John Chorazy

Dr. Dew

ENG-550-X4341 Gr Studies English Language 14TW4

August 23, 2014

Why Speak? Why Use Words at All? Mentalese, the Poetic Mind, andthe Vernacular Mode

O body swayed to music, O quickening glance,How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?

- William Butler Yeats

If the mind/body problem is inherent to any philosophical

question asked regarding human nature, then it follows that

language – the vehicle of translation and transmission of human

thought from the mind through the body and into the world – can

be discussed and questioned in similar terms. From what source

and of what essence is language? We can argue that words in

general, or the signs created and used to interpret thought, are

what bridge the qualia of our existence to the living, material

world. Although the presentation of a non-material “thing” is

bound by a symbol which cannot be that thing, it seems certain

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that in the vast realm of human experience we are as sure of the

existence of the immaterial world as we are of the tactile and

concrete. Mathematics, an unyielding universal law, is a common

example; while “math” cannot be physically held or touched, it

can be demonstrated, represented, and employed as a principle.

And thus it is with thought; human language, and in particular

its oral transmission, expresses the phenomena of one’s inner

mental state. I will suggest herein that human language, which

is poetic in nature, is capable of rendering a metaphysical

experience of the non-lingual or pre-lingual essence of thought

known as “mentalese.” Furthermore, I will propose that words act

not merely as signs for mental representations, but are

utterances and events (gestures) implicitly tied to meanings

which, when collected in the grammar, style, and specialized

diction of poetry, often evade intellectual or logical

interpretation because, as sound, they hold natural meaning and

are irreducible.

The study of language and speech as a unique biological

system is appealing to a number of scientific fields. Recently, a

move away from the generative model to one that describes

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language as a “complex adaptive system” (Beckner et al.) has

allowed for further study into the human mind that creates,

modifies, and uses words for a variety of purposes. Systemized

speech, with its ever-changing lexicons and varieties, is one (if

not the most distinct) factor that separates us from other living

things. We are not merely higher order creatures who by chance

developed a nearly inexhaustible means of communication; we are

able to reason, solve problems, and create art through the power

of the spoken word. And beyond that, humans have used language

and its adaptations and evolutions as a means of developing

culture and interacting within and across communities. Moved by a

profound and uniquely human existential awareness, we are

compelled whether it be by sign or language to express and share

the innermost thoughts, ideas, and questions that course the

mind. We are provoked by our very nature to speak.

The basis then of all communication is the continual

transition of the mind “from Self to Other” (Valéry 95).

Existential notions such as love, peace, and happiness are not

material entities and must be transmuted into such (assuming

dualism or a type of epiphenomenalism). According to linguist

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Steven Pinker, the brain transforms the mentalese treatment of

these universals into lucid thoughts, changing abstract concepts

of collective ideals and principles into the ongoing dialogue of

the mind (Hickey). This occupation of the mind – the constant

processing of metaphor, the translation of the abstract into the

physical – is not the dialogue heard in one’s head, but is the

pre-lingual energy generated and gathered together by the brain

before speech. Arguing against a compositional meaning theory for

mentalese, Schiffer (2003) posits the question regarding the

language-of-thought-relation: “What relation must obtain between

a person and a potential language of thought in order for the

latter to be a language in which the former thinks?” (166). But

beyond the differing opinions on mentalese found in the works of

Schiffer and Fodor, however, I suggest that the brain does not

“think” in a discrete, distinguishable language at all – the

deliberations of “mentalese” are and remain pre-lingual. Thus the

arguments for compositionality when considering mental

representation seem in some ways moot; the argument herein

assumes the existence of pre-lingual processes and a process by

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which the human brain translates knowledge and experience from

thought to language.

At least some science is necessary for context in this

position. In his article “Poets vs. Critics: Different Brain

Systems”, Norman Holland explains some of the underlying

cognitive forces at work as the brain deals with language:

“Heilman mentions eight interconnected blocks, some referring to well-known and clearly defined brain regions and systems, others to geography less certain. He mentions, obviously, the auditory cortex (Heschl's gyrus) that somehow--no one knows how--breaks the incoming sounds into phonemes. Then there is a "phonologicalinput lexicon," corresponding to Wernicke's area, that "remembers" the sounds of various words. There is a motor systemthat makes the sounds of speech and "phonetic-speech movement programs," Broca's area. It embodies the programs for forming various words and other sounds. Both these systems rely on a "phonological output lexicon" that remembers what those words andother sounds are supposed to sound like.

