Have You Ever Stumbled Over A Hyperobject?

Have you ever stumbled over a hyperobject? A black hole? The colossal California drought? Capitalism? A tectonic plate? How about language? French, Spanish, Mandarin, Hungarian, Somali, Tahitian, Hawaiian, Hindi, Igbo? Did you stub your toe? Did you bring it home as a funky collector’s item? Put it in a glass case? Stuff it into a box? Find a place for it in the garage?

Language meets all the identifying features of a hyperobject. The hyperobject (a term coined by environmentalist Timothy Morton) is an object that is so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity. Examples of this are the internet, evolution, charismatic facts, eco-socialism, elite emissions, relativity, habitat nostalgia, sites of significance, the biosphere, all plastic ever manufactured, Styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. Hyperobjects have temporal undulation. They ripple through time in ever widening circles, encompassing all within their circumference, combining and incorporating other phenomena.

Language does this. All languages do this. They invite immersion. They modulate moods. They ignite relations. I never feel outside language, I feel like I’m inside a language. In my case, English. I feel that I’m inside English. It’s so much a part of my being.

For example, that gut-wrenching scene in Hamlet, Act III, scene 4, after Hamlet has forced his mother rather violently to look inside herself and won her over to his argument, though not entirely, so that she feels divided, heavily conflicted, and assuages his demands with this painfully uttered parcel of speech: “Be thou assured, if words be made of breath / And breath of life, I have no life to breathe / What thou hast said to me.”

Our relationship with our mother tongue is as intimate as the blood circulating our veins.

I’ve been studying French for over two decades now but I still feel outside it. The day I feel inside French is the day it becomes so natural to speak it it will feel like an additional appendage, a new arm with a new hand, un nouveau bras avec une nouvelle main. My emotions will flow expressively form my mouth in new sounds, new phonemes, new hues and tumultuous outbursts.

There’s a strange volatility running through all languages, an irrepressible instability inherent in any vast, boundless, illimitable entity. Weather, for example, which is essentially the behavior of a gas, observable in terms of temperature, precipitation, clouds and wind and lightning and thunder. Air is a chief component of language, and there are storms in language, the thunder of great speeches, simooms of gripping narrative, chinooks of impassioned confabulation, flashes of lightning we call poetry.

“A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry,” writes Timothy Morton in Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.

All potions, all drams and elixirs, all medicines, all tonics, all brews and libations have side effects. That’s what makes them so much fun. Side effects are usually thought of as adverse, but some side effects, such as intoxication – elation, euphoria, intemperance, giddiness – are often enlightening and inspirational. Sometimes the nearest one can get to the truth of any situation is by distorting one’s perception. A really good lie will often lead straight to the truth. Language can also have profound effects on neurology. Bilingualism can lead to increased gray matter density in areas of the brain involved in language processing, and increased white matter integrity, which connects different brain regions. Language learning boosts brain plasticity and the brain’s ability to code new information. It strengthens neural connections and the ability to profit from counterintuitive information. Particularly, that of poetry. Its fantastic irrationality. Its open abuse of logic. Its uncanny resemblance to fingernails. Its word-by-word assembly of neurons in an act of passionate ganglia.

Poetry is one of the more potent side effects of language, a phenomenon loved by many, a supercilious indulgence and effrontery to human dignity hated by most. Poetry is a potent distillation of all the inherent capacity language has for elevating one’s awareness, one’s diversions and playfulness. A lot of people are happy just to get through the day as quickly and profitably as possible, and to accomplish this via self-restraint and taciturnity and maintaining a tight focus on empirical and commercial concerns. But there’s also a substantial group enthralled with the grandeur of the spoken word, the free-form flow of rhapsodic enchantment, the manic impulses of incantation, the stunning blast of an inspired phrase, or the distillations of a haiku.

The haiku is to a hyperobject what a hyperobject is to a pond: a kerplunk valued in ripples. It brings everything full circle, out of the abstract and back into the real. Or the surreal. The wonderful feeling of a cold knob on a hot day. The breeze that preceded a sneeze. The electric smell of the air on the prairie prior to a storm. A wall of purple so deep and weird it bruises the eyes. The distant sound of a tractor. The hog in the pen. The cog in the wheel. The sting in the needle. The alloy in the steel. The persistent, exquisite pain of an existence baked into a book. The words we meant to say that came out different, that got to the point faster than we did, and left us with an infinite number of ways to figure out why, and what got us to this point, and the many detours along the way.