Processing on Language

 Language is a technology.  

Every technology we acquire changes who we are,

like a substrate lying beneath the possibilities of culture.  

Language is a diverse technology.  Like the wheel

we’ve used it in lots of ways

Now we can use it to type in a phrase and generate a painting.  

Hey, that debate’s over now—

a picture is worth a couple words.  

Right now I’m exploring.

This is a way most people don’t know you can use language.  

Language is the history of symbols overlapping abstractions.

This is the result of Socrates’ word games:

we exclude examples from an abstraction to get a clear idea

and then add new examples to alter the idea 

such that the history of the transformations of an abstraction 

ends up telling us how the technology was altered.  

Painting was never one thing.  It was one word overlapping the history 

of the transformations of an abstraction.  

All great technologies undergo this process.  

Language is a great technology.  

For some reason I find myself drawn to poetry, or the word poetry.  

It appears more ultimate than the other language words.  

It says: I live in a moving sphere.  

Poetry is a program for language.

How would someone know—not an expert—but just someone, know 

that I’m writing a poem and not something else?  

Honestly one of the first ideas might be “it doesn’t make sense” 

or “it rhymes.”  

Can this technology be saved?  

Or am I looking for a new transformation of language?  

Perhaps that is poetry itself.  

The true transformation of language.  

Such that all prose and philosophy that is transformed in time is poetry.

Therefore its ultimacy.  

Meaning that poetry is in a sense beyond tradition.  

It is the art of language super omnia

the governing principle behind the transformation of the technology of language.  

Alright.  That’s been a ream of abstraction.  What do I want to do with language?

Where is the poetry?  

The question has always been: what do I want to communicate?