At a still higher level of processing, the brain's intentional systems (anterior cingulate and frontal lobes) create what StevenPinker calls "mentalese" and stimulate speech production systems to turn those mental thoughts or proto-utterances into physical words and sentences. On the input site, there are object recognition units (ventral temporal occipital lobe) that associate words with perceptions of objects. At, so to speak, the highest level of the whole verbal system, there is a semantic-conceptual field that deals with meanings (probably widely dispersed in the parietal and temporal lobes” (Holland).

The human voice then is the machine that changes these previously

abstract thoughts and mental representations into sounds, which

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in turn become spoken words (This supposition is prescient of

anomalies such as deafness and aphasias that preclude this

manifestation. Schick et al. [2002], for example, notes the

impact of lack of access to language, suggesting that cognitive

delay is often a result of such events and that “language

provides the scaffolding to understand how minds work”). Those

words, acting emblematically, are the foundation of a larger

language formed of the meaningful combinations of sound gestures.

Speech, the verbal utterances of those words, is the

actualization of language; natural language is necessarily

spoken. This orality, as described by Walter Ong, is a feature of

language that considerably predates written records and verbal

recordings (Ong 5). Because words have their origins in thoughts,

the connection is implicit – words are a “union of concept and

sound image” (Saussure). In this sense, spoken words are not

signs at all, but are sounds compacted with meaning based on the

intonations of pronouncement. Sound and thought cannot be

divided. Saussure’s understanding of this underlying factor is

echoed by Ong, whose work on orality buoys the very concept of

this paper: “It would seem inescapably obvious that language is

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an oral phenomenon… speech is inseparable from our consciousness”

(Ong 7). From here, the leap to a theory of language as innately

poetic is not an excessive one.

The assumption that “thoughts are the mental representation

of reality and that language is shaped by this mental

representation” (Flohr) suggests the prominence of metaphor in

the natural construction of language in order to represent

abstractions, as well as insinuate the meanings of sensory-motor

experiences – all of which are no less “real” to a human than are

concrete phenomena. Thus, I would argue that language was from

its inception pervasively poetic (how could the very first words

not have been symbolic and in a sense metaphysical?) and will

agree with Friedrich’s contention that “all natural language is

poetic in part” (Friedrich 23). Connecting this notion to the

suggestion of poet Robert Frost (1930) that “all thinking, except

mathematical thinking, is metaphorical,” we find the tie that

binds thought to metaphor, metaphor to language, and spoken

language to poetry. With that posed, it might appear that

language then is strictly a system of readily and concretely

translated signs. But the arguments of Saussure, Derrida, and

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others have shown otherwise. Connotation and context are

extenuating nuances of language, along with problems of

definiteness and interpretation. It is in the sound of the

utterance, not only in its symbolism and denotation, where we

find the untranslatable depths of meaning. Along with the

features of metaphor, the tones of human vocalizations since the

earliest of all human languages have imbued individual words with

significance.

Ironically, and contrary to previous epochs, the present age

does not consider the sound of language (the noise made when

words are knocked together and the aural reception of the

vibrations of words) a primary element of communication. In oral

cultures, as Ong notes,

where the word has its existence only in sound, with no referencewhatsoever to any visually perceptible text, and no awareness of even the possibility of such a text, the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as processedby the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life (Ong 73).

Outside these societies that still promote the spoken word over

the written, language values are

largely subjected to truth tables and other deconstructions that

eliminate any semblance of poetry and metaphor. But sound for

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poets of every age and tradition has been an indispensable tool

regardless of other stylistic faculties and conventions employed,

a necessary element that contributes to meanings far beyond the

scope of signs. Frost’s intense concern for the varying

intonations of language – and particularly that of vernacular

speech – was nothing new to poetics, but his theories supporting

the immutable importance of cadence, inflection, and the

musicality of the human voice are seminal for all poets. He was

convinced, as Elaine Barry notes, that “intonation alone could

carry meaning, quite divorced from particular words,” and that a

word very often relied “on the tones of saying it and the

situations” to grace it with significance (Barry 1973). The

impracticality of disconnecting Frost’s notion from any

discussion of orality and the poetics of common speech is

evident. The question of “raw” language making, and its relation

to mentalese, and how vernacular varieties accommodate emotional,

cognitive, social, and aesthetic aspects of thought, can be

answered by a deeper

perusal of Modern poetics influenced by a range of influences.

