A reconsideration of Wittgenstein’s “Family Resemblances” and “Language Games.”

What baffled Wittgenstein was his inability to define “games,” a simple concept, easily understood, but which defies the impulse of the dictionary. I have no interest in defining games. But I am very interested in his bafflement. There’s nothing special about a word that cannot be defined. What would be interesting would be a word that can be defined. What’s fascinating is the fact that anyone ever thought up the concept of dictionary, which is the legacy of Platonism, which got everything backwards. How much of history and philosophy and just thinking has been confused by the idea that meaning is something that words have rather than something, as every poet knows, that we use words to produce: always in time, at a moment in history. The moment stretches and changes through memory and writing (which is any form of recording) forward (Shakespeare would have said “backward”) into time. But meaning only ever exists at a moment, the moment of saying, the moment of hearing (writing/reading). We want to be as precise as possible, but not based on the meaning of the word, based rather on the history of the use of the word—the contexts in which it has been used to create meaning. The presupposition that meaning exists always already “out there,” and that our job is to find it, inscribe it, and pass it on is a metaphor less accurate and less useful than the metaphor deployed here, that words are used to inscribe meanings available but never yet accessed in language, by novel combinations of words. What is “out there” is the pressure of “being” at this moment on the writer (thankfully, me) to reassemble the words to settle for now the image whose formulation is functional, which makes our present make better sense. Since words like “game” (and all other words, those that obviously defy definition—poetry and history and love and nation and person and on and on—and those that we think do not) mean only in moments, then all uses are stipulative. And so in a moment of use “game” have have all the precision of the number “2”’ and “2” all the vagueness of the concept “nice.” And what’s surprising is that it is surprising. 

The Paradox of Memory

Memory is fallible.

Every time you access a memory you change it.

To retain a memory you must access it often.

The more vividly you remember a long-ago event the less accurate that memory is.

The passion then that became your being is therefore now more metaphor than substance.
True only as metaphors are true.

If the goal is an accurate account of an event, recording works best. You can put it down just then and put it away and never think about it--until, years later, you stumble upon your image of this forgotten time and read it like a story, one you feel you may have read before, recalling each line as it emerges, unable to anticipate what’s next, as though the account you are reading is of something that happened to someone else.

Which it is.

It is always the destiny of history to be resurrected

as story. 

Murphy's Law and Gun Control

I don’t know the origin of Murphy’s law. I suppose the origin is only a google away, but it doesn’t matter. The law itself states, as we all know, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” with a sometimes corollary, “at the worst possible time.” The corollary is clearly a late add-on, intended to intensify the perceived cynical joke that is the heart of the law. But the law itself, though comically formulated, is in fact a law. Better stated, “Anything that can happen, will happen, given enough time.” It explains why intelligent life showed up in the universe despite the extraordinary chances against it (by the reckoning of some). The universe is that big and that old and given certain conditions it is possible. It tells us also, then, that even if we were to eliminate all causes of death except one—let’s say car accidents—then eventually everyone will die in a car accident. Much could be accomplished if we were to simply keep Murphy’s law more prominently in mind when we do such things as build nuclear power plants and put in place ample safeguards to insure against meltdown. There are not enough safeguards in the universe to insure against meltdown. Or when we argue about gun control: no law (as the right wing always reminds us) will prevent random slaughter. Or when we put locks on houses: no lock will prevent unwanted access. Safeguards and locks and laws are all means of reducing chances, lowering percentages.  That doesn’t mean they are useless.

More on Time and Language and Borges and Nietzsche

Borges’ “New Refutation of Time,” and Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return,” rest on the same thing (for “thing” we could read “fact” or “error”): that the world of language has no way of conceptualizing the world of experience that can fit into itself (that can “comprehend”) time. Our system of concepts as well as our vocabulary is too poor. We simply cannot say what we intuit regarding time in an irrefutable fashion.

