“Where the linguistic consciousness is fully developed, language, in order to designate the whole of an action, need not represent all the details of its »course, but contents itself with fixating the beginning and the end of an action, the subject from which it emanates and the objective goal toward which it is directed. Encompassing the whole scope of this opposition in a single glance, language can now mediate it: the tension between the two extremes has been intensified, but at the same time a spiritual spark, as it were, leaps across the gap and reconciles them.”

— Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, V 1: Language

Language is a method of inventing and crossing gaps. It instantiates a network whose nature is redefined and restructured by each act. The resulting ‘mind’ is the ‘standing body of preservations and potentials’ thus acquired and informed during one’s exposure to and interactions with linguistic culture and its ‘traditions’ of conceptualization, description, denotation and explanation. These traditions are purposive, and their purposes inform the character and potential for intelligence (or delusion) in the results. But the entire charade is fundamentally related to creating gaps and crossing them… linguistically, conceptually, and relationally.

Ion.

Each letter serves the purpose of both imposing and re-connecting a gap; so, too, each word and sentence. The gap is at once created and crossed by the methods we use, but the deeper significances of this activity easily evade discovery by our habitual ways of thinking (and feeling) about language. The grammatical classes themselves both divide and reconnect the elemental distinctions of sensing, identity and relationship. This activity is happening in a dimension more real than its ambient invisibility implies, for this kind of activity is one of the fundamental signatures of living beings… and intelligence.