019 - Language as Doorway

We are talking about the face, about singing, about vocalization, and so it is appropriate to talk about language itself.

I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “We are the granddaughters of the witches you could not burn.” One of my favorite witches– one of the oldest, and most profound– is the LANG witch. You can see how, in a book like this, if we don’t hold the reins tightly, it could get away from us, and we could end up talking about everything that exists.

Yet I would be remiss, in this section on portals to connection, if I didn’t address the deep and fundamental way in which language can either open or close the doorway to connection.

Language is not in and of itself a physiological portal, though vocalization certainly is, and yet it is one of the defining characteristics of our species, which is not to say that many other animals don’t have languages, but rather that the degree to which our experience of self is enmeshed in language is most probably uniquely human.