Thought as language?

We're in northwest Morocco cycling north from Asileh to Tangiers on the shortest day of the year, hoping to get a ferry back to Spain this afternoon. We had stopped earlier to admire a vast flock of geese way overhead, a couple of hundred or more, as they honked their way west. They looked like they knew where they were going, in their sure V-formation, not a doubter among them.

Heading up the next long rise, I noticed the incessant chatter of thought, what Toni Packer calls "the whole Niagara of consciousness": my separate selves, arguing and complaining among themselves. My awareness is filled with contradictory voices guiding, teasing, stewing, judging. Sometimes muffled, sometimes screaming at me.

Anyone who tries to pin down the concept of "self" immediately comes up against the obvious fact that none of us has just one self. We have selves. Not the multiple-personality "Sibyl" type selves who take over completely, but the committee of noisy, irritating cries and whispers that second guess, criticize and frown. Oh sure, sometimes they offer a muted compliment (Alright Barry! Nice catch! Wonder if you can do it again?) but mostly they're parental, rational and cautious (Shouldn't you do the dishes before Louisa comes home?).

On each side of the road, fields lush from the December rains stretch to the horizon. My girl is two hundred yards up ahead, looking fit and healthy, her legs pedaling happily in a sweet rhythm that matches my own--nothing beats a bike on an empty road in a far-off land, I think, before reverting to Philosophy 101.

Back in the early 1970's, psychologist Eric Berne narrowed our internal dialog down to a handy cast of just three: Parent, Adult and Child. The game was called Transactional Analysis, and the object was to let the adult-self see when it was being subverted by one's child-self or parent-self.

B-adult: Good morning sweetheart. What time is it?
L-adult: Hi dear. About seven.
B-parent: Oh shit, it's so late. Couldn't you have woken me earlier? You know I hate to sleep later than six.
L-child: I'm sorry, I was so involved in my writing, I didn't notice the time.
B-child: I just want you to be more aware of me in the morning.
L-parent: If you asked me nicely instead of complaining, you might get what you want…

Three selves are certainly better than the ten or twenty that inhabit my skull (and yours too I trust--I'd hate to think I was alone in this menagerie). Three is a nice manageable number, and one of them--Adult--is a no-nonsense, what-you-see-is-what-you-get character--my sort of guy, so Berne was only talking about two "problem" characters, only two selves to actually worry about.

I'm too absorbed in my thoughts to notice the 18-wheeler until it's right on my tail, and jeezus here comes a pick-up just ahead! Body takes over and I'm swerving onto the gravel shoulder, barely avoiding a spill. Nice catch, Barry. This road just isn't wide enough for the three of us. I watch, relieved, as Louisa pulls over calmly, giving the truck all the road it can use. I love seeing her taking such good care of herself.

But that's absurd! As the truck disappears over the hill ahead, something shifts in my brain, a spark jumps, hitherto unconnected synapses shake hands, a flash of understanding shocks me. Here I'd been absorbed with seeing these selves as debating among themselves, each with a well reasoned argument. As I start up the rise, the thought comes: thought doesn't come in sentences and words. Thought isn't language!

What thought? That thought, that sense of a thought, that interpreted, grammatically-correct, filtered, politically-correct version of something that happened in my brain that day in 2000.

***

Any attempts to put thoughts into words are dead on arrival.

Oh sure, we come up with something, we always do, we all do. If someone asks, What are you thinking? we can always come up with something in words. But before speech, I don't have the words all lined up in skull, it's more like, I speak to know what I'm thinking. (Well okay, some words sometimes appear, like when I'm playing around with a sentence before typing it out, or when the words of a song roll around inside my head, but inevitably there's a whole lot more going on.)

The actual words I utter in response to, What are you thinking? or Who am I? are a thin broth compared with the thick gruel of images, feelings, moods, tendencies, sentiments, fancies and just plain old stuff that swirl around, making up what I laughably call my "awareness."

It's easy to overlook the fact that our mental life seems more like a convention of whirling dervishes (Julian James' "world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind") than a well-parsed, grammatically-correct keynote address. The classic example of "thoughts made visible" is Mollie Bloom's soliloquy at the close of James Joyce's Ulysses. I've seen it offered as a sterling example of "stream of consciousness" writing. But of course, it's nothing of the kind. Sure, this is what the indomitable Molly, had she been asked what she was thinking, might have said. But that hardly makes her recorded monologue any more a true record of her thoughts than you or me saying, I'm afraid of dying encompasses the vast pollock-canvas of drips and splatters and rivulets of emotion accompanying that shorthand phrase.

(For a careful author like Joyce--who was known to have spent a whole day trying to come up with a single "right" word--the monolog is multiply-removed, the work of a literary craftsman.)

English novelist David Lodge writes: One of the modernist arguments for removing the intrusive authorial voice (wise, omniscient, reliable, reassuring) from the novel was that it was false to our experience that life is in fact fragmented, chaotic, incomprehensible, absurd...[Virginia Woolf] called for a kind of fiction that would 'record the atoms of experience as they fall upon the mind, in the order in which they fall, that would trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.'

Woolf may have called for that kind of fiction, but her best attempt, the 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, is a valiant attempt, no more, to portray the inner life of English-upper-crust-party-hostess-going-slightly-batty Clarissa Dalloway. Rather than those atoms of experience falling on the mind, readers are treated to fully-formed, perfectly framed words, sentences and paragraphs: we learn something of Mrs. Dalloway's thought process, surely, but we are hardly privy to her consciousness.

How could we be, when we can barely offer a listener--or reader--the barest glimpse of our own inner lives? In fact, skip the "put into words" problem. Isn't it deeper than that? Do any of us, really, have more than the merest glimpse of what's actually happening "inside"? And isn't even the richest conversation a bare skeleton compared with what's going on between two of us as we try to communicate?

We were on the three-o'clock ferry to Algerciras, right next to the Rock of Gibraltar.

(For more on the thought as language metaphor, check out my No. 1 desert-island book, Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh.)