Les éléphants et les acrobates (part II)

But symbology is not relegated to the scientific world. Symbology is part of everything we know and do. Why is this? Because we are all isolated from each other and isolated from the world ... separated by our senses. It's as if we were each an island and our senses are narrow bridges. We must sort which information is allowed to pass over as well as in which lane: express lane, medium lane, slow lane. Some lanes we hardly even pay attention to; we just store any traffic passing on these lanes in a warehouse somewhere in case we need to try and remember it later. Meanwhile, when we wish to communicate back over these bridges to another individual, we must do so using an intricate system of signs and symbols.

This is often portrayed for simplicity's sake as:

A (meaning) → B (symbol) → C (interpretation of meaning)

This is language. We codify our thoughts into words which we utter. The receiver of our message listens to our utterance, assigns meaning to the phonemes, and interprets the meaning in their mind. It's actually quite a crude process -- prone to many errors. These errors can be the fault of the sender, who may be tired and mispronounce words or mumble; they may be on the part of the receiver, who may not be paying attention and mis-hear something; or they may be due to environmental interference such as background noise and commotion. The most intriguing errors stem from miscommunication, however. These occur when the sender and the receiver have different interpretations of the symbols used, which is not difficult to imagine since a symbol is by its very nature arbitrary and therefore a bit ambiguous. Add to this the fact that language is very complex and most words have more than one meaning, some words have homonyms, etc. Moreover, oral communication is not confined to the words themselves, but also our inflections and body language.

Communication isn't only spoken either. It can take many senses and forms and pass to us through any of our senses. Even the layout of a store or home influences our thoughts: hence the emergence of feng-shui as a new popular fad in American society. Communication is multi-dimensional. In its conventional and most basic form (i.e. A→B→C), communication is dependent on us assigning similar meanings to symbols: the more ambiguous the symbol, the more room for alternate interpretations. A good example of this is dance or art, where the artist's intent is to communicate complex emotions through body movements or stripes of paint on a canvass and yet viewers can have extremely diverse emotional responses to these. And, in the realm of body language, arbitrary hand gestures have various negative meanings, depending on which culture you find yourself in.

The whole process of communication is a fight between economy and comprehensiveness. How much information is too little? How much is too much? If we err on the side of paucity, our listener is sure to infer a different meaning than the one we implied. On the other hand, if we use a superfluity of words we run the risk of making our listener feel patronized or bored. We subconsciously gauge our listener and couch our words in language we'll hope they'll better understand (like when people speak slower to foreigners or children). Our language changes from individual to individual, and with close friends that language can be very exclusive, with much specialized meaning assigned to single words or phrases. Our interpretation of the meaning of words is based upon our background and life experiences. The way we communicate with another individual is based upon what we estimate about their backgrounds and life experiences.

This can cause major problems. Among other things, we often stereotype people -- which itself is the process of assigning meaning to a person's appearance or culture. Sometimes stereotypes are true, often they are false, but the significant thing is that to stereotype is natural: our minds are looking for patterns of behavior and attempting to connect that to a symbol we can interpret...in this case, a person's skin tone. Most behavioral scientists believe racism arises from faulty education. I believe that to stereotype is natural, but that stereotyping becomes discriminatory and racist through environmental reinforcement. In other words, I think it is natural for a black child and a white child to notice their differences; but it is when a parent teaches their child that to have an opposing skin color is bad (thereby assigning meaning to that symbol) that we arrive at racism.

Now, moving away from social commentary. I would like to return to what I was saying before about the arbitrariness of symbols. Poets and artists use that arbitrariness to their advantage. It was once the trend in Classical Art for artists to imitate reality, and they perfected these attempts over time until an artist could render a landscape or a portrait with a startling degree of accuracy, using contrasting colors, shading, light and perspective to create the illusion of reality. More recently, there was a revolution in art and artists began moving away from realistic art and back into the abstract. This made interpretation of art more difficult, but added to its esoteric nature. Furthermore, it placed more of the onus of interpretation on the viewer allowing for more emotional interaction. Post-impressionists such as Claude Monet used dots and color splashes to affect their viewers emotionally rather than logically.

Deliberate arbitrariness is also used by the military in cryptography. Using codes, they assign meaning to arbitrary symbols like streams of letters and numbers, making it so that only an intended receiver of the information (i.e. one who also knows the code) can interpret the hidden message. This is an age-old process. From the first moments of history, groups of people were either deliberately or naturally assigning esoteric meaning to different symbols. The Children of Israel had numerous symbols with hidden and sacred meanings: the snake on the staff, altars in the wilderness, the unleavened bread, cherubim and brass seas in the temple. Much of this was, as I said, natural: they had eaten unleavened bread due to their haste in leaving Egypt and yet the Feast of Unleavened Bread became a ceremony symbolizing deliverance from bondage. Symbols create identity and mystery. They are also divisive: creating insiders and outsiders. In ritualistic ceremonies such as in the temple, the symbols' mystery symbolizes the mysteries of God Himself. The symbols are not obvious because God is not obvious. Only priests and those willing to delve deep into the mysteries are able to discern the true meaning behind a symbol.

This also applies to symbolic writing. Kabbalism is the study of hidden symbols in writing -- especially ancient Jewish religious texts. Modern scholars attempt to glean esoteric meaning from numerology and the placement of Hebrew characters. They find "Kennedy" and "assassination" crosswise or downwards in the text and make the assumption that God had foretold the president's death thousands of years before it happened. They then scour the texts for further meaning in hopes of finding hidden prophecy. In the more mundane realm, anyone who took English in High School will know that similar processes are used to scour poetry and literature: searching the words like Kabbalists in order to ascertain the author or poet's true underlying meaning. Sometimes there is a hidden dual meaning. Other times there is not except to our imagination. Some English teachers are strict and believe that only the author can interpret his/her work, others that the receiver can, and still others feel that only the Greater English Community of Academics (GECA) can properly decide what meaning can be assigned to a work (Mrs. Hill, Davis High School).

Taking this one step further, there are some philosophers who believe that there are archaic symbols so deeply rooted in the human consciousness that they carry universal meaning. Joseph Campbell is one such believer. Carl Jung is another one, only Jungists believe that these symbols are part of a collective consciousness...that we are born knowing them. There is evidence, at least in the animal world, that knowledge can become innate. A baby chick placed in a room will scurry for cover if the shadow of a hawk passes overhead; while it will remain calm if a non-predatory bird shadow does the same.

I cannot pretend to know all the ins and outs of this subject. I have a personal revulsion to thinking that we are hardwired to interpret universal symbols. It seems too metaphysical for my tastes. On the other hand, I can easily believe that some colors and symbols have a certain psycho-somatic response in us: the shape of a woman and its accompanying effect on men, for instance (and I'm not talking about the unnaturally skinny shape of today's women; I mean the pear-shaped "birthing" female archetype once worshipped by Neolithic man). I have always wanted to give more thought to the subject; and I keep saying over and again that I should read Joseph Campbell. I just haven't gotten around to it.

Curse you, Tad Williams! Curse you, Neil Gaiman!