Synergy Creative Learning Solutions, LLC

Create New Words – Learn the Elements of Mind – Enter an International Contest

NOTE for TEACHERS and SELF-GUIDED STUDENTS: This page divides into a sequence of seven connected games and lessons.

Please feel free to organize the content into sections that fit your learning purposes. A model for the writing contest appears in section two.

Study the 7-minute Ennoummon: Living Lexicon demonstration video,

and download the free companion writing curriculum.

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Language represents a fraction of mind; mind, a fraction of reality. Thus we find ample room to grow new language–both mind and reality greatly exceed it. This fact excites imagination and spurs necessary invention: we need language to organize mind and to understand reality, and we find endless possibility and prompting to engage in creative projects. The fact that reality exceeds language also vexes and oppresses us, because we need to understand reality to contend with its mysterious pressures, pressures that emerge from unfamiliar domains that resist or entirely elude our symbolic handles and technical controls (e.g., our words, logic, and technology). Thus wonder and need call us to explore the obscure and to grow new knowledge from experiences of it.

The Living Lexicon system positions creators to experience wonder and address need. A primary purpose of the Living Lexicon system is to grow awareness of language-mind-reality interactions and to support skillful language creation. Living Lexicon begins as a game, forms the basis for a system of creative and critical thinking, and helps one become resourceful in creating words across all domains of knowledge and life experience.

Creative individuals–teachers, students, conlangers, linguists, philosophers, artists, scientists, and many others–can learn the Living Lexicon system by studying the materials on this website, including the essay that comes last–after the series of brief games and lessons in this introduction. By completing the games and lessons, and by reading the essay, one will be well prepared to create language and to develop new ways of thinking about reading and writing.

Teachers may use the games, lesson, and essay in their classrooms to present to students as a series of concise, engaging lessons on vocabulary, creative and critical thinking, imagination, and word creation. The neologism directly following this introduction may be sufficient for interested creators to make an entry into one (at most two) of the four 2024 Living Lexicon Writing and Visual Arts Contests, open to teachers, students, and creative individuals from April 1st through May 15th, 2024. The essay that concludes this page of lessons and games may engage especially interested readers who wish to learn more about how word-creation sets a stage for critical and creative thinking across several disciplines and life contexts.

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Within each person exists a singular and expansive inner library of imagination, rich with material for new words. To all creative participants: I look forward to learning from you, discovering new language together, and seeing the world through new words.

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Word-Creation in Response to a Singular Visual Experience

CONTEST MODEL

The following example may serve to inspire anyone interested in learning to create new words.

This brief text also presents a model for writing contest entrants:

include a pronunciation guide; list at least one part of speech assignation; present a story about the origin of the word; give an illustration of the word in a passage; and compose a reflection on how the word evolved from a sequence and combination of elements of mind (sensory perception, sensory imagination, intrapersonal concepts, interpersonal concepts, individual interpretation–and, if applicable, social interpretation).

Visual artist contest entrants may evoke a sense of the symbol-creation process in several mediums.

pla•tin•a {pluh-TEEN-uh}

(noun) a translucent layer of platinum-colored light 

Illustration and Origin of the Word:

One morning last winter, I had occasion to sleep in a little and come to school late, so I got to see the sunrise. I walked from my car to the oak yard at Weaver Street Market in Carrboro.  On my way to the cafe, I stopped several yards from the door, despite frigid air, to watch the light—to note its unusual color, a coating of it spread on the face of the long brick wall of the converted mill building, laced bright on the black of curvilinear branches, and settled on fallen leaves curled like hands cupping rain.  Stevens’ observation came back to me in this moment—to paraphrase: a new pattern, a new observation, a new idea, equals a new word.  But several willing labels bounced off of this light.  No, it was not precisely golden—gilded would not do.  Not exactly argentine.  Not only copper-hued.  Metallic in color, however, and a watery amalgam of these, and subtly bathed in a hide-and-seek seeming of pale gray, pale blue auras—and most like platinum: white-on-gray, lit within to silver; all blended and brightened.  And not metallic, after all.  Malleable, yes.  More so than gold.  Though clear as glass; clear as shellac, a fine-grained varnish, a luminous patina.  This crystal layer lining shapes’ sharpest features, shining color, and allowing colors-shining-through to show, became to my mind, in a thought, platina: a patina-like coating of light all at once converging on, touching, flying off of platinum.  Perhaps the spread of such light on objects is a process called platination.  The quality of such light is platinar (PLAT-en-ur), not to be confused with the Spanish “platinar” (plah-tee-NAR), which, nevertheless, means “to coat with platinum.”  In some moments the mill’s glowing wall seemed surfaced with electric blue.

