Wordplay
revival: -> awakening, cheering, consolation, enkindling, reshening, invigoration, quickening, reanimation, reawakening, recovery, recrudescence, regeneration, rejuvenation, renaissance, renewal, restoration, resurgence, resurrection, resuscitation, revitalization
revival: -> reanimation, rebirth, regeneration, rejuvenation, renewal, resurgence, resurrection, resuscitation, revitalization
Related Words: renaissance, reactivation; rally, recovery, recuperation
Near Antonyms death, expiration, extinction
revival: -> reanimation, rebirth, regeneration, rejuvenation, renewal, resurgence, resurrection, resuscitation, revitalization
Related Words: renaissance, reactivation; rally, recovery, recuperation
Near Antonyms death, expiration, extinction
Merriam-Webster
I have always been fascinated by words, with their capacity to not only let us express ourselves, but that they are the palette of how to frame what we have to think about. They spring up when an idea or event comes up which we feel the need to express to others. They are a paper trail, when recorded in a written language, of where we have been before, when new concepts emerged which needed short well-defined sounds of themselves, apart from all others, to be named as a single and separate thing, a word distinct, self-inclusive.
That is why I have studied languages, to try to get into the heads of cultures to gauge their present mindsets, which concepts they think are most important at the moment, important enough to be set aside apart from all others, to be crystallized in peoples minds as words, as something which they have grown up with, think they know, as basic words of common sense, the building blocks of how they frame their worlds.
I have not been able to study languages in detail enough for my aims, as it would take up too much of my time which I have not had either the resources in money for, nor lack of other things I deemed more important to be focused on instead of hiding myself away for long periods of time to absorb the richness of the past, and bask in the diversity of culture and different mindsets inherent in studying different languages of the present.
As with so many other things, I have dabbled in trying to understand language, but dabbling has its merits as well as well thought-out expertise. We are all dabblers in many subjects because the immense body of recorded language and history now makes complete expertise on more than one (or a few) topics virtually impossible without surrendering much of your life and free-time to it, but having some expertise in many things is, or can be, as valuable as great expertise in a few things. And if no one had lesser expertise in fields, experts would have no one but students to sell their books to, or a public educated enough to relate to what they have to say and contribute. And without a mass audience, no matter how relevant to society, they can be pushed to the fringes of irrelevance of purposeful ignorance by those who pander and offer the public pseudo-knowledge for 'guidance' or control. Without some ability by the mass public to gauge the expertise of those who are called experts, we simply open our heads to their opinions and give up willing the right to question them.
My dabbling with languages began with Latin, which lead me to the name I used for business, Scandere, which meant to climb. I did not know it at the time but it was a perfect match for the defnition to the name I had resolved to take for myself as an adult since I was a child, which means to descend. They, like so many concepts, like words, bookend each other, for you cannot have one word or concept without entailing its opposite. Anything and its opposites are united in conceptualization, you build another word for its opposite, whether spoken or not, admitted or not, and a third for the spectrum which includes them both, or as a single concept or single way of looking at things.
In addition to writing as a non- expert about words and my fascination with them, I have written about the danger of polemic thinking, such as good and evil, because this leads to identical actions of each side, supposedly for different causes or hoping for different effects. Step back far enough and you see they are the same thing, use the same methods, are two sides of the same coin, and ultimately the same concept.
I have seen things in modern Christianity, mainstream Christianity, which are nearly identical to Satanism, which itself while trying to distance itself supposedly 180 degrees from many things, adopted the same language, the same words, the same concepts, the same myths as Christianity. Many things denounced as Paganism, later as Satanism, were incorporated into the Catholic Church, and many truly independent alternative religions in Europe were falsely condemned as Satanism, again itself being an offshoot of Christianity, which these European religions had nothing to do with Christianity, Satan, or anything associated with the religions of the Middle- East, and why they were treated (and massacred) all with the same brush. If it wasn't what the Church said was the case, then it must be Satanic. If you weren't with everything you were told to believe, if you weren't blindly with us, you obviously must be working for and with the most evil of evils. Even simply by rejecting our dogma, our black and white mindset, our definitions, our words.
