This morning like most mornings, after getting up and taking care of the basic life-functions, I kicked up into a handstand.
Some days I hold the position for balance as long as I can. Other days I knock out a few pushups.
I don’t yet have the skill to do both at the same time. I can either do an unsupported hold, briefly and sort-of, in the top position, or I keep a toe on the wall for balance with a few pushups.
The handstand is as much about learning how to move and position yourself is it is brute strength to control your own weight.
As I kicked into position, I heard the dreaded jingle-jingle-jingle heading in my direction.
This morning like most mornings, there was a cat in my face while I was upside down.
For some reason my being upside-down bothers him. When he hears me kick into position, I’ll hear the bell on his collar jingling a-frenzy as he sprints over to rub his nose and tail over my inverted face.
This is great fun while trying to concentrate on a fairly difficult posture.
I can’t figure what exactly troubles him about this, but it does. Even when I don’t get cat in the face, I get the Samuel L. Jackson attack-eyes from across the room.
Abnormal always attracts attention.
I got to chewing on that idea while reading an article the other day about how we might communicate with intelligent alien life-forms, should we ever discover any.
In that article was this old gem:
“We often forget that language determines how one views the world.”
Does it now?
In the “For” camp:
Native speakers of Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, or Farsi live with their own figures, metaphors, analogies, and concepts different from the word-maps of Anglo-derived lingo.
The way we interact with each other, with the world around us, and with ourselves inside our own inner realities, depends to a great degree on the words, ideas, and assertions we can draw on in our attempts to make sense of these goings-on.
What you notice, and what you don’t, are functions of the words available to you. A trained field botanist could take me on a guided tour of a meadow and open up a whole world I never knew was right in front of me. He knows all the secret names I never learned.
Now figure you’ve got a creature from a different species, a different environment, and a totally different ancestry with nothing in common to Earth life. Assuming they speak or think in concepts even roughly as we do, which is a huge “if”, you figure they’ll have much to communicate that we could understand and vice-versa?
The fact that we know and use language at all already separates us from the rest of nature. What an alien mind could be like, that’s the open question.
In the “Against” camp:
I can’t speak for you, but I’ve got a body. That body has needs that require me to take certain actions to keep it alive and healthy.
Those needs and actions involve me with a reality full of stuff that I can’t fully understand or see clearly, much less bring under the control of my will. Some of these are physical objects. Some of them are people. Nature overflows with vast and often terrifying powers that we understand poorly if at all.
The way we’re built, with our five or seven senses and a brain and nervous system, sets the terms for a great deal of what we can experience and can’t.
Reality is gonna do what it’s gonna do no matter what names I call it.
The verdict?
We put the words there, but the words are our responses to what we encounter.
Using words is how human beings attempt to create a sense of normality out of lives that are anything but normal.
I stress attempt. This sense-making project is on-going, life-long, and through shared learning of culture, it reaches beyond any individual life. We never really succeed at it. There’s always more reality than we have words to talk about it.
But we are easily fooled to believing we’ve got it all figured.
Language is our blessing and our burden.
My bet is that if we find aliens it will be more H.P. Lovecraft than The Galactic Federation of Nice Aliens.
The egg-heads who are in love with what they already know are unlikely to even recognize them as intelligent. You can’t deal with the shocking and unexpected from a place of knowing it all.
What’s more interesting is the alien abnormality already right here. Ordinary life already overflows with the strange and weird and anomalous, and I don’t mean cats in the face while you’re upside down.
What you call ordinary waking consciousness is already a restriction of experience.
Many people around you are not fluent in languages to understand themselves.
This is supposed to be about working-out and physical development, I guess, so let’s hook that in to how difficult a time people have with basic movement.
We’re seeing PSAs reminding people to stand up and take a steps every few hours. When I was PT-ing, one of the major red flags came in the form of clients who did not know how to do basic movements like a push-up or unweighted squat.
Folks out there having Holy Wars about nutrition, which is one of the simplest things to get right.
And that’s not half of it. For much of my life I never knew how to “speak the languages” of my own mind and self, and I suffered mightily from that ignorance. It was never taught to me. Nobody ever brought it up as something to know, probably because they didn’t know or care either, which isn’t so helpful when your unhealthy mind is falling apart on you.
Anyhow, making normal out of the abnormal with our words, that’s our game. Trick of it is, it’s the abnormal of John Carpenter’s The Thing more than E.T. You think you know what’s going on and then your co-worker explodes into a tentacle monster.
What you and I are is kinda frightening. Maybe not tentacle-monster frightening, but odd enough that most of us put it in the basement and try not to think about it.
Speaking of things I try not to think about:
I’m not much of a social media guy, but I find that Substack’s Notes are not terrible. There’s none of that mind-hijacking junk on the feed, and I almost always find a neat article or three to read with a five-minute scan.
I might be posting more short-form stuff like this on there. Or not. Either way if you want to give me a follow, useth thine link:
Use the link for Substack goodness
Matt Perryman