The Night Before...

Orientation meetings are starting for school tomorrow. I guess monday the kids will be there. I'm trying to relax tonight. I spent the day at school moving all of my crap from my old room up in the old weather station (our school is in the old KUTV news building) and into a bigger and better one. It's nice because the ceiling is more than twelve inches above my head in the new room. I mean it was neat to feel tall for a couple of minutes, but I'm quite looking forward to my projector not burning out every day and my room not smelling like a dirty clothes hamper. That's what we used to call my old room, "The Hamper".

There have been some problems and a lot of unpleasantness at school over the summer, especially in the last week, and I fear that this year is going to be even more challenging than last year was. I was very anxious about it, but I realized that the things that have changed are entirely out of my hands and there's nothing I can do about them. I'm trying to take the advice of the Dali Lama in the movie Seven Years in Tibet. Poorly paraphrased (I haven't seen the film in years) he says that if it is something you have control over you don't need to worry, and that if it's something you don't have any control over then there's no reason to.

Anyway, I have a pretty good idea about what I'm going to lead with once I get all of the beginning of the year, beginning of the trimester crap out of the way. I've been reading about Wittgenstein (not reading Wittgenstein, although I got Philosophical Investigations at the library today), and I'm going to start out by reading one of my favorite bits from On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, which eventually ties into Wittgenstein, uses some Truman Capote, then pulls back around to Kerouac.

In the passage Kerouac has arrived in Denver where he finds all of his friends from back in New York. Alan Ginsburg and Neal Cassady tell him that they are performing an experiment, which he subsequently witnesses. Ginsburg and Cassady sit across from each other and talk, and they talk and talk and talk, and they try to describe what they are thinking in such detail that the other will truly understand what they mean. Finally Ginsburg brings up something that Cassady doesn't want to talk about, saying, "There's one last thing I want to know-". So Cassady deflects it and says, "But, dear Sal (Kerouac's character), you're listening, you're sitting there, we'll ask Sal. What would he say?"

Kerouac replies, "That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo (Ginsburg's character). Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all."

So, the question is whether true communication is possible. This ties into Wittgenstein (I think) in this way. An individual names a particular sensation, on some occasion, 'S', and intends to use that word to refer to that sensation. So, this is an example of a word in "private language". Holly Golightly in Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" uses the term "mean reds" do express a significant emotion to her. I might call it anxiety, or ocd, or add, but although my analogues may describe her "mean reds" none of them really are "the mean reds".

Wittgenstein would say that even "the mean reds" isn't really "the mean reds". The mean reds simply are, and though Holly Golightly calls them the mean reds they exist outside of her name for them. What's more, her name for them, "the mean reds" doesn't really mean anything to someone else until she further describes them in sufficient detail that the person can associate it to the sensation or emotion with which they would associate it. It's private language, so until Holly Golightly and the person with whom she's speaking agree upon the association of "the mean reds" with a specific emotion or sensation then it's not really language at all.

Meaning is a social event; meaning happens between language users. As a consequence, it makes no sense to talk about a private language, with words that mean something in the absence of other users of the language. A private mental state like "the mean reds" cannot be adequately discussed without public criteria for identifying it. Wittgenstein argues, if we can talk about something, then it is not private. And, conversely, if we consider something to be indeed private (unique to the individual), it follows that we cannot talk about it.

This illustrates that we are fantastically alone.

But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to communicate. It's my belief that all of the great literature out there is a collection of humanities best effort at communicating "that one last thing". Even if we can't communicate our private experiences, can't make someone feel exactly what we're feeling, with words, we can still inspire them to feel. We can stimulate their imaginations and emotions, and that's still pretty good, and pretty important. At that point I'll read them another passage from On the Road. Maybe the one where he says that it's always been the mad ones for him, or how his favorite word is manana. I still need to work on the dis-mount a bit. But that's the basic idea.