Friday, May 21, 2010
an obvious parable.
This is a parable, and sure as the sea is blue it will contain, at some well planned point, a moral. You, gifted reader, may also have already guessed that this parable will also include an intriguing main character whose actions will be central to the revelation of the moral. If I could even be so bold, in my own writing, I would like to name that character as you, gifted reader; now you are the intriguing and gifted main character of your own parable. Congratulations. Although it is true, and let it be known to all that you are highly gifted, you may yet have a thing or two to learn. You might even be aware of this, since you are after all, gifted and intriguing. The lesson that you learn over the course of your journey will be immensely and eternally valuable in its own right, I assure you, but the journey itself will also be quite significant. I must warn you, there may be some danger along the way, the nature of which I cannot entirely predict, but fear not, you will reach the safety of the clearing quite together. Think to yourself for a few moments what you will take with you on this journey, but I will urge you to travel light, for material goods will not hold up well where you're going. If you could pack it all down to but a handful of ideas and concepts, decide what they would be; a few memories of past lessons and journeys may not be a bad idea to take along as well. Arm yourself with your sharpest wit, and guard yourself well with your best problem solving techniques. You will need both. Take nothing at its face value, oh most gifted and intriguing protagonist. Again I assure you that you will survive these trials for the better in the end, but it seems that I have run out of time to talk to you. This is the end of the parable. Did you catch the Moral?
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
the sentence
If a word can represent a notion, a mere infant in metaphoric form, then a sentence could be considered yet a child in the metaphoric world; somewhat coherent, more individual, but still able to fluctuate as it moves, sometimes clumsily, through context. Of course there are multiple ways of looking at this; a sentence can be a conglomeration of words, ideas beginning to form a more evolved and specialized organism, or sentences can be single notions and ideas in themselves. Like a cell made up of different parts and characteristics which all work towards a single function; or at least singular at any given instant, though this function can also change instantly and without warning. That being said we have to take into consideration the large variety of functions that a single sentence can have, and how to at least attempt to differentiate these functions from each other. Difficultly does arise, admittedly, in different reader interpretations, but for the purposes of this paper I will define “function” as usage, and “meaning” as personal interpretation reflection and/or meditation on the sentence in question. You might, for instance, buy a Dr. Seuss book for your child because they are a commonly accepted for early readers, even you yourself might suspect it is secretly a political doctrine of some kind. Although, I think it can generally be said be that most people will not read Dr. Seuss the same way they read, say, the politically defining “Declaration of Independence”, or that we do not read the metaphoric and poetic works of Shakespeare the same way we read the somewhat eccentric, though still very metaphoric and poetic in his own way, Burroughs. Although truly, these two authors, and so, so many more, write sentences so well that even my rather simple definition of function becomes useless and not helpful in the least. The sentences defy me.
The ever useful Oxford English Dictionary turns up, out of many others, this for the definition of a sentence, “A series of words in connected speech or writing, forming the grammatically complete expression of a single thought; in popular use often, such a portion of a composition or utterance as extends from one full stop to another. In Grammar, the verbal expression of a proposition, question, command, or request, containing normally a subject and a predicate.” Now that is a sentence, but what of it? For one thing, I definitely do not agree with the idea that a sentence can only be a single thought. I would even go so far as to say that the quote contradicts itself; the first sentence gives us at least two ideas. One idea is what the sentence will contain (that is, thought) and the other describes the how the sentence is built grammatically. This idea is reconciled, although not expressly, in the subtext of the entry: “English grammarians usually recognize three classes: simple sentences, complex sentences (which contain one or more subordinate clauses), and compound sentences (which have more than one subject or predicate).” So at the very least, a sentence will at least have some sort of grammatical structure which will hopefully allow us to recognize a sentence as a sentence. Beyond this though, not much is certain, if we look at the interpreted meaning of any given sentence we would almost certainly find that everyone will come up with at least a slightly different idea of what thought or thoughts the sentence is trying to communicate. And while the interpretations of our peers will probable seem more valid and useful to us, we can’t just write off some one’s ideas. In this sense, any sentence could present an infinite number of ideas across the world. Some of this might seem problematic or even paradoxical at first. With so much room for interpretation, how does a sentence manage to communicate anything mutually accepted enough to be useful? Even to have an argument or to disagree about the meaning of the sentence, you have to at least believe that the opposing side’s ideas are plausible interpretations. This is where context becomes important; where a sentence is created and where it is received have huge impacts on how they are read and understood. I know from experience, for instance, that Shakespeare is not read the same when blocking lines on a stage as it is in an English class. Context, also, is incredibly vast, multilayered, and in constant motion. It would be impossible to list all the contexts that we are part of in this university setting, but luckily they seem to merge together well enough that some form of communication takes place, is encouraged even, within them.
