I don't think Michael meant speech when he talked about words. Abstract thought is based on symbols reflected in 'images' of words related to situation. Those are 'shadows' of words always present, except learned mechanical reaction of the mind- body in some fast parts of the games and other activities you mentioned. Boris Shoshensky
---------- Original Message ---------- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Thought always precedes speech Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:29:29 EST Michael writes: "You can't think, at least at a high level of abstraction, without words. And you can't learn words without learning to speak and hear. So, you learn to speak and hear, then learn to think, and then learn to write. All the ideas come later, as you learn to control and reassemble the materials of art." I claim this is wrong in almost every regard, Michael. We all have thoughts and feelings before we ever learn how to put them into words. When Hannah Arendt wrote, "All thinking is in words, speechless thought cannot exist," she also had it flat wrong. Writers struggle to find the right words -- how could that be if their thoughts are in words? How could you ever mis-speak yourself? Rock-climbers, chefs, chess-players, even tennis-players -- they're thinking all the time, just not with words. The notion always precedes the word in the writer. Writers constantly talk of the frequent time-consuming struggle to find the images and actions -- and then the words to express them -- that will produce the effect they want. Consider the four stages of an "act of art". (That phrase need not be fully defined here. My notion behind it will be serviceably clear in a minute. I'm not using the word 'art' in a judgmental sense.) The four stages of a writer's creative act are: 1) a craving for an effect; 2) imagination of the specific material that will produce the effect; 3) conjuring of the words to "express" that material; 4) judgment and selection. The first stage is a craving for an effect on the sensibility and awareness of anyone viewing the work. This first stage is a "generic" yearning in the sense that the specific satisfier of the effect-wanted is not yet identified. When Whitemore was writing his play, BREAKING THE CODE, about Alan Turing, there came a point when this generic intuition came to him: Repeatedly TE LLING the audience that Turing was smart won't do it; now I need to have Turing SHOW them. That was the generic effect-wanted. His next intuition was this: Turing should be in a lecture hall, giving a mind-blowing lecture on cybernetics. But that intuition was still to an extent generic; Whitemore then had to find the right words. In the last stage his sensibility judged those offerings of imagination - yes to that one, no to that oneb& The intuitions (1) of that generic effect-wanted right here, (2) of the "material" that will produce it, and then (3) of the apt words, are three separate actions in the mind of the writer. Each of those stages has to (4) get the approval of sensibility. T.S. Eliot, in his theory of the "objective correlative", overlooked that third stage -- finding the optimal words to express the "maerial". He called for "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events", but he apparently failed to appreciate that the objects aren't the "formula" that readers encounter on the page; they encounter words. A layman and a good writer may both bend themselves to describing the same hurricane, or battle, or a certain slant of light on winter afternoons, but the good writer will come through while the layman is dumbfounded. In sum, the thought, feeling, image always precede their articulation. How otherwise would the mind know what to articulate?
