To Be an HK0

I was reading. Something gelled, something struck. It's funny to realize in the middle of reading that there is an interesting idea out there that you've come across before but never thought very much about. (It's also funny to realize in the middle of reading that there is an interesting idea brand new to you at the time—transfinitude, bivalent communication, an algebra that speaks equally well about knots and quanta—but this reading was not that.)

The idea was being blind. I never think about being blind and maybe I should, since I am notoriously bad (to boyfriend and optometrist alike) about sleeping with my contacts in. As I think back through the mists, it seems like I was 10 or 12 when I came to accept blind is better as my answer to the playground straw poll (/ candied, caffeinated chitchat) about whether it was better to be blind or deaf. I can't really isolate my 12-year-old intuitions; but it feels true to say that those then were mine now, as far as the blind-or-deaf question goes. Which pretty much means I haven't thought about it since. Weird.

The 12-year-old intuition, then (in a new suit of words): Love and friendship are muchly if not mostly vocal. A faceview says plenty, true, but faceviews say less than conversations (and not just trope-ically)... Little toddlings may look to faces for context and reassurance, but us older children look to the tics in the stream of voice. Or at least I do. I can watch a movie with my eyes closed—at least one of the old mise-en-scene human-paced variety—but I have trouble with my ears closed. Is this just the way movies are made now, dialogue-rich, or is this tentative evidence that human life more densely packs into sound than into sight? (If the latter, uh-oh. See my previous post, My Voice is Visual.) Upshot: I feel more cut off cut off from sound than I do from sight. Another illustration that this is true for me: When I plug my ears (unless I psych myself up for it and the scene is brief and visually rich, as when I use earplugs in a noisy dance club), I feel claustrophobic to the point of dry-drowning. But when I close my eyes all I feel is a calm, boring, eager dark.

I just experimented a bit to see if/how my intuition has changed. When I close my eyes now, fifteen years older, it feels scarier. The thought creeps in with moderate force, What if you couldn't open the lids again, at will? It would suck. (Maybe this feeling is fertilized by the knowledge that I love to see thoughts as sentences. I never hear them quite right, but often I see them just right. Also, I'm bad at visualizing hard abstract pictures—terrible topologist I'd make—so I need visual, symbolic assistance. I need to see the pictures tracked syntactico-discursively, since I usually can't see them in their naked forms. Pity, since I love nakedness. Damn my shitty visuospatial pathways. Thank God so much of math has been algebraicized.) But still it feels at least a pinch more claustrophobic to imagine a sound vacuum from here on out. Just a succession of signs and symbols, ugly pictures and pretty, faces and feces. Not good.

But let me move on to my motivation for writing this post. It's in the questions I'll try formulating as: How much of us is lodged in our senses? and the corollary/ancillary Utterly senseless, what are we? and most of all, Are our senses crucial to our identities, or crutches without which we might even be abler? I can't really answer any of these, but I'll stab at the dark with a few thoughts.

Good old Helen Keller teaches us that a sense vacuum (especially two of the main 'cognitive' senses, sight and hearing; the abstracting senses of music, math, and art) is a nightmare but that there is at least something like waking, into the calm provided by that even more abstracting, representation-providing faculty: the linguistic intellect or more simply, language. Representation (hereafter, REP) joins us to a larger world and frees us from the sticky hothouse you can simulate by touching and tasting things for an hour with a blindfold on and earplugs in. REP is so integral that it's hard to think without it. Although modernism and postmodernism try; with their words and paint splotches speaking only their own language; as wheels within wheels and no road around. It's interesting. Doesn't get you too far, though; you start hating or loving the melody, the splotches or the inward aesthetics of the words (their meaning, context, and advocacy aside), which is all good and a good source of loveable things to keep handy in your life, but still, after a while you crave meaning context and advocacy. You want the abstracted bits to open up views, to transport you to them. (Side note: Sometimes they do this without having to, just by jogging or instigating thoughts: by founding thoughts, intentionally or unintentionally.) O REP, too much of you and all we have is the world again—the world redundant, the words pleonastic—but too little and all we have is smudges of word-tokens and pigment. (Which again are sometimes lovely, but not lovely enough to keep us satisfied... not lovely enough to keep us loving the world and the fact of our being in it, or so I'd conjecture.)

Math is a weird special case. It's abstract, so much so that besides the kooky Platonists (who in flights I almost join now and then), everyone believes math isn't 'about' anything other than the structure of our formal concepts, which we lift from the empirical world but then de-empiricize before christening mathematical. Like the natural numbers. You know, 1,2,3..., those. If someone tried to verify a very large computation with say, popcorn kernels, and the instantiated kernel-calculation disagreed with the abstract one done in numerals, the numerals win. Everyone assumes something went wrong in practice; and the kicker is, some computations are with numbers oodles larger than the number of particles in the universe, and no one worries that there is no way to verify that the computation is really 'true of the universe'; and the double-kicker is, even if the world did weird shit like when you put exactly 500 kernels together in a group, one disappears, so that physically adding 500 and 500 gives 998, math would still claim that 500 + 500 = 1000. De-empiricized.

So math is lost, basically. Between being certain about what it's certain about (which it is, and should be) and not being about anything in the world; only in worlds the world inspires. (Bertrand Russell made a similar point a hundred years ago, before he came to believe—bad Wittgenstein!—that math is fully tautological and therefore fully pointless.)
So math is awesomely powerful, but philosophically tenuous.

But interesting. Math grows and thrives, cut off from the world. Maybe other cut-off things can grow and thrive? God? That's a whole 'nother story.

And something I'm keeping in mind as I'm wondering if a senseless world would make a better one (if Helen Keller, twice deprived, is defined as an HK2, then the utterly senseless are HK5s) is that without all that periodic sensory input, influx and inspiration math gets before it sets up shop in the concepts, the concepts probably wouldn't be there for us. (A philosopher might put this as No abstracta without concreta.) Or would they? HK had language abilities waiting to be activated, and boy were they once they were. What else waits with us and in us? And is some of what waits (a religious itch?) de-activated by our usual sensory overload? Is God any brighter in a blackened sky? Blank inside—for moments or hours, by choice—what choices might present themselves?