today's topic

today our topic is language.  again.  i realize our topic was language the day before and the day before that and the one before the day before that and the one before the one, the one twice before the one, and thrice, and so on past numbers into the realm of infinite words, a realm that has been rumoured to be mythical but has not yet been proven by scientists and others given to proving or trying to prove or seeming to prove to be so or wholly so.  now in all these lessons in language – which consume our days to such an extent that we could say our days are nothing but these lessons – in all this time – which could be said to be such a continual consumption that it subverts itself and is hardly time but far more words – have we learned anything?  that we even have to ask the question is disturbing and this feeling too we wonder about – wonder many things, but as an instance, whether the disturbing nature of this question is in some manner related (and, if so, how) to time … and, since time is only numbers and numbers only words, more fundamentally to words:  in other words, whether language, though seeming to teach, actually doesn’t.  but this could be a difficult thought – perhaps the most difficult – as haven’t we devoted history (and its associates:  civilization, culture, war, government) to developing language to teach, as a sort of replacement for nature, as nature seemed not to teach anything (or at least anything we liked).  so language, in offering the possibility of teaching something (or at least something we liked), is turning out to teach us nothing and nature (though who among us could speak authoritatively of nature now, since nature too has simply become another word) is turning out (at least as fully in memory as language is in hope) to have offered us something to be taught.  but all this seems simultaneously too binary and confused to coalesce into anything we might rightly call a lesson.  yet we began by not calling this a lesson but a topic and this is an important distinction.  a lesson aims to teach us something, while a topic is simply a topic and has no aims other than itself, which is to say no aims.  perhaps this is the frustration – we want language to be a lesson while all it has the capacity for is being a topic.  or is it the topic?  to speak so definitively seems problematic, raising a grammatical issue of whether the definite article is appropriate in matters outside the specific, sensuous, and prosaic.  we can obviously say – see the cat over there – without raising too many issues.  but as soon as we ask whether language is a topic or the topic, whether that is a point or the point, the’s inadequacies reveal themselves.  which should not stop us from asking, some of you might say, even as others might say these problems and limits and questions have already been discussed and yet we still are here, we still go on, language still is language.  so what can we conclude?  nothing, certainly.  but perhaps something, just to give us a little morsel to chew provocatively even if it should give us some digestive issues or make us throw up or possibly kill us.  or if something is a possibility, are not all possibilities possible and so we could say nothing certainly and everything possibly and something not at all.  but this is hardly satisfying.  don’t we want something?  yes, we could say, with perhaps almost as much certainty as nothing.  and so here it is:  this something, which has already been offered, and is here again today, with our barely even having noticed.