A Story About Fish

Words are pregnant with the magic that can be exorcised if you play around with them. They are like mystical clay that can be formed into an infinite variety of shapes. And sometimes the very shape-ness of the words can emanate with a deeper meaning than the words were actually intended to mean. Some words tell a story or explain a train of thought to their would-be audience. Others are: mixed morph fish sentence sentence, comma example, paradox/meaningless?

There is something deep, powerful about self referential words and sentences, much like this sentence, or these words. There is in a sense a sacred geometry being mapped out via symbols, via texts in a formation like this. A sentence can be self referential in the same way an experience can. Am I experiencing the luminescent glow of my laptop as I type, or am I experiencing the experience provided by my perception which is only what I think is happening in front of me?

A lot of folks are adverse to loopyness, so we may have lost another 50% of what was left of an audience, simply with that last sentence, which was really just purposely confusing. Right?

Some sentences are not necessarily purposely confusing, but in a sense, sometimes the only way to convey a true and accurate self-referential idea or point, is to make a sentence that’s all loopy and confusing. Sacred geometries in linguistics are often loopy and paradoxical. But there is importance behind the very fact that our primary mode of operating, as communicative creatures, allows for such messes to be uttered and understood.

A lot of folks avoid this sort of talk or thinking because it seems pointless. It is pointless; that’s kind of the point.

But I challenge society to think of this language problem as scientists. What can we learn from a sentence that is impossible (i.e. ‘This sentence is a lie.’), or refers to something that can’t be (i.e. ‘That is a round square.’)? This sort of enigma seems a great place to test the boundaries of what truth and falsehood are.

Our ways of thinking and reality force us to split statements about any “thing” into two categories: either they are true or false. When I’m not talking about things, I’m talking about no things. Then it is necessarily just irrelevant whether what you are saying is true or false, because you are talking about nothing anyway. To take a step back:

To talk about no things is to talk about nothing.

Might have lost another 50% on that one. Is this hard? Maybe, or maybe it isn’t. The hardest part about paying attention to this self-referential dribble mess of letters is that it is very counter intuitive to convince yourself it’s worth it to try to pay attention to something that is about nothing. Here’s a piece of art about nothing:

This exploration isn’t about fish; though if you expected it to be about fish and are upset that it’s not, you’re probably not in my target audience anyway. I’m kind of trying to go for this surrealist confronting-the-absurdity style using words rather than images style of art-ing.

Hopefully the purpose of these words is a bit clearer after reading through them. Broken up into portions and styles based on their references challenges a reader to not only read the words at face, but

to imagine what the words might be illustrating about “thingness” and “selfness” beyond simply what they are saying

Imagine it like this: A woman is at a dinner with her husband, one of her fellow employees and his wife. The woman sees that her husband is exhausted; he had a flight into the city that left at 5am that morning. She knows him, and can sense that he is tired, but he is not saying anything, so as not to be rude to their hosts. So she tells her fellow employee: “Hey, I think it might be time for us to head out, though. I have a lot of work to catch up on tomorrow and I’m pretty beat.” By using these words, she is communicating that she is tired to her co-worker and his wife. But beyond the words that are being used, there is a deeper context that illustrates that the woman is actually communicating this message on behalf of her husband through a self referential format. It might be a bit strange to say, “Hey, we should get going, Jerry’s really tired”. Gosh dang it Jerry.

Gosh dang it Jerry.

So in order to understand the full content of words, you also need to understand how they are being used. In this scenario, there’s also actually a deeper layer, an underlying communication going on beyond the utterance of the words themselves, or the use of those words taken at face value.

This article is about nothing. There are two ways to interpret the sentence. Maybe even more, but there are at least two. It could be that the article is about ‘nothing’, as in what ‘nothing’ is, or what it means. It could alternatively be that the article is literally written about nothing in particular.

The image above depicts an idea of what a wormhole is like. If you think about how it is illustrated though, an idea is essentially expressed just by showing a geometrical form that may be applied to physics. The idea of how spacetime or dimensions may be shaped isn’t any one thing in particular, so one could say, the idea is about no thing. The dimensionality image, which appears to offer an innovative idea, an imaginary practice, technically refers to nothing in particular, really.

Alright, let’s wrap this up:

Start to think of things in terms of “thingness” rather than just taking things as they seem to be at first. Do this rather than to simply think of things within their “thingness”. ‘Of’ and ‘within’, not just ‘within’. If you think about “thingness”, you will automatically test your knee-jerk reactions to sentences, their meanings, and might even find a way to further empathize with the people in your life that use words. Search for layers of language that may not even be there.

One way to think of reality is that everything just naturally has a sort of “thingness” and that’s just how things are. Now think about how you might try to not think of things in terms of “thingness”. Can you escape communicating in thingness? Is there any communication beyond expressions within thingness? Then you are thinking in terms of nothingness.

If there is no thingness, then there is no difference between a fish and the ocean it swims in. If there is no thingness, then a fish and the ocean are one in the same, in that they are both not.

Just try it.

…

Garrett Stephens has a PhD in nothing and knows a lot about nothing. He is the Founder of Radiance Collective, which really isn’t anything in particular.

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The Whole Point of this endeavor is to be inspired, to think smarter, not harder and to engage with other people who push the limits. So here’s the content that’s kept me on my toes from some other thought leaders and innovators recently:

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