My fascination with words has framed much of my life. In my teens I started writing poetry seriously and was taken in with the concept of using multiple levels of meaning with the fewest words possible, the swordplay of wordplay, the essence of communication. That is what religions teach as well from the earliest of recorded histories, using stories or parables to convey deeper meanings you cannot either say outright because of the unquestioning times you live in, or that they need to be embodied in people, real or imagined, to become relevant, fleshed out, comprehensible. And that is the essence of deeper levels of meaning to what is written, how different others might see it, for it is the diversity of perception and what different life experiences possible readers bring to bear which gives poetry and other types of attempted 'positive' double-speech, their supposed deeper levels. Saying two things at once, or more, or far more with the same words, requires these other minds and mindsets to speak to to give them these multiple meanings at once.
And you cannot speak to them without knowledge of them. The tragedy of America in these days is the 'writing off' of other culture's views, especially upon our own actions, as irrelevant and uninformed. To not want to see and know yourself from other culture's points of views, I have said before, not only makes you something ugly, something deformed in the light of general human development, it is to write off their perspectives as meaningless. They might as well not exist. And in that light as in so many other nations in the past, we are doing 'good' to 'remove' them.
It is a myth of the left and progressives that Americans are peaceful and would never advocate genocide. They, the left, are as wrapped in their own perspectives as much as the Neo-Conservatives are in choosing to see the world according to their own beliefs rather than see the uncomfortable reality of the situation around them. I know to a great extent neither self-delusions of the left or right is absolute, that both know their mindsets are false, but think by openly promoting them whenever possible as true will make them real, or at least more real.
Most Americans like most in any other country are peaceful people who are sent to war because that is the machinations of leaderships that do not hear them and do not respond to their wishes. But there is a dark side in all people, and in Americans as well. I have heard many voices since I have been back advocate genocide, the murders of thousands, even millions, and not just on television. "Bomb them all," "Nuke them and take their oil," and so on. This is not just because of shameless propaganda outlets like Fox News, it is almost a natural reflex when you think your side is good and the other side is bad or evil.
In studying other cultures, the biggest revelations for me came from studying Chinese philosophy and Buddhism, getting beyond the duality of 'Good' and 'Evil.' Such is called 'Eastern thinking' in opposition to our 'Western thinking.' No culture in the next 100 years can call itself 'developed' or 'enlightened' without having a foot firmly in place on both sides. Each exposes the limitations in the other's type of thinking. Each side has its own poisons as well. The West seeks to eliminate all opposing viewpoints to its 'universal' values, now by the US actions, unsubtly at the point of a gun, while openly violating all of those values at the same time. But the West has a toleration for ethnic diversity which the East lacks, yet the shortcomings of both lie in their imagined 'superiority' over others. That you cannot be at the top of the cultural spectrum without others at the bottom. More limitations of words and concepts.
When writing about my poetry and Taoism which influenced it, I first had to speak to the fact that it was using a different 'language' than what I had been raised in, as the East/West divide in thinking is, different ways of looking at the world each forged with different histories which must now combine themselves without pride and patriotism into a common world history which includes both and will be influenced by both without the elimination of either one side or the other. Yet that is where militaristic thinking warps the development, the myth that that is possible, to totally eradicate or completely subdue your enemy. It is up to politicians and historians to sell that to the public as not being an immoral thing. "It was inevitable," "they left us no choice but to destroy them."
Chinese (Mandarin) was one of the first languages I studied, in part, to try to understand the palette of ideas which lead to this different type of thinking and world view than the one I had been raised with. Reading the "Tao Te Ching" was one of the most enlightening events of my life and opened up new worlds of thinking embodied in the views and cultures of others. Such knowledge are bridges that the cultural totalitarians on both sides of the Pacific are afraid of.
