May 7th, 2008
Tethers
A dog on a tether knows exactly how long it is, and exactly when it is attached. What about us? How do we know how far our minds and imaginations go? Does “I’ve seen this all before” reveal the limits of “this” or of “I”?
Transcript: We can go anywhere we imagine. / Again. / And again.
and thus the need to leave behind the thought of this.. “tether”…
though it isn’t as remotely easy as it sounds…=\
In this case, the “It” is grammatically the dog or the tether, for starters. If the telltale question is how long it is, then the tether would seem to be the object the pronoun refers to, although I have known people to ponder just how long their dog is.
The question of “when” it was attached is a choice I don’t think I would have thought about. My question would be to consider which is attached to which. Is the dog attached? Or the tether attached? And if the highest use for the tether is to limit the dog’s movement, are we being fair to it by referring to it doing its function as a “limit”?
On the Internet I thought it was the length of cats that fascinated more. Anyway, the question of attachment is pertinent. If nothing is attached to us, then to what are we so attached? Why keep returning to the same habits of thinking and acting, again and again? It’s one thing if we have examined the tendency in question, but quite another if we are not aware of it. I’d venture that most of us are not aware of most of our confines.
As another example of a limit… Language. People who learn only one language at birth think only in that language. Their minds cannot escape its limits.
Learning 2 or more from birth teaches thinking between and beyond languages. A multilingual-from-birth person has slipped this Orwellian tether…
I can’t say I agree. I was born into Russian, started learning English at the age of 6, then Hebrew at the age of 9. I think my thoughts are in English, because that’s the language I have the largest vocabulary in.
Still, on the topic of language - I heard a saying once, not sure whose, but it went something like: “Language is the destroyer of imagination”. So, yes, we put ourselves in frames, and leaving those frames often requires more effort than we are capable of applying. But would we really be able to communicate, if we didn’t have language? Any kind?
You may think a mind that has no limitation can expand to infinity. Fine. What then? It gives birth to imaginary galaxies, where there’s an imaginary planet with imaginary people that either have language or don’t.
It’s a mathematical fractal.