Terms of art, special vocabularies: "I would turn to you for a good, working definition of trope, synecdoche, or metonymy." Actually, I would find it difficult to give you definitions or these terms. Oh, I could look them up in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, sure, but I'd much rather find examples to present to you. Not that I don't think one can make meaningful generalizations--it's just that, to my mind, examples carry more force. (I've always thought that the various sub-divisions of metaphor, for example, invented by critics are mostly hair-splitting.) Birds: My vocabulary for birds is not terribly large, though I keep a Petersen's Field Guide on the coffee table & a pair of binoculars nearby. I can identify the common species that visit our yard, but my friend Angie has a vastly larger vocabulary of birds--she can identify warblers, distinguishing between the many, many species of this small & nervous bird, often identifying them by their song. This is a prodigious act of naming, I think. Poetry: When I was in grad school my teacher Sandra McPherson gave our poetry workshop an assignment to discover a specialized vocabulary--plumbers' jargon, airplane parts, etc. & build a poem around it. It's a way of entering another domain of language use & I've given the assignment myself.

You wrote, "In 36, Wittgenstein engages in a meta-reflection on the indeterminacy built into ostensive definition situations that leaves us with a sense of the origin of the concept of mind as a locus of certitude. If the bodily action of pointing results in unpredictability or mistakes, then we want to be able to fall back on some deeper, spiritual activity that will ensure that there is potential for truth, accuracy, perfect understanding, in this context." Interestingly, in current debates about poetics, there has been some attempt to reground certainty in the body, whether through the use of breath as a metaphor (Olson) or the heartbeat as a substrate for regular meters & more recently, the time it takes for neurons to fire & recharge, or some such: "The rod of Moses and the caduceus of Hermes/Mercury combine the staff and the snake in a symbol whose meaning is ambiguous, but which mediates between biological and cultural forms of emergent order. The double-helix geometry of the Greek version of the symbol may be a natural diagram of growth through feedback, so that its resemblance to the shape of the DNA molecule is no coincidence. The mythical exchange of the caduceus for the lyre, symbol of poetry, implies a further meaning for the caduceus: human poetry and art in general." [Frederick Turner] Well, chaos theory, complex systems, etc. as far as I can tell amounts to the New Reductionism, to go along with the New Formalism in poetry. But, really, we're falling through space--all that is solid melts into air.

Colors: When I was learning the words for different colors in Vietnamese, I came to realize (see?) that for a native speaker the blue of the sky & the blue of the water & the blue of a Westerner's eyes could all be covered, casually, by the same word; but when the sentence is ambiguous, there is always a modifier at hand. My intention in pointing this out is simply to highlight the subtlety of the way speakers of a language are sensitive to context & use.

I take your point (5/22) regarding the non-inevitability of a particular political structure; by analogy to evolutionary biology, we could think of this view as "Gouldian," in the sense that it emphasizes contingency & rejects teleology. In these days of the fading American hegemon--fading even as it reaches a crescendo--this will be a very unpopular view. So, I don't know my way around--never have--but I keep scribbling maps & lists of landmarks in the sand & on these scraps of paper in my pockets. This obsessive activity is, more than anything else, what sets me apart from my fellow-citizens. Further thought: you seem to be saying that even what we think of under the heading of Politics is historically contingent & the same for that other capital P: Philosophy.

[37, 38] This & that: I won't attempt to reproduce the Vietnamese here, but when I was beginning my lessons in the language I had a devil of a time getting down the difference between this clock & that clock, for instance. In any case, W is right, these words are not names in themselves, but modifiers of names, i.e., what in grammar we call adjectives. But, just to think this through: couldn't we conceive of this & that as naming spatial relationship between an object & a speaker? It is an important & useful distinction that seems pretty fundamental. Well, just thinking out loud here--I await the real philosopher's reading of these paragraphs.

[34, 35] I've been thinking this morning about the conventions of color naming in our culture--probably because it is so gray & rainy outdoors at the moment. In 34 & 35 W points out the difficulty of knowing just what is being pointed to--a shape or a color--when one, say, is directed toward a red circle. Somehow this got me thinking about those little strips of color samples one gets at the paint store in order to decide what will be an appropriate / attractive color for the living room. This is statistical & culturally local, but I bet if you showed people colored rectangles & asked them for a definition, they would name the color; but if you showed them colored circles, they would name the shape. But that is only because we have an (unspoken & probably not universal) convention about such things in our particular time & place. What W is doing here is trying to get us to see the conventions as a convention, a practice, a way of life.

All of which is therapeutic, of course, but we cannot live daily being conscious of all the conventions in which we are enmeshed, can we? Would that be satori, or its opposite? At the same time, it is very useful to be able to phase in & out of therapeutic mode & this is something that many, but by no means all, people do more or less routinely.

I was using "epistemology," I suppose, as a stand-in word for philosophy, though for me the word commemorates my own youthful struggles to understand how we humans understand whatever it is we understand. Anyway, we agree that a philosophy must generate an ethics; question: can one begin with ethical intuitions & build a philosophy from that?

An epistemology that does not produce a workable ethics is sterile. In a nutshell, that's what's wrong with solipsism.

"O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." (Hamlet II.ii.) It's those bad dreams we have to be careful to attend to. The poet's business, I guess.

[33] The vexed problem of the relationship of word to thing. Poets, I think, would like for there to be something direct, intrinsic about the relationship; despite its analytical power, we poets find Saussure's assertion that the relation between sign & signified is arbitrary troubling. I think Wittgenstein, early & late, was also troubled by this relationship.

