Culture takes place with language as its apparatus?
A language is a house for a culture? Culture is a house for concepts? Concepts are houses for thoughts? Thoughts are houses for language?
“Hyperobjects seem both vivid and highly unreal.”
“We know more than what we can embody and we can’t put the Ginny back in the bottle”
With no hierarchy, objects (=beings) are nested within other beings, and other beings are endlessly nested within those beings.
The word “Ecology” comes from the greek word “oikos”, meaning a household. We live in a house, an environment, an ecology - which is endlessly nested in other houses, other environments, other ecologies, in an infinite open mesh in which nothing is defined and yet everything exists.
“Cartons are houses for crackers Castles are houses for kings. The more that I think about houses, The more things are houses for things.
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A mirror’s a house for reflections… A throat is a house for a hum…
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A book is a house for a story A rose is a house for a smell My head is a house for a secret. A secret I never will tell. A flower’s at home in a garden A donkey’s at home in a stall Each creature that’s known has a house of its own And the earth is a house for us all.”
I found the book difficult to read. Similarly to LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest, the “bad guys” are so wholly bad, maybe in this case oblivious too, that it makes the book a little un-believable. I wonder if in times of worse female oppression it was ever like this?
But then, leaving the narrow second-wave feminism mindset, if you read the book as a critical commentary of a race / gender / colonial framework, you get a much more interesting read.
As a personal anecdote which was a gateway into these themes for me, while I was living in Israel language around the Palestinian occupation / conflict / colonial project were intentionally confusing and conflicting. Words in Hebrew overlapped, described the same action but meant different things. The terminology was weaponised against public understanding, which caused the general public to say, “this is too complicated, I don’t understand anything about this, I’ll let the government / professionals handle this”.
Ironically, once I moved to the UK, I’ve learned the relevant colonial vocabulary, so I could more precisely identify what was happening in my own home. I guess all this imperial history really does develop the right language to speak about colonisation.
Taking off from the dehumanising of the Other, not just women, what is our language (Engilsh, in this case, as we are not able to talk about languages we don’t actively speak) lacking today? what concepts is English lacking? Do you think a new language will be able to change our situation?
Thinking of Climate Crisis, I think language around that topic is wholly inadequate. It makes the story feel both too-big, so an individual feels totally insignificant in the face of it, and terrifying, so we can’t stop thinking about it.