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I have put forward the idea that poetry, due largely to its

utilization of sound, is a vestige of the earliest of all spoken

communication and that vernacular language is by nature poetic.

Raw, oral language making in its most base form – including

abbreviations, omissions, and slang phrases common to non-

standard varieties – is closest to the frenetic dialogue of the

mind, that rapid fire conversion from universal to distinct

mental representations to the incessant dialogue of ideas (those

random, seemingly disassociated, coalescing sounds and words that

fill one’s head even as one reads this… the stuff that makes up

our “thinking”). Literary artists affiliated with twentieth

century Modernism intended, as a creative strategy, to produce a

faithful rendering of vernacular dialects in their works, often

drawing on “free association to express the rhythms of

consciousness” (“The Twentieth Century”). William Carlos

Williams, along with Ezra Pound, forced scholarly, rigid verse to

yield to an invigorated line rich with the cadences of natural

speech and breath pauses: “We seek a language which will not be

at least a deformation of speech as we know it –but will embody

all the advantageous jumps, swiftness, colors, movements of the

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day” (Ginsberg 128). Citing Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism

(1994), Lorenzo Thomas explains that T.S. Eliot and Pound “used

what they thought was a Negro dialect against the standard

language to make way for an entirely new literature (Thomas

2001). Why “Negro” vernacular from among the many dialects of

American speech? Speech-based poetics are evident in African-

American literature, from slave narratives to modern variations

of the “speakerly” text. This sensibility remains inherent to

spoken AAVE in its contemporary forms, as “the intrinsic

interconnection between orality and literacy [is] an essential

element of a Black aesthetic (Jones 2002). The sound of AAVE, not

just its grammar, imparts a non-language based perception of

poetic concepts understood in and by the body rather

than solely through an intellectual exercise.

Though of course it is not only poetic language that employs

metaphor and sound, this essay is concerned primarily with

irreducible meaning, or metaphysical phenomena, gleaned through

the inherent, aesthetic qualities of poems – and in this case,

those poems constructed in the Modern vein. In a sense, it is

fitting that the Imagists touched upon the impact of sound, but

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also that Williams had projected that “no ideas but in things”

would be the course toward a vernacular verse form; these

elements are inherently tied together in his work. Phonosemantics

as a study of sound and its impact upon cognition explains the

approach based on the idea that raw utterances and phonemes hold

at least some natural meaning:

“Essentially, all bodily sensations are converted into a sensory map that is like an acoustic image inside the cerebral cortex. The result of this process can be effectively labeled an “idea”, which is derived in fact from the Greek term for “image”. As we can foresee, the brain is where connections between sounds and ideas are made, and where every concept or perception is represented as a picture. So we can guess that sound symbolism comes from the natural ability of the human mind to represent reality in form of images…” (Leonardi)

So, a physical interpretation of poetry comes through its aural

impact on the body, the sonant transfer from speaker to listener;

one need not decipher the dictionary meaning of every word in a

poem to fully absorb that poem. The meanings of words are so tied

to their sounds that a message can be communicated to a listener

regardless of literal translation.

In the case of New Orleans poet Yictove, who employs a blend

of regionalisms and black vernacular in his work, the line acts

as a vehicle of thought, of rhythm and meter, of imagery, and of

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style – all of which help create the poet’s “voice” when combined

with elements of assonance, consonance, and other oral features

typical of vernacular slang and AAVE:

Prophet don’t need people’s names,        prophet needs ears & doing muscles, 15

arms & hands & feetof people.Old time ago,Moshe shout “Go”

        & whole bunchgone cross. Slick likelightning kick wood.Prophet say, “Stop!”& government freeze up;

        “Don’t do one thing 20or die.”Plan of purpose always.Plan in purpose.Plan on purpose.

(“Prophet” 1997)

The variation in line lengths are subtle, but enough to notice

the poet’s intention; the combination of typical subject/verb

format (with modifiers) and declarative, descriptive fragments

causes a casual, conversational, authentic “speakerly” voice

employed through much of the author’s work. But it is just as

much the insistent repetition of vowels and consonants that bring

deep meaning to the verses – a meaning beyond translation, but a

meaning that provides mental pictures and bodily understanding.

