Interlude: "Real thinking is better done without words than with them" (from Louis Sullivan's Autobiography of an Idea)

Just one post today.

After the Duluth Public Library sale, unsold books are left in the lobby to be given away.  It's always a great disappointment to see favorite treasures orphaned this way.

One of the orphans this year was a paperback version of Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats.  This book includes a passage that both energizes and bothers me.

Words, after all, are but a momentary utterance of thought. They may be, in that utterance, as beautiful as the song of a bird we hear, but they are not the bird: for the bird is flown, and sings elsewhere another song in the forest... Therefore I would take your mind away from words, and bend it to thinking.

So I'm all about words.  Didion (whom I think I read when I was 19, in Slouching towards Bethlehem, in "On Keeping a Notebook," I think) says things like How do I know what I think until I write it down?  Writing is thinking.

Louis Sullivan was an architect.  I love teaching about architecture in humanities classes, and I love using architecture as a metaphor for writing.  And Louis Sullivan thinks that language is the birdsong, but thought is the bird.  This is a challenge to my assumptions.  So what is thinking, for Sullivan?

Thinking is a philosophy. Many people believe that when they are reading in a book they are of necessity thinking... but it does not necessarily follow. The best that reading and listening can do is to stimulate you to think your own thoughts, but nine times out of ten, you are thinking the other’s thought, not your own. What occurs is like an echo, a reflection; it is not the real thing…

Real thinking is better done without words than with them, and creative thinking must be done without words. When the mind is actively, vitally at work, for its own creative uses, it has no time for word-building: words are too clumsy: you have no time to select and group them. Hence you must think in terms of images, of pictures, of states of feeling, of rhythm.

"Real thinking is better done without words than with them"
"Real thinking is better done without words than with them"

(hyperventillates)

"Real thinking is better done without words than with them" 

"Real thinking is better done without words than with them"
(breathing returns to normal, slowly but precariously)

The well-trained, well-organized, well-disciplined mind works with remarkable rapidity and with luminous intensity; it will body forth combinations, in mass, so complex, so far-reaching that you could not write them down in years. Writing is but the slow, snail-like creeping of words, climbing, laboriously, over a little structure that resembles the thought: meanwhile the mind has gone on and on, here and yonder and back and out and back again.

Thought is the most rapid agency in the universe. It can travel to Sirius and return in an instant. Nothing is too small for it to grasp, nothing too great. It can go in and out of itself—now objective, now subjective. It can fasten itself most tenaciously on a fact, on an idea; or sublimate and attenuate itself with ethereal space. It will flow like water. It may become stable as stone... 

Thinking is an art, a science of magnificent possibilities... It’s a great art, remember this, it’s an inspiring art. I mean the real, fluent, active thinking, not the dull stammering and mumbling of the mind: I mean the mind awake. …

I read this, and my first response is to deny.  "No, this is not how it works.  Writing is not the slow, snail-like creeping of words, climbing, laboriously, over a little structure that resembles the thought -- words are thought.  Right?  Maybe?  Please?

At this point, I get nervous because I want to know why I am uncomfortable with the idea that thought is this powerful, that though is able to be all these things:  It can go in and out of itself—now objective, now subjective. It can fasten itself most tenaciously on a fact, on an idea; or sublimate and attenuate itself with ethereal space. It will flow like water. It may become stable as stone.  Why do I not embrace this?  Is it a disciplinary training, eleven years of undergraduate and graduate training, followed by fourteen years of the teaching of communication, that have created in me an "occupational psychosis" (as per Kenneth Burke in Permanence and Change) that privileges words?

Or did I choose a profession that privileges the written forms of thinking, the slow, snail-like creeping of words, that I was comfortable with?

Sullivan does not leave me hopeless.  He sees a place for words, one I can accept, one that makes me feel good about teaching students how to use them and feel at least like using them myself can be still powerful. What good can come of words?

Let it always be understood that the powers are not in the words so much as in the mind and heart of [someone] who uses them as [an] instrument. The thought, the feeling, the beauty, is not so much in the words as in what the words suggest, or are caused to suggest, to the mind of the reader, the hearer; and this power of suggestion, of evoking responsive imagination, is the power of the artist, the poet, who surcharges words.

Words have dimensions of power beyond the mind and heart of the user -- every word I use carries with it meaning embedded in ideologies that I may only barely be conscious of.  So what Sullivan proposes here, for words, is not enough.  (But then. he was an architect, not a rhetorician.)

But the idea that I am teaching students to be architects of words, and that both the architect and the writer work with "the power of... evoking responsive imagination," well that's not a lousy goal.

(breathing returns to normal)

If you get a chance, at your free table outside your public library, snag a copy of any book by Louis Sullivan.  It may both resonate with and challenge your work as a teacher of communication.