Eskimos Won’t Talk about Bears: Language as Physics

Description

Building on the thesis that language is physics (see the work of physicists David Bohm and David Z. Albert), the book confronts the double-slit experiment, a simple laboratory exercise that rocked physics in the first half of the 20th century. At their professional peril, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, David Bohm, Basil Hiley, John Archibald Wheeler, and John Bell explored the implications of the new quantum potential revealed by the experiment Albert Einstein called “spooky.”

Their findings have large implications for the rest of us. We learn that the space-time focus of classical physics is a special case of physics. The universe in fact operates in an enigmatic energy-momentum manifold—as aboriginal people have been saying since the Pleistocene—not space-time. Witness the message of Chauvet, Lascaux, Trois-Frères. Witness Navajo cosmology. We find ourselves in the eerie presence of this energy-momentum physics in the language of all these people, from the Kalahari Desert to the Alaskan tundra.

With language (which is the same as consciousness: see Hegel, Heidegger, von Humboldt, Wittgenstein) restored to its proper place as a force of nature, the confiscated (by anthropology and historical consciousness) Pangaea of Wildness that defined the Pleistocene becomes accessible once more. The language of wildness—that is, language that conforms to the quantum potential—breaks the “will to power” (Nietzsche) of civilization, where good and evil “lurch, wrestle and twist in their purposeless war” (Bringhurst), giving us access to the universe we knew as children, the world of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” and the Open Rilke invokes in the Eighth Elegy.