The Zen of Words

Nurturing the writer's soul in the age of AI

Dear Living Dark reader,

Some years ago I started telling the students in my literature and writing classes that language has an alchemical power. I usually did this when we were studying poetry, although I applied the idea to prose as well.

This always necessitated a pause to offer a brief explanation of the word “alchemy.” Then, once that was out of the way, I went on to explain that there is a positively magical power in language, particularly in the poetic use of it, since language enables each of us to recreate his or her private thoughts and emotions in someone else’s headspace and heartspace. This is particularly true when it comes to lyric poetry, I explained, because this type of poetry is meant to capture and express the writer’s state of mind and mood at a particular moment, and therefore a full understanding of a lyric poem entails not only an intellectual understanding of what it’s saying in terms of the words, concepts, and images, but an actual shared feeling with the author. When a lyric poem “works,” it actually recreates the writer’s inner state in the reader or listener, so that writer and reader are vibrating in sympathy, as it were, and the reader doesn’t just understand the poem “from the outside” but divines it “from the inside” by sharing the actual experience that motivated the poet to begin writing. It’s a veritably alchemical moment, since the poet acts as a linguistic alchemist who uses language to transmute the reader’s inner state into something else.

Of course, I didn’t always get all of that properly said in my classes. The above description is a kind of idealized version of what I wanted to say. Sometimes it came out better and sometimes worse, depending on the specific tone of the interaction I was having with the specific group of students at the time. But my students never failed to find it interesting, and I never failed to find something interesting in their responses. I often used Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening,” which is both a lyric and a narrative poem, to illustrate the point, and the alchemical explanation seemed to help many of students gain a better grasp of what Frost was getting at with this textual apotheosis of a wintry longing for silence, solitude, and ultimate rest.

The above recollection is one aspect of the fact that, as a professional writer and former teacher of writing and literature, I have been prone to think frequently about the role of language in life at large. One of the recurring themes in my thinking—occasioned at least in part by some of my grad school studies in philosophy, anthropology, and sociolinguistics, and also by my having been confronted every day at my teaching job by extremely rough and problematic uses of language that were damned difficult to address—has been the question of “correct” language. Is the very idea of linguistic correctness just a culturally imperialistic metanarrative? Is it just arbitrary in the grand scheme of things? Or does it really get at a crucial truth?

And beyond mere technical correctness—as in grammar etc.—what about matters of rhetoric, style, and syntactical choice? How important are these not just to academic matters but to life in general, and not just in a utilitarian sense, but in a deeply human one?

A 2010 essay in The New York Review of Books offers some useful fodder for reflection on these things. In “Words, the British academic Tony Judt talks about the central significance of language in both his own personal life and the life of human culture at large.  The essay is both fascinating and poignant. It’s fascinating because of the insight Judt brings to bear on the relationship between, on the one hand, the clear and skillful deployment of language in both print and speech, and on the other hand, the achievement of a general clarity of life and thought. It’s poignant because he caps the whole thing off by talking about a progressive neurological disorder from which he suffers, and which he says will inevitably rob him of speech. (In fact, he died from it just a few weeks after the essay was published.) “Translating being into thought,” Judt says, “thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.”

He explains that he was brought up in a family where talking and debating were centrally important, and that he was processed through the British elementary school system of the 1950s, when “‘Good’ English was at its peak” and “we were instructed in the unacceptability of even the most minor syntactical transgression.”

“Reality’s transcendence of language means that the real world and life in general should be infinitely expressible in words. A person should ideally be able to describe his or her thoughts and experiences in a literally endless variety of linguistic variations.”

The heart of the essay appears in his comments about the close connection between clarity of language and clarity of thought, and the way this connection has been devalued over the past half century of public life:

Sheer rhetorical facility, whatever its appeal, need not denote originality and depth of content.

All the same, inarticulacy surely suggests a shortcoming of thought. This idea will sound odd to a generation praised for what they are trying to say rather than the thing said. Articulacy itself became an object of suspicion in the 1970s: the retreat from “form” favored uncritical approbation of mere “self-expression,” above all in the classroom. But it is one thing to encourage students to express their opinions freely and to take care not to crush these under the weight of prematurely imposed authority. It is quite another for teachers to retreat from formal criticism in the hope that the freedom thereby accorded will favor independent thought: “Don’t worry how you say it, it’s the ideas that count.”