In China, the obvious threat is of Western ideas of liberty, now ironically available in practice to their own wealthiest elite at home, to single party rule. Yet at least there is change going on there. America has become the dinosaur of political change compared to almost anywhere else in the world, China, Russia, India, the European Union (which most Americans know almost nothing about), and has become notable in recent political evolution changes only for its erosion of freedoms and increasing absence of regard for human rights. Secret prisons, kidnappings, torture, election rigging, funding civil wars and terrorist groups in countries it does not like, holding people without trials, spying on journalists, whistle-blowers, demonstrators, wrong voters, and on and on. And keeping Americans ignorant of how the rest of the world sees us now puts our own elites hold on power tenuous. Thus our "news" networks instead of informing us of our transgressions and slide instead mock the rest of the world for being 'uncivilized' and 'resenting our freedoms.'
In addition to studying Chinese and Latin, other languages I have dabbled in include Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Russian. I have envied those who can speak a multitude of languages because each can open up to them new concepts not inherent within, or stressed as much, in their own language or culture. But I still think, though that is obviously better, using language at all in our thinking limits our thinking only to ideas we have been exposed to previously. We need to go beyond the past embodied in language. In my earliest writing on the subject, I stated that "It is due to this limiting aspect of our languages that it is beneficial to clear one's mind of these concepts and deal in pure thought or pure existence. Just as in mathematics, how the answer is determined by the question, one could reasonably argue that all the thoughts we think are logically deduced from our experiences, both internal (feelings, moods) and external, and are defined by the rules of language. If we, however, clear our minds of both our experiences and our language we may be able to 'see' from a point of view which would be forever unobtainable as long as we are limited by language and experience." I have also written about words in First Words in Towards Tomorrow, and Perception in Deconstructing the Universe.
And within that are the great lessons of Eastern thought, Taoism, Buddhism, and Zen: the need to recognize the limitations of languages, and by extension, of cultures, as contextual, limited in scope to those they were originally developed within or for, but needing constant expansion and having that past, that foundation, being put in new contexts through new experiences and greater histories which they cannot contain without constricting them. Constricted growth is as close to death as it is to life. Growth must be free of the limitations of languages, of single cultures, of single ideologies, of single types of governmental or economic systems, or it is not growth at all, merely attempted sameness, death of better ideas, preventing new words, new concepts, new systems from emerging.
Truth is not found in words. Words like art, like anything in our environment, are attempts to make a representation of truth. The "Western" type of thinking, of an external objectifiable truth to reality has its roots in a wider viewpoint. Among the earliest Greek philosophers, Paramenides among others, knew that thinking was at best an approximation of truth, an elusive search meant to be unending, always sought after, yet forever out of reach. That has nothing to do with the absolutism with which the West has come to be identified with, mainly as an excuse to impose its culture upon others. Parmenides said on truth, " "both the unchanging truth behind all that which only seemingly comes and goes from being, and the opinions and perceptions of Man about this in which there cannot be found truth, ... it is necessary for you to see how untruths and misconceptions come to be seen as truth, both (the unchanging truth and our interpretations/changing perceptions of things/subjectivity) together create all experiences."
I began my own philosophical search as a cultural relativist, have moved beyond it, yet am astounded and disheartened beyond measure to see my own culture, America, slam cultural relativism, as something trite, irrelevant, even a fashion without substance. It has become a victim of its own hyped up self-importance, a media preaching that ignorance is better than knowledge. There has been so much of a backlog of falsehood, misrepresentation, propaganda, and outright self- destructive lying to the American people by the Bush Administration of the 21st century that as it begins to get exposed, has the potential to point us, and because of our possibly undue influence or control over the rest of the world, to point the world on a new and better path as we begin once more to speak what we believe to be the truth. We need to try to know what is outside of ourselves, what lies outside of our bodies, minds, beliefs, mindsets and national borders, that is not irrelevant, not without truths of their own which we do not destroy without destroying our own ability to grow.
The truth will begin to be let out more and more. We in the West, we need to demand a media that shows us to us as the rest of the world knows us, so we may see what they do and we do not. To see ourselves from the most points of view. To see ourselves from the most points of approximations or representations of truth that may not be true in individuality, but in sum, in total, in the view we are purposely now kept from seeing, comes as close to the truth as we will ever get without retreating into our own unquestioning assumptions, dogma, propaganda, hubris, and self-delusions. We have become and have been led by the embodiment of such a dark path of willful ignorance. Yet a new path has already begun. It is young yet, this truth telling, and its fate depends upon the actions of millions of others to survive against the legacy we have spun, yet I have faith in it. I have faith that it will grow, that it will survive, and it will dominate the lies, at least in the short term, and at least of the recent past.
