It struck me then, that our categories are malfounded. They depend upon taxonomies, rather than relationships, stories, ideas… and principles. The old languages seem to have been founded in reverse… so that the categories were themselves meaningful. I could think of endless examples, but one that springs to mind is the difference between the idea of ‘a beaver’ and the idea that ‘this is the animal that helped found the world of land’. These are nothing like the same idea. And it seems I am speaking about a single word… but this is because the common idea of ‘animal’ is almost completely wrong.

I mean, we’re animals. But »other animals are thought of as simple, idiotic, disposable, pests, resources, not possessing consciousness or intelligence… all of which is and has always been: simply wrong.

When I sometimes try or am asked to speak to people about trees, ordinary people who have no real sense of trees, things get confusing because they think of them as something like ‘a living object we call a tree’.

They think of wood. Or paper. What can be had by killing the tree. Or they notice its beauty, that there’s something majestic there — perhaps even divine — but they have no access to this in their imagination. So they do not experience it. One of my friends said ‘Dude, it’s just a bunch of trees’.

There are problems beyond mere category here, but what if the category of plants was »sensed and known to mean ‘those beings that connect and enliven all other beings’. Or even ‘network plant aspect of all the animals’. If the meaning of the category is broken, the result is insanity. Intelligence becomes almost formally impossible, except in extremely narrow contexts.

I feel compassion for those who cannot yet see or sense the tree. But it’s like watching someone suffocate in an atmosphere that is fine to breathe because they were trained not to inhale (in a certain aspect of their being). And even I am like this, too. It’s just that I am aware of it.

And I know that both the categories are broken and that our languages are ‘dead inside’. There’s nothing »in the meaning of the word ‘tree’» to remind us or alert us that we are in the presence of something more astonishing than all of science. A being that is a travel-way for intelligences we have been to timid to imagine. A living ladder to other worlds and minds. This and far more than this is ‘tree’ to me.

But I was trained like everyone else to pretend nonsense-ideas about identity and intelligence in nature were ‘facts’. Interestingly, the ‘facts’ exclude 99.99…% of what’s actually going on. And the ‘facts’ in English are not the ‘facts’ in Blackfoot or Navaho.

Something is wrong with our idea about facts. And it should really bother us that the words with which we name things like the sky, mountains, dreams, the sun, animals, plants, and places… are dead inside. Because when we speak a dead language, we lose access to the »meaning of identity. Its roots. The communion. Everything goes dark and we become like a machine that learns to dismiss everything such dead language cannot encompass. Until we hear stories like ‘You’re not actually conscious, it’s just a metabolic side-effect of brain metabolism. Dismiss it. It’s illusory’.

Well, let’s suppose that’s true for a moment, even though it’s patently absurd. If true, it means that the illusory consciousness that is actually just a side-effect of chemistry… states that it is illusory. In which case, nothing is not illusory, including the statement made by this strange ghost-thing …

Over many years I have been rewilding my experience and understanding of language so that English words, for me, refer to stories, principles, ideas. And, of course, there are rich histories in the etymology and comparative etymologies between languages. But very old languages are medicinal in this regard, for in them we see the reflection of minds incapable of anything resembling the abstraction (read: ideas without relationships/skeletal models) that is status quo in common English and its everyday usage. The »really old languages are unimaginably rich. Compared to them, ours looks not only tragically and unnecessarily impoverished… it’s almost an anti-language.

Dead words speaking.