Forty years on from the 1960s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence (or the training) to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly just why it inhibits intelligent reflection. The revolution of my generation played an important role in this unraveling: the priority accorded the autonomous individual in every sphere of life should not be underestimated — “doing your own thing” took protean form.

Today “natural” expression — in language as in art — is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.

Judt goes on from this to observe that in the modern milieu of social media and texting, “pithy allusion substitutes for exposition,” and people who live under the reign of an overweening consumerism begin to talk like text messages.

The prognosis he offers is grim and unequivocal:

This ought to worry us. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy.¹

As I said, this all hits home because of my personal and professional positions as a writer and teacher. And also because of my philosophical and spiritual proclivities. I am deeply influenced by a loose Zen-Christian nondual school of thinking, seeing, and knowing, and of course this involves the recognition that reality in itself is fundamentally unspeakable, fundamentally a matter of pure being-ness and first-person apprehension. “The menu isn’t the meal.” “The map isn’t the territory.” Don’t get so distracted by the finger pointing to the moon that you miss the moon itself, the finger being words and concepts and the moon being the living realities they symbolize. And so on.

For years I struggled with the question of whether this semi-existentialist recognition of the abstraction of language and thought from real being, while valid and crucial, might not entail the necessary conclusion that language is unimportant. That’s one of the major reasons why I find Judt’s insights to be so gripping: because he, with his neurological disorder, was faced with the imminent loss of his ability to communicate in words. And this really did strike him—and me—as a loss.

In point of fact, reality’s transcendence of language means that the real world and life in general should be infinitely expressible in words. No matter that the words and concepts are relative realities instead of absolute ones and symbolic realities instead of existential ones. This very fact means a person should ideally be able to describe his or her thoughts and experiences in a literally endless variety of linguistic variations, all of them circling around and pointing toward the realities themselves and recreating in the mind and affect of the equally linguistically astute listener or reader an approximation of those very realities, thus encouraging a “see for yourself” transition to direct looking. Not to be able to do this, to lack the skills and sensibility to state and restate our experience, is to be locked away in a prison of muteness.

I recall being exhilarated as an undergraduate when I read Robert Anton Wilson’s The Widow’s Son and came to a passage in which Wilson presented a character’s speculative imagining of humanity’s first moment of self-consciousness, and the attendant birth of beauty with it. The character imagines an early human who, while suckling her newborn, falls into a deep reverie. And then, suddenly,

she saw for the first time. A single rose, a gorgeous sunset, the intricate design of what had previously been an “ugly” insect—I cannot guess what she saw, but she saw. And in excitement and rapture, she cried out to her mate (whatever form of “marriage” they had in those days) “Oh, look at this, look!” and he looked and he saw. And beauty was created in a world that had been flat and dead and meaningless until that moment.²

The entire history of language, or at least language artfully used, proceeds from that delightful leap to self-consciousness, from that titanically freeing and empowering ability to step back from life and really see it, and to symbolize it in some form that’s communicable to others, so that they, too, can see for themselves by using the symbol for its proper purpose: as the Taoist’s finger pointing toward the moon, which directs attention away from itself and toward reality, serving only as a bridge.

“In writing, our walled-off world of interiority becomes something we can communicate to someone else, and they can communicate theirs to us.”

Years ago, I read and loved Colin Wilson’s The Philosopher’s Stone. The entire philosophical thrust of that ecstatically philosophical novel is the value of being able to step back from immediate experience and grasp wider meanings. Wilson writes, “So poets, philosophers, scientists are always having these moments in which they grasp enormous meanings.” He even deliberately presents an instance in which a dull and prosaic-minded character suffers a head wound that accidentally endows him with the ability to induce “value experiences” at will (the novel’s fictionalized version of Maslow’s “peak experiences”). Wilson’s purpose in including this is simply to enable him to make a point about the importance of linguistic expression: “We had found someone who could plunge into ecstasy as a moment’s notice. Here was a Wordsworth without the power of self-expression, a Traherne who could only say ‘Gor, ain’t it pretty.’”³