A close look at Borges’ essay reveals how tricky the problem is: is it according to experienced that time exists or according to intellection? Experience tells us both that time exists and that time does not exist. Borges walks down the streets around his old neighborhood. One moment succeeds another. He stops at a wall,

I kept looking at this simplicity. I thought…: This is the same as thirty years ago… Perhaps a bird was singing and for it I felt a tiny affection, the same size as the bird; but the most certain thing was that in this now vertiginous silence there was no other sound than the intemporal one of the crickets. The easy thought ‘I am in the eighteen-nineties’ cased to be a few approximate words and was deepened into a reality. I felt dead, I felt as an abstract spectator of the word; an indefinite fear…. I did not fear that I had returned upstream on the supposed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I was the possessor of a reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity.

It is the same thing expressed by Keats, “Thou wast not born for death immortal bird.” Borges also experiences this eternity, as do we all, he tells us, in music and other “human moments,” such as suffering and pleasure, moments repeated exactly from one person to another, moments, we might add (contra Bakhtin) that are the basis for art and language, when identity fades and different experiences lose their difference.

Time is experienced as successive and eternal, as existing and as not existing. In language it is posited as the only explanation for phenomena and yet it is uncapturable, inexpressible. It must be posited because it cannot be shown to exist at all. (To call it “self-evident” is to say the same thing in a disingenuous way, trying to erase the very problem—not visible to language.) Time’s existence and time’s nonexistence are both part of both language and experience, but as four nonoverlapping circles.

This cannot imply that our experience is true and our intelligence is false. But it does mean that we have to choose which to accept before we can choose how to respond. (How could one stay neutral here?) Let’s choose, provisionally, momentarily, experience over language not for no reason, but only because it’s more interesting to do so. It leaves us more to say.

This problem of the inadequacy of language to its presumed object is of course not limited to the comprehension of time. This inadequacy of language to match experience (subjectivity) or the world (objectivity) accounts for the whole being and frustration of philosophy as well as literature. It’s demonstrable, for example, of the infamous cogito, the so-called foundational statement of modern philosophy. The statement itself has become ragged for all the darts tossed at it: I think, therefore I am. In its favor, it functions as well as statement can to capture the experience of being. But it does not make logical sense—it fails in terms of language. So here’s the point: contradiction is the sine qua non of statement. Go back through these very paragraphs and graph the contradictions.

In his “New Refutation,” Borges makes the marvelous statement that night pleases because it “suppresses idle details, just as memory does.” Reading—in fact any comprehension of language—requires darkness as well as light. All coherence, all meaning, is washed out if the reader comprehends the full scope of every word. Every word is a potential metonymy. And every statement is a riddle of contradictions that must be ignored for the reception of the thread meaning that runs through it under the fabric of noise. All understanding requires the good faith and hard work of the receiving brain. 

Tomorrow was Christmas

Tomorrow was Chirstmas said Mr. Escher yesterday there will be snow.

Ambaguam, Beginning at the End

Ambaguam, Beginning at the End

He's not human.

My Dearest John

Please,

stop loving me.

It’s distracting.

Oh, I’m not saying you don’t do an admirable job smiling and chatting

and walking nonchalantly away,

but that smile and that catch in your chat

and those eyes that affix my eyes

so I can’t duck or nod or turn

my head. I want to spend a night in bed

without this stone in my chest.

Is that too much to ask?

I want to walk outdoors on a cool spring morning and feel the world’s effervescence

without howling.

Stop reminding me about Paris. Stop asking

if I’m okay. (I’m not, okay?) Stop telling me you have a free hour

every Thursday after lunch.

Stop running past my window

in your cleverly reflective running shorts

and matching shoes. I’m here,

but I won’t tell you.

Dear John, somewhere

someone has days

she can’t get through

because of what she thinks when she thinks

of you. Dear John,

I don’t care that the past can never be put away,

That what it will have been is always yet to be determined.

I do not care.

This has to end.

Love,

Jane