A grammar of being in the world
for f.
Is it useful to speak in terms of a grammar of thinking, feeling and believing? And since these all determine behaviour, a grammar of being, a grammar of how we are in the world?
Wikipedia says about grammar :
Native speakers of a language have a set of internalized rules for using that form of speech. This rule set constitutes the grammar. The vast majority of the information in the grammar is – at least in the case of one's native language – acquired not by conscious study or instruction but by hearing other speakers. Much of this work is done during early childhood; learning a language later in life usually involves a greater degree of explicit instruction. Thus, grammar is the cognitive information underlying language use.
In the same way, as children we acquire a set of internalised rules about what are and are not appropriate feelings, thoughts and beliefs — and how they are ordered.
Again, we learn this at a very early age, before we are conscious of the fact that we are learning it, mostly by seeing and hearing how others express or don't express and order their feelings and what and how they think and believe, and how this becomes the way that they are being in the world. It is as if we absorb the order which we perceive in the world in which we find ourselves, we internalise it and this internal order seems 'natural' to us. We don't really question it. It is as if it is part of our cognitive system.
So the work is like learning a different language, but it is also like learning a new grammar, and unlearning the old grammar. But it is more than this and this is why it is useful to think about the work as a form of deconstruction, in the sense that Jackie used the term. Because we have to closely examine and read the very fabric, the material out of which our cognitive systems, our belief systems, the way we deal with our feelings, are constructed. It is not only what we think and feel and believe but the way we order our thoughts, feelings and beliefs and we read not only for what is present, but for what is absent. We look for irregularities, we feel for bumps, for little holes, and tears in the fabric. Where it is necessary and appropriate we repair, but in other places we unravel and disentangle, and at times we rip it to shreds and we rage and scream and cry as the full magnitude of the realisation that all that exists at the very fundaments of our being has been put there, not by a malicious or malevolent other but by a process of osmosis. And we are not guilty. We are ashamed for no good reason. We did not make ourselves. And for the most part we were not even consciously and deliberately made by others. Each one of us was formed in response and in relation to what was happening around us before we were even conscious.
In this work of deconstruction, of examining and where necessary disentangling, unravelling, unfolding the fabric of our so called selves, each one of us has to come apart quite literally at the seams and perhaps in other places as well and in this work it is useful to have the assistance of an other. It is preferable if that other is at least a little further in the work of disentanglement of themselves but nevertheless it is a collaboration because in helping others disentangle we disentangle our selves.
And it is a work of love.
#f.
grammar
version : 20190920-093619x
tags : the work, language, grammar
links : dropbox | write.as