Reflection on the Evolution of the Idea through Elements of Mind Combinations:

Sensory perception sparked this creative process.  This visual experience commanded my full attention.  Almost in the first moment, I began to reach for image-denoting language to name the phenomenon, or perhaps phenomena, unfolding moment by moment, but I felt the platinar visual experience overflowing and defying conceptualizations.  The words needed to crack open and flow out and come alive to more nimbly follow perceptions of the platination that slowly evolved.  I began to watch my inner patterns, too, patterns of concepts touching sensory perceptions, while at the same time I continued gazing at the shine of the winter trees, steel tables, crisped leaves…in the courtyard, where I stood alone.  A subtle in-lit frost swirled in the canopy.  At this point, I looked as much at sensory imagination and intrapersonal concepts, along with fleeting interpersonal concepts (words, in this instance), as I did at sensory perceptions.  I began to notice a blending of cognitive elements.  Not till I made efforts to speak about the quality of the light did I resume a struggle with concepts, which required persistent effort at individual interpretation—synthesis of perceptions and concepts—that resisted the “completing the circle” phenomenon: I wanted every detail that went outside the frame of words to stay in the frame of descriptions.  It seemed wrong somehow, even disrespectful, to mask the light behind generalities rather than to keep my attention and memory “there” with it in order to make the words come toward the light’s real character.

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Again, this model serves as an example of work that writers can create for the Living Lexicon Contest. Learning to reflect on the elements–and tolerating confusion in order to think within and outside of language–helps one to become an agile creator.

NOTE and PARADOX for CREATORS:

To paraphrase the poet Wallace Stevens: within oneself and in the world one may find limitless material for potential word-creation. At the same time, none of this material will necessarily announce itself to one’s attention in order to become a word.

One’s attention and one’s imagination are necessary for new forms to come into focus.

The following games and discussions prime one to participate resourcefully in the language- and symbol-creation process.

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GAME #1: Random Abstract Symbol Interpretation

Toward a System for Metacognition, Critical Thinking, and a Creative Philosophy of Mind

We can play a simple game that makes visible the elements of mind that operate in our thinking. Playing this game and noticing these elements gives one an awareness of and language for the symbols and processes that interact in imagination. In turn, we can use this awareness and language to create new concepts and to become more perceptive and agile in thinking across all disciplines and life contexts.

In order to play the game, first prepare by getting a writing utensil, a blank piece of paper, and a timer. Play this game with two or more others, if possible.

Once these materials are ready at hand, then look for 60 seconds at the large abstract symbol in view beneath these preparatory remarks.

Write as many interpretations of what part or all of the object could represent; let your mind run with this process.

Keep your answers to yourself for the first part of this game; sharing comes later! Afterward, you will reflect, learn more about the elements, and then go deeper with a second wave of the game.

Now, take 60 seconds — interpret the object(s) — BEGIN:

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STOP after One MINUTE — and now look over your list; share with someone else who has played the same symbol game; and then share as a group. Take a few minutes to share aloud and compare and contrast lists.

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REFLECTION on GAME #1

Which interpretations repeat in two or more of the lists? Which items occur only once in the entire group set?

As with a Rorschach test, this game reveals features of internal schemas that the observer-interpreter carries and creates within oneself. It makes sense that people sharing a similar social and cultural milieu would arrive at similar or even identical list elements. However, even within such a group, difference will often appear. Yet we can agree, perhaps, to this claim: the object represented on the screen is exactly the same on the screen for everyone. However, after we look, the “same” object merges with each individual’s awareness and enters into processes of synthesis and transformation.

