Bamboo structures

A bamboo structure my dad and I walked by in Tung Chung this past August

Recently, on a night out with friends, I took the MBTI test. I think it’s interesting that I got Mediator (INFP-T), especially since when I had taken this previously a few years ago, I got something, I forget, but it started with “E” (Extroverted), not “I” (Introverted). I guess college these past few years have turned me inward.

Anyway, that’s not why I wanted to write. This morning when I was showering, I actually became interested in the second division of the MBTI attributes: thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling. That every single perception of human experience, of personality, falls somewhere on a spectrum between left brain, right brain.

Apparently, I’m “Feeling – 63%.” Whatever that means.

Here are the first two definitions of what my computer’s dictionary gave me for these two words.

Think: “Have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something.”

Feel: “Be aware of (a person or object) through touching or being touched.”

Or, the second definition: “Experience (an emotion or sensation).” (Helpful!)

For the infinitude of experience that life gives us, isn’t it strange that we have only two words?

This is not my own thought. Last semester, in passing, a professor mentioned how pitiable it is that there are only two options for when you want to express the thought of thinking and feeling. She said: “How sad!” And at the moment, I thought so too: How sad. How sad that we have only two words to capture the infinities of experience we experience every moment, let alone every minute, day, lifetime.

Wittgenstein declared that words fail. He identified how words, and concepts, begin to fall apart when you think about them too much. Like, try defining the word “think” to yourself. Describe it, with a sentence. Then, continue to qualify it, more and more. Eventually, I bet, you’d get to a definition that sounds like “feel” more.

Like, this secondary definition of “think” in my dictionary: “Have a particular mental attitude or approach. He thought like a general. One should always think positive.” Wait, what does that mean?

When my professor had pointed this out, it solidified in me a nebulous feeling I had been feeling for a long time, feeling throughout my time in college. After those deconstruction-centric courses like Postmodernism and Derrida, I felt that the failure of words was kind of apocalyptic, like discovering everything about my world had been built on a lie. It seemed like there was no meaning to anything to words, speech, language. This was an entirely arbitrary system. I was trapped, capable of describing words only with other words. Eventually, it just broke down, and I ran myself in circles trying to figure out “true definitions” to no end.

And the scarier thought: I was capable of describing myself only with words. And more words.

This realization about the arbitrariness of words reminded me of those bamboo structures that you sometimes see around Hong Kong around the festival seasons. It’s like a well-made structure on the outside, from afar. But you walk up to it, and you see that each stick of bamboo is made up of smaller strands of wood, the size of toothpicks. And you zoom even closer to these little toothpicks, and see the individual fibers that make up each strand. And then you keep zooming in.

It’s not a perfect metaphor. But you get it, right? It’s almost like you can keep on going, keep on fixating on tinier sticks of bamboo, sticks, fibers, until you realize you’ve gone on the wild goose chase of the definite. It’s fascinating how so many small, inexact things can come together to make something as substantial as a large, imposing structure like a bamboo tower. As words come together to make meaning.

For a long time, I thought that this breakdown of language identified the meaninglessness of communication, that there wasn’t any reason to use words anymore because meaning could explode in every direction. What did I insist on a certain name? Why did I ever insist on what was “right” or “wrong”? And there are even more problematic labels, which fall apart at the slightest interrogation. (Try anything to do with identity. Collapses at the touch.)

But after some time, I’ve come to refuse this hole of meaninglessness. Kind of like that bagel in Everything Everywhere all at Once. You can’t just get sucked into nothing just because you’ve identified how fraught meaning is.

Because, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, there must be a meaning to all of this, right?

The failure of words cannot entail the failure of life. That feels like a false entailment to me. That’s not logically correct. If anything, life precedes words. We experience the world through things like sense or intuition before they go into words. (“Sense,” “intuit” … now there are some alternatives, to “think” and “feel.” Now we’re getting somewhere…) Words are not useless. Rather, the issue is in the order in which we apply the utility of words. Words are useful so long as we recognize that they come after life. We experience life first; then we put them into words in order to “make sense” of it. We do this for ourselves as much as for others.