Still, there is so much more to the sentence than any of this. I want to turn it inside out and twist it, to show a few more, but not all, of its forms and dimensions. Most people probably know off hand, for instance that a sentence can also be a judgment. So to be sentenced to fifteen years in prison for example, is a sentence in sentence form. More than that, a person cannot, or at least isn’t supposed to, be detained in the United States without a proper trial; most of which contain many of these sentence-actions. J.L. Austin gets the credit, not for inventing them, but for pointing them out to us, and giving them a name; the performative. From his lecture “How to do things with Words” Austin gives us this as a description of performatives, “The uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just’, saying something.” The examples that he gives us of performatives are things like bets; you can’t make a bet without opening with: “I bet you…”. So in this sense the sentence is the action, and moreover, it is distinct from a simple statement. Austin’s views may be yet too narrow however; since no statement could exist without the words attached to it. By this logic a statement is a performative, and the same goes for descriptions, questions, and orders. Maybe I am stretching Austin’s ideas farther than I ought to, but language, and therefore sentences, were created with the intention that they do things. “How to do things with Words” may be a misleading title. If I could impart one thing to the audience of this paper, I think it would be that words, sentences, paragraphs –communication techniques and methods are always doing things if they are being used. Is it even possible to utter something just for the sake of utterance?
What I feel that we cannot over look in an exploration like this one are our peers; since in reality, everyone around us has enough common experience with sentences to be useful in this endeavor. I asked one person one question, and the amount of insight I derived from his answer set me thinking for days. You could ask Jesse Hutchings if he considers himself an expert on sentence use. He would probably say no, but I feel like it would be perfectly valid for him to answer yes. I asked him what he feels he is trying to do by using sentences; his answer was, “When I use a sentence I consider it one part of a bigger picture; implying that there is yet more to come. I try to create a functional machine.” I thoroughly enjoyed Jesse’s opinions on the matter of sentences. I feel that there is certainly a need to be able to look at sentences as single structures, or machines, but to also consider the bigger machine –the book, the day, the paragraph, the film, among others. But I feel that the last part of the quote is the most profound; that perhaps all our task is as writers is to make our sentences functional machines. The usage of these machines is completely up to the reader. Functionality, somewhat contrarily to my earlier proposition, does not need to be commonly agreed on, nor does a specific function need to be set by an author. Overarching functionality over specific function; I know, and care not what you take from my writing, only that you do take something.
The ever useful Oxford English Dictionary turns up, out of many others, this for the definition of a sentence, “A series of words in connected speech or writing, forming the grammatically complete expression of a single thought; in popular use often, such a portion of a composition or utterance as extends from one full stop to another. In Grammar, the verbal expression of a proposition, question, command, or request, containing normally a subject and a predicate.” Now that is a sentence, but what of it? For one thing, I definitely do not agree with the idea that a sentence can only be a single thought. I would even go so far as to say that the quote contradicts itself; the first sentence gives us at least two ideas. One idea is what the sentence will contain (that is, thought) and the other describes the how the sentence is built grammatically. This idea is reconciled, although not expressly, in the subtext of the entry: “English grammarians usually recognize three classes: simple sentences, complex sentences (which contain one or more subordinate clauses), and compound sentences (which have more than one subject or predicate).” So at the very least, a sentence will at least have some sort of grammatical structure which will hopefully allow us to recognize a sentence as a sentence. Beyond this though, not much is certain, if we look at the interpreted meaning of any given sentence we would almost certainly find that everyone will come up with at least a slightly different idea of what thought or thoughts the sentence is trying to communicate. And while the interpretations of our peers will probable seem more valid and useful to us, we can’t just write off some one’s ideas. In this sense, any sentence could present an infinite number of ideas across the world. Some of this might seem problematic or even paradoxical at first. With so much room for interpretation, how does a sentence manage to communicate anything mutually accepted enough to be useful? Even to have an argument or to disagree about the meaning of the sentence, you have to at least believe that the opposing side’s ideas are plausible interpretations. This is where context becomes important; where a sentence is created and where it is received have huge impacts on how they are read and understood. I know from experience, for instance, that Shakespeare is not read the same when blocking lines on a stage as it is in an English class. Context, also, is incredibly vast, multilayered, and in constant motion. It would be impossible to list all the contexts that we are part of in this university setting, but luckily they seem to merge together well enough that some form of communication takes place, is encouraged even, within them.