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In this sense, poetic language found in AAVE (which includes the

sing-song rhymes and rhythms of black preachers, reminiscent of

slave chants) speaks past literal reduction and roots itself in

the subconscious of the hearer.

Walter Ong discusses the general psychodynamics of sound and

suggests that “the effects of oral states of consciousness are

bizarre to the literate mind” (Ong 30), which might serve as a

terse but accurate truism describing the impact of poetry upon a

hearer. The tacit understanding of poetry is untranslatable. Just

as consciousness typically bears no record of the impulse to

speak, one cannot always point to the word of a poem that

initiates metaphysical response – it is the poem experienced as a

whole, with all its sounds, rhythms, and images, which induces a

holistic meaning. Often, it is the experience alone that is

intended; not literary interpretation, but incorporeal and

potentially supernatural insight that extends beyond language.

Through the intricately crafted “sprung rhythm” of his poems,

Gerard Manley Hopkins (as an elder example) purposefully weaves

poetic devices for divine purpose:

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Sound, rhythm, image, and meaning become inseparable in a kind ofmystical fusion that enacts, as much as it represents, union withGod. Like Crashaw before him, Hopkins writes out of an act of “grasping” the holy Trinity, not simply symbolizing, praising or praying to, Him. Hopkins’s intensely textured work takes us to the “extremest verge” […] of the religious experience of ecstaticconsciousness, whose soul beats with the “sprung rhythms” of primordial existence, breath, oceanic oneness (McRae).

Hopkins’ Victorian environment aside, his work is decidedly

Modern and presages a break from formality and the crafting of

verse rife with sounds devices and structure previously unseen.

This is not to say that Hopkins’ work is untranslatable or eludes

interpretation, but that it plays with sounds and rhythms in a

way that reaches (and bridges) the body and the mind in the

tradition of the metaphysical poets and at the same time informs

the Moderns:

O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark 15

But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection. Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

20 In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal

diamond,

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Is immortal diamond.(Hopkins 1918)

As McCrae notes, the language Hopkins uses in his poetry – and

the syntax whereby he builds the structures of his verse – is

less concerned with “sense” and concreteness or the “sign system

of Victorian culture,” but “is positing that parallelism of sound

in a poem may “beget” some parallelism in meaning” (McRae).

Hopkins pursues a translation of the mystic experience and

expression of the Divine in his work and it is not through the

finite meaning of a word that he does so, but through the echo

and chant of sound and rhythm.

We can strongly suggest now that what makes poetry the

particular language figure closest to that of pre-lingual thought

impressions is its return to the body, and how the spoken word of

poetry causes a tick, a shiver, a physical sensation that cannot

be named. Again to Frost: “The living part of a poem is the

intonation entangled somehow in the syntax idiom and meaning of a

sentence” (Barry 1973). The poem, kinetically speaking, is mental

energy transferred and returned to energy upon hearing. To

further illustrate the modern concern for this phenomenon, poet

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Allen Ginsberg sought a state of mind that would initiate the

poem as a direct transcription of actual thought, be it the

mind’s haphazard observations, erotic imaginings, or otherwise.

Following Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Generation” spontaneous prose

model, as well as Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa’s related

maxim “First thought, Best thought” when creating poems, Ginsberg

describes a “narrow path of practice to get to the mind”

(Ginsberg 116-117). Charles Olsen too, with his projective verse

process, aspired to a system by which “one perception must

immediately and directly lead to a further perception” (Olson

1950). In translating those perceptions, Olson was concerned with

the form and structure based on the syllable of the word and the

line of the poem, and that each was directly impacted by the

writer or speaker’s breathing patterns. Breath, to Olson, is

man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended.

Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are

in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if

he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given

him size, projective size (1950).

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Linked to colloquial speech, complete with its ethnically

influenced intonations and rhythms, the fluid relationship

between thoughts, words, and sound is evidence of vernacular’s

influence upon modern poetics. And because AAVE in particular

reflects the significance of orality, and as the language-based

(rather than solely intellectually-based) poetry of Modernism

continues to impact poetics at large, AAVE invariably plays a

role in the presence and preservation of vernacular

speech in contemporary verse.

