Thinking without words

It is much faster to think in words.  More efficient.  More transmittable. But in the end all you are left with are words.  And words are just words: a sound, a whisper.  Arguably the greatest invention of our species - words, symbolic thought - but in the context of the history of life on earth as ephemeral a phenomena as the emergence of the iPhone is to human history: a plaything, an experiment, a game, a question mark.  

It is much slower to speak in non-words, in actual things. To think without words is almost unthinkable.

There are human thinkers so beguiled by words that they question the very existence of a realm beyond words, of the Ding An Sich. If it cannot be enclosed by words, by human consciousness, it doesn’t "exist."  (Or at least it doesn't matter. Such idealism, deeply engrained in Western civilization, fuels our obsession with enclosement, architecture, cities.)

Why would one want to think without words?  For the sake of honesty.  To remember what is all around the habitus of words that we have constructed.  To live out in the open for a while. 

How does one think without words?  One way is to think in places.  Landmarks, trails, directions. In the place one happens to be in.  Or let the place think through one’s body.  

And if one loses faith in words, does one not then give up on everything human? Isn’t giving up on writing and speaking a form of dying? 

Words are a kind of artifact, and artifacts are deeply ingrained in how we think of ourselves as human, as exceptional.  Giving up on artifacts, apparatus, tools, clothing, toys, everything but the bare body, the limbs in their movements, the eyes that see, the vulnerable fingers.  

Standing next to my dogs I am struck by the immense distance between us.  Though we are intimates - living and working together everyday - still there is a chasm between they and I.  They live in their bodies, that is all they need and expect.  They are more vulnerable to accident and death than I am, but there is nothing that they need to buy.  They make no deals and contracts.  That kind of wildness is hard to comprehend.  And we are talking about dogs, highly domesticated, genetically modified by humans for thousands of years - not some truly wild thing.  A wild animal is more akin to an alien being, the representative of another world, if we could muster that much respect for anything other than human beings.  

Giving up on our artifacts, on words, on the many little things that make a human life recognizable, common, human.  Is there anything left?   Nirvana?  A state of danger? 

Phone, car, computer, house.  Little things  -  toilet paper, coffee, saved food, cooking pot, box of matches, shoes. To come down from the white world of technology that we have built around ourselves - the fortress, the cocoon - and to return into a naked silence.  What could be more terrifying?  What could be more shameful?  What could be more unthinkable?

And yet is it not beguiling? That kind of honesty and simplicity. To touch the very smallest edge of a excluded, forbidden animality,  To be both less and more than a civilized human.  

To lose everything. To think without words.

Momentarily, here and there, a tiny, invisible release from the machinery that we make ourselves to be.