Friday afternoon mindstream..

Sometimes I just let my thoughts flow, without trying too hard to contain them - just go with it and see what happens. Like this:

My youngest daughter can't entirely read yet. So she has this oral she needs to do at school, but obviously can't just use crib notes. The solution: I drew some little pictures - icons - for her to remember the various sections of her talk. Bushbabies live in trees - so I drew a tree with a house on it. Bushbabies are bluish grey but the South African version is slightly yellow - I drew my version of a bushbaby eating custard. Isabelle loves custard - so despite the picture looking more like a stick man, with a tail, holding a square over a circle (instant custard being poured into a bowl) she remembered it. And for the bluish grey - I drew a cloud. Within a few minutes we had memorized the whole thing and she got it right first time.

This got me thinking about language - and hieroglyphics and other symbol based systems of writing. We tend to see writing as a contained unit. I give you a book and that's pretty much it - you read it and you're expected to get it all from the words used. Or like reading what I'm writing here. I sort-of expect you to understand what I'm getting at without having too much context.

But perhaps it all started differently. What if writing wasn't so much to contain a message, but the symbols were used to remind the 'reader' of a story they already had heard. That the symbols and the culture went together - like maps to a 'file' that contained that knowledge.

But I guess that's what words do as well, or names of people, animals, things. Each word, each phrase triggering a memory.

So I did some research to find out the origin of language - and got everything from theories about the tower of Babel and language supposedly being proof of a higher power, to whole lot of other stuff that you only find on the www. But the one thing that triggered a thought, as words tend to do, was the recursive nature of language, which led me to think about the word 'word'. We have a word for 'word', a word used to describe itself, which reminded me of an old friend who used to say 'Words don't have meaning, meaning has words'.

But there's another lesson in here - that the mind is full of words that take up so much space and time, full of meanings and memories and perhaps all this stuff is there because if it wasn't, then maybe there wouldn't be any meaning at all. And perhaps this is the truth of truths - that, as a very wise man once said, what we need isn't meaning, but an experience of being truly alive. And if, every now and again, we don't allow all these words to get in the way, that might just happen. So now is a good time to stop this flow of words and go and enjoy the weekend....