YON TORN - A paper tiger; two children with one toy
YON U SAN - The hesitation a boy experiences before first kissing his first girl
YOR KIN BE - A house; a circumlocution; a waterproof hat; the smile of a slightly imperfect wife
YUP PA - A book in which everything is understandable except the author's purpose in writing it
YUPPA GA - Stomach ache masquerading as eye-strain; a book in which nothing is understandable except the author's purpose in writing it
YUTH MOD - The assumed bonhomie of visitors and strangers
ZO ZO CIN - A woman in another field
More words: syntax, symbol, and space-time. Syntax is a way of arranging symbols in space-time. When you invent new symbols, you must invent a syntax for them, or specify the known syntax in which they are designed to be used. When you move into a different continuum, your old syntax is likely to be totally useless, even if your usual symbols have retained their meaning. Changing your syntax can emphasise or modify the connotative significance of a symbol by displaying it in a new perspective.
The most common use of the word syntax refers to the use of words in sentences. A word is a word is a word, whether it be spoken in a cave, sung by a bard at a crowded fireside, flashed on a screen for subliminal perception, printed in graceful Gothic type on a page of elegant sentences, orated in a speech, intoned in a chant, shouted from a mountain-top (to the sound of one hand clapping), or broken up in typographic effects as part of a picture. But though the word remains the same, its impact, value, in-context meaning, colour, shape, sound, may vary enormously with the syntax.
Syntax trouble is symptomatic of our society — of any society in transition. Our intellects operate through the manipulation of codified symbols for abstractions; mathematics provides syntaxes for such symbols; so does myth; so does language.
It is tempting to abandon detachment and intellection entirely at a time when we are discovering, with astonished joy, the uses of involvement, immersion, sensual and transcendent experience. But we are no more suited to the role of exultant flowers than of emotionless computers: we are human beings, equipped for both sensual and sensible experience and behavior. Mathematicians began to create new syntaxes for their new concepts a hundred years ago; scientists today have frames of reference in which to manipulate the multiplex symbols of space-time. In sociology, theology, psychology, we are just starting to seek the new matrixes. If it seems the tines are out of joint, it is rather that our syntaxes — in mythology, in language — are out of joint with the times.
Meantime, we find ourselves falling back on words, away from sentences: simply nouns and verbs, or, subtly-complexly, the noun-verbs — the ones the old syntax called participles or gerundives, and the make-do ones pressed into crisis service: package, protest, love, broadcast, star, surround, contact, fix, talk ...
Double your meaning, double your fun.
The following selection consists of three excerpts from Part II of the novel Journal from Ellipsia (Little Brown, 1965). It starts with the beginning of the actual 'journal'.
from Journal from Ellipsia
Hortense Calisher
On, on, on and on, on; and on, and on, on. The paradox about distance is that quite as much philosophy adheres to a short piece of it as to a long. A being capable of setting theoretical limits to its universe has already been caught in the act of extending it. The merest cherub in the streets here, provided he has a thumbnail — and he usually has ten — does this every day. He may grow up to be one of their fuzzicists, able to conceive that space is curved, but essentially — that is, elliptically — he does nothing about it. He lives on, in his rare, rectilinear world of north-south gardens, east-west religions, up-and-down monuments and explosions, plus a blindly variable sort of shifting about which he claims to have perfected through his centuries, thinks very highly of, and, is rather pretty in its way and even its name: free wall — a kind of generalised travel-bureaudom of 'across'. It follows that most of his troubles are those of a partially yet imperfectly curved being who is still trying to keep to the straight-and-narrow — and most of his fantasies also. His highest aspiration is, quite naturally, 'to get a-Round'; his newest, to get Out.
And he will too, though in his current researches he may have reached only so far as the Omega particle. In the phenomenology of all peoples, the mind slowly becomes curved.
At least that is what Ours are matriculated to, and I had seen nothing to contradict this, during my all-to-brief sojourn in Bucks. Ah, what a mentor was there, was mine, though except for one, I never saw — as she taught me to say — Her!
As I taxied once again along the upper solitudes, trying not to arrive instantaneously at destination — which is of course Our main problem here — I thought of Her with considerable leaning. Leaning is to Us what yearning is to You — but that story will emerge later. The hardest thing to learn here — and still not mastered — is how to get about pornographically.
Meanwhile — and what a concept that is to a being accustomed to Ever — like standing à point as the meteors of thought surge by! This place is simply teeming with time. Excuse me. It is scarcely my fault if everything you do here is so attractive. Meanwhile, I was having my own practical problems, as I elided in and out, intent on not overshooting the mountains of the Ramapo. Omega particles indeed, to say nothing of such heavinesses as the baryons, neutrons and protons into which they here have finally divided that grossity of theirs, the atom. Let them try iris-ing in, as I had done the first trip, from slightly more than thirteen billion light-years away, while receding therefore at more than the speed of light and hence invisible, on radiotelephone sources purporting to emanate from a nubbin of matter still acting flatly against its own spherical. On the darker side of which, for this my second trip, moonwise at their eleven o'clock (what a statement!), amid a smear of foothills, these directional signals would just probably be sending again, if She was able to arrange it, from apparatus just like that in Bucks — in an environ likewise named monosyllabically. (They yearn for our Oneness constantly. They are indeed a touching people.) Hobbs.
At the point where I re-entered their ionosphere, the dear curves of Our being — which they term 'body', and I must not forget to call 'my' — nearly reversed themselves, but thanks to the extreme elasticity of our mental curvature, these held. Shortly after, I entered that condition, common enough among us, which however sounds so regrettably silly in their language — and is indeed almost impossible to gauge in one where the amount of things so consistently takes precedence over their unanimity. There's no help for it. I became more Here than There. From then on it was easier; they tell me that things done for the second time here usually are. A 'second time' is one facet of their concept of two-ness that I had no trouble with, a kindly sign that the curves of our not quite cognate worlds do somewhere intersect. As I crossed, the far, reddish spectrum of Out There faded, gradually receded, whelmed by the increasing blue ozone of Right Here. From twenty thousand up, the daily height of their own traffic, once again their planet looked as extraordinary as any planet of the universe must look to the resident of another, up that close. Yes, I had done this before, experiencing no difficulty with their numerical progressions, and almost none with their time-sequences. It is only the two-ness of people that still gives me unutterable pause. In Bucks, I was told that monotheists here suffer almost the same tension over the many-goddedness which with us is so restful, all Our people being One.