Bowl of Alphabet Soup

Nothing like a bowl of JC's 酸辣湯 Chinese soup! Especially, around the Chinese New year. Even more special, when it's the year of the Rabbit. My year.

I ate my soup too quickly. When there was only a sip or two remaining at the bottom, I lifted the bowl to my mouth and slurped in what was left. This was a good moment to be grateful for this being Chinese soup and not Korean. Koreans insist that the bowl stays on the table while you're eating. I would have been in trouble.

I put the empty bowl on the table and looked at it for a minute or two. If I call it a bowl, does it know? Does something change if I change its name? What if I called it a vessel or, with a tip of a hat in the general direction of England, a porringer? Would it change its usefulness?

I observed my bowl for a bit longer. It seems that its usefulness lies in the space that it surrounds. It is not the bowl that I wanted, it is the soup that it contained. The utility of something is in what it isn't. Another paradox. Seemingly.

As the words flow onto this blog, it is the space between them that defines them. If I were to read them out loud, it would be the silences that define the sounds. And, if I timed the sounds and the silences, the silences far prevail over the sounds.

If there were neither words nor spaces between them, this would be an uninterrupted chunk of colored space. Green, for now. The words break up the wholeness of this green page and it is no longer seen as a page at all. It fades out of the consciousness.

I wonder if the words have a similar effect on us in general. The language allows us to communicate with each other in a fairly precise manner. But, as we define objects with words, we break what is whole into parts. If I talk about somebody's arm, during that conversation the arm is mentally segregated from the rest of the body.

Language is a powerful tool. Perhaps, its power lies in its ability to segregate big things into little parts.