Post script
Here is the paradox of language: if I say, all words are fictions then these words are fictions as well. Thus the statement is true if false and false if true. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t so. That is, it is a dubious argument at best to use a paradox to prove that all words are not fictions. But how can we be so sure? How can we show empirically that the statement, ‘all words are fictions’ is false? It is our contention that we cannot. From the problem of ‘nouns’ to the absoluteness of ‘is-ness’ language is wrought through and through with untenable assumptions which do not have any correlation to the relativistic universe in which we live.
“In the Beginning was the word and the word was God.” This does not mean that nothing existed before the word just that, for conscious self awareness, there could be no beginning before the word. The word is the beginning of conscious self awareness. It is the means by which the self extracts itself from conscious awareness; the means by which we learn to differentiate, if only for a moment, that which is forever a seamless whole. Within a historical perspective, this can be seen as necessary, a survival of the fittest. For if our words could not function reliably we would not speak them. If they bore no semblance to something not only would we not mistake them, we would not have them to begin with!
The big mistake comes when they become an ending, when our words become definitive. Then, we become their prisoners and all that was once beautiful becomes dull and grey. This is why we must never leave this world in the hands of the those who cannot go on, who cannot continue to find New Horizons. Language is the beginning, not the end. When we free ourselves from the bondage of our words we have not forsaken them, only come to appreciate the humor and subtlety of their infinitely transposable nature. In so doing, we have freed them, and they have freed us.
July, 1999