90

Next one. Full of grey space. Shapes move throughout. There is no emotion, there is no particular spirit in any sense that he can recognize. There is no place for it, here, within this person. There is no noise, either. No sound of any kind. This person has some strange shit going on, he thinks. All is numb except for the shapes. It is hard even to say that all is numb because numb is a thing of comparative awareness: numb does not exist on its own -- it is the absence of feeling. He does not know that there has ever been feeling, here. All is shape. All is movement of shape. There is perhaps a language of the movement of shape. A dance. A choreography. A geometric vocabulary. Perhaps there is none of this. He doesn't know. This committee member has not spoken, so far as he can remember, although perhaps she has spoken before he became a member. But he wonders whether it is possible to generate language with an interior self such as the one he is seeing. At first, he thinks that there is nothing to talk about, here, except for the shapes. But then he realizes that there is something fascinating to ponder about these shapes. Do these shapes generate language? Here is the puzzle: is the force that originates language linguistic or a-linguistic? (Or could they be pre-linguistic? And is pre-linguistic linguistic or a-linguistic?) Are these shapes a component of language or are they something else that comes before? Are they an alphabet (and thus a component of language) or are they a non-language system out of which, perhaps, a language awareness might arise?