| | | Patterns and Languages |
Above the table where I write, there is a still life oil painting. The rendering is brusque, almost telegraphic, and the painting readily dissolves back and forth between an image -- a coffee pot, a bottle and some garlic -- and a meaningless pattern of brushstrokes. The uneasy balance between meaning and mess is delicious, and it's what I enjoy most about the painting.
This book is also a pattern, made up of 26 letters and punctuation. It, too, is potentially meaningless. Like the painting, the interpretation of the meaning described by the pattern of these letters is a fragile thing, liable to be impossible except under certain special conditions.
Meaning is granted to this arrangement of letters by the reader's command of the English in which it was written. The author's intentions are not irrelevant, but they are only a part of the story. I do have a meaning in mind when I arrange these letters, but that meaning is only conveyed to readers who share my language.
My language is not just English, but English informed by the time and place in which I live. It is not simply a set of dictionary definitions, but a set of definitions augmented by the formal and informal rules of usage in effect right now, where I sit. If I write of someone that his elevator doesn't go all the way to his top floor, I divide the speakers of English into a group that understands the meaning and a hopefully much smaller group that does not. My use of the word "hopefully" in the previous sentence further divides the world into a group that disapproves of this usage as a corruption of the adverb, and another that considers it an unremarkable part of everyday English.
But what is often overlooked is that the context in which the pattern of this book is most accurately interpreted is tremendously, absurdly, unimaginably, more complex than the book itself. As we all have private fancies with which we arm ourselves against the cruel world, I imagine I have thoughts about life that others may find interesting. But in the deepest embrace of this fancy, in the wildest ravings I've ever suffered, I've never once imagined I could alone build an intellectual edifice to rival the richness and complexity of the accumulated store of the American English language in the 21st Century. I may occasionally wander in fields of self-delusion, but I know the way home.
This book can be translated into another language, allowing people who don't speak English to share its meaning. But some translations are more challenging than others. France, for example, shares with America a great deal of intellectual tradition. The French have elevators, for one thing. Between these two languages, there are relatively few utterly untranslatable cultural references, perhaps excluding a few very current ones. Consequently, a French-English dictionary and some basic grammar is all you really need to do an adequate translation. Of course, the more sensitive you are to the nuances of each language, the better the translation, but the point is about the conveyance of meaning, not the elements of style.
In contrast, a translation into one of the many indigenous languages of the interior of New Guinea--where elevators are scarce--may be more challenging. To make a real translation into a language like Bwaidoka or Enga, I must make explicit much of what I can leave implicit to those who share my culture.
The cultural common ground on which the reader and the author stand is often slighted in the same way it is easy to overlook the air we breathe. But, like the air, close examination reveals normally unseen whorls of complexity.
So far, so obvious. So what?
The point is that somehow, this common sense analysis leaves us when we consider the complexity of DNA. Like this book, a molecule of DNA contains a pattern made up of a small number of "letters" arranged in slightly larger groups which could be considered "words" which are themselves arranged into groups fancy could call sentences or paragraphs. The whole sequence, across all the separate chromosomes, makes an organism's genome. The comparison to a written human language is nearly unavoidable, and few people--or at least few writers--avoid it.
| | | Patterns and Languages |