Everything here, all the words I’ve just written, is merely a longish and rambling rumination for the purpose of getting around to saying the following: Judt was right. The power to use language with self-conscious correctness, and not just that, but with rhetorical beauty, is a real power with real value because it really does allow “the translation of being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication”—which means your and my subjectivity becomes shareable. Our walled-off world of interiority becomes something we can communicate to someone else, and they can communicate theirs to us. There may be, in fact there truly are, wordless ways of doing the same thing—but words are one of the finest and most effective means we have of doing it.

Even more: Words, like self-consciousness, can actually enhance primary experience. The capacity for self-consciousness and the capacity for language being inextricably intertwined, it’s simply the case that the better your ability to reflect upon and express your experience consciously and linguistically, the more fully you know that experience. The very act of reflection creates the reflector. It’s bound up with the fact of individual subjecthood itself, as any student of the Western intellectual, philosophical, political, and social tradition, not to mention any student of Buddhism, can tell you. And the achievement and refinement of that ego self, despite the undeniable and enormous problems it has created—everything having to do with the “nightmare” of recorded/civilized history from which Joyce was struggling to awake—is one of the greatest quantum leaps in the history of the universe’s evolution. It’s the universe becoming awake to itself, and our purpose lies not in fleeing from the ego but in fulfilling the purpose for which it arose. See the pre/trans fallacy famously articulated by Ken Wilber. See the biblical Jesus: “I come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it.”

Our culture now presents us with an opportunity either to rise to, and even above, the opportunity embodied in words and language, or to sink below it. This is what I and every other writer and/or teacher is charged with addressing. Contrary to the widespread utilitarian degradation of education’s purpose in the minds of most people these days, teachers of writing in high schools, colleges, and universities aren’t just trying to enhance students’ communication skills in order to enhance their employment prospects. We are helping to focus their being, to focus Being itself, for the ultimate fulfillment of its purpose, by helping them to develop their linguistic capacities and conscious interior sensibilities to the greatest possible extent.

As you may have noticed, none of the above mentions AI, even though the subtitle of this essay refers to it. That’s because the paragraphs above are actually a combination of two older pieces of writing that I only rediscovered earlier this month, though I have now updated their language (e.g., by changing some verb tenses to past). I wrote them fourteen and fifteen years ago, one in July 2009 and the other a year later in July 2010, during my second and third years as a college English instructor. Previously, I had taught high school English for six years.

In 2009 and 2010, AI large-language models weren’t even on the horizon. But even so, my words above say still say essentially everything that I now want to say in response to the claim, which we’ve all heard, that this technology will help people to express their thoughts more effectively. To restate my point: Thought cannot be separated from its specific form of expression or articulation. If someone or something else does the articulating, that means they’re doing the actual thinking. And this represents a grievous existential loss.

“An artificial intelligence cannot give coherent, clarifying, formative voice to your scattered thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and personal vision. It cannot express or articulate yourself.”

The ancient, intrinsic value of writing as an alchemy of self-discovery and self-formation, and as a cognitive and spiritual shaper of civilizations, reemerges forcefully when machines are able to supplant the purely practical, market-based “writing as skill” approach that has dominated classrooms for decades. In other words, there is an opportunity here for clarifying why we write at all, humanistically speaking.

An artificial intelligence can now write—for example—an essay for you. Or rather, it can do this “for you,” if by the term “essay” we simply mean a set of information presented in a specifically organized form of human textual language. It can do the same with stories, novels, poems, screenplays, and anything else. But what an artificial intelligence cannot do is to give coherent, clarifying, formative voice to your scattered thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and personal vision. It cannot express or articulate yourself. Only you can do that. Otherwise, you’re letting a machine tell you, and others, who you are.

Warm regards,

1. Tony Judt, “Words,” The New York Review of Books, July 15, 2010 issue (paywalled).

2. Robert Anton Wilson, The Widow’s Son (New York: Bluejay Books, 1985), 336.

3. Colin Wilson, The Philosopher’s Stone (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2013), 67.