Still, there is so much more to the sentence than any of this. I want to turn it inside out and twist it, to show a few more, but not all, of its forms and dimensions. Most people probably know off hand, for instance that a sentence can also be a judgment. So to be sentenced to fifteen years in prison for example, is a sentence in sentence form. More than that, a person cannot, or at least isn’t supposed to, be detained in the United States without a proper trial; most of which contain many of these sentence-actions. J.L. Austin gets the credit, not for inventing them, but for pointing them out to us, and giving them a name; the performative. From his lecture “How to do things with Words” Austin gives us this as a description of performatives, “The uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just’, saying something.” The examples that he gives us of performatives are things like bets; you can’t make a bet without opening with: “I bet you…”. So in this sense the sentence is the action, and moreover, it is distinct from a simple statement. Austin’s views may be yet too narrow however; since no statement could exist without the words attached to it. By this logic a statement is a performative, and the same goes for descriptions, questions, and orders. Maybe I am stretching Austin’s ideas farther than I ought to, but language, and therefore sentences, were created with the intention that they do things. “How to do things with Words” may be a misleading title. If I could impart one thing to the audience of this paper, I think it would be that words, sentences, paragraphs –communication techniques and methods are always doing things if they are being used. Is it even possible to utter something just for the sake of utterance?
What I feel that we cannot over look in an exploration like this one are our peers; since in reality, everyone around us has enough common experience with sentences to be useful in this endeavor. I asked one person one question, and the amount of insight I derived from his answer set me thinking for days. You could ask Jesse Hutchings if he considers himself an expert on sentence use. He would probably say no, but I feel like it would be perfectly valid for him to answer yes. I asked him what he feels he is trying to do by using sentences; his answer was, “When I use a sentence I consider it one part of a bigger picture; implying that there is yet more to come. I try to create a functional machine.” I thoroughly enjoyed Jesse’s opinions on the matter of sentences. I feel that there is certainly a need to be able to look at sentences as single structures, or machines, but to also consider the bigger machine –the book, the day, the paragraph, the film, among others. But I feel that the last part of the quote is the most profound; that perhaps all our task is as writers is to make our sentences functional machines. The usage of these machines is completely up to the reader. Functionality, somewhat contrarily to my earlier proposition, does not need to be commonly agreed on, nor does a specific function need to be set by an author. Overarching functionality over specific function; I know, and care not what you take from my writing, only that you do take something.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
parable of symmetry
Somewhere, in a realm and time that would seem quite unfamiliar to any of you, lives an entire race of creatures that you, quite ignorantly, might call half people. They hop about on a single leg and operate countless machines and devices with their single hands. It all would look quite bizarre to the casual symmetric observer, but to the Singularians, as they like to call themselves; everything runs quite smoothly. Although it would be quite difficult for you to draw any sort of comparison between you and them, if you could, you would probably find that their technology and cultural advancements are on par with your own; and in all honesty, the Singularians were not incomplete or lacking in any way. I am not going to go into great details describing them, but instead I would like to relate a curious, but not uncommon, meeting which should help to illuminate their differences from you. At least know this, before I begin, the Singularians quite detest symmetry, or at least, they have had no reason to ever like it, for it has never been prominent in their world. Now then, in the world of the Singularians once upon a time a horrible freak of nature was born to a very ashamed Singularian parent (if you thought there were separate sexes among the Singularians, guess again). The freak, as it were, could have probably been your cousin. He was unlucky enough to be born with two of everything, with a nice, straight set of teeth to boot. Despite what talents and skills he maybe could have possessed in your world, in the realm of the Singularians, the symmetric one, as they called him, was doomed to be an utter failure at all things. Singularian infrastructure simply had no place for the symmetric one, and it simply didn’t make sense economically to design new systems to cater to him because he was the only known historical case of such peculiar defections. Many warm hearted Singularians had worked tirelessly for great deals of time to find a place for him, but in the end, no one could figure out how it could be done. The symmetric one would end up living the majority of his life as a beggar on street corners. So it happened one day, despite all the attempts to keep such a cross from occurring, that a sharp young Singularian gallivanted up to the symmetric one in a fashion later considered quite graceful by other Singularians.