The symbol combines with elements of mind–sensory perceptions (in this case, visual sensory perceptions), sensory imagination (in this case, image-memories and image-associations), and internal ideas (intrapersonal concepts) that one can usually label with accuracy by relying on existing words (one class of interpersonal concepts, along with numbers, notes, and other structural forms that communicate ideas).

The symbol “transforms” by, in a way, becoming–even being “replaced by” these symbols, in the end. We can become aware of this “replacement” phenomenon by watching others’ list-labels rearrange our way of seeing the object in the instant we hear someone’s interpretation, whereupon we experience the word and the image snap together in a new form. In such instances, others’ influences–their words and interpretations–reorganize and direct our perceptions.

In this simple game, we can see every element of mind–two types of perception (sensory and imaginative), two types of concepts (intra- and interpersonal), and two types of interpretation (individual and social)–enter into imagination. These same elements interact in all of our thinking about literature, math, science, art, music, writing, sports, engineering, and about a wide range of life-experiences.

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We may compare this game’s function, in terms of its role in revealing the elements of mind, to the function of a particle-collider physics laboratory’s revealing of subatomic elements that are always present in matter, weaving together the structure of the world we see and feel and know, but invisibly so (until, briefly, they appear when atoms collide).

In this game, what “collides” is intentional, reflective attention, on one hand, and on the other: spontaneous emergence and interactions of the elements of mind. When attention and the elements come together, we can become aware of the elements (concepts, perceptions, and interpretations) while also learning how to pay attention to them more carefully, and at a very fine-grained level. This type of thinking can help one to create new ideas, new words, and new ways of imagining. Students can gain mastery of this process and apply it in each of their classes and in several life contexts.

Before entering round two of this game, let’s consider a model of how language, mind, and reality interact:

Our words are part of mind and reality–the center of this model shows all three regions in full overlap. Our words also represent elements of mind and features of reality. However, words exist in a much wider and deeper field of mind and imagination–words give meaningful but partial revealings; and reality greatly exceeds the present contents of mind and imagination, prompting us to renew inquiries and refresh our perceptions and concepts. Think of a starling cloud settling in a field, lifting again into a tree, and whirling again into a wind–so our concepts can move and refresh their orientation to one another and to worlds of description.

If we wish to understand ourselves, others, nature, and the world and universe, we must grow language outward into the wider realms of mind and reality. This is a project for imagination. Each person carries, within, an inner library of perceptions and possible ideas that spring from one’s individual contact with mind and reality, simply by being that singular person. To speak uniquely from one’s original connection to life requires learning and practice–such as we find in these games.

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GAME #2: Random Abstract Symbol Interpretation

Toward a System for Metacognition, Critical Thinking, and a Creative Philosophy of Mind

Now that we have played a round of the game and started to reflect on distinct elements that smoothly and spontaneously blend in imagination, let’s prepare for a second round, keeping the same format and process but with some new goals in mind: this time, briefly, fleetingly notice the particular elements as they enter into imagination, and see if you can sense how they interact. Insofar as one can form this perspective on how one’s thinking works, then one develops a capacity for metacognition (i.e., thinking about thinking), which one can learn to apply in any type of study or creativity.

The philosopher-scientist Albert Einstein, who revolutionized physics in the early 20th century, described his own creative and analytical thinking in terms of these same elements of mind. In his “Autobiographical Notes,” (p. 7 in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist) Einstein remarks: “[A]ll our thinking is of this nature of a free play with concepts; the justification for this play lies in the measure of survey over the experience of the senses which we are able to achieve with its aid.” Einstein used his creative and analytical awareness of the elements of mind in order to expand human understanding of reality. The type of creative and analytical process that Einstein applied gives people a chance to notice and describe features of reality outside the realm of existing language. For the sake of wonder, joy, inner play and appreciation, and important social causes, we need to grow our capacity to activate and learn from reflection on the elements of mind.

Prepare your writing utensil and your page; set a timer for 60 seconds — and BEGIN:

Again: STOP after One MINUTE — and now look over your list; share with someone else who has played the same symbol game; and then share as a group. Take a few minutes to share aloud and compare and contrast lists.

