“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”– Edward Sapir, 1925
But let's not get too discouraged here, since in any single language
Most importantly, without the ambiguity of metaphor and other language tricks, there'd be nothing to say, at least nothing of interest except perhaps to obsessed mathematicians, as long as possibility is preferred over the prevailing disappointment of failing prediction beyond counting fingers on a hand but before the angels start dancing on a pin. Lest we forget, Sapir & Whorf were talking about linguistified reality as mimicked sets of habits whose place is called by geographers "the habitat". That habit, if you have it, means style, vogue or what's in fashion, not just vapors shooting up from under your foot or others up your nose. Sometimes it's just a dangerous addiction. But who correctly posits any universal style hiding somewhere underneath your clothes except the fashion-police running in the shadow of Mr. Jones? Should your reality be any different? Not just guests or ghosts, our own errors may be the worst which come to haunt us. Back in Myth-time anything was possible and most importantly, folks can communicate with other others just the same as they seem to do with each other. It's not quite a Dr. Do little thing, but that may be a good start, never the less, it may involve some chewing and regurgitation, another word for shape-shifting.
"There’d be no work for tinkers’ hands. We have another life. It shadows the life we actually lead. We occasionally become aware of it, particularly in those moments where we step outside of what it is that we are, and reflect upon, for better or worse, how it might have been. We are presented with, in that moment where we have become exactly whatever it is that we are, another who is not us, but who also is. This other us is a type of intimate personage, a subset of our self. The life we have not lived is always, at the very least, conceivable and therefore, remains subject to us. Or anyway, we are attached to it somehow – it seems to haunt significant crossroads and drags us back there. To shake ourselves free from the melancholy hold of this shadow, we consider the innumerable variables of existence, and multiply all the other others we also might have been. By means of conjuring up the possibility of other lives we also did not live, we relativise the significance of the life we actually failed to bring into the world. But these other others are categorically distinct from our intimate stranger – they are merely the lives that we have not not lived. We are never presented, in moments of regret or celebration, with the roads that are not not taken. These possible computations of existence have no substance for us, they are like the fantasies of others, wholly uncompelling; their improbable coilings and writhings permanently accompany our every moment without our ever giving them the least attention. They do not ever achieve the compelling and haunting form of our other self, that spectre who fixes us to who we actually are."
Just like the difference between "public opinion" and "the rise of neo-nazi sentiment reflected at the poles" as well as in quasi-journalistic peanut galleries or reality tv, the after-image may reflect that only Wilhelm Reich's fascists are left to do the voting, deprived as they are of love but never sex and gender. Quantification is meaningless outside of any surveilled sample. What is not observed might just as well have been excluded, and this is no argument for universal suffrage unless one over-wishes to extend the suffering. Nazis have always been big fans of democracy, as long as they remain the fittest, and not in any numerical sense, another misconfusion of quantity and quality inheritant in all darwinian analyses, should only flukes survive which more accurately reflects that survival of survivors is in dialectical opposition only to the worms of decomposition.
Through the lens of extended environmental conspiracies, we see from a height (a sort of superstition) the worms are us as well (or as well-connected to the ground a' wiggling), and fascist pigs are only "living" inside the telescopic spyglass but have no vision of their own, hence no imagination, hence are most alone without a doppleganger or even shadow and if well-deserved of pity, they couldn't accept that gift as there's nothing in them to be resonated like a guitar string by a flat pick or shovel to the head – perhaps the only creatures in the verse born dead or shortly there-after sung in post-pleistocenic time scales. Only worms and earthly microbes are for giving, which is why when pigs are pumped with formaldehyde and wearing their protection, they keep on coming even after we inter them. No good can come preserving mummies except to fuel steam-powered ships or future loco motives. Such is the problem of historical interpretation: it must proceed backwards, to a point disqualifying as inadmissible the possibility of other others. Mythic discourse is not weighed down by relegated absences of monsters or material effects (like glandular secretions) from ethereal forces (like remorse or anticipation).
Exclusion, that is, disqualification only ensures that language remains one-sided and therefore, in stasis, that is to say, stagnant but without the entendre of living organisms superflurishing in a swamp. We're talking frozen solid like an iceberg or rock. Otherwise the invalid can only limp along with a persuasive crutch. The only discourse is its own, a monologue when even floppy ears are not included. Extracted from their context like a corn-cob from Illinois, even they are not immortal. Like lies, Pharaohs burn hot when subjected to a flame which shares the essences of fire. The transparent substance of a truth is likely leaky, but everyone has seen a liar.
Besides the confusion of criteria with "class" in the construction of categories (most of which, like brackets, are not but artificial or political means for boxing within boxes) there's the same amnesiatic condition antagonistically prevailing. To wit: for human sorts at least not swimming in the sea in schools of parrots, there's no social anything without a bit of languaging. If one can't see its own reflection, could we ever even sense there is another in the world, even as a possibility? What chance then have other words or worlds existing, without coinciting a reality or kindle its untwisting? It may not be the language after all producing cosmic order, but it's arrogant rules of grammar which insist that, despiting eyes and nose and ears and toes, meaning or semantic system is more synonymous with the thing which makes most sense than any tongue or organ.
