The Word

A word is so much of everything and nothing all at once. 

A beautiful old woman named Juana lives at a nursing home a few streets down from me. She is mute, deaf, and needs help eating meals. As I feed her the same squash soup she eats every day for dinner, she swallows every spoonful contentedly without reaction. When I help her to wash it down with some water, however, there are times when she tells me she wants more to drink.

How does she say this, though, without actually "saying" it?

She opens her eyes widely and leans toward the cup of water with sudden urgency. She says everything with her body. 

Words are one of the vehicles through which we convey our deepest selves to the many “others” of the world. Words, as inherently saturated with artistic power as they might be, will ALWAYS fall short of this task. We can only ever talk about an experience, for example, but we can never experience an experience fully solely by discussing it. 

Luckily for Juana, I would argue that more responsibility in any given language exchange falls on the interpreter, rather than on the communicator. 

What happens chemically in our minds when we interact with language? A very basic comprehension of this incredibly complex neurological process has led me to deduce the following about language data processing:

The left hemisphere of our brain categorizes incoming data into linear, comprehensible material, while the right side of the brain (connected more to the “intuition”) tries to grasp the concept that floats behind, in and around the linear data that is being transmitted into the left side. The left side categorizes specific information and the right side recognizes whole patterns.

So when words flood into our minds we compute and conceptualize the data. It’s like a truck comes in carrying specific vernacular cargo and transports the material between hemispheres, taking logic itself and transforming it from phonics to philosophy, or from dialogue to diagnosis. We store data, and then we “story” it. 

We find ourselves caught up in a dance. 

Language communication/interpretation is neither pure art nor pure science, but any exchange of this nature unequivacally contains a heavy dose of both. 

In “The Dancing Wu Li Masters,” author Gary Zekav writes, “The Chinese language does not use an alphabet like western languages. Each word in Chinese is depicted by a character, which is a line drawing. (Sometimes two or more characters are combined to form different meanings.) This is why it is difficult to translate Chinese into English. Good translations require a translator who is both a poet and a linguist.”

微软公司生产的文字处理软件

(This is the result I got of searching for the definition of the word "word" in Chinese on the internet)

This is why it is not only difficult to translate Chinese into English, but difficult to translate any given thought into some kind of interpretable tool. All we have, after all, are lines, characters, or distinct sound waves (that emerge as a result of moving our mouths and releasing our voice in a specific way) to convey what we are trying to say. It’s why any piece of communication must be stripped of any unmerited intrinsic power or weightiness that we tend to ascribe to it (aside from calling upon its artistic value, which has its purpose, naturally). It’s why as interpreters (human beings), we’re charged with the task of approaching our lives as both linguists and poets – not just one or the other. 

Learning another language – speaking it, understanding it, and participating in the exchange of it – involves the same life-governing process that we partake in throughout our lives: the dance of meaning-making. If we can learn to dance in such heightened cognitive environments as learning a foreign language, where nothing is comfortable and where most of the information is new, we will dance with grace and fluidity with everything around us. Interpreting language will remind us that we are the authors of our own lives. 

“The Wu Li Masters know that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are only dances, and that those who follow them are dancers. The dancers may claim to follow 'truth' or claim to seek 'reality,' but the Wu Li Masters know better. They know that the true love of all dancers is dancing.” 

– Gary Zekav