Touchstones:

or the need of the other for language.

One idea, sparks another. A new way of using a word starts to play out in your head. It suddenly makes new patterns apparent. This sparks a little cascade of ideas. Suddenly a few more words shift into a newly evolving schema. This shift in thought starts to pull other words out of orbit. Suddenly a whole bunch of mysteries open up and you have the power to see into them. You can now hear over-tones in the words that were never before suspected. The words that shifted a little in the beginning have started to take entirely distinct linkages, splitting into multiple words. And these new layered words have new meanings added to them each based on the previous layers of meaning. But as you build up these towers they begin to shift in the wind. A path through the abstractions only traveled once is not deeply etched, and is only remember vaguely, by virtue of re-deriving the path from the land marks. But who has time to retrod a path deep into memory, when on each trip down the path several more present themselves. Now, tying back to the base metaphors for a moment so that this path not become as lost and the one about which it is a story of, we are building up news layer of connections between words, ideas, images, and so on. Each new layer forming bridges and short cuts between distant places in the forest of the mind. But these bridges are put up quite wily nilly often not much more then lifting a word over the canopy, and tying it to another word pole far away with rope. Thin rope. Each time we cross the ropes the pull another rope with us, making the bridge more secure. But rope bridges are not solid, other forces move then around when we aren't paying attention. The forest of the mind isn't very stable you know! And of course ever since this damn story started, with the lifting of one word to a new layer of canopy we have been able to see dozens of new possible connections (what am I talking about, brains, neurons, forests, bridges, towers, paths?) and we have been in a rush to start linking them is this really playful way, drawing ropes from place to place that cats cradle in the mind. So many new connections that we go back down to the forest layer that we called home before this started and look up, seeing a HUGE new canopy. And some words even raised about the super canopy we imagine as starting points for a no doubt more abstract super duper canopy to come, like trees planted on and growing from the ropes that connect the underlying layer. The wind (those little thoughts that we never all the way hear, blowing through our minds) is making sway the rope bridges, and tangling some. Only the most used and reused bridges are staying stable(ish). We look down to the ground of life. The most grounded and tied to the world bits of our mind. We see that it is dizzyingly far beneath us. I look: This forest... I invented as a metaphor, quite by accident... for the loneliness of private language, my words running amok as I play with their meaning, inventing a new jungle... what was the ground, it is so far that I can hardly see... as yes I can see a bit of earth a touchstone... you, for all the confusion of my mental adventures and the dangers of being lost, and making a forest so thick that I can't escape it... there is you and your use of language not tangled up in the same way.

So I tell you the story of the forest, and you receive the best connections from the story. You say 'hey, that bridge there is quite nice, lets keep it, so we always have a short cut for that connection.' and in that the cacophony on other bridges fades. The forest rots back into the soil. But the finest new trees (truths) are left standing as glorious new canopy members. This is why we name trees, because they are connected in ways that let us see patterns in the world that we can't see from the ground. These named trees are the ones we both know, sharing a forest.