At any rate the Alabama well-house was the place to set out from.
If one could ever fathom what happened when Helen knew that water “was” water, one might begin to understand a great many other things, perhaps even why people get bored in Short Hills and move to the Gulf Coast to enjoy hurricanes.
The Strangeness of Delta
The longer one thought about the irreducible triangle and its elements and relations, the queerer they got.
Compare Delta Δ phenomenon with the pseudo triangle of Ogden and Richards: buzzer→dog→food. The latter is a pseudo triangle because one needn’t think of it as a triangle at all but can conceive the event quite easily as a series of energy exchanges beginning with buzzer and ending in the dog’s salivation and approaching food.
But consider the Delta phenomenon in its simplest form. A boy has just come into the naming stage of language acquisition and one day points to a balloon and looks questioningly at his father. The father says, “That’s a balloon,” or perhaps just, “Balloon.”
Here the Delta phenomenon is as simple as Helen’s breakthrough in the well-house, the main difference being that the boy is stretching out over months what Helen took by storm in a few hours.
But consider.
Unlike the buzzer-dog-salivation sequence, one runs immediately into difficulty when one tries to locate and specify the Delta elements — balloon (thing), balloon (word), boy (organism).
In a word, my next discovery was bad news. It was the discovery of three mystifying negatives. In the Delta phenomenon it seems: The balloon is not the balloon out there. The word balloon is not the sound in the air. The boy is not the organism boy.
For example: Where, what is the word balloon? Show me the word balloon as I can show you the sound of the buzzer. Unlike the dog “understanding” the sound of the buzzer to “mean” food, the boy does not understand the particular sound balloon—which his father makes and which enters his ear — to mean the balloon. For it is precisely the nature of the boy’s breakthrough that he understands his father’s utterance as a particular instance of the word balloon. Where is the word itself? Is it the little marks in the dictionary which you point to when I ask you to show me the word balloon?
Charles Peirce said the word balloon is not a concrete thing at all but a general one, a law.
What about the balloon itself? Cannot one at least say that what the boy is pointing to and “means” is that particular round red rubbery inflated object?
No.
It is precisely the nature of the boy’s breakthrough that the object he points to is understood by him as a member of a class of inflated objects. A few minutes later he might well point to a blue sausage-shaped inflated object and say, “Balloon.”
What about the boy himself? Can he not be understood, as the dog is understood, as the organism within whose neurons and molecules certain interactions occur which lead to his uttering and understanding the name?
No.
For it is not the case of the boy being the site where certain interactions and energy exchanges take place, arrows flying along neurons and jumping synapses. Something else happens. However many arrows fly along the boy’s neurons (and they do), he does something else. He couples balloon with balloon. But who, what couples? Who, what is the coupler? Do you mean some part of his brain does the coupling? I could not say whether it is his brain which couples, his “mind,” his “self,” his “I.” All one can say for certain is that if two things which are otherwise unconnected are coupled, there must be a coupler.
Then what can one say for sure about the three elements of the Delta phenomenon?
Only this: The boy in Delta is not the organism boy. The balloon in Delta is not the balloon in the world. The balloon in Delta is not the sound balloon.
An unpromising beginning.
Indeed there was not much to be said for my own Helen-Keller breakthrough (was this the nature of the beast too, that it couldn’t be said?) and very little to be sure of. Only this: the Delta phenomenon yielded a new world and maybe a new way of getting at it. It was not the world of organisms and environments but just as real and twice as human.
Would it be possible, I was wondering then in Louisiana, to use the new key to open a new door and see in a new way? See man not the less mysterious but of a piece, maybe even whole, a whole creature put together again after the three-hundred-year-old Cartesian split that sundered man from himself in the old modern age, when man was seen as a “mind” somehow inhabiting a “body,” neither knowing what one had to do with the other, a lonesome ghost in an abused machine?
Perhaps it was not a case of exorcising the ghost, as the scientists wanted to do, but of discovering a creature who was neither ghost nor machine.
These hopes have not of course been realized. What follows here is only a very tentative exploration of the terra incognita, an edging into it from its opposite sides.
From one side, the far side, set out with man’s breakthrough — with Helen Keller or with species man perhaps in the cave in the Neander valley a hundred thousand years ago or with any man two years old.
What does it mean for a good organism to break through into the daylight of language?
Set out from the other side, this side, the near side, with the full-blown woes, estrangements, and peculiar upside-down delights and miseries of the late twentieth century.
Two unique happenings: man learning to speak and man behaving as he does now.
Does one have anything to do with the other?
Is the organism who breaks into Delta daylight and learns to speak also and for this very reason the same creature who feels bad in Short Hills when he should feel good and feels good in hurricanes when he should feel bad?
Is there any other way to understand why people feel so bad in the twentieth century and writers feel so good writing about people feeling bad than in terms of the peculiar parameters, the joys and sorrows of symbol-mongering?
There is a difference between the way things are and saying the way things are.
Here, in what follows, only a few trails will be blazed into this dark forest, my only tool the Delta Δ blade of the symbolic breakthrough, Helen’s magic Excalibur which she found in Alabama water.
In the beginning was alpha, the end is omega, but somewhere in between came Delta, man himself. Man became man by breaking into the daylight of language — whether by good fortune or bad fortune, whether by pure chance, the spark jumping the gap because the gap was narrow enough, or by the touch of God, it is not for me to say here.
But it happened, and to this day man knows less about what happened than he knows about the back side of the moon.
* I am aware of course that other phenomena can be described in a sense as nonlinear, e.g., action of a force field, gestalt perception, transactions in a neural net, etc. Yet these events lend themselves to formulation by equation and to explanatory models which discern this or that causal or statistical relationship within a structure.
The utterance or understanding of a sentence does not so lend itself.
2. THE LOSS OF THE CREATURE
EVERY EXPLORER NAMES his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to no one else is it ever as beautiful — except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has to be recovered.