsnatcher is also the reason it's hard for me to swallow certain claims about scripture. Claims like "inerrancy" and "infallibility". Or the idea that God's primary concern is our acquiescence to a set of statements. Or even that, as a friend wrote not too long ago, "the book (words and concepts, not the ink and paper) is the breath of God".

In the face of the absurd opacity of language, there's something scandalous about the idea that God spoke.

But then again, is it half as scandalous as the claim that God pooped? Or God died? And yet creditable doctrine of the incarnation would have me believe that God is just that scandalous. And if God took on flesh--with all its grossness and debility, even to be snatched up by the final absurd opacity of death--might he not also take on words?

Spam Withdrawal

stanford space is finally down. this means that a couple of my sites have gone dead, which means i'm reshuffling the blogspace once more. if you're still at the old site, my main blog site is now here.

my school email address is dead now, too. if you don't know how to contact me, because i forgot to ever put up an autoreply message (sorry), my new address is the short version of my first name, my middle initial, and my last name, separated by periods, at gmail dot com. (try that on for size, spambots.) let me know if that's insufficiently convoluted for you. you can also contact me at my full name--first, middle, and last--at gmail dot com. or if that's still too confusing, i also have a stanfordalumni dot org account.

upshot is i've now fallen off the eight gazillion mailing lists i used to be on (and am bouncing like a superball--sorry, majordomo), which is a mixed blessing. on the one hand, i didn't really read nine out of ten of the emails i was getting. on the other hand, there was always that tenth one. ah well; chalk up the withdrawal as another post-college rite of passage.

Shout Out

You may have heard me mention my friend Pat, who lives in Mexico. He tells good stories, and now he has a blog. I recommend you read it.