Words function more like a social mechanism. They’re a collective system that we all buy into in order to replicate the ideas and experiences we have in the minds of others. Or ourselves, in different circumstances.

When I say “I live in New York,” it’s easy to imagine how it would mean something very different to my brother, who goes to Cornell, and lives in upstate New York. But when I say “I live in New York” to my roommate on Riverside Drive, or when Joan Didion said it to me before I lived here, that would mean something entirely different. If I say “I live in New York” to myself years from now, when I won’t anymore—that would also mean something different too. You see how words are instruments we use to generate similar or different ideas in each other? They are inextricably context-dependent.

As a side note, this is why I am usually such a stickler for grammar, especially those minor grammar problems. Like, where people put “only” in a sentence. Like, do you know how different the sentences are "you only live once" and "you live only once"? I would hate to only live once. I’d probably choose to die rather than to only live once. I want to eat and to love and to take photos of curious things I notice on the street too.

As an extended side note: Even when you “get the words right,” so much of it depends on context. Here’s a trick: come up with a five-word sentence that expresses something straightforward, under the form Why did x verb y? Like, Why did I eat sixteen pieces of chicken last night? Or, Why did Derek write this essay? And then read every part of that sentence with a different emphasis.

Why did Derek write this essay?

Why did Derek write this essay?

Why did Derek write this essay?

Why did Derek write this essay?

(I typed this, actually, in my Epistemology class.)

Why did Derek write this essay?

(I’m writing this essay because I had a thought in the shower after Orangetheory this morning and couldn’t quite get over it. Usually, I pay more attention in class.)

Isn’t it weird how different these sentences get?

If you begin to think about it, the failure of words begins to pose such a problem. What is said is often not what is meant. I suppose this issue matters to me because, in my writing these days, I’ve been playing with that (elementary, but highly effective) technique of replacing “to be” forms with action words, which oftentimes default to “think” and “feel.”

Like, changing “It was sad.” to “I thought it [to be] sad.” Or, “It felt sad to me.”

And, beyond that, what of all the stylistic things you can do?

Mood: You are sad. Be sad. You could be sad.

Tense: You were sad. You would have been sad. You had had to have been sad.

Voice: I was saddened. (By whom?)

Syntax: I felt sad a while ago. A while ago I felt sad. I felt, a while ago, sad.

(The pains of learning how to write.)

Meaning is so supple. So slippery. Like something doused in oil, almost impossible to pick up. And even if you do pick it up, it won’t be for very long.

(It’s also one of those rare concepts that seems to be more evasive, the more you think about it. Try defining “meaning.” My dictionary gives me: “Implied or explicit significance.” Thaaat clears things up.)

So, back to thinking and feeling. Doesn’t it just feel like such a problem when those are the only two choices you basically get, when deciding how to describe your exposure to the external stimuli of the world? As if life is just that binary between categorical certainty or emotional uncertainty.

What if we proposed new words for all the in-betweens, out-beyonds, of this arbitrary dichotomy? It’s not a perfect solution, but a start.

Can I have a word for I think one thing about x but I feel the opposite of it?

Can I have a word for I thought and felt something about x, concurrently?

Can I have an apolitical word that means, to “think”? And one for to “feel”?

What am I trying to do here?

Here’s one “meaning” to life: To develop an individual philosophy. That’s what I’m trying to do that right now.

What’s this philosophy?

Well, if I were to describe it to you, it would be a philosophy of not thinking, and not feeling. A philosophy of alternative ways of coming into contact with the world, being a part of it, reacting to it. Nothing as analytic or dramatic or heavy as “thinking” or “feeling.” How about: Brush against. Embrace. Reckon with the weight of. Once I stopped asking myself to “get the meaning” of something…

Here’s one of those passages that changed the way I think about things: “A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”” (Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts.)

Oh also, something else about this philosophy—acausality!