If you read this page aloud it will strike you that there is nothing in your speech corresponding to the white spaces on the page that separate the words. Word separation is not a feature of every script – some Asiatic ones do not use it even now – and it has been accomplished in different ways at different times; the Romans used dots or points (puncta – the origin of ‘punctuation’) the Greeks I think used none originally, and even at one time wrote boustrophedon (literally ‘ox-turning’, or in the manner of ploughing a field) – i.e. the lines run alternately from left to right then from right to left, perfectly logical in terms of eye movement:

Word division, then, is plainly an aid to reading, an adjunct of the written form, with no counterpart in speech; and this raises interesting questions about words themselves. We might incline to think that we need no word division in speech because we ‘already know’ how to distinguish words, because, well, we know the individual words, which are stored in our vocabulary (or word-hoard, as the Anglo-Saxons called it) like so many building blocks or components ready for use whenever we wish to construct a sentence.

There may now be an element of truth in that, because two and a half millennia of literacy (interrupted by the Dark Ages in Western Europe, but continuous further East) has schooled us – literally – in the ways of educated speech, which is heavily influenced and indeed dominated by the written form. We are used (or at least my generation was) to learning other languages in a way that brings out their rule-governed nature – we have verbs laid out in tables that show the variations from first to third persons, and from singular to plural; we analyse individual words into roots that remain the same and endings and beginnings – prefixes and suffixes, or inflections – which vary according to case and so on; we learn rules for the order of pronouns (me te se before le la les  before lui leur before  y before en before the verb, if I recall). And of course we accumulate lists of vocabulary, learning individual words and their particular meanings.

All of this encourages us to think of language as a system of building blocks or individual components – words – which can be assembled in a variety of ways according to certain rules – grammar. Yet a little reflection will tell us that this analysis only became possible – or indeed necessary – with the development of the written form.

When speech was – as I have suggested before [Plucked from the Chorus Line, The Disintegration of Expression] – only one mode of expression among many (and quite likely not the most important) – then we had neither the means nor the need to analyse it in the way we take for granted now. We did not have the means because there was no method of giving speech objective form so that it could be studied and analysed; that only comes as a by-product of the invention of writing [as discussed in The Muybridge Moment]. A by-product, because we must remember that writing was not primarily devised as a means of transcribing speech, a need which our ancestors would not have felt – after all, we had been transmitting our culture orally (and by other means of expression) since the dawn of time, for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.

The accidental nature of the whole concept of a written language and all that it entails – literacy, books, systematic text-based education, the whole basis of our modern way of life – is worth emphasising, to remind us that we managed for a long time without these things and did not feel in the least deprived or impoverished: it is perhaps the most significant example of what I have called an ‘elective indispensable’ something we have managed very well without, then reoriented our way of life to make living without it inconceivable.

Before we were able to analyse language by studying its written form, we may have followed rules, but we did so unconsciously, by instinct, much as (say) indigenous Amazonian tribes will appear to observers to engage in rule-governed speech but would not (I guess) be able to say much about the rules they were following, or offer a grammatical analysis of their own tongue in the way that the observers (trained to look at things that way) could.

‘Trained to look at things that way’ is a key expression there. Do the observers see something that the native speakers overlook? That is a complex question, worthy of close attention. To walk with a trained geologist through a landscape is to see it with fresh eyes, and to learn a new and different way of looking at it; and to walk with an indigenous Australian through the landscape where he is at home would be similar, though the two would see quite different things. One way of putting it would be that they would see themselves as in two different stories about how they related to and understood the landscape; what strikes one as significant might be quite different from what strikes the other, so who is overlooking what?

What that comparison brings out is the extent that we bring things to our analyses, rather than finding them there. An analogy might be to going out equipped with a box divided into compartments of different shapes and sizes – the things you find to put in the different compartments are ‘already there’ but you have brought your system of categorisation with you; your principles of selection are decided beforehand. If you came instead with a number of equal-sized boxes but each lined with a different colour sample which you sought to match, you would end up with a wholly different selection and arrangement of things ‘already there’.

The underlying question is whether your system of categorisation corresponds to something objective, something we might be inclined to call ‘reality’. This seems to me a – or possibly the – fundamental philosophical question, and it reminds me of something that might at first seem wholly unconnected. I wonder if you will follow my leap?

What my mind leaps to – or leaps to my mind – is a passage from Samuel Beckett, in Molloy. I must thank my friend Stephanie Peppard (her blog, The Woman on a Yellow Bicycle, is worth a visit) for drawing it to my attention. I strongly commend reading it in full – http://www.samuel-beckett.net/molloy1.html.

or indeed you can hear it here (in a slightly varied text): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXoq_H9BrTE

The gist of it is that Molloy, on visiting the seaside, lays in a store of pebbles, which he calls ‘sucking stones’. He likes to suck each stone in turn and is considerably exercised by how best he should arrange them about his person in order to facilitate this. Having four pockets and sixteen stones, he first considers an equitable distribution of four in each, so that when he draws from his ‘supply’ pocket (which we can call the first) for a stone to suck, he transfers a stone from the next, second, pocket to make up the deficiency, and so on, with the sucked stone eventually taking its place to make up the depleted numbers in the fourth pocket.

However, he soon hits a snag:
‘But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about.’

In order to guarantee his principle of sucking each stone in turn, he tries various permutations, only to find that he has to sacrifice another cherished principle, that of having the stones in balance across his pockets:

‘Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But
deep down I didn’t give a tinker’s curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and forewards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end
of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed …’

This passage strikes me as a profound – and profoundly funny – insight into human behaviour: it captures the absurd rigour with which we observe self-imposed conventions, while all the time being aware ‘deep down’ that none of it matters, or rather only matters because we choose to make it matter. That last distinction is important: to read this as a commentary on the pointlessness of human behaviour is, I think, too bleak; it is more that what we do is self-validating – it matters because we make it matter. The underlying message is not that nothing matters, but rather that something does – though what that is, exactly, we are not sure; which is why we go on searching – or just go on.