Sleight of Word

"Language is the first, most fundamental magic. It reveals worlds, just as it conceals them. Consider this: words themselves, once we know them, appear to come out of nothing, fully formed and granting their meaning to our thought as if it were always, already there. Linguistic meaning arises as fiat and epiphany, after which we cannot imagine the prior state. The archetypal creation ex nihilo begins with a word. Order is brought to chaos by means of a vibrating breath. Once we know the Logos, we cannot un-know it. The sense of words to a native speaker is spontaneous, effortless, and instant. Meaning suddenly appears to flower. Magic is socially ubiquitous because language is socially ubiquitous. We acquire the habits of selective attention, which prime us for all the prompts and goads of conventionalized idiom, at the same time that we acquire the Word. We become involved in the play of conceptual sense and meaning as magicians performing dozens of small magic tricks per utterance, producing spontaneous miracles of meaning and knowing; semiotic archipelagos that we subsequently inhabit as our normalized, everyday life-worlds. Moreover, at the same time that we perform these countless, forgotten sleights of mind, we are the audience of both our own magicking, and that of others. Just as we effortlessly juggle meanings when we perform language, we simultaneously stand mentally to the side of ourselves as we watch them pop up and dance before us. Meanings dance in a kind of “vision” that has emerged within us as the mode by which we think. The para-optical domain."

The Art of Hidden Causation - Peter Duchemin, PhD