Name Your Nameless Gifts

...seeing through language, seeing beyond it.

Photo: Cliff Scholz

I’ve used this example before, but it’s a handy illustration of a principle in linguistics: We’ll often hear about how the native peoples of far northern latitudes have so many words for “snow”. I guess when variations in the quality of snow can make the difference between, for example, making it safely back to camp after a hunting expedition or freezing to death on the tundra, it makes sense to pay attention to something like that. Language can make a difference in this situation. Language helps to make things visible. Language can help codify relevant distinctions. One could even say that language makes “things” out of things.

You wanna make a big thing outa’ this?

Language has that capacity.

Being social creatures, we will tend to go along with that. If a lot of people seem to be making a big thing out of some aspect of our reality — that is, talking about it — given our long history as a species living on the edge of annihilation, we are pretty much hard-wired to assume that whatever they are talking about is indeed a “thing”.

As children, what is and is not a “thing” gets imprinted into our brains as we acquire language. Interestingly, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a thing on the scale of knowing for example a poisonous fruit from one that will keep you alive. It could be the length of a skirt that’s a big thing, or make of a car. Doesn’t matter. As a child, if it’s a “thing" to those around us, people we rely on to survive, well then, as little humans we will assume that yes, it’s a “thing”. Again, just because people are talking about it.

Such socially reinforced connections get encoded in our neurology. Conversely, if people seem not to be talking about things, we generally tend to ignore those aspects of reality as our socialization progresses. Along the way, the neurons that don’t get reinforced periodically die off, and their connections — these could be perceptions of reality, or even worlds — tend to vanish along with them.

At some point, of course, we become more or less fully “socialized” individuals. Depending on our culture, we will be people who either see dozens of kinds of snow or who disregard such distinctions as irrelevant, perhaps putting more attention on things like what Hollywood actors say and do, or how much things cost, or who leads the American League in RBIs.

Next thing you know, toddlers are staring at handheld devices. They see people interacting with these objects, talking about them, talking into them, placing enormous emotional energy on them. Children just want to fit into their worlds. Even if it messes them up. Even if these things were designed to mess them up.

We’ve all gone through this cultural hazing process. And I call it “hazing” because much like in a fraternity hazing, we sacrifice a portion of our individuality, and the payoff is belonging in a group. Big pieces of ourselves get ignored and eventually wiped out just so we can fit in. Fit in, though, to what? Looks to me like what we are really asking of people at this point in history is to fit into societies that are increasingly homogenous in their dysfunction, with fewer and fewer practical alternatives to conforming with their mandatory madnesses. Meanwhile — and I can’t help but wonder if this was also by design — whole alternative worlds become invisible to us, simply because, biologically, given the nature of our species, it seems to us that it is in our best interests to inhabit a shared reality, even if it’s a warped, dehumanizing, mutated or progressively delusional one.

So by now you may be catching a glimmer of why this could present a problem. I think this is part of the reason why as a culture we are now speeding past so many WRONG WAY and DO NOT ENTER signs that lately it seems we are literally navigating forward by inverting their intended messages.

Wrong way?

Let’s go that way!

Do Not Enter?

Allllrighty then! Let’s do it!

Ah, but the signs are, for many and perhaps still for most, invisible. And (as everyone in my generation has heard a thousand times) the freaks are crying.

Freaks like me, for example, perhaps. Is it simply an innate resistance to socialization in the vein of “shut-up-the-emperor-is-wearing-clothes-everybody-sees-that-and-you-better-admire-them”? Or is it inadequate synaptic pruning that leaves a little more of some folks’ original grey matter intact? Or is it more about the rewiring of what’s left?

Honestly, I don’t know.

Good news is, there’s a mitigating force to social conditioning and synaptic pruning, and it’s the human capacity for lifelong neuroplasticity. And yes, it’s true, neuroplasticity has long been mercilessly exploited to promote broad public acceptance and the fast-tracking of heinous atrocity, gross malfeasance, and the advancement and promotion of profoundly degenerative social impulses — aka, in its most recent iteration: “the new normal”.  But by the same token, our neuroplasticity also holds the promise of moving things in a more positive direction. I mean, if we can’t change our minds, we probably can’t change much of anything. On the other hand, if we can change our minds…well, the sky’s the limit.

