In the house of the head shaman...

[jporter]

The trees outside are festive with irridescent monkeys. The scents of exotic
teas come wafting in with servant girls tattooed from head to toe, while
Benjamin Whorf sits lotus-like on soft pillows listening to the intonations
of the master, scribbling notes in a leatherbound journal:

"The idea is too drastic to be penned up in a catch phrase. I would rather
leave it unnamed. It is the view that a noumenal world- a world of
hyperspace, of  higher dimensions- awaits discovery by all the sciences,
which it will unite and unify, awaits discovery under its first aspect of a
realm of PATTERNED RELATIONS, inconceivably manifold and yet bearing a
recognizeable affinity to the rich organization of LANGUAGE, including *au
frond* mathematics and music, which are ultimately of the same kindred
language. The idea is older than Plato, and at the same time as new as our
most revolutionary thinkers. It is implied in Whitehead's world of
prehensive aspects, and in relativity physics with its four-dimensional
continuum and its Reimann-Christoffel tensor that sums up the PROPERTIES OF
THE WORLD at any point-moment [...] All that I have to say on the subject
that may be new is the PREMONITION IN LANGUAGE of an unknown, vaster world-
that world of which the physical is but a surface or a skin, and yet which
we ARE IN, and BELONG TO." [Language, Thought & Reality- selected Writings
of Benjamin Lee Whorf, The M.I.T. Press, 1956. p.247-8.]

Inspite of the numerous Eskimo words for snow, or the many Herero terms for
cow shit, Whorf (and Sapir) probably got it upside down, but his studies of
Hopi and other Native American languages, including Mayan, are still
interesting, and probably influenced the Pynchon of V.

jody