REFLECTION on GAME #2

Which items repeat in two or more of the lists? Which items occur only once in the entire group set?

Did you notice distinct elements of mind momentarily appearing in your interpretive process? Do you notice your perceptions rearranging when you hear someone else’s different list elements?

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Let’s pull new lessons from this second round of reflection. First, when one reads words in a poem or story, interprets numbers in an equation or symbols in a formula, or reads notes of music on a page, these same transformation processes come into play–or, variously, they do not. One can reflect on whether and how symbols (e.g., numbers) become perceptions, concepts, and interpretations when one engages with them, and with what degrees of vividness and rates of speed–or if the symbols merely remain abstract ciphers apparently void of significance. Does one see in sensory imagination how numbers describe motion, force, speed, dimension? Does one hear visual notes? Or does the inner screen of sensory imagination remain faint or blank? A larger question is: can one change how one relates to, interacts with, and creates with various classes of symbols? To make such a change would involve changing how the elements of mind combine in imaginative work and play.

A second lesson: insofar as the symbol game process is playful, we enjoy hearing about differences; differences make us wonder, reflect, and open ourselves to contemplation. Now, imagine if this game were a competition to prove an absolute or singular meaning of the symbol, and with very high stakes for winning and losing. The spirit of the activity, even the range of thinking and imagining that observers allow themselves to experience, may change. True: we sometimes find ourselves needing a “best” interpretation (e.g., a best cure for a disease or a most accurate understanding of history), while at other times we need new vision, new understanding (e.g., a new system for producing energy or a new way of looking at a familiar object).

…Even in this very brief reflection, we can begin to see and sense how debates may grow from how we read events in the world through the elements of mind.

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Humanity’s 7,117 languages (www.ethnologue.com) make interpretation of events in our shared world all the more variable. Conscientious, analytical, and creative reflection on how we apply the elements of mind in all of our forms of interaction may help us to orchestrate connections among nations, cultures, fields of research, and life ways that operate in isolation or in conflict.

We can illustrate the latter claim by playing a third (similar) game that prompts observer-players to experience a new way of looking at a familiar object.

GAME #3: Image Interpretation

Toward a System for Metacognition, Critical Thinking, and a Creative Philosophy of Mind

We played the first two games by studying an abstract object and pondering what it represents. Let’s begin the third game in similar fashion: look at the object(s) shown directly below these lines, and write a list of what these images, together, represent:

Prepare a writing utensil and a page, set a timer for 60 seconds — and BEGIN:

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REFLECTION on GAME #3

What descriptions appear on your list? How do your descriptions differ from and compare to others’ interpretations?

How, in any serious way, can the similarities and differences matter in how we interpret this picturesque but relatively familiar object or set of objects?

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In order to answer this question, let’s consider the object(s) from divergent perspectives on these images of “forests” and “trees.”

If we consider the pictured forest scene(s) to represent “habitat,” then we center our interpretations of the object field in the language and values of wildlife ecology.

If we consider the pictured forest scene(s) to represent “lumber” or “building materials,” then we center our interpretations of the object field in terms of economics.

If we consider the pictured forest scene(s) to represent a “superorganism” (following E.O. Wilson’s Biophilia) of connected life forms, then we see not merely “trees” but a much more complex organism that calls for careful assessment.

If we consider the pictured forest scene(s) to represent a “refuge for mysterious and potentially dangerous life forms or practices,” then we interpret the scene in terms of threat and security management.

If we consider the pictured forest scene(s) to represent a “sacred refuge for healing and meditation,” then we interpret the scene in terms of spiritual practices.

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Of special importance to notice here is how differently a cultural group may interact with the pictured scene(s), based on which interpretation becomes dominant. Seeing objects in the scene as “lumber” and/or as “dangerous” prompts a markedly divergent response in comparison to that of a cultural group that interprets the scene primarily as “habitat,” “superorganism,” or “sacred.”

