Most of the junkyard quotes this week are long. I’m not sorry to make you read them!
1) “Language has the power to shape reality.”
-Dr. Lisa Gezon (UWG). It terrifies me that this is true, yet no one (outside academia) really talks about it.
2) “As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of atheism; a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of man-ism with but little deism, and is as near to atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious or an irreligious eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade.”
-Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason. I could really quote the entire book and have nothing to add to this awesome sauce except to say that he later rants for a bit about the idiocy of studying languages. Specifically dead languages. He makes some valid and excellently articulated points in that argument, as well as a few statements to which I had a very horrified reaction: HOW CAN YOU SAY THIS TO ME, TOM?
Here’s some of it:
3) “The human mind has a natural disposition to scientific knowledge, and to the things connected with it. The first and favourite amusement of a child, even before it begins to play, is that of imitating the works of man. It builds houses with cards or sticks; it navigates the little ocean of a bowl of water with a paper boat; or dams the stream of a gutter, and contrives something which it calls a mill; and it interests itself in the fate of its works with a care that resembles affection. It afterwards goes to school, where its genius is killed by the barren study of a dead language, and the philosopher is lost in the linguist.”
Among other things, he seems to have completely skipped over that little phase of infanthood where babies imitate the sounds they hear and begin to associate those sounds with meaning, i.e. begin to learn a language (or two). I won’t go into it because he's smarter than I am and I don't have all the tools necessary to successfully debate the issue, but that was probably the one part of his book (so far; I’m reading this in between schoolwork) that made me say NO. And SHUT UP.
Disclaimer: I’m a linguistic anthropology major. So there you have it.
4) “A culture that just uses a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human can foist on that critter, will probably view individuals within its community, and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentalities.”
-Joel Salatin, in Food, Inc. I really have nothing to add to it, other than to say that it was the only time during the entire unforgettable viewing experience that I said “YES” aloud. That’s exactly how I’ve felt about what is perhaps one of the most trivial-seeming things in our daily lives: driving by roadkill. The closer we associate ourselves to something, the more likely we are to stop. Who wouldn’t stop for another human being? All other conditions being equal, it’d be more likely for someone to stop or slow down for a cat or a dog than a mouse or a squirrel, and for a squirrel or a mouse than a caterpillar. We don’t even know how many ants we run over every day. Who cares? Exactly.
5) “When you look at it, to have Martha play that scene (and no one questioned it—what that meant, or what the alternatives could have been underneath the dialogue), it’s mind boggling. The profundity of this subject was not in the lexicon of our rehearsal period. Audrey and I never talked about this. Isn’t that amazing? Truly amazing.”
Shirley MacLaine, in The Celluloid Closet. Some people tell me that it’s impossible for a writer to not know the entire potential of her own work (whether that potential be in setting, character work, theme, etc.), that every choice on how to use (or not use) that potential is, by default, done with her full awareness. Essentially, that it's impossible for a writer to shortchange her own subject matter or character, or to even write contrary to where the characters, themes, etc., seem to be naturally headed towards. I can’t agree with that at all, and it’s something I’m very mindful of (maybe too mindful or maybe still not mindful enough, being too concerned with other aspects of the work). We only have to point to how LGBT characters have been written and portrayed in history and even now to see there are many things writers (and actors) overlook, whether it’s deliberate or accidental. If I didn't believe other examples, I still have my own work, where I don't know how many drafts of a certain short story of mine (which I'm now torturing Professor Ellison with) I've gone through until I'm finally (this weekend) beginning to catch the heart of the matter, where the characters live and what their voices are, rather than the garbled mess that I've been hoisting onto them.
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