Then last night, I came across this quote in the closing paragraphs of the essay “The Wall and The Books” by Jorge Luis Borges:

Generalizing from the preceding case, we could infer that *all* forms have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural “content.” This would concord with the thesis of Benedetto Croce; already Pater in 1877 had affirmed that all arts aspire to the state of music, which is pure form. Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.

The only reason I even opened that book last night — rather than next week or next month — is because it is overdue at the library, and I’m rushing through select essays. Weird.

Even though I’ve been a musician for a long time, I don’t know if I think sound is any purer than abstract visual information, or other senses. And I sometimes wonder if sound and light are thought to be richest in information because so much art focuses on hearing and sight. Taste is a sense well-catered to by the culinary arts. Could we imagine art forms in which smell or touch alone trigger the same range of emotional response as music or film or words ? On a personal level, I can think of ways, but on a broader, one-to-many scale, I’m not sure.

I have always been partial to songs without verbal meaning: the Vonlenska/Hopelandic of Sigur Rós, Lisa Gerrard, Liz Frazier of the Cocteau Twins, and their precedents in Luciano Berio and György Ligeti, who used phonemes from the International Phonetic Alphabet where more traditional composers would have used poetry, libretti or liturgical texts. There is definitely something in our minds that yearns for this wordless realm.

An excellent insight to bring the surrealists into this discussion. I’m going to have to really digest that and integrate it into some of the follow-up posts. Looking at surrealist/sound/Dada poetry on the page has often left me cold, but artists like Christian Bök have reminded me that this was work which was meant to be heard. Check out his performance of Hugo Ball a couple minutes into this episode of the Poetry of the Shelf podcast: Stop Making Sense

Bök is a particularly evocative practitioner, and really brings out that liturgical aspect of Ball’s work.

Well, I better stop, before this comment turns into a post.

Thank you, as always, Zoe! You’ve given me a lot to think about.

I’ve always been fascinated by exploring these questions, because although I consider myself a writer and lover of literature/writing, I also recognize that the spoken/written word is not the end all be all.

I wrote my thesis on surrealist poetry, and it was extremely interesting to study how the surrealists tried to “unleash” the unconscious using all sorts of exercises, games, and writing strategies — “automatic writing” for example. There was this constant question of how to give legitimacy and light to these ideas and experiences before they were “tainted” by the conscious mind. I read a lot of Julia Kristeva’s work as a lens through which to view surrealism; she proposes that poetry comes from the “semiotic chora” — energies and drives that are an expression of the unsignifiable.

I don’t remember who said it, but I believe it was a writer who said that all arts aspire toward music — it has the quality you alluded to, of accessing that unconscious in a pure, incomprehensible way. I think honoring this “other” system of thought — or whatever we can call it! — is undeniably important for the human experience.
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Great points about shared memory and meaning.

“Cook ’til done” is an interesting example. It could be translated into specifics, e.g. at 375F for 29 minutes, but that will yield varying results: overdone in one oven, still too raw in another. Such a vague instruction seems like a purposeful ambiguity, a reminder to adapt to local conditions. It’s a goal, rather than a technique, and the details are left to the reader.

A word like ‘cumin’ points to a specific plant, and in the context of a kitchen, a very specific use of that plant. Even though the name changes in different languages, it can be translated easily. But while the definition is clear, the way it connects to each of our own pasts will vary: maybe it smells like that great restaurant where we used to hang out in high school, or the barely-edible chili our friend makes with way too much cumin.

With a word like ‘done’, there’s a shared sense of ‘ready to eat’ but a local meaning, an individual definition, as well: some people like their Brussells Sprouts al dente, while others want them fork-soft.

To use such a word is a kind of half-translation on the part of the writer. The rest of the translation (i.e. done = al dente) happens in the mind of the reader. Which is kind of where I’m going with it in a subsequent post.

In this case, taste/mouth feel/aroma would be the most precise form of communication, I suppose. But which came closer, the description or the photo?

I am leaning toward relying on context and on past experience, on common knowledge, on known quantities, on shared touchstones to pull the communicated meaning into focus. In other words, a shared vocabulary. This could be words, pix, music, touch, taste, smell … ideas.

What if all you had to say was, “just like mom used to make them”? What that could communicate would depend on whther you were speaking to a family member who shared your memory, or to a stranger. And would you communicate the idea of a specific recipe prepared in a particular way, or would it be the idea of comfort food — or possibly something akin to the code at my house relating a certain cook’s home made soup and dishwater….

I do know that idioms reflect a sensibility, and they vary from language to language in colorful ways. But whether the expression came first or the thought pattern/cultural imprint, I don’t know! And yet, they do inform our way of seeing/interpreting/relating to/defining/sharing the world around us.

I suspect this is related to the power of metaphor.

Just muddying it up, no clarity from me. Enjoying the pondering.

I wonder if ideas have a native medium? What you paint might be an idea that would lose some of its nuance and force if translated to words, and then back to image again. A director with even a modest film in mind can’t just go make it, and woo actors and financing on that basis, but must first create the script as an approximation of the idea, and then use that script as a vehicle for gaining interest in realizing the actual film.

I’m glad you brought an historical perspective into this. When I first read through the Federalist Papers I was struck by the casual use of historical references such as the Amphictyonic League. That such references were chosen to make their arguments, rather than an example involving a local merchant or farming community, says much about the expectations they had of their audience. (As well as the context they wanted to create for the Constitution.) Without a classical education and/or Wikipedia, that section might as well be in Greek for many readers — including me. Perspicuity, indeed!

I’ll be exploring some of this in a future post.

Thanks for your comment!

James Madison has something to say on the subject in Federalist 37 when talking about the difficulty in writing the Constitution..when they had the ‘idea’ framed, but not the words:
“The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity, therefore, requires not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriate to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words or phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas. ”
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