Conclusion

Re-Emergence of the Language of the Birds through Twitter? (Part #11)

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As indicated in Fig. 1, providing an initial overview of the argument, the intention has been to interweave a variety of themes -- typically dissociated. Whilst Twitter is a matter of current everyday reality within an emergent global knowledge society, the Language of the Birds is a feature of the mythical heritage of a wide range of cultures. Its mythical nature provokes speculation as to what it might be (or have been understood to be) at a time when the semantic web evokes speculation on how knowledge can be more fruitfully articulated globally. However, consistent with the evident subtlety of physics in reflecting on the fundamental nature of a multidimensional universe, the language in which concepts can be formulated regarding the possible nature of a Language of the Birds merits corresponding subtlety.

The argument above has stressed the necessarily allusive/elusive nature of such a language. It has used the possibility of configuring interjection -- including silence -- to elicit "higher explicatures" through meta-narrative. The suggestion is that such configuration serves as a challenging "gateless gate" to the Language of the Birds -- in the Zen tradition of the 13th century configuration of 48 koans, the Mumonkan (Robert Aitken, The Gateless Barrier: the Wu-Men Kuan, 1991). The antimanifesto (above) of the Société Imaginaire neatly warns against the trap into which many fall when inspired by a Language of the Birds. As emphasized in apophasis -- "unsaying" -- it is as much what it can be declared to be as the antithesis of such description. A language appropriate to the times (Being What You Want: problematic kataphatic identity vs. potential of apophatic identity? 2008).

In this sense, the possibility of some such language raises questions, as is the nature of interjections in response to conventionally articulated patterns. In the alchemical tradition, with which the language is held to be associated, the design challenge is that of the cognitive "container" for that which characteristically dissolves any container -- the alkahest as universal cognitive solvent. This allusion may be seen in the light of the highly questionable cognitive role played by the container metaphor in current discourse, as articulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Metaphors We Live By, 1980).

The cognitive challenges of such a language may be compared with the current paradoxical design challenges for a nuclear fusion reactor -- in which contact of nuclear plasma with the containing reactor wall must be prevented to avoid quenching and thereby inhibiting fusion. By analogy, it might be said that the cognitive challenge of the times is to avoid "cognitive quenching", as separately explored (Enactivating a Cognitive Fusion Reactor: Imaginal Transformation of Energy Resourcing (ITER-8), 2006). It is this through this that any "circulation of the light" might be ensured (Circulation of the Light: essential metaphor of global sustainability?, 2010).

It is to that end that further reflection on the possible nature of a Language of the Birds merits imaginative reflection. Seemingly, to enable its essential function, it "is" (or needs to be) a language that flickers between multiple connotations -- alluding to correspondences without fixating on them -- evoking new patterns of insight and their resonances (Theories of Correspondences -- and potential equivalences between them in correlative thinking, 2007). It thereby engenders new modes and possibilities of cognitive embodiment -- as implied again by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Philosophy in the Flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought, 1999). Use of the traditional binary coding system explored in the Annex, and its embedding within a Fibonacci spiral, offers design features consistent with the complexity and subtlety of the challenge.

In such a context the associations of the Language of the Birds with rhyme, poetry, music, mathematics or movement, are all to be considered partial concretizations of a modality whose essential dynamics are reminiscent of the resonant hybrid structure of the molecule common to all organic structure -- and therefore to life. As a form of Rosetta Stone of relevance to the fragmented cognitive challenges of global governance, the nature of the language is as much what it can be creatively imagined to be as not.

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