I have always been fascinated by words, with their capacity to not only let us express ourselves, but that they are the palette of how to frame what we have to think about. They spring up when an idea or event comes up which we feel the need to express to others. They are a paper trail, when recorded in a written language, of where we have been before, when new concepts emerged which needed short well-defined sounds of themselves, apart from all others, to be named as a single and separate thing, a word distinct, self-inclusive.
That is why I have studied languages, to try to get into the heads of cultures to gauge their present mindsets, which concepts they think are most important at the moment, important enough to be set aside apart from all others, to be crystallized in peoples minds as words, as something which they have grown up with, think they know, as basic words of common sense, the building blocks of how they frame their worlds.
I have not been able to study languages in detail enough for my aims, as it would take up too much of my time which I have not had either the resources in money for, nor lack of other things I deemed more important to be focused on instead of hiding myself away for long periods of time to absorb the richness of the past, and bask in the diversity of culture and different mindsets inherent in studying different languages of the present.
As with so many other things, I have dabbled in trying to understand language, but dabbling has its merits as well as well thought-out expertise. We are all dabblers in many subjects because the immense body of recorded language and history now makes complete expertise on more than one (or a few) topics virtually impossible without surrendering much of your life and free-time to it, but having some expertise in many things is, or can be, as valuable as great expertise in a few things. And if no one had lesser expertise in fields, experts would have no one but students to sell their books to, or a public educated enough to relate to what they have to say and contribute. And without a mass audience, no matter how relevant to society, they can be pushed to the fringes of irrelevance of purposeful ignorance by those who pander and offer the public pseudo-knowledge for 'guidance' or control. Without some ability by the mass public to gauge the expertise of those who are called experts, we simply open our heads to their opinions and give up willing the right to question them.
My dabbling with languages began with Latin, which lead me to the name I used for business, Scandere, which meant to climb. I did not know it at the time but it was a perfect match for the defnition to the name I had resolved to take for myself as an adult since I was a child, which means to descend. They, like so many concepts, like words, bookend each other, for you cannot have one word or concept without entailing its opposite. Anything and its opposites are united in conceptualization, you build another word for its opposite, whether spoken or not, admitted or not, and a third for the spectrum which includes them both, or as a single concept or single way of looking at things.
In addition to writing as a non- expert about words and my fascination with them, I have written about the danger of polemic thinking, such as good and evil, because this leads to identical actions of each side, supposedly for different causes or hoping for different effects. Step back far enough and you see they are the same thing, use the same methods, are two sides of the same coin, and ultimately the same concept.
I have seen things in modern Christianity, mainstream Christianity, which are nearly identical to Satanism, which itself while trying to distance itself supposedly 180 degrees from many things, adopted the same language, the same words, the same concepts, the same myths as Christianity. Many things denounced as Paganism, later as Satanism, were incorporated into the Catholic Church, and many truly independent alternative religions in Europe were falsely condemned as Satanism, again itself being an offshoot of Christianity, which these European religions had nothing to do with Christianity, Satan, or anything associated with the religions of the Middle- East, and why they were treated (and massacred) all with the same brush. If it wasn't what the Church said was the case, then it must be Satanic. If you weren't with everything you were told to believe, if you weren't blindly with us, you obviously must be working for and with the most evil of evils. Even simply by rejecting our dogma, our black and white mindset, our definitions, our words.
