A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Sixty-Six

Yesterday, I attempted to explain some of the higher level thinking about language that I have been pursuing.  The general take-away from that is the idea that language is the tool that organizes conscious experience, and that our interactions with language can create changes which will impact that mediation.  This is, at one time, quite obvious, but I think that obviousness is often based in misunderstanding.  I am not here talking about the interpretation and extraction of specific meaning from language, at least not that alone, but aspects of how language is structured that impact specific processes for a reader.  If I ask you a question, what is it that happens inside your mind?  How does the insertion of those questions here impact your reading experience?  The fact that you are being required to think in a linguistic way yourself is an interruption, and if I were not making you consider it, would you?  This is a small thing, but the point I am making is that when we use language, it is the creation of mental experience, not just the communication of information.  If I describe an object with sensory detail, engage you with the smell of a match just after it has been struck, the feeling in the nostril that comes with that, the flaring, the sensation of those tiny nasal hairs as they are tickled by it.  That is the drawing of an image, but it is the elicitation of specific sensory details from memory, is pulling resources and experiences into consciousness that were not their.  Now, this is all outside the meaning itself.  The same information can be contained and shared within different modes, using techniques to include or exclude specific types of language or detail, and in so doing, the reader is led into various mental experiences.  Questions will elicit a certain mental activity, description can connect the senses or emotions, even ones that are not mentioned in the content.

A reader is always running the words through their mind, and that is the same, in a large way, as thinking with the conscious mind.  It is a voice in the head saying the words, and when those words enter, we respond to them in certain ways.  That is not to say that we agree with whatever we read, or that we always respond in one way or another, but if I mention the color blue, you can only understand the word by thinking of that color.  That is, language works outside of conscious awareness, triggers a meaning before the meaning is considered.  As such, the writer is being given a huge amount of access to a reader's experiences.  When I consider this, it makes me believe that we have barely even scratched the surface on what is possible within literary art.

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