“There is, on the next corner over,” rattled the Singularain, “a fellow who like you has been quite unsuccessful, he now spends his days begging for change, just as you do.”
“I see.” Replied the symmetric one, already wary of the direction this conversation was taking.
“Do you know why he must beg?”
“No, why must he?”
“I’m afraid, you see, that he has fallen on the most difficult of times. He has been quite unfortunate with work all his life and is now deeply depressed over it, but there is more to it than that, you see he has no living family now, and as his depression grew over time he lost contact with all of his friends. Now he has no one who would help him, and since his affliction is so vague and circumstantial in nature it seems that he has fallen through the cracks of society, beyond the reach of any organization that might be otherwise be able to help him.”
“I see.”
“But do you know why you must beg on this corner?”
“Because I am different.” Said the symmetric one, and although he knew this was the proper answer, it was evident that he regretted knowing it. In truth, he had come to this conclusion years ago on his own. If the symmetric one had gotten out of reach of societies help, it was because he had been deliberately put there.
“I see, someone must have already explained it to you.”
“No, I think rather that I have figured it out for myself over my many years of begging and being so unsuccessful.”
“Oh?”
“As far as I can tell it is because of my defects of excess. I was born with too much of everything it seems. I require twice as many resources to survive as any one like you does, yet I have only ever been able to be as productive as any single individual. No menial labor position can properly sustain me, and similarly, no higher paying position will ever be available to me because of my grotesque appearance. In all honesty, it is somewhat a miracle that I have survived to this day, but the people of this city are incredibly generous; still let me assure you that not a day goes by in which I don’t wish that I was a functional member of society.” Explained the symmetric one.
“And yet you are not unintelligent,” commented the Singularian, “it truly is a pity that you were born into such circumstances. When I first saw you, I had planned to ridicule you, but now I am touched. Please take this money.” So left the Singularian, quite somber, and truly changed for life. The Symmetric one only laughed quietly to himself. If I told you just how rich he had become of the pity of the Singularians, you would almost certainly try to find a way to their realm yourself, and that would be incredibly foolish of you.
“There is, on the next corner over,” rattled the Singularain, “a fellow who like you has been quite unsuccessful, he now spends his days begging for change, just as you do.”
“I see.” Replied the symmetric one, already wary of the direction this conversation was taking.
“Do you know why he must beg?”
“No, why must he?”
“I’m afraid, you see, that he has fallen on the most difficult of times. He has been quite unfortunate with work all his life and is now deeply depressed over it, but there is more to it than that, you see he has no living family now, and as his depression grew over time he lost contact with all of his friends. Now he has no one who would help him, and since his affliction is so vague and circumstantial in nature it seems that he has fallen through the cracks of society, beyond the reach of any organization that might be otherwise be able to help him.”
“I see.”
“But do you know why you must beg on this corner?”
“Because I am different.” Said the symmetric one, and although he knew this was the proper answer, it was evident that he regretted knowing it. In truth, he had come to this conclusion years ago on his own. If the symmetric one had gotten out of reach of societies help, it was because he had been deliberately put there.
“I see, someone must have already explained it to you.”
“No, I think rather that I have figured it out for myself over my many years of begging and being so unsuccessful.”
“Oh?”
“As far as I can tell it is because of my defects of excess. I was born with too much of everything it seems. I require twice as many resources to survive as any one like you does, yet I have only ever been able to be as productive as any single individual. No menial labor position can properly sustain me, and similarly, no higher paying position will ever be available to me because of my grotesque appearance. In all honesty, it is somewhat a miracle that I have survived to this day, but the people of this city are incredibly generous; still let me assure you that not a day goes by in which I don’t wish that I was a functional member of society.” Explained the symmetric one.
“And yet you are not unintelligent,” commented the Singularian, “it truly is a pity that you were born into such circumstances. When I first saw you, I had planned to ridicule you, but now I am touched. Please take this money.” So left the Singularian, quite somber, and truly changed for life. The Symmetric one only laughed quietly to himself. If I told you just how rich he had become of the pity of the Singularians, you would almost certainly try to find a way to their realm yourself, and that would be incredibly foolish of you.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
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