i am posting this because some of you don't go to this brilliant unnamed entity's blog. which you really shouldn't have to to absorb information.

Monday, January 21, 2008

so,

recently I watched a film in which most of the "speaking" was Japanese.

and there were not subtitles
but
I watched it anyhow

because i thought the sounds and visual language(s) and all that was being "said" was really interesting. [and also because i didn't really think it was supposed to have subtitles until i had already watched most of the film...]

my understanding of Japanese being such that i am "completely illiterate," in any attempt to use or understand it, my read of the dialogue was a severed one. severed, because to me the sound images are nothing but noise--isolated from their ideas or presupposed concepts[save for any secondary meanings implied by the visual or gestural scope of the situations]

in the absence of any discernable meaning, i was compelled to impose a new pattern of ideas onto the sounds somehow—by means of interpreting and linking together the other visual and auditory patterns presented to me. not surprisingly, others watching the film composed both similar and unique ideas about the dialogue.

"she is yelling at him because she is angry about something he just said to her...?"
"i thought she was yelling because she was scared..."

we had to reconcile ourselves that our interpretation of the sound images was just as interesting as the intended meaning.

and also--

that we were probably operating in separate "realities," confined to our unique [but also heavily imposed] processes of thought/language. even beyond the scope of our native tongue, concepts are defined by an imposed idea-shape.

i could not change the meaning of the English sounds spoken in the film, any more than i could change the color of grass [since "green" is "green" and not "purple" no matter how color blind you are...] but i could create my own ideas about the nature of the Japanese sound images because no person in my general vicinity had any concept of Japanese or its sounds' "significance[s]."

in this case, each person's mind got the chance to create it's own new language cult--one where the sound "oo-ye" could mean either, "i love you" or "get bent."

Sunday, January 20, 2008

i dreamt:

i went to a halloween party where the floor had a huge hole in the middle covered only by a malleable linoleum substance that made you sink into the hole when you walked off the edges of the room..it was like blue parquet. then they told me that under the hole was many layers of squish and finally a pool of bright liquid lit from some unknown source. and i was thouroghly terrified.

suddenly a fear came over all of us and things went very dark and the party guests began hiding here and there. i hid in the bathroom, stoned, and i fell asleep. the light was dark and shifiting from red to green and blue...

I awoke and no one was there but myself and a few crazies who were trying to consume me in some way? [i cannot decide if they wanted to eat or rape me] so i politely found a reason to leave...and then found myself without a car...or stalled somehow. someone i knew appeared but they were demented and could not help me much. i found my car, and looked in the mirror there. hair was growing all over my face...I had a mustache and a unibrow and sideburns and i remember that they had forced me to drink some potion and it was poison and then I awoke.

Posted by nectarine at 12:14 PM 0 comments