My fascination with words has framed much of my life. In my teens I started writing poetry seriously and was taken in with the concept of using multiple levels of meaning with the fewest words possible, the swordplay of wordplay, the essence of communication. That is what religions teach as well from the earliest of recorded histories, using stories or parables to convey deeper meanings you cannot either say outright because of the unquestioning times you live in, or that they need to be embodied in people, real or imagined, to become relevant, fleshed out, comprehensible. And that is the essence of deeper levels of meaning to what is written, how different others might see it, for it is the diversity of perception and what different life experiences possible readers bring to bear which gives poetry and other types of attempted 'positive' double-speech, their supposed deeper levels. Saying two things at once, or more, or far more with the same words, requires these other minds and mindsets to speak to to give them these multiple meanings at once.
And you cannot speak to them without knowledge of them. The tragedy of America in these days is the 'writing off' of other culture's views, especially upon our own actions, as irrelevant and uninformed. To not want to see and know yourself from other culture's points of views, I have said before, not only makes you something ugly, something deformed in the light of general human development, it is to write off their perspectives as meaningless. They might as well not exist. And in that light as in so many other nations in the past, we are doing 'good' to 'remove' them.
It is a myth of the left and progressives that Americans are peaceful and would never advocate genocide. They, the left, are as wrapped in their own perspectives as much as the Neo-Conservatives are in choosing to see the world according to their own beliefs rather than see the uncomfortable reality of the situation around them. I know to a great extent neither self-delusions of the left or right is absolute, that both know their mindsets are false, but think by openly promoting them whenever possible as true will make them real, or at least more real.
Most Americans like most in any other country are peaceful people who are sent to war because that is the machinations of leaderships that do not hear them and do not respond to their wishes. But there is a dark side in all people, and in Americans as well. I have heard many voices since I have been back advocate genocide, the murders of thousands, even millions, and not just on television. "Bomb them all," "Nuke them and take their oil," and so on. This is not just because of shameless propaganda outlets like Fox News, it is almost a natural reflex when you think your side is good and the other side is bad or evil.
In studying other cultures, the biggest revelations for me came from studying Chinese philosophy and Buddhism, getting beyond the duality of 'Good' and 'Evil.' Such is called 'Eastern thinking' in opposition to our 'Western thinking.' No culture in the next 100 years can call itself 'developed' or 'enlightened' without having a foot firmly in place on both sides. Each exposes the limitations in the other's type of thinking. Each side has its own poisons as well. The West seeks to eliminate all opposing viewpoints to its 'universal' values, now by the US actions, unsubtly at the point of a gun, while openly violating all of those values at the same time. But the West has a toleration for ethnic diversity which the East lacks, yet the shortcomings of both lie in their imagined 'superiority' over others. That you cannot be at the top of the cultural spectrum without others at the bottom. More limitations of words and concepts.
When writing about my poetry and Taoism which influenced it, I first had to speak to the fact that it was using a different 'language' than what I had been raised in, as the East/West divide in thinking is, different ways of looking at the world each forged with different histories which must now combine themselves without pride and patriotism into a common world history which includes both and will be influenced by both without the elimination of either one side or the other. Yet that is where militaristic thinking warps the development, the myth that that is possible, to totally eradicate or completely subdue your enemy. It is up to politicians and historians to sell that to the public as not being an immoral thing. "It was inevitable," "they left us no choice but to destroy them."
Chinese (Mandarin) was one of the first languages I studied, in part, to try to understand the palette of ideas which lead to this different type of thinking and world view than the one I had been raised with. Reading the "Tao Te Ching" was one of the most enlightening events of my life and opened up new worlds of thinking embodied in the views and cultures of others. Such knowledge are bridges that the cultural totalitarians on both sides of the Pacific are afraid of.
In China, the obvious threat is of Western ideas of liberty, now ironically available in practice to their own wealthiest elite at home, to single party rule. Yet at least there is change going on there. America has become the dinosaur of political change compared to almost anywhere else in the world, China, Russia, India, the European Union (which most Americans know almost nothing about), and has become notable in recent political evolution changes only for its erosion of freedoms and increasing absence of regard for human rights. Secret prisons, kidnappings, torture, election rigging, funding civil wars and terrorist groups in countries it does not like, holding people without trials, spying on journalists, whistle-blowers, demonstrators, wrong voters, and on and on. And keeping Americans ignorant of how the rest of the world sees us now puts our own elites hold on power tenuous. Thus our "news" networks instead of informing us of our transgressions and slide instead mock the rest of the world for being 'uncivilized' and 'resenting our freedoms.'
