My native language isn't
Yesterday I glued three spools of ribbon to a bedsheet. I forgot how good that feels.
Language, any system of formalized symbols, signs, sounds, gestures, or the like used or conceived as a means of communicating thought, emotion, etc. was my second love. Stories and the means by which they convey them have enchanted me since before I knew how to read. I imagine, if I were able to remember that far back, that they have from before I learned how to speak. I am very, very good with words. I know a lot of them, I use them, I soak in them. I read the way some people smoke. I take in words like breathing. A couple of times in college I missed reading, because I didn't have time to do enough of it. In the last year I've binged on reading, even by comparison to myself, but something was missing.
Knitting is the bridge between language (numbers, letters, sounds--music, mathematics, words written and spoken) and my native "language," how I think. Knitting is a visual-tactile impression with counting and patterning if one does it with a pattern, of pure sensory input and impressioned repetition if you don't. I'm very good at knitting. I'd knit in college, I'd knit in the car, while I watched TV, knit to have something to do to settle down at the end of a long while writing papers or toiling in the studio. I understand knitting, and lately I've been doing a fair amount of it, but something was still missing.
Last night I spent three or four hours in my parents' bedroom, solely because it has the largest patch of open floor in the house. I was pacing off a bedsheet on the floor. I tore it to size. I rubbed a bar of soap all over it, unspooled ribbon, laid it all out, and glued it down.
It felt... peaceful. Peace in the absence of strong feeling, peace in the gentle, inescapable sense of a quiet, subtle contentment, that which comes when a square peg fits snugly into a square hole. That was what had been missing.
When behaving natively (given over completely to myself, to what is easiest, to what I do when I do not have to adapt) my native "language" isn't language at all--not without a healthy exercise in semantics. I have an internal monologue. (I actually have several, and occasionally they become external monologues, much to a couple of ex-roommates' amusement.) I talk to myself. When I read, I "hear" the words in my head. But I do not think in language.
This isn't something I'd ever deliberately realized until I began working for an office that offers education on, among other things, autism, and heard Dr. Temple Grandin, PhD, tell the world that she does not think in language. She does not think in words. She thinks in pictures. We talk about visual/tactile/audial thinkers and learners, especially education, but she means it farther and, perhaps, deeper. Because she is autistic she doesn't adapt as readily and quickly as those not on the Autism Spectrum. She couldn't figure out how to translate her visual thinking into a linguistic world--she had to be taught. She's not unique in that--this is why speech therapists have jobs.
I think in pictures. I think in sensations: I think in touches, scents, tastes, emotions, and pictures. I think in impressions (defined as a collection of sensory data attached to an emotion). I can feel my body assuming postures it is not actually moving to assume. I can smell things that are not there, see images that have nothing to do with my eyeballs, and, very occasionally, hear things that have nothing to do with my ears. It's not ESP, it's how I think. This is the native "language" of my internal processes, this is how I store and recall information, this is how I make decisions and projections about the future.
This may be why I am good at description, and why I am so bad at the info dump (to whit, giving a reader unnecessary information).
...this is also possibly why I'm so good at understanding people face-to-face when neither one of us is fluent in the other's language, rather neutral at understanding written foreign language, and so bad at understanding foreign language over the telephone. This may be why, if fluency is defined as "not needing to translate two languages in your head," I can be fluent and still have a vocabulary too small to read a book with. When I speak and hear French, I do not translate from English to French. I "translate" from an impression to French. When somebody is talking to me in English while I'm trying to understand French at the same time, I'm translating from English to picture to French to picture to English, all while carrying on the background retrieval that allows context and navigation (both mental and the sort that allows one to figure out a railway system), and am usually mentally keysmashing while I do it wishing SOMEBODY would shut up until I click into gear.
I could make twinkie claims (on the sound basis of one entire animal behavior book) that I think like an animal. And you know, maybe I do think like an animal. This doesn't mean I understand animals, because I am a primate and the native body language of a primate is not the same native language as a dog, or a horse, or a snake, or a bird. I don't even understand primates all that great, I just understand them better. I had to learn those other animals, and in the latter three cases (particularly the birds) I haven't learned it well enough to avoid some fairly spectacular "errors in communication." Detail, shall we say, is most emphatically lost.
Art is not a "language" of language. It's a system of impressions--of picture, color, scent, touch, perhaps even sound, movement, and taste. It's a visuo-kinetic activity that fits, square peg into square hole, with how I think. And for some reason, probably no real reason at all, I hadn't done it in a while.
Last night I glued three spools of ribbon to a bedsheet, and I couldn't have been happier. I've missed it.