Your quoting W's "I will teach you differences" put me in mind of G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form. Brown's first move in creating his calculus is to posit the marking of distinctions between one thing & another. I'm still not sure whether this is profound or superficial, to tell the truth. The Philosophical Investigations seems to be teaching us that we must constantly renegotiate the distinctions we make, more or less automatically, about the world. It might be possible to derive an ethical system form this: inability to renegotiate leads to inflexibility, doctrine. Or am I just finding a fancy way of rationalizing my own fairly radical relativism?

I place myself in the company of those "pessimistic ecologists" who mock our mastery over nature. I don't think Bickerton, in Language and Species, is arguing that human transformations of the natural world are necessarily good or bad, but he is noting that more than any other species, we change the world to suit our personal & cultural whims. Now, I'm going to go out in the yard & begin digging the footings for a retaining wall. I have a certain vision of the way my property should look.

I wrote a sort of free-form meditation last night on my personal weblog about language & species. I think it is relevant here.

I've been thinking / reading about animals, including us humans. I'm circling toward something here, but not sure what, exactly. Stay tuned.

My progress in Vietnamese is "impressive" only to those who do not speak the language. But your description of dreaming German jibes with my experience of dreaming in Vietnamese. Often, the dreams are actually about learning Vietnamese. When I was a freshman in college my roommate was fluent in Spanish: one weekend he had a Spanish-speaking friend visit & the second night I was dreaming in "Spanish" of which I knew maybe fifteen words. We should not overestimate the powers of the unconscious mind! Still, it's true that I have been in the throes of a love affair with Vietnamese. Who knows why? Such things are the province of the gods. I got lucky--I found a language-universe that made sense to me.

I like your analogy. Old Marx / young Marx ~ Old Wittgenstein / young Wittgenstein. There is self-critique, certainly, in both cases, & a certain change of perspective, but alienation, in the first case & ordinary language in the second remain as fundamental themes. We also have to distinguish between the use to which the Logical Positivists put Wittgenstein & W's own views. It does seem to me that W does reject the picture theory of language as well as the notion that human language can be reduced to a logical skeleton, which he had advance in the Tractatus. (Barrett relates this to W's philosophy of mathematics as a human practice.) At the same time, his fundamental concern remains the relationship between things & words--this is the fundamental concern of poets as well as philosophers. Wittgenstein, surely, must be ranked with Eliot & Pound as one of the founding fathers of Literary Modernism, with all the contradictions that entails.

I remember, age 19, crossing a footbridge on the University of Washington campus, from town toward the Henry Art Gallery, thinking: Are words & sentences things, or do they merely represent things? I was thinking particularly of poems. Is a poem something in the world that stands apart from the world somehow, a self-contained reflection on the world, or a record of perception. That, perhaps, is the question I have spent my life exploring & despite the fact that, then, I devoutly wanted the poem to be self-contained, I have tended since toward the view that language is so embedded in reality as to be indistinguishable from it--which does not so mush answer as deflect my original, youthful question.

Hey, it was good to see you at the Agway today. Just a couple of suburban homeboys trying to read Wittgenstein. I wanted to take up the idea of second languages & Wittgenstein's treatment of it in 32. Earlier in our discussions, in talking about language, I relied a good deal on my recent experiences trying to learn Vietnamese. My second language. How I learned my first language, I will of course never know. I would need to have had language to encode that experience; what I do know is that very early in my life I realized that language, even if it did not create the world, created to a large extent the human experience of the world. (I understood the power of effective lying.) I would go so far as to suggest that what we call mystical are those experiences that fall outside the ability of our language to express them. I'm following the Tractatus in this, I think. Those last few pages William Barrett sees as crucial to the movement of the Philosophical Investigations. (One of the infuriating things about Wittgenstein studies is the debate that frames Wittgenstein's career as either a smooth continuum from the Tractatus to the Investigations, over against the view that there is a radical break between the early & the late Wittgenstein. Both views are true, which is to say that neither is true.) Question: is the classical Logical Positivist view of language that a proposition can be A) true, B) false, & C) nonsensical? If I've got this right, doesn't W. even in the Tractatus suggest a fourth possibility: D) propositions that are neither true nor false, but to which we still attribute sense?

Anyway, back to second languages: At every step of the way in my learning Vietnamese I am "triangulating" between my native knowledge of English, Vietnamese, & some third ideal point--perhaps the Chomskian language-in-general. Except, that there were moments, living in Hanoi, when Vietnamese just simply happened to me. That is, I became a baby again & began to know the language from the inside. In those moments, I was reborn into Vietnamese. The experience always left me giddy. I would go so far as to say that, for a poet like me, supposedly superbly fluent in my native tongue, learning even so much Vietnamese as I have managed so far, represents a conversion experience. The fact is, during my year in Hanoi I was both deliriously happy & profoundly disoriented & manic. Obsessive. It was a crisis experience, life-changing. Had I gone as a tourist or diplomat with no intention of struggling with the language, I could have avoided this mental turmoil; which is to say, I could have avoided the experience itself.

Thank you for your kind words about my elevation to what another colleague, who has also attained the exalted rank of Professor, called "the world of Old-Fartdom." It does, though, feel subtly different being a Professor. Funny what words (& a raise) can do. And had Wittgenstein worked at Clarkson as you & I do, he would have known that this is a real job in a way that Cambridge, perhaps, was not. There is that Puritan strak in Ludwig that I am going to have to confront one of these days. But let me take this opportunity to note your service to the School of Liberal Arts & the Honors Program here: I believe that I can safely say that it is the intention of your colleagues to make an honest man of you & get you on the tenure track. (Or is that the Road to Perdition?) Indeed, it is shameful that we have not been able to do this before now.