We Think With Words

When Dante first decided to study Chinese in the summer of 1980, a family friend, George Schneeman, casually tossed off the comment, “How can those Chinese think with all that gobblety-gook in their brains?” George, a painter and friend of the many New York poets and writers, was good at stirring up discussion. He did it from his perch four stories above the streets of St. Mark’s Place in the East Village.

Dante couldn’t refute an underlying premise of what George said. We use our words to think thoughts. The language you are thinking with influences the thoughts you can have. Can you have a thought without forming it in words? Try. Maybe Jade was right when she said that in spite of all his study, Dante really didn’t understand the Chinese. Buddhist meditation was designed to free a person from the thoughts jumping around like an uncontrolled monkey in the brain. Dante hadn’t been that successful at his attempts to meditate.

The character for form (色), actually means sex or color in modern Chinese. Dante liked those multiple layers of meaning in Chinese. This was in spite of the fact that teachers had told him that some of the layers of meaning he liked didn’t really exist for native Chinese speakers. Using his English vocabulary to think about Chinese created false meanings. On top of that all thoughts were empty, anyway.

Form is empty (空), afterall. The piece of paper was empty until Dante applied colors to it with his brush, hoping to make something beautiful, or at least, to communitcate something.