It's how I think.
Language, any system of formalized symbols, signs, sounds, gestures, or the like used or conceived as a means of communicating thought, emotion, etc. was my second love. Stories and the means by which they convey them have enchanted me since before I knew how to read. I imagine, if I were able to remember that far back, that they have from before I learned how to speak. I am very, very good with words. I know a lot of them, I use them, I soak in them. I read the way some people smoke. I take in words like breathing. A couple of times in college I missed reading, because I didn't have time to do enough of it. In the last year I've binged on reading, even by comparison to myself, but something was missing.
Knitting is the bridge between language (numbers, letters, sounds--music, mathematics, words written and spoken) and my native "language," how I think. Knitting is a visual-tactile impression with counting and patterning if one does it with a pattern, of pure sensory input and impressioned repetition if you don't. I'm very good at knitting. I'd knit in college, I'd knit in the car, while I watched TV, knit to have something to do to settle down at the end of a long while writing papers or toiling in the studio. I understand knitting, and lately I've been doing a fair amount of it, but something was still missing.
Last night I spent three or four hours in my parents' bedroom, solely because it has the largest patch of open floor in the house. I was pacing off a bedsheet on the floor. I tore it to size. I rubbed a bar of soap all over it, unspooled ribbon, laid it all out, and glued it down.
It felt... peaceful. Peace in the absence of strong feeling, peace in the gentle, inescapable sense of a quiet, subtle contentment, that which comes when a square peg fits snugly into a square hole. That was what had been missing.
When behaving natively (given over completely to myself, to what is easiest, to what I do when I do not have to adapt) my native "language" isn't language at all--not without a healthy exercise in semantics. I have an internal monologue. (I actually have several, and occasionally they become external monologues, much to a couple of ex-roommates' amusement.) I talk to myself. When I read, I "hear" the words in my head. But I do not think in language.
This isn't something I'd ever deliberately realized until I began working for an office that offers education on, among other things, autism, and heard Dr. Temple Grandin, PhD, tell the world that she does not think in language. She does not think in words. She thinks in pictures. We talk about visual/tactile/audial thinkers and learners, especially education, but she means it farther and, perhaps, deeper. Because she is autistic she doesn't adapt as readily and quickly as those not on the Autism Spectrum. She couldn't figure out how to translate her visual thinking into a linguistic world--she had to be taught. She's not unique in that--this is why speech therapists have jobs.
I think in pictures. I think in sensations: I think in touches, scents, tastes, emotions, and pictures. I think in impressions (defined as a collection of sensory data attached to an emotion). I can feel my body assuming postures it is not actually moving to assume. I can smell things that are not there, see images that have nothing to do with my eyeballs, and, very occasionally, hear things that have nothing to do with my ears. It's not ESP, it's how I think. This is the native "language" of my internal processes, this is how I store and recall information, this is how I make decisions and projections about the future.
This may be why I am good at description, and why I am so bad at the info dump (to whit, giving a reader unnecessary information).
...this is also possibly why I'm so good at understanding people face-to-face when neither one of us is fluent in the other's language, rather neutral at understanding written foreign language, and so bad at understanding foreign language over the telephone. This may be why, if fluency is defined as "not needing to translate two languages in your head," I can be fluent and still have a vocabulary too small to read a book with. When I speak and hear French, I do not translate from English to French. I "translate" from an impression to French. When somebody is talking to me in English while I'm trying to understand French at the same time, I'm translating from English to picture to French to picture to English, all while carrying on the background retrieval that allows context and navigation (both mental and the sort that allows one to figure out a railway system), and am usually mentally keysmashing while I do it wishing SOMEBODY would shut up until I click into gear.
I could make twinkie claims (on the sound basis of one entire animal behavior book) that I think like an animal. And you know, maybe I do think like an animal. This doesn't mean I understand animals, because I am a primate and the native body language of a primate is not the same native language as a dog, or a horse, or a snake, or a bird. I don't even understand primates all that great, I just understand them better. I had to learn those other animals, and in the latter three cases (particularly the birds) I haven't learned it well enough to avoid some fairly spectacular "errors in communication." Detail, shall we say, is most emphatically lost.
Art is not a "language" of language. It's a system of impressions--of picture, color, scent, touch, perhaps even sound, movement, and taste. It's a visuo-kinetic activity that fits, square peg into square hole, with how I think. And for some reason, probably no real reason at all, I hadn't done it in a while.
Last night I glued three spools of ribbon to a bedsheet, and I couldn't have been happier. I've missed it.
It's how I think.