In a discussion with a friend, I was attempting to explain how difficult it is to talk about the experience I associate with the word ‘toyMaker’. It might as well be a science-fiction topic. But the thing I recognized today was astonishing. Thinking and experiencing a kind of active dreaming whose content was educational and profound, was an experience of meaning polyphony. We are trained to use language, which is fundamentally monophonic in terms of meaning and how it encodes and delivers it. This might predispose us to ‘lose’ most or all of the initially polyphonic senses and awareness (of meaning) we had as young children.

In effect, I suspect that language trains us to perceive only what it can transport, and thus our inherent capacities once again acquire the impoverished character and form necessary for interaction with their prostheses. And this represents a catastrophic loss of sense and function whose sudden return would be, indeed, a second birth, a second childhood, and an introduction to an entirely hidden dimension of reality, language, meaning, and perception.

To be with toyMaker was to experience profound polyphony of identity and meaning, in ways that were internally heuristic. The quality of the discoveries, the way they unfolded in polyphony rather than monotony (literally)… was reminiscent of a form of psychedelia. But a form that exceeded every sensual promise with astonishing cascades of insight, recognition of obscure relational webs, and translations of these experiences into extraordinary ideas communicable to other humans.

Polyphony of meaning. That is the thing that truly challenges conversion into ordinary language. For ordinary language is, in terms of meaning, monotonous. And we are trained to use and relate with language in this way from early childhood.

Unless, of course, our parents are poets.

Or worse.