Terence McKenna phrased this wonderfully, by saying “It seems to me that language is some kind of enterprise of human beings that is not finished.”<p>The full quote is more psychedelic, in the context of his experience with so-called ‘jeweled self-dribbling basketballs’ he would encounter on DMT trips, who he said were made of a kind of language, or ‘syntax binding light’:<p>“You wonder what to make of it. I’ve thought about this for years and years and years, and I don’t know why there should be an invisible syntactical intelligence giving language lessons in hyperspace. That certainly, consistently seems to be what is happening.<p>I’ve thought a lot about language as a result of that. First of all, it is the most remarkable thing we do.<p>Chomsky showed the deep structure of language is under genetic control, but that’s like the assembly language level. Local expressions of language are epigenetic.<p>It seems to me that language is some kind of enterprise of human beings that is not finished.<p>We have now left the grunts and the digs of the elbow somewhat in the dust. But the most articulate, brilliantly pronounced and projected English or French or German or Chinese is still a poor carrier of our intent. A very limited bandwidth for the intense compression of data that we are trying to put across to each other. Intense compression.<p>It occurs to me, the ratios of the senses, the ratio between the eye and the ear, and so forth, this also is not genetically fixed. There are ear cultures and there are eye cultures. Print cultures and electronic cultures. So, it may be that our perfection and our completion lies in the perfection and completion of the word.<p>Again, this curious theme of the word and its effort to concretize itself. A language that you can see is far less ambiguous than a language that you hear. If I read the paragraph of Proust, then we could spend the rest of the afternoon discussing, what did he mean? But if we look at a piece of sculpture by Henry Moore, we can discuss, what did he mean, but at a certain level, there is a kind of shared bedrock that isn’t in the Proust passage. We each stop at a different level with the textual passage. With the three-dimensional object, we all sort of start from the same place and then work out our interpretations. Is it a nude, is it an animal? Is it bronze, is it wood? Is it poignant, is it comical? So forth and so on.”<p>This post feels like the beginning of that concretization.