So what I was thinking was, what I was thinking, and yes, thinking being the critical word, and thinking just like this, in these very same words, what I was thinking was this. Conscious thought, not thought itself, but conscious thought is directly linked to language. Or it could be. Bear with me here. This has frighteningly little relevance to your life. Now obviously we can think without language. Whenever we’re walking down the street we might see a squirrel in a tree branch, or hear a bird call, or notice a bright red car driving down the sidewalk towards us, and our sub-conscious processes these, sifts through them, and calls to our attention the relevant data. But it’s not until these things are voiced in our mind, i.e. ‘Holy fuck! There’s a bright red car driving straight for me!’ or, if you’re French, ‘Putain de mon dieu! Il y a un voiture rouge qui se conduit directement pour moi!,’ that they become conscious thoughts. And they’re conscious thoughts because we have voiced them, in our minds or out loud. So the thought that coalesced from this, or the question rather, I s’pose it was more of a question, so the question was, ‘is it possible to have conscious thought without language?’ Is that the crucial ingredient to human’s awe-inspiring discovery of ‘self’? The awareness of our own reality, is that a product of divine intervention? Or is it merely the development of intelligence to a level where communication is possible, and then, utilizing those self-same tools of communication, the creation and expression of abstract thought. Is it possible that it’s not merely ‘I think, therefore I am,’ for all animals think, even if it’s only their subconscious telling them they need to eat or sleep and their thought processes instinctively answering those basic needs, but is it really, ‘I can say that I think, therefore I am’? And if that’s the case, does that mean that I’m smarter in English, since my French isn’t that good? Or is it unrelated? Could I abstract this entire argument, or divulgence, or cacophony of nonsense, or whatever it is, into non-linguistic thought, and then express the same sentiments with complete understanding to myself without the reliance on a single word? Or is it necessary, as in Wheel of Fortune, to talk it out?
And really, I mean deep down honestly, we’re talking pure as a lamb soul-bared truth, is it really necessary to ask so many bloody questions?
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Rudyard Kipling
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
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