For days I have been writing updates related to language here, and erasing them. Most of what I want to talk about is so exotic and provocatively metaphysical that I cannot frame it in language I trust. I suppose the simplest thing I can say is that our relationships with language and knowledge are far more peculiar and suspicious than they are wont to appear to us. And that we conserve, as individuals and as a species, echoes of our ascent of a developmental ladder whose histories are fraught with astonishing implications.

Perhaps more precisely: our relationship with language is strange enough that it might as well be with some form of nonhuman intelligence. That it comprises a nonordinary domain where we are probably interacting either with other forms of intelligence or artifacts of the recursion of our own. Possibly both.

Whatever language may be, it is a lot more interesting than a virus. It is some sort of transpsygenic catalyst that may be the remnant of contact with nonhuman intelligence. Within human minds and cultures, beyond the guiding contexts present at its inception, it acts pseudo-intelligently and domineeringly. It’s what we tell ourselves what stuff is -with-, and it is not exactly a thing in any ordinary sense. Through human beings, it remakes the world in its image, the image of representation.

In our human cultures, language is like a misbehaving force somehow unleashed during a terrible accident. We are going to have to either discover what distorted this relationship and amend it, or take control of it by deeply understanding its history and implications.

I expect that in exploring these terrains we will make astonishing discoveries about the nature of language and our relationship with it. I think these are likely to be as provocative as any discovery ever made, and will change what our understanding of our identity as humans and as organisms.