Dialect Tricks

WHOSO WOULD BE A MAN, MUST BE A DIALECTRICIAN

How do we make ourselves understood? How, through all the different jargons, national variants of English, social groupings each with its banter and style, technical knowledges which abduct common words for their private abuse, non-native speakers with their various shades of misunderstanding, and self-contained discursive circuits with peculiar habits of phrase--how can our utterances ever be understood aright? How can English, "the international language," function under such a heavy load of difference? Especially on the internet, where the readership is so vast and its ties so weak, how can any language function? What techniques can we use to ensure that something, anything, of what was meant to be said will come through?

The answer--the only possible answer: dialect tricks. We use the same words, and it is not the same language. Will you listen? Can I fool you into believing that you know what I mean? Can I fool myself?

I am playing with you. Realize this. There is nothing you can do about it. You can refuse to read any more. But then, I will simply have manipulated you off my site. Or, you can keep reading and, like a kitten with a ball of twine, follow my thread.

I will tell you this much--I have laid a crafty web. Be careful.

I play, with this language from which I descend as much as from my parents, and out of which I sprang as much as from the womb, and still spring--I play with this language of mine--of mine, of everyone's, of fishermen and housewives, executives and actresses, toddlers and tyrants. I play, also, with what the language alone does not provide, and books deny--hypertext, the logic of linkage, a choice-making, nonlinear reading. I play, in order that you, my reader, might through all this clatter hear--what? A faint rustling of a far-off fabric? A wind-whisper that forms itself into words? No, rather than you should hear, in the rhythm of my play, a certain thread of logic, tapped out across names--Plato, Descartes, Marx, Freud--that most often recede into the distance of their inscrutable fame, but through my words brought close, intimate, ever-present in the permutations of possibilities, and yet still evanescent and untouchable, like a mirage within arm's reach, a shadow that blows in the wind. Names of the dead, haunting our lives through their thoughts--dead men who built prisons in which we still live, or spades to dig our way out.

If often, instead of frolicking, I exhort and harangue, kvetch and bombard you with attacks and dismissals, cut through the smallest deviations with my sharpest, meanest knife, it is because of the fear that you will jump ship, abandon this thread and run away--and for the worst of reasons. I fear, because I know how small a shade has sufficed to black the greatest lights--ill repute attached to someone's name, readings that presuppose exactly what a text challenges, cliches that come to define whole realms of idea, "isms" set in stone. I know full well that the most persuasive arguments, to most, are not the best arguments, but the ones just good enough not to insult the intelligence of the prejudices they appeal to, and that this is just as true among the "intellectuals" as among their foils, the undistinguished mass they imagine so as to be superior to something. I know full well that truly rigorous reason is pursued with enthusiasm by the brainy in reference to purely technical issues, only to be abandoned at once as soon as anything comes up that might affect their conception of where they really stand in the world and who they really are. I know that most rabid sports fans can discuss their teams' prospects rationally, but not politics, religion, or their own motivations. I know that people can go on being, indefinitely, while the question of being hangs in suspension above their heads. Everyone is a philosopher, but no one thinks they need to be. I know all this. I fear the worst.

So I use my sharp knife, I cut away the cobwebs, I cut away the crap, I cut almost everything, to leave so little standing that you have almost no choice. My discourse offers you no side paths. Seize it--or turn and run.

Yet all my defenses are futile, for new fallacies can always be woven, anywhere and anytime. All it takes is a need. There is no vaccination against stupidity, still less against the failing of that suicidal integrity that is our only protection. Even eternal vigilance is only half of what we need. The other half is willingness to cut away the ground beneath our own feet--to live life in a conceptual caravan, and never have a place to call a home. The only real thinkers are gypsy thinkers.

In our times, the pulse we follow opens up into the electrical medium--the trace of ions, flickering across the fragile connections of a new, denser space. The newest and densest is the internet. When we are evicted by our own critique, our caravan follows its sad, dialectical path, out onto the open highway, where bandits, yuppies, and e-businesses flourish side by side, hard to distinguish. The wares we offer there, being free, have few takers. They are mere use-values, unconverted into any commodity, and so lack the prestige of a Beanie Baby. We have to comfort ourselves with the thought that while a single fool may learn from a wise man, a pack of fools is more likely to beat him up and cast him out of decent society--in which, indeed, he has little place. If, in the maw of the new age's awakening mammoth, we wish to seize our smidgeon of its roar, then we must purvey, without apologies, our electric dialectics.

And if we hope from time to time to catch a stray unconverted visitor, and preach to him in words that do not fade, a sermon he will carry with him in his own world, where we have never visited--and if we hope that what he finds there, when he unpacks our gift, is something that we, across the space and differences, still would recognize--then, friends, we have no choice. There is simply no time to refuse to be a fool. Elves of the ether, our unwary guests are no match for our surprise. Let us bemuse and confound them all. We will soap their windows with words, leave gnomish idioms around their lawns, and steal all the commas from their soon-sputtering cars. Yes, my friends--

Let us play dialect tricks.