Our language has inherent flaws and misnomers with which we attempt to confront our world, the implications of that process of coding and decoding remains mostly unsaid, mostly unstudied and yet, these processes are complicit in fostering our ability to turn our collective head away, from new information, uncomfortable truths and to disregard blatant evidence. Sometimes, even the most compelling reasons to change. Inside the safety pin lies the point of a very dangerous message. like the tool itself, the words that we choose, can be used to heal, stitch and lance, the message may be beyond our ability to describe, but I will take a tiny stab at it.
This week alone, I asked myself some seriously twisted questions about our language. First, I mused over the fact that monosyllabic is a misnomer. Onomatopoeia is not what it sounds like either. With simple things being described in complicated terms, we often insulate truth from the people who need a dose of it the most. Lots of words and terms seem to not only allow, but encourage mis-understanding.
Safety pin, was an obvious oddity because of the close pairing of nearly opposite ideas. I was wearing a shirt that had a safety pin on it the other day and when questioned about it, I said that I wore it to enhance my happiness. Whether at work or play, I almost never wear gloves, which leads to a more than average number of slivers. If I find a safety pin, I often pin it to my shirt and it lets me rest a little easier knowing that if I get a sliver, I can immediately remove it, without having to look around for a safety pin. Two people, hearing the story, seemed to think that I was crazy, taking a certain level of delight from this sort of "prepared" state, like I was betting on a sliver or something. The third person, on hearing it appeared to understand that if one got a relatively large number of slivers, that this preparedness itself could be a palpable "good". We were split two to two on which reality was valid.
The differing meanings that we share, or don't, do as much to relay and convey information as to lose and twist it. Like the spring end of the safety pin, the rest would be useless without it, but the most minute twist ever occurs at this end. The working parts are as far removed from this end as possible, yet without the twist, there could be no grasp. The two who thought I was crazy, probably continued to think that I should just wear gloves. My own reliance on positive contact between whatever tools or work surface I have to deal with and my hands requires me to be bare handed, even if it means that my skin partially freezes to the surface in the cold, or if it is covered with oil, dirt or slivers means nothing to them. I will use gloves for hot materials, just because the smell of burning leather is better than that of my own flesh, plus, the pain would be a torment. Slivers can be gotten out, the rest washes off. What is striking about language is that we can rarely unseat someone from their own comfortable beliefs, even when we are lucky enough to change someone's perspective, it is them who have changed position and only at their own behest. Just as easily, they could have gotten the glazed eye look, blinked a few times and said, that can't be right, falling back into the comfortable ignorance that inhabited them in the first place. What is necessary in changing one's perspective, is the ability to have a sort of binocular vision from our old perspective and a new one simultaneously and working out how to tweak our new vision to see more clearly in the future.
Teasing out our own way amongst the newly opening horizons of possibility requires a level of self-reflection and self-knowledge than ever before. Perhaps this is where the needling comes in. A certain level of discomfort may be necessary to get some people off their couch. I'm anxious for the rapidly approaching time when the vast majority sees through the sham of our corporatocracy, their elitist crap and the resulting world dominion at the hands of a few dozen corporations. In my country, our Supreme Court has sided with corporations far too often, this week again. The justices who sell out our people to the corporate welfare whores are pretending they are patriots. Tyrannical and despicable as it sounds, we are all forced to pay for things that we do not believe in, but if a corporation can "believe" it, and it justifies an exemption from responsibility, then Hell's Bells! We need to red-neckonize it.
The punks that I knew all held the iconic safety pin as a sort of North star of their attire. Pinning and patching things up, especially after they had been rent asunder was just a fact of life...still is in most places.
Safety pin, was an obvious oddity because of the close pairing of nearly opposite ideas. I was wearing a shirt that had a safety pin on it the other day and when questioned about it, I said that I wore it to enhance my happiness. Whether at work or play, I almost never wear gloves, which leads to a more than average number of slivers. If I find a safety pin, I often pin it to my shirt and it lets me rest a little easier knowing that if I get a sliver, I can immediately remove it, without having to look around for a safety pin. Two people, hearing the story, seemed to think that I was crazy, taking a certain level of delight from this sort of "prepared" state, like I was betting on a sliver or something. The third person, on hearing it appeared to understand that if one got a relatively large number of slivers, that this preparedness itself could be a palpable "good". We were split two to two on which reality was valid.
The differing meanings that we share, or don't, do as much to relay and convey information as to lose and twist it. Like the spring end of the safety pin, the rest would be useless without it, but the most minute twist ever occurs at this end. The working parts are as far removed from this end as possible, yet without the twist, there could be no grasp. The two who thought I was crazy, probably continued to think that I should just wear gloves. My own reliance on positive contact between whatever tools or work surface I have to deal with and my hands requires me to be bare handed, even if it means that my skin partially freezes to the surface in the cold, or if it is covered with oil, dirt or slivers means nothing to them. I will use gloves for hot materials, just because the smell of burning leather is better than that of my own flesh, plus, the pain would be a torment. Slivers can be gotten out, the rest washes off. What is striking about language is that we can rarely unseat someone from their own comfortable beliefs, even when we are lucky enough to change someone's perspective, it is them who have changed position and only at their own behest. Just as easily, they could have gotten the glazed eye look, blinked a few times and said, that can't be right, falling back into the comfortable ignorance that inhabited them in the first place. What is necessary in changing one's perspective, is the ability to have a sort of binocular vision from our old perspective and a new one simultaneously and working out how to tweak our new vision to see more clearly in the future.
Teasing out our own way amongst the newly opening horizons of possibility requires a level of self-reflection and self-knowledge than ever before. Perhaps this is where the needling comes in. A certain level of discomfort may be necessary to get some people off their couch. I'm anxious for the rapidly approaching time when the vast majority sees through the sham of our corporatocracy, their elitist crap and the resulting world dominion at the hands of a few dozen corporations. In my country, our Supreme Court has sided with corporations far too often, this week again. The justices who sell out our people to the corporate welfare whores are pretending they are patriots. Tyrannical and despicable as it sounds, we are all forced to pay for things that we do not believe in, but if a corporation can "believe" it, and it justifies an exemption from responsibility, then Hell's Bells! We need to red-neckonize it.
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