Shadows of your heart

Mathilde I was not a nice little girl. One time when I was eight I saw a fawn eating dandelions in my backyard. Its legs were spindly, like my friend Clotilde’s legs. Clotilde had three freckles under her left eye that looked like tears; when she laughed it was always because someone else was suffering. She told me she wanted to leave home some day, and I told her that she shared her name with a slave ship.

Our words don’t suit prophecies anymore. That power is left to other species: to oak trees, for example, to the tides, which through their restlessness carry a phosphorescence we’re not equipped to hear.

“Philosopher, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says we require three things to attain a meaningful life. The first is feeling part of a wider community – family, friends, and society in general. Second is an understanding of nature and a connection to the natural order of things, which McGilchrist feels we have largely lost. Finally, we need to form a relationship with the sacred or divine – this can be found in art, music, poetry and religion, where we acknowledge the ineffable and all-encompassing force that holds the world together.”

“In other words, language is necessary neither for categorisation, nor for reasoning, nor for concept formation, nor perception: it does not itself bring the landscape of the world in which we live into being. What it does, rather, is shape that landscape by fixing the ‘counties’ into which we divide it, defining which categories or types of entities we see there - how we carve it up. […] The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has partial truth - if you don’t have the word, you are likely to lose the concept; but this research demonstrates that the concept can arise without the word, and is therefore not dependent on it. So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represented a more fixed version of the world: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking.”