Yesterday I received report of my granddaughter’s visit to the physician.  She is a toddler, walking about, exploring, and babbling.  I sense that she is on the cusp of language.  She understands simple commands and responds with appropriate behavior.   She runs about her play area, with obvious excitement, laughing, to point out the toys, the features that delight her, such as the LCD screen display of TV cartoon images.  Aspects of her environment remain puzzling to her.  This is revealed by the repetitive nature of her play.  For example, her mind is figuring out the three dimensions of space.  Her small world, under the benevolent care of adults, is a seamless fabric to her.  She appears to live, generally speaking with a attitude of wonder and delight.

I commented to her mother that she is just like us.  I meant that she is happy to point out to any attentive adult who enters the room, the objects which are of most interest and importance to her.  We do the same thing with language.  She is pre-language, expressing her self with outstretched arm, pointed finger, a facial expression and mono-syllables of delight.

Her pediatrician endorsed my intuition saying that she is on the edge of speech.  She will be speaking within the next six weeks.

That is good news and sad news.  Her journey is about to begin into the adult world which human-kind has fashioned.  We along with uncounted generations of ancestors have created a world by means of language.  When I say, or write “world” I mean what is real as defined by the extent of my language.  The boundaries of my world are determined by the limits of my language, — the language which I began to learn from my parents in my nursery, and continue to learn from my teachers, from the authors of the countless books that I have read, etc.  The learning is endless.  One can only see/experience features of reality in synchronous parallel with the vocabulary and syntax that allows manifestation.  That is the good news.

And what is the sad news?  Language also fragments the world, shatters it into objects, seducing us to forgetfulness that everything is connected to everything else, that the relationships matter.  Especially for humans alive at the beginning of the 21st century, an abundance of information tempts us to hyper specialize in a field of study.  For example a petroleum engineer adept at fracking crude from the tar sands of Canada, may well be ignorant of the consequences of his enterprise upon climate patterns.  Nature’s storehouse of millennia of carbon are being released into the atmosphere. Our petroleum engineer lacks the vocabulary and insight of a climatologist.

It is language, our agreed upon vocabulary and syntax, allowing us to understand and efficiently move about the world, — that breaks the world.  We are divided up into tribes, nations, communities that are accustomed to different vocabularies, no longer able to understand one another.  To cite an example the nation of France struggles with Laicite, the custom of separation of church and state.  Since the 1799 revolution France has worked toward the ideal of a secular society.  This is now challenged by large numbers of Muslim citizens who understand their identity in religious terms. 

Another example closer to home; how many of the views held by the militant community of the Oath Keepers who participated in the January 6 insurrection, would be held in common with myself?

The world is fractured by language, by the habits of seeing and of behaving that are embedded in language.  The bias of the status-quo endemic to language is tenacious, resistant to openness.  Sometimes the fractured world breaks.  My granddaughter will never again naturally experience the world as a seamless fabric.  Post language, this “seeing” is achieved with effort, with difficulty.

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We need a song do we not?  This one is magnificent.  The lyric, a meditation upon our difficulty to understand time.  We are creatures aware of the passage of time, as we are embedded in times “flow.”  We say, “not enough time” in many contexts, many of our endeavors.  When words often fail us, we become lost…  Make time stop, — but alas…

Not Enough Time

By INXS

And I was lost for words
In your arms
Attempting to make sense
Of my aching heart
If I could just be
Everything and everyone to you
This life would just be so easy

Not enough time for all
That I want for you
Not enough time for every kiss
And every touch and all the nights
I wanna be inside you

We will make time stop
For the two of us
Make time stop
And listen for our sighs

Not enough time for all
That I want for you
Not enough time for every kiss
And every touch and all the nights
I wanna be inside you

In our fight against the end
Making love we are immortal
We are the last two left on earth
And I was lost for words
In your arms
Attempting to make sense of
My aching heart
If I could just be everything
And everyone to you

Not enough time for all
That I want for you
Not enough time for every kiss
Not enough time for all my love
Not enough time for every touch

Not enough time for all
That I want for you
Not enough time for every kiss
And every touch and all the nights
I wanna be inside you

Lyrics written by Andrew Farriss, Michael Hutchence