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To
be or not to be – that is the question.
~ Shakespeare, Hamlet
Let’s think for a moment about thought. We
live now in a world in which thought as such really has a relatively
small role. We imagine,
certainly, that we think almost all the time, but in actuality, our
immersion in visual culture and communication
has resulted in vague and imprecise feelings and images knocking
about in our minds, giving us the impression, the sensation – the
imitation, perhaps – of thought. Most
of us mentally experience a chaotic, non-linear jumble of words and
sensations in which one word, one impression, a single sound or scent,
can cause a mental association with something illogical. William
Faulkner’s novel The
Sound and The Fury provides an intriguing instance of such thought.
I remember very well my first attempt at reading this book: it
opened with a scene of people playing golf, but then that scene suddenly
– and for no obvious reason – changed and I encountered a different
scene: different people during a different time.
When it happened a third time, I became so worried and concerned
I had to ask my instructor what Faulkner intended in doing this. I
remember how she smiled. “What’s
the name of the book?” she asked.
I told her. “Where
does it come from?” From Macbeth,
I said. “Tell me the whole
quote.” So I did: Life’s
a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
“Good,” she said. “The
Sound and the Fury has four parts, each from the consciousness of a
different person. The first
part represents the consciousness of Benjy, who, in the parlance of the
Twenties, was an idiot – he was what we might call today mentally
retarded. The book opens
with him watching golfers across the street.
This golf course now stands on land that his family once owned
– land where he used to play with his sister.
His sister’s name was Caddy.
Now a caddie, of course, carries a golfer’s bag, but when he
hears that word from one of the golfers, his mind shifts to a time when
he played there, to a scene in which Caddy is his sister, and Faulkner
indicates this by changing from regular print to italics.
Apparently he wanted to show these shifts using colors, but the
cost of that would have made the book too expensive to buy.” This
small example illustrates the way our minds can make sudden illogical
connections. We’ve perhaps
all experienced such things: a song that suddenly makes us cry or a
scent that in an instant takes us back years to a very different time,
place, and situation. True
logical thought, however, requires our utilization of words
(“logical” deriving, of course, from the Greek word “logos”
meaning “word”), and of syntax and grammar to structure these words
in such a way as to create meaning.
And writing allows us the opportunity to give these words, these
structures, a tangible reality in the world where we can indeed see
them, where we can study and examine them, and even, if we choose,
improve them. Writing forces
us by its very nature to put that dreamy, chaotic, non-linear stuff we
have floating about in our minds into some kind of order – into a
linear progression of words following the natural, instinctive laws of
grammar and syntax. I
tell my writing students that writing provides the best opportunity to
find out what you think. They
believe at first that they’ll have no trouble articulating their
beliefs, but often when they come up against the reality of actually
putting their thoughts into words, they encounter difficulty.
Years of poor schooling and of television watching have made it
difficult for them to utilize their own native language in such an
essential and fundamental way. Often,
their first few attempts at writing, at giving their thought a tangible
reality in the world, reflect the vagueness and imprecision of their
chaotic, non-linear mental impressions.
And since thought essentially stems from the combination of
matter (nouns) and energy (verbs) to create a basic, simple reality
(clauses), this vagueness not surprisingly stems from general and
imprecise nouns combined with the verb to be. I
noticed this heavy reliance on the verb to be relatively early on
in my teaching. Sometimes I
would do nothing to their essays but circle every form of being that I
saw in their paper – I wanted to give them a visual indication of just
how often they used, and how heavily they relied on, not just a single
verb but, more importantly, a verb that indicates, especially when used
alone, no action whatsoever. I
tried to impress upon them the idea that putting being at the center of
thought often leads to vague, sloppy, and imprecise thinking and that
putting action at the center of thought immediately forces you to become
more precise simply because you now have to think harder – an action
requires a responsible party, whereas is or are can take
as its subject it or there, thus creating a subject/verb
pairing like there are or it is which, although they do
contain a subject and verb and thus create simple independent clauses,
have absolutely no information content whatsoever. Only
recently, though, have I come across the concept of E-Prime.
I first saw it mentioned in Quantum
Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson.
E-Prime, according to the man who coined the term, David Bourland,
involves the elimination of the verb to be.
As he writes in Working
With E-Prime, eliminating being from thought “encourages,
even forces, the user to write, speak and think more clearly and
accurately.” It “automatically
eliminates the ‘is-dependent’, over-defining of situations in which
we confuse one aspect, or point of view, of an experience with a much
more complex totality.” For
example, you might think and say that you are tired, or that you are
a fireman. But do those
words accurately describe or define you?
You could instead more accurately and precisely say that you feel
tired, or that you work as a fireman. Let’s
say someone says “that movie was boring.”
This formulation ascribes the quality of “boring” to the
movie itself. But when you
eliminate the being from the sentence, you now must say, “the movie
bored me.” The idea of
boring-ness changes from an adjective, from a quality of the film, to
something that film did to you, which makes a major philosophical
difference. Or
let’s say something thinks or writes, “it’s a good thing to do.”
As the International Society for General Semantics website suggests,
you might revise that to: 1) I suggest you do it, 2) My ethics require I
do this, 3) In order to achieve your goals, you need to do it, or 4) I
want to do it. Notice how
drastically each of these revisions differs from one another.
It resembles something I’ve shared with my students in this
regard. Think of the
statement many of us have heard at one time of another: “Something
should be done about that.” Then
take it apart and analyze it a little:
something (however we define it) should be done
(whatever “doing” means) about that (again however we define
“that”). We could revise
or translate that into anything from “you should mow the lawn” to
“we should kill him.” In
both cases, “something is being done about that,” but all the terms
now have much more precision and definition.
And they also differ a great deal.
So
how does this relate to freedom? Simply
put, such thinking forces you to think more exactly and precisely about
life. Rather than think
about how you think the world is or how you would like it to be,
you have to think about the realities of the world and how things
actually work. Rather than
think about what government is, for example, you must now
consider what government does, and for many people, this kind of
thinking, particularly about government, can help them see things
hitherto hidden from their consciousness and provide eye-opening
revelations. Seeing how
things actually work often enables people to see past their preconceived
notions of what should be and understand the importance of
individual liberty. As
Robert Anton Wilson wrote in his essay Toward
Understanding E-Prime, “consider
the human brain as a computer . . . . The
wrong software guarantees wrong answers. Conversely, finding the right
software can "miraculously" solve problems that previously
appeared intractable. “It
seems likely that the principal software used in the human brain
consists of words, metaphors, disguised metaphors, and linguistic
structures in general. The Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski Hypothesis, in
anthropology, holds that a change in language can alter our perception
of the cosmos. A revision of language structure, in particular, can
alter the brain as dramatically as a psychedelic. In our metaphor, if we
change the software, the computer operates in a new way.” Thinking and writing in E-Prime can go a long way in helping you understand the importance – indeed, the primacy – of the individual and of individual liberty. |
