Hilarie's TAE Response

[Website Services Admin]

#724

“When a human being who is experienced in some field senses something, there is always something. It could turn out to be quite different than it seemed at first, but it cannot be nothing.”

I love this idea that every feeling, whether misidentified or misdirected, is worthy in and of itself (which is what I take from the “is always something” formulation, even though it strikes me that I might be taking the valuing a little too far, since Gene doesn’t want to place value on these things in a hierarchical way).

“Language is implicit in the human process of living. The words we need to say arrive directly from the body. I have a bodily sense of what I am about to say. If I lose hold of that, I can’t say it. If I have the sense of what I want to say, then all I do is open my mouth and rely on the words that will come.”

Here, I’m really struck by two formulations: “the words we need to say” and “the words that will come.” The first phrase flips around, really usefully, it seems to me, the idea of having a sense and not being able to find the right word. I love this way of thinking of it as an idea in search of a means of expression. Gene’s phrase here really evokes the certainty that the idea and the word will be matched up, no matter how awkward the matching process seems. The second phrase is heartening too, in its confidence that words come no matter what. It’s also up to us to “rely” on them, which is a neat concept that should help to remove some writerly anxiety that the felt sense process so nicely shepherds away (as in, don’t worry so much about the right word. Work with the ones you have, and others will come).

“In certain kinds of sentences a word can go beyond its usual meaning, so that it speaks from the felt sense. When one has tried several words and found that each of them fails to say what needs to be said, fresh sentences can say what one wished the word to mean.”

The linked ideas of going beyond and of freshness fit nicely with the anxiety removal I considered above. This passage seems to be saying that we think we know what words can do, but we are almost limiting them by thinking that way. We have to go beyond the known in order to get to the freshness.

“When many TAE theories cross, they need not constitute one consistent logical system. There is a different way in which they go together. They cross. Crossing makes the other theory implicit in the felt sense under one’s own logically connected terms. Then we find that we can say more from our own felt sense, using the other theory and its connected terms.”

I’m really not sure how to understand crossing (I find that I’m trying to visualize it), but it strikes me as a concept that will be helpful in sorting a lot of this out as soon as I can get a handle on it.

[Sondra Perl]

#733

I am glad that you highlight the ‘heartening’ aspects of Gene’s theory — an interesting and apt word if we want to open it to various meanings as in (my formulations) Gene’s work comes from the heart, Gene’s work heartens us in its optimism about human creativity, Gene’s work can be seen as uplifting, as a theory of the possibilities inherent in language, and so on. Interestingly, here I can pause and ask, What do I want ‘heartening’ to mean in relation to Gene’s work and begin to do TAE right here.

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