That AAVE is a particularly stigmatized variety of Standard

English is of no small

consequence. Wolfram and Shilling-Estes have suggested a

“conflict model” of class differences

in which

linguistic differences are seen as a reflection of interests ofdifferent classes and conflicts between classes. Accordingly, thestandard–vernacular dichotomy may be viewed as the symbolic tokenof a class struggle… they [non-standard speakers] use vernacularspeech forms as a symbolic expression of separation from theupper classes with whom they conflict (Wolfram, Schilling-Estes1998).

For Pound, Williams, Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and others, the

conflict is embodied in Modernism’s paradigm shift away from

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nineteenth century conventions; the use of colloquial speech was

especially representative of Anglo-American poets who sought a

realism found not only in imagery, but also in sound. Employing

an “Uncle Remus dialect” was for Pound an effort “to demolish the

authority of the European languages and even of the Roman

alphabet” (Thomas 2001). Drastic indeed, yet Pound’s desire

discloses a considerable recognition of vernacular orality and

the social implications of public speech. This is not to suggest

that AAVE alone influenced modern poets; in his 2004

dissertation, Matthew Hart illustrates a hybrid “synthetic

vernacular poetics” employed by American Modernists, a method

utilizing various “regional, national, and ethnic vocabularies”

as a device to secure orality as a poetic value while not

attaching to itself any specific linguistic identity (Hart 2004).

Nonetheless, AAVE serves as the dialect so diachronically rooted

in sound and social implication that its importance cannot be

overlooked when examining poetics and the ability of poetry (as a

distinct language form) to move toward mentalese representations.

Friedrich suggests that poetic language “is actualized in

all domains of life” (24), making references from sports jargon

Chorazy 20

to the street lingo of AAVE, and that vernacular dialogue is

imbued with sound and metaphor such that “the relation between

poetry and conversation is a continuum” (27), differing perhaps

only in its practical usage (the average speaker may not

necessarily be intent upon creating poetry). For Kerouac, the

sounds of an expression – the human voice or instrument, for that

matter – incorporate in the expression itself define the meaning

of the expression. Kerouac’s spontaneous prose model extended to

his poetry is an example of mixed influences, but the sound

sensibility of AAVE clearly dictates the spirit of his “blues”

poems. His system, explained in the introduction to San Francisco

Blues, likens the poetical form to a jazz blues chorus:

and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus intoanother, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to theother, or not, in jazz… It’s all gotta be non stop ad libbing within each chorus, or the gig isshot (Kerouac 1995).

The connection to jazz immediately assumes a link to African

American culture, but also advocates spontaneity and exuberance

within the musical phrasing of each line. Along with Black

vernacular, complete with absent copulas and double negation,

sounds infuse Kerouac’s work with meaning:

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Red shoes of the limpin whore / Who drags her blues / From shoreto shore / Along the stores / Lookin for a millionaire / For hertime’s up / And she got no guts / And the man aint comin / AndI’m no where // He aint done nothing / But change hats / And goto work / And stands in doorway / Swingin the 8 inch / Stogie allaround / Arc ing to see / Mankind’s vast - 48th Chorus of SanFrancisco Blues

Perhaps sound is the distinguishable meaning of his moreexperimental pieces:

O my patinat pinkplat Mexican / Canvas for oil in boil / Marrico– has marsh m draw / The greenhouse bong eater from / fenceN’awrleans, that – // Bat and be ready, Jesus is steady, /Score’s eight to one, none, / Bone was the batter for McGoy / Poy– // Used as this ditties / for mopping the kitties / in dream’safternoon / when nap was a drape. - Untitled (1953) fromScattered Poems

Surely Kerouac’s examples elude rational explanation ofliteralness; it is unlikely that such

deduction was desired, intended, or even attempted by Kerouachimself. If, as Pinker posits, we

think in “visual and auditory images” and that language is a wayof “communicating thought, of

getting them out of one head and into another” (Hickey), thenpoetry is the most dynamic, most

apt form for such a process. It would seem that Kerouac in thiscase wishes to pass music itself to

the listener’s mind, for certainly there is little other cogentdeconstruction of his verses, in these

cases at least.

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Regardless of context, meaning will forever remain tied to

speech, as Derrida comments on Saussure’s Course: “The linguistic

object is not defined by the combination of the written word and

the spoken word: the spoken form alone constitutes the object” (Derrida

1967). Thus the power of poetry is maintained in living

vocalization, though experiments in form (like Kerouac’s) often

succeed in replicating on the page the soundscape of the human

voice and its breath patterns. Saussure suggests that the sound

image (which I argue is capable of inducing not only mental

representations, but pre or non-lingual sensations as well) “is

not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychic

imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses”

(1959). Thus, we find the return of the voice (language realized)

to a mentalese-like, pre-lingual condition. The interplay between

language and understanding necessarily accommodates all prior

experience, thus considering emotional, cognitive, and social

aspects while at the same time evaluating larger abstractions.