Language becomes the filter for seeing and interpreting, which in turn becomes a basis for a range of actions and values. The language-objects, in a subtle but powerful sense, “replace” the phenomena to which they in some way correspond.

Each way of seeing may take on the form of logical and systematic description–built upon object-to-word correspondence that, on some level, “makes sense.” However, these multiple interpretations ground very different modes of interaction and habitation. This insight becomes all the more significant when we consider that object-to-word correspondences become a frame for action by extremely large entities such as national populations.

With the energy of growing numbers people–billions of people, in some contexts–flowing through particular object-to-word correspondences as a channel through which to understand and connect to the larger living world, the consequences of the design and the limitations of the correspondences come into very sharp relief. We need to develop sight and sense that operates outside of such symbol-correspondence systems and helps us to see anew, develop new systems, and coordinate a system of systems that informs awareness and action.

Intelligent machines that can coordinate rapid, large-scale action based on symbol-correspondence must–MUST–be programmed with such wisdom. A hyper-activated industrial process, powered by super-laborer machines acting on a narrow symbol-correspondence worldview will quickly bring the danger of such narrowness into view. We need to act on subtler signs and anticipatory inferences, using foresight, seeking multiple symbol-correspondence interpretations of nature and reality, forged in generous good faith and honest spirit. Doing so could be a matter of survival in a machine-powered, densely populated world with ecological resources pushed to the planet’s outer limits.

The latter reflections show us the surprising importance of the processes that occur in the seemingly simple symbol game.

We must keep returning to the game and playing anew with our symbols, and, perhaps more importantly, with our sight. When we become aware of multiple, divergent interpretations, we can debate the merit and importance of varying interpretations. We can also wonder if any of the interpretations fully capture the essential phenomenon. In cultivating such wonder, we de-center any interpretation, restore the scene(s) to mystery, and wonder about the object(s) anew. In such a manner of concentration, our relationship to what we interpret becomes marked by freedom, critical awareness, and creative possibility.

A takeaway lesson: how we interpret “everyday” familiar objects largely determines how we see and do not see what is there in reality.

The simultaneous seeing-hiding effect of our interpretations will, in turn, produce major differences in how we live in the world and interact with the objects that we understand-and-misunderstand. When we couple human action to these different worldviews, and when we magnify the impacts of these actions and worldviews over decades and centuries, and when we accelerate the consequences of channeling industrial and cultural processes through useful but limited symbol-correspondences, then we end up in markedly different worlds from where we started, worlds that grow in interaction with our manner of interpretation and our actions that flow from worldviews that grow in our ways of seeing and symbolizing.

We can interpret objects and processes in practically innumerable ways. Our interpretations simultaneously show and hide content; we can learn to entertain many interpretations at once while retaining independence of mind and critical creative awareness; and we must learn to conduct graceful and accurate interpretations under everyday pressures of time, economics, and competing values.

We can gain these essential skills as interpreters by playing games of word-creation. Learning the art of word-creation requires us to participate in meaning-creation at the level of the elements of mind–placing imagination into fields of mind and reality that include but also exceed boundaries of finished language.

We can use both the techniques of word-creation and the new concepts we create in order to know the world more fully, and to enable this creative-reflective process, itself, to deepen, for its own sake and for the benefits it brings to us in the way of aesthetic pleasure, cultural and scientific progress, individual growth, and satisfaction of our shared needs.

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ESSAY

Notes on Word-Creation and the Living Lexicon System

“Crystal on crystal until crystal clouds

Become an over-crystal out of ice,

Exhaling these creations of itself.”

Wallace Stevens, “Pieces”

If one wants to create language, then one must be willing to drift into imagination where words have not yet taken hold of forms. In the thought-space a creator opens in order to imagine in such a way, the creator may behold novelty while also glancing at the existing lexicon, pondering all the while how to form bridges from first perceptions to the established, evolving system of our living language, thereby infusing our shared language with vitalized perspective.

These perception-to-concept bridges form through experiences. Such bridging experiences range from wordless receptivity, to sensations and perceptions, to sudden, unbidden ideas, to rational, linear thoughts and sentences, all of which teach one about the emerging form, the potential word.

Gