A few times now I have played a game with friends in which you try to get your team to guess a word on a card by way of hints/words you come up with. What makes it hard is that you may not use long words that need more than one “sound” to speak (yes, there is a word for that, but if I used it here, I would break the rules). If you slip up and use a “big” word, you get bopped on the head with a club (a soft one that is blown up with air from your lungs).

What I found was that my style is not the same as that of my friends. They tend to speak one word at a time, each one picked as a key hint that might—on its own—help close in on the word to be guessed. An example might be that hints for the word “soup” would be words like “hot,” “slurp,” “bowl,” “cup,” “broth.” It gets the job done.

But I tend to speak whole thoughts as a string of words that have nouns and verbs and all the bits that join them—the way we tend to speak in real life. And for the most part, I seem to keep up a pace close to what I can do in day-to-day speech—if not just as fast. In the “soup” case, I might say “It’s a type of food made with broth that you eat or slurp from a bowl or cup: best on a cold day or when you’re sick.” I can tell you that it works well. My friends are so quick to guess the right word when I use this scheme that I don’t make it to the end. It turns out that our brains are well-tuned to this style of speech.

On a lark, I thought I would try to write based on these rules, to see where it might go. So far, so good—sort-of. A few times I have had to go off on a strange path to make my point, when a key thought seems to have no short word that can do the job. But as I wrote more, things took a turn that I had not guessed would come to pass when I set out. The lark took the shape of a post!

Words do not make the world. They can’t catch all that is real. Words can’t give a full sense of how red does not look like blue, or what light is, or how quarks move, or why some things are charged or what charge is, in fact. Words are not up to the task. The world has been here for far more time than words have, so does not and can not work based on them. Words can give no more than a poor, pale sense of the truth of things.

What I want to do in this post, just for fun (well, more than that), is use the rules of this game to show how hard it is to make a strong and clear case for a point that would still be tough to make if I could use all words. I think/hope we can learn from it. When bound to a small set of words, all kinds of wrong views can be spawned in the cracks that are left. But this is true as well when the full set of words can be used, which is—let’s face it—still a small set in the grand scheme of things. In each case, words have no choice but to fall short of the full deal.

Screech!

I come to a tough spot right off, since what I picked to speak of is a theme that has no short name. Let’s do it game style, where I give hints in the form of prose: It is a stance I don’t like, of which I wrote at great length for ten posts in a row in the last few months. It deals with a sense that there are two parts to the world: “mind” and plain stuff like that found in stars and stones and bones. Such a view drives a gap that splits the world to make two parts. Got it?

In the end, it seems I have no choice for this post but to cheat and use a mark to stand in for the word I can’t use. Let’s use ♠ since part of the point has to do with the phrase “to call a spade a spade.” I do beg you to give me a pass, here—but at least my choice of ♠ can roll off the tongue as “spade” and not break the rules.

Get to the point…

So, the point I want to make is the odd fact that most ♠s don’t know they are ♠s, and might swear they are not. What takes the cake, though, is that they try to claim that it is me who is a ♠. In fact, some folks who shared thoughts on my posts did try to stick me with the ♠ tag, and not for the first time in my life. Each time, it makes no sense to me. When I ask them to find the gap that splits my world in two (and it could well be that I am blind to it), they fail to point out such a split. But you can’t have two parts if you can’t point to a split in the whole. If it’s all one big thing, it’s not two. No ♠ to see, here. How is my view seen to be ♠-like, then? Well, I can’t say for sure, but here are a few thoughts as to what might go on. I could be wrong, but this is my best guess.

You see, to a ♠, faith that “mind” is its own thing is so strong that the world makes no sense at all if this is not true. They can’t take the first steps to think this way. Thus, since I say plain stuff is real, and it need not be said that “mind” is real (since “of course it is”), I am—in their view—forced to have two parts to the world. To them, it is so clear that mind is its own thing that can’t just be like all the rest of the stuff in the world. So, if stuff is real, and mind can’t be made of just stuff, this means the world is made of two parts. If I can’t see that—that I am at heart a ♠—then that’s on me. I know, it makes no sense. That’s my whole point, I guess. The fact that it’s hard to get is not all the fault of the rule that I can’t use “big” words, I swear.

Let me try to make the same point in a new set of words. When mind seems so real that a world can’t be thought of where this is not true, the one who holds such views is not free to think like I do. They’re stuck. To them, I don’t have to fess up that mind is real: it is, as far as they can tell, and so I am in fact a ♠. Too bad, they think, that I don’t get that fact, since I am blind to the real and clear truth of “mind,” as they see things. At its core, it’s like no one can take as truth a thing they do not think is true.

I’ll try one last way in this vein. This is what a ♠ might say: “Since I hold the one true view as to what “mind” is (or is not), so, too, must you at base—though you may not see it. You are fooled by your own wrong thoughts. Then, since my way is the one true way, it makes no sense for you not to think so, too. Deep down you have no choice but to see things my way if you could just get there. Since I am right, no one can hold a truth that is at odds with mine, and all must be as I am, in light of that one truth.” Like I said, I may be on the wrong track, here, but it’s the best I’ve come up with.

To me, it comes down to a lack of skill to break out of one’s own thought-jail. Of course, I can’t put it past them to say that the same is true for me. Yet it is not hard for me to get that my “truth” is just my best guess, that no one can have it all right, that all meat-brain thoughts are flawed in some way, and that some will hold firm to a stance that does not sit right with me. I try not to force my “truth” on them: just make the case as best I can. In the end, each of us claim the one that’s not us is a ♠, and I doubt we are both right. Which thinks mind can’t be “just” stuff? I don’t think that’s me.

Last Try

I can think of one more flawed cause for why I might be thought to be a ♠, and I have said things close to this in the past. To a ♠ who does not know that they are a ♠ the ♠ tag has a foul smell. It goes back to the dead French guy best known for the stance of ♠. He was cruel to forms of life he thought to be “just stuff,” since “stuff” has no worth next to god-like “minds” or “souls.” I think the gut sense folks get when I say we’re all just stuff is that I must be one of those vile ♠ as well. For one who buys the whole “mind” or “soul” thing, to say that all of us (and all forms of life) are “no more than stuff” is to toss us and the beasts in the trash bin with “mere” stuff (that has no soul), and thus would seem to pave the way for cruel acts. But for this to make sense at all, one needs two planes of worth to start with. The foul smell needs this split to be in place to be smelled at all: needs a “low” and a “high” state. For me, it can’t be “bad” to be “stuff” if “stuff” is all there is, and there can thus be no “low” or “high” states. We are all kin, and in the same boat. So, in this case as well, the ♠ is stuck in their own split sense of the world and has not yet found a way to see the world through the lens of “one.” Their field of view is split in two at all times, but that’s what they are used to, now.

Not Just This Game

I hope this post helps give you a feel for how bounds on words make it hard to get a point across. But it comes up all the time: not just in this dumb game. One realm where the bounds placed by words drive me nuts is in how hard it is to keep words like “I,” “me,” “we,” “our,” and so forth out of what I write. See? If I try to do so, what comes out sounds weird and needs way more words to forge a path that makes sense at all. The game I play in this post shares that trait: odd paths that twist this way and that so that I don’t need to use one of the “bad” words. Thus, the same sort of hard ground still comes up when I can use of the full set of words: I still face bounds that are hard to skirt. By way of this odd post, you may now have a taste for how I feel all the time when I write. Words just can’t stack up to the rich and real world. The map can’t be the land.

My Bad

I must beg you to not think ill of me for the strange form of this post. It was at first just a neat way to try a trick in type form—just for my own fun. But then I thought I might learn more if I could try to make a tough pitch. I think it helps show how words place bounds on what can be made clear, which is true all the time. Yes, more can be said—and with more ease—when big words can be used. But the bounds are still there. Words cloud the truth that sits at the base of all things. The Tao that can be said is not the true Tao, as it was once put.

Coda

Eek! I broke the rules! Yes, I can’t add this part without deviation, because I want to share from this experience the words I found hardest to replace. Obviously “syllable,” “sentence,” and “dualist” created trouble early on, but it was simple words like “even,” “other,” “any,” “only,” and “able” that repeatedly arose and were the hardest to substitute. Also, no gerunds really limited grammar. And I had to overuse “stuff”—lacking access to “atoms,” or “matter.”

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