This is why for years I’ve been suggesting: Name your nameless gifts.

My sense is that each of us carries much-needed gifts that often remain nameless and thus invisible and uncelebrated in our culture. Remember, there are kinds of snow that most people reading this probably do not distinguish simply because we have no names for them. I suggest that may also be true of some of the things that make us capable of living our best lives and making our highest contributions. In fact, it seems logical me that these gifts are most needed precisely because they are nameless, or because the words we do have that might apply to them have been eroded, diminished or inverted in their meaning. For example: Are you expressing kindness? Then in certain circles, that makes you a sap. Are you capable of generous, intuitive giving? That kind of thing might put you into the category of “hopeless idealist.”

Such redefinitions matter, and they often happen on a completely subconscious level. Thing is, as I have written about elsewhere, despite the fact that the world of the unnamed vastly exceeds the extent of the named world, most people choose to inhabit a consciousness bounded by the naming of things.

The drawbacks of this approach seem obvious to me, but what can I do? I am, among other things, a “writer”. That’s the label. And I have to laugh. People who don’t write think they know what that means, in part because they have a word for it, a label, in part because they might if asked be able to transcribe a bit of language into written form themselves. The idea that I and others engaged in writing are doing something really, really weird — like using language to point to something wordless, and even at times using language to disassemble itself — doesn’t seem to occur to most people. Funny thing is, in general what I’m trying to articulate in my writings is invisible, of course. That’s what makes it worth writing about. But naturally, one of the risks of discussing that which is invisible is that one can end up becoming invisible one’s self. One of the other risks is that in making something visible, others who want certain things to remain invisible will try to prevent that from happening. They might try to silence us.

We’ll know the we are on the short and inglorious train ride to hell when not only journalists and commentators but also poets, novelists and comedians start getting deplatformed, fired, jailed, spectacularly murdered and so on.

Fortunately for my purposes here, the zone of increasingly regulated speech does not yet seem to include discussions about language itself. Well, that’s not quite true: I read recently about a university professor who was prohibited from doing so.

All aboard!

Anyway, at this point it’s generally possible to talk about the way that important things can go unarticulated or become harder to see due to a lack of discussion or the loss of words or word meanings, and then, as a result, fall into a zone of social invisibility. Even farther out on the fringe (and probably safer from official scrutiny) is the idea that perhaps some of the most important of invisible things to pay attention to and start mapping into our conscious minds may be the things happening right now in the interstices, cracks and gaps of very own, moment-to-moment experience. This is the part of this essay people are most likely to forget later, because what I’m saying or at least trying to say here is so utterly strange and foreign. I’m suggesting that we prioritize the recovery of the kinds of attention and ability to pay attention to stuff that we used to have as children. Note how much of our childhoods we typically forget. I think, though, that many of those kinds of perceptions are still present as echoes and vestiges. If true, this means that in a way we haven’t just forgotten our childhoods in the past, we are continuously forgetting these world-opening perceptions, moment by moment. In the present tense, we skip over these levels of experience at least in part because we’re conditioned to do so. I also think that this is, at least in part, reversible, and that if we can see things differently, we can move forward in a way that may work better. Still, there is little social recognition or reinforcement for such an activity. Once again, what doesn’t get talked about doesn’t exist.

I suspect, however, that such label-resistant feelings, experiences and perceptions, and likewise unlabeled states of being and associated human capacities, are the very things we most need to explore right now. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes about the function of the shaman in traditional societies. In these societies, he says such people are understood to be necessary and indeed revered precisely because they have a demonstrated resistance to social homogenization. In John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk describes a horrible fever that he had as a child that left him changed. I can only wonder, had he not had that experience, if Black Elk’s gifts would have been lost to history. Gains of this kind can sometimes be fraught with risk.

However, as mediators between their people and the great, wild, cosmic unknown, such individuals may be able to help course-correct a society that is drifting toward catastrophe in its collective, socially induced trance, as societies are wont to do. Abram points out that shamans typically live on the fringe, beyond the outskirts of their villages. This seems entirely plausible to me. Undoubtedly this is a practical arrangement, but it’s also a metaphor.

I’m thinking, probably, it’s best for more of us to get out on the fringe in whatever ways feel  appropriate and practical. That’s where our nameless gifts will be found.