I have been struggling again with finding a comfortable place to sit in my role as researcher in the Institution. It began with carelessness about words and it was reinforced by the word fetishism that so easily slips into academic talk. When the labels we use to speak about the world become other than just an honest attempt to convey the meaning they are pointing at, language dies and is objectified. There is a gradient along which this occurs but ultimately language becomes a straightjacket. If we take words too seriously, we all too easily forget what they are about. Nowhere is this more poignant than in academia.

I don’t want to juggle categories to make them fit someone else’s abstraction of the world. I want to discover the world through partaking, inventing, sharing, creating, evoking a language of a reality where I can feel at home.

The struggled ended. With words. Acceptance and conciliation. In conversation of course. In the good company of Tony Dias with whom speaking is like a Bohmian dialogue. That is a slightly separate story which I will come back to shortly. For now I want to move on into new territory with a snippet of our conversation, planting it as a flag pointing to a place where language can resurrect and come back into life.

I was trying to understand how one might speak about the world “understanding that whatever labels we use they are only labels, and finding ways to engage with what is underneath the labels, not letting them get in the way. Letting things speak for themselves and not doing violence to their language when we go on to employ them in our own.”

Tony said, “There is a hidden corruption in the wink and a nod behind an easy slipping into secretly accepting labels "among us experts!"

This comes back to the question of initiation. – You know, that all just came up as we talked yesterday! This is how thinking gets done! Instead of managing collections of dead and labeled thoughts! – Initiation takes us past posturing about our relationship with our vulnerability and the futility of Ego-driven postures. This embeds this disillusionment within our beings and opens up a line of communication with our organism and – as you so rightly pointed out – the many paths of connection between our organisms. At this point words are another form of gesture, and together with gesture, and all the other aides to communication, words take their rightful place helping us communicate. Helping us to see where the we is going. Helping us find a place where thinking "moves by its own accord…."

This gets us to the attitude of seriousness that is there in, say your grandmother's culture. It's not seriousness as a pose, it does not stand on ceremony. It holds humor gently and is always ready to accept joy; but it is serious through and through. There is sincerity that goes all the way down.”