The origami of language

“…Sometimes," posits Astell, "Even an honest and good Writer ... may insensibly fall into (Obscurity of writing), by reason that his Ideas being become familiar to himself by frequent meditation, a long train of 'em are readily excited in his mind, by a word or two he’s us’d to annex to them; but it is not so with his readers who are perhaps strangers to his meditations.” (853)

This theme of the differences we as individually sentient beings have between our own inner languages, and the difficulties in transmitting the ideas we have in those personal languages between each other, seems to be recurring here from Locke. The idea leads to think that with our inner thoughts and words as familiar as breathing to ourselves, the logical solution to achieve (or attempt to achieve) that same clarity in others would be to resort to using a lot of words to capture or try to contain the same amount of meaning. 

Tangling horns with the idea that we need a lot of words to correctly or clearly articulate things to others, Astell recommends instead “we shou’d fold up our Thoughts so closely and neatly, expressing them in such significant tho few words, as that the Readers Mind may easily open and enlarge them.” (853)

            What gave me a particularly pleasurable pause here was her wording of ‘signifigant tho few words’. Here she seems not to mean just ‘general’ words, which, though few, don’t strike specific enough chords to be significant. And conversely, she also seems to be avoiding long, tedious amounts of inanely specific words; such strategies, as we all know, are agonizing as a reader and, as a writer or speaker, ineffective anyway. Call me mad, but what she seems be referring to instead is metaphor. Not buying it? Metaphors are the perfect combination of general and specific—very personal images, associations, or thoughts folded up as little origami planes to carry whatever is actually written on the page inside across the windy gulf of the wide world, under the protection of a new form, to another person somewhere. That person, snatching it from the air, can unfold it in her own way, and through its unfolding can't help but contribute to its new, slightly creased but ultimately legible form. I believe it is this contribution to its creation—the collaboration of creation between the folder of language and its unfolder, that is key to the ultimate form of clarity Astell forwards as so important. 

            Astell proposes this ‘folding up of our thoughts’ as the means for achieving clarity, but says that “nothing conduces more to clearness, the great Beauty of writing, than Exactness of Method.” Her descriptions of successful style and grammar that follow were a timely and pertinent reminder that though language is a versatile piece of paper, and can be folded up in an infinite number of ways, there is a structure to the underlying demand for understanding that we cannot ignore. The metaphors of language—language itself as a metaphor—can’t be successful without this essential structure.