In addition to studying Chinese and Latin, other languages I have dabbled in include Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Russian. I have envied those who can speak a multitude of languages because each can open up to them new concepts not inherent within, or stressed as much, in their own language or culture. But I still think, though that is obviously better, using language at all in our thinking limits our thinking only to ideas we have been exposed to previously. We need to go beyond the past embodied in language. In my earliest writing on the subject, I stated that "It is due to this limiting aspect of our languages that it is beneficial to clear one's mind of these concepts and deal in pure thought or pure existence. Just as in mathematics, how the answer is determined by the question, one could reasonably argue that all the thoughts we think are logically deduced from our experiences, both internal (feelings, moods) and external, and are defined by the rules of language. If we, however, clear our minds of both our experiences and our language we may be able to 'see' from a point of view which would be forever unobtainable as long as we are limited by language and experience." I have also written about words in First Words in Towards Tomorrow, and Perception in Deconstructing the Universe.
And within that are the great lessons of Eastern thought, Taoism, Buddhism, and Zen: the need to recognize the limitations of languages, and by extension, of cultures, as contextual, limited in scope to those they were originally developed within or for, but needing constant expansion and having that past, that foundation, being put in new contexts through new experiences and greater histories which they cannot contain without constricting them. Constricted growth is as close to death as it is to life. Growth must be free of the limitations of languages, of single cultures, of single ideologies, of single types of governmental or economic systems, or it is not growth at all, merely attempted sameness, death of better ideas, preventing new words, new concepts, new systems from emerging.
Truth is not found in words. Words like art, like anything in our environment, are attempts to make a representation of truth. The "Western" type of thinking, of an external objectifiable truth to reality has its roots in a wider viewpoint. Among the earliest Greek philosophers, Paramenides among others, knew that thinking was at best an approximation of truth, an elusive search meant to be unending, always sought after, yet forever out of reach. That has nothing to do with the absolutism with which the West has come to be identified with, mainly as an excuse to impose its culture upon others. Parmenides said on truth, " "both the unchanging truth behind all that which only seemingly comes and goes from being, and the opinions and perceptions of Man about this in which there cannot be found truth, ... it is necessary for you to see how untruths and misconceptions come to be seen as truth, both (the unchanging truth and our interpretations/changing perceptions of things/subjectivity) together create all experiences."
I began my own philosophical search as a cultural relativist, have moved beyond it, yet am astounded and disheartened beyond measure to see my own culture, America, slam cultural relativism, as something trite, irrelevant, even a fashion without substance. It has become a victim of its own hyped up self-importance, a media preaching that ignorance is better than knowledge. There has been so much of a backlog of falsehood, misrepresentation, propaganda, and outright self- destructive lying to the American people by the Bush Administration of the 21st century that as it begins to get exposed, has the potential to point us, and because of our possibly undue influence or control over the rest of the world, to point the world on a new and better path as we begin once more to speak what we believe to be the truth. We need to try to know what is outside of ourselves, what lies outside of our bodies, minds, beliefs, mindsets and national borders, that is not irrelevant, not without truths of their own which we do not destroy without destroying our own ability to grow.
The truth will begin to be let out more and more. We in the West, we need to demand a media that shows us to us as the rest of the world knows us, so we may see what they do and we do not. To see ourselves from the most points of view. To see ourselves from the most points of approximations or representations of truth that may not be true in individuality, but in sum, in total, in the view we are purposely now kept from seeing, comes as close to the truth as we will ever get without retreating into our own unquestioning assumptions, dogma, propaganda, hubris, and self-delusions. We have become and have been led by the embodiment of such a dark path of willful ignorance. Yet a new path has already begun. It is young yet, this truth telling, and its fate depends upon the actions of millions of others to survive against the legacy we have spun, yet I have faith in it. I have faith that it will grow, that it will survive, and it will dominate the lies, at least in the short term, and at least of the recent past.
posted by Jared DuBois | 2:04 PM
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