Old Language, New Name

Inanimate sentience and other things written in stone

Entrance to the Abbey of St. Walburga

Up Colorado route 287, just south of the border with Wyoming, there is a tiny unincorporated community called Virginia Dale. Encyclopedically speaking, Virginia Dale is in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It’s difficult to convey what this really means—how unforgivingly beautiful it is. Enormous red rock buttes to the east are like headstones for fallen celestials. To the west, the land begins to slope and fold like pine-studded muscle. Jurassic grimace, creek-swollen skin of time, grass-golden; cow, coyote, pronghorn, hare, fox, eagle, and big invisible cats.

In one of the ten thousand valleys that approach the mountains is a Benedictine abbey named for St. Walburga, patroness of hydrophobia, storms, and sailors. (If this sounds weird, picture yourself in the 8th century crossing the English channel in order to traverse the forests of France and Germany just prior to their conquest by Charlemagne. Or picture yourself crossing the Great Plains in any century you like. At the mercy of wild creatures and foreign climes, one needs special protection.)

I visit the Abbey once or twice a season, because it is beautiful; because I like talking to Sister Maria, who runs the gift shop; and because at the entrance to the abbey is a steep hill with a single panoramic bend, and this hill is limned with the Stations of the Cross.

The fourteen Stations—also known as the Way of the Cross, or the Way of Sorrows, or the Via Crucis—are images that represent the path Jesus walked to his crucifixion on Golgotha. Today, they are most commonly found lining the inner perimeter of chapels and churches, a symbolic processional harking—as so much religious imagery does—to majority-preliterate times.

Walking the Way of the Cross in Virginia Dale brings the Christian message home so powerfully that Christianity itself shatters: dogma fails, artifice fails, and in this failure the reality of human suffering and compassion shines like sweat on sunlit skin. Put another way, understanding is confirmed not solely by signifiers like Cross or Way or even Word, but by walking.

But the signifiers do matter. Our sensing bodies, moving through space, land over and over again on significant details; this is the birth of semantics,¹ how language and logic relate to meaning. It’s the birth of reading.

The unicursal labyrinth is a particularly elegant example of a sign devised for the entire body to read. When moving along the path of a labyrinth, one is physically deciphering a pattern. It’s an extension of how we naturally move about in the world, but within symbolic constraints.

The body knows—or yields to knowing—in a way that the mind, alienated from the body by purely conceptual problems, cannot.

What happens when we see language as something that matters? Reading can then be seen not only in terms of understanding, but of carrying, of holding. When we denizens of the 21st century abandon or otherwise lose track of the burden back of the reading act, we grow inured to real literary comprehension, which is the deep image leaping, the radical imagination that subtends empathy—never anything less than epiphany.

The book is now but one of many secondary bodies that hold language, that hold language for us. Computational bodies and screen-based media compound signals unto an infinity of attention grabbing incandescence, but book bodies retain fidelity to the textual sign and its inanimate sentience. Something about the agency required to connect textual sign to sounded signal to signified image consecrates or otherwise preserves the pure act of hospitality that gives rise to verbal meaning.

My favorite part in Everything Everywhere All at Once is when Evelyn and Joy become rocks, and their relationship carries on in silent, subtitled dialogue as they overlook a vast canyon-land on an alternate-reality Earth devoid of animate life. In a film so full of auditory and visual stimulation, it was beautiful to suddenly experience the drama of dialogue without sound. The voices of Evelyn and Joy were still there, in the text, but so was silence and, within it, a great new scope for meaning.

In honor of all the above, I’ve renamed this project after the existing monthly segment and its eponymous geomorphic signage, Cairns. When on an uncertain path, whether over plains or through pines, there is nothing quite so reassuring as a little pile of stones. They say, in silence: This way.

And also: Here.

1. From the Greek sēmantikos ‘significant’, from sēmainein ‘signify’, from sēma ‘sign’