Bear with me a little, while I play
at philosophy.
What is a word?
You can say that a word is a sound.
But there are lots of sounds that are not words. What makes a sound into a
word?
The sound has to be shared by other
human beings.
“Shared.” What does that mean?
You say a word: “hello.” I hear the
sound. I know what that sound means. When I hear that sound, I locate it in the
midst of a story.
A story is a sequence of memories
in my brain. When I hear “hello” I think of other times when I heard that
sound. The experience of the sound was followed by other events that are
somewhat similar to each other. I remember people smiling, maybe shaking my
hand. Each such memory is a story, a script for things that happen.
But what is the word itself? It is
not just my memory, because I cannot create a word on my own. A word has
to be created by a community of some kind. The word is not the sound
that the community hears, because in the midst of a different group of people,
for example, people speaking a different language, the sound would be
meaningless. The word is somehow “out there,” floating above the people making
the sound.
They say that the sounds that a
bird makes has meaning to other birds of that species. There is one song for
warning, another for mating, and still another for just celebrating the morning
(I think of what I used to call “the morning song of the robin”).
I once used a textbook in social
psychology that claimed that without words, we cannot think. When the portion
of the brain that processes language is damaged, for example, by a stroke, we
literally cannot think. We cannot remember.
My father had a stroke. The last
months of his life he sat by his living room window looking out. When I came
into the room he would brighten up. The textbook would say that when I was not
in the room, he literally could not think of me. His brain was processing his
immediate experiences, but nothing beyond the immediate experience.
A word is an event that has no
weight. It cannot be measured. It can be observed only when people are using
it, but it ceases to exist when people are not using it, except that the memory
of it is lodged in the people’s brains. But their memory is not the word
itself. Their memory is of a sound linked to a story. The memory would have no
meaning unless the experience of the sound had been shared by others, who have
linked it to similar stories.
A word is an interpersonal event.
It cannot be observed or measured, except in its effects. That sounds to me
very much like what the ancients called a “spirit.” A word is literally
spiritual.
They say you cannot observe or
measure a soul. You cannot observe or measure a word either.
There is a spirit world that we
live in the midst of, a world of words and stories.
I like to think of an evil spirit
as a bad story, and an angel as a good story.
Let me describe an experience I
recently had.
I wear two hearing aids, each one
worth $1300. I was walking down by the Mississippi River. The day was very
windy, and I began to worry that the wind could catch one of the hearing aids
and flip it out of my ear without my realizing it. So I took out the hearing
aids and put them into my left pocket.
I thought I put them into my left
pocket. I did not. After about a half hour of walking, I returned to the car
and got out the hearing aids to put them back in. There was only one hearing
aid in my pocket. I searched the car, over and over again. I felt in my
pockets, and began to panic. $1300. Finally in despair I decided there was
nothing else I could do except to go home, and maybe look in the car with
different lighting, although there was nothing wrong with the lighting where I
was.
My companion insisted on trying to
retrace our steps, to see if I had dropped it somewhere along the way. She went
one way, so I decided, with no hope at all of success, to go the other way. I
had not gone more than ten steps, when I saw the hearing aid, lying on the pavement
in the street about a foot from the curb. I could not believe it. How had it
escaped being run over by a car? It had to have lain there for at least a half
hour.
That whole event was as close to a
miracle as I have ever experienced. It would be very easy for me to tell the
story that an angel had saved the hearing aid and pointed me to it at the right
time.
It is that kind of experience that
causes people to talk about angels.
I have heard stories of people,
especially young people, who suddenly go “off the deep end.” They seem to
become someone else. They start doing things they would never otherwise do,
sometimes very destructive things. I speculate that an evil story has entered
their head. A “demon.” (The original meaning of the word “demon,” in Greek,
meant some kind of force that took over a person or a situation. The force
could be good or bad--an angel or a devil.)
We very easily turn physical
objects into persons. We personify a car. I think of the way World War II
pilots named their airplanes after women. The plane that dropped the first
atomic bomb over Hiroshima was called the “Enola Gay,” the name of the mother
of the pilot.
As a child, I got my first
introduction to electronics from a book called Electronics for Young People.
It personified electrons as little people, moving about in wires and vacuum
tubes. That allowed me to visualize what was happening.
I have come a long way from “words.”
I guess what I am saying is that a word is a spiritual event, one that cannot
be measured or observed in itself. But once you start analyzing the experiences
that give rise to words like “angels” and “devils,” the experiences do not seem
so unbelievable.
We are learning that each of us is
bathed, inside and out, in microbes, our “bionic” environment. We are also
bathed in spiritual realities, inside and out. We are bathed in words.