Ongoing, in flux, and active as long as the mind is alive, the

translation of mentalese into public language and the return of

language back to a mentalese-like field is a circular experience

Chorazy 23

accomplished through speaking and listening to poetic speech. As

language is “a feedback process” (Friedrich 34), the very nature

of the cognitive and creative processes of an individual and his

culture are imbedded in his speech patterns and vocalizations.

Until AAVE (or any stigmatized variety) becomes standardized

by an arrangement of its features into a written grammar, it will

essentially remain attached to sound and orality. “Black”

vernacular especially, its position in poetics already

established by scholarship, has moved into pop cultures across

the globe and is the essential force behind Hip-Hop and Rap music

– the latter being a genre considered by many to be a musical

poetry of sorts, an aesthetic rendering of mental representations

and cultural experience. It would seem that a convergence between

the Abstract and the mental image, made lucid through vernacular

language, is sought through a stigmatized but trendy speech

system that exists far outside Standard varieties. But poetry

itself, and by association vernacular registers as well, cannot

be standardized; as long as there is varied human thought and a

potentially infinite number of possible utterances, poetic

language persists as a display of inexhaustible mental activity.

Chorazy 24

Ultimately, the principals of my argument may come down to

the question of whether or not phonemes carry meaning in and of

themselves, and whether or not this is true of all languages and

their registers. The field of phonosemantics is presently

breaking open avenues of research that may draw close to an

answer. In this regard, Pramod Agrawal’s stance recently

published in International Journal of Linguistics is clearly a

substantial one – an ontological slant that supposes an intricate

connection between language (units of semantic values) and basic

existential awareness:

As far as phonosemantics is concerned, different parts of existence represent different phonemes. And the phonemes can be explained on the basis of their placement in the structure of existence. This structure of existence is responsible for conversion from “meaning to phoneme (outflow sounds; speaking)” and “phoneme to meaning (inflow sounds; listening)” (Agrawal 108).

Agrawal supports the notion of vocalization as gesture, which as I have suggested means that

words are not signs alone but carry weight as meanings themselves, going so far as to suggest

in his work “a unitary code, which is the root cause of every

existence including animals and

Chorazy 25

human. This unitary code carries a code of converting meanings

into sounds” (107). Structuralism has provided a model of

analytical (descriptive) grammar from phonemes to utterances; it

would seem now that the arguments for or against a language of

thought are reaching a zenith and an impending explanation of one

of the most fascinating components of human cognition. As of yet

there is no scientific consensus, and contrary theories

(including this paper’s thesis) abound alongside the essential

questions regarding cognition, language, and the mind. We persist

employing our language in attempts to broach the nature of

language, a Chinese box paradox that eludes us, as if a posteriori

language can approach the vague a priori diction of pre-lingual

mental states. We probe human consciousness and coax it to

explain itself, wondering and thinking about wondering and

thinking, improbably bound by the limits of what separates us

from all other living entities. We cannot tell the dancer from

the dance – but maybe it is indeed in poetry, the figure most

disposed to music and metaphor and the realms of the unspoken,

that we draw near the imperceptible Self and the Adamic lingua

ignota at rest beyond all influence.

Chorazy 26

Works Cited

Agrawal, Pramod Kumar. “A New Approach to Phonosemantics.” International Journal of

Linguistics. Vol. 6, No. 1. February 26, 2014. http://www.macrothink.org/journal/

index.php/ijl/article/view/5131/pdf_67. August 22, 2014.

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Barry, Elaine. Robert Frost on Writing. Rutgers University Press. New

Brunswick, N.J. 1973. 3-53.

http://www.frostfriends.org/FFL/Frost%20o%20writing%20-

%20Barry/ barryessay2.html. June 30, 2014.

Beckner, Clay, Joan Bybee, Richard Blythe, et al. “Language as a

Complex Adaptive System.”

Sante Fe Institute. 2007.

www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/08-12-047.pdf. June 30,

2014.

Derrida, Jacques. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967).

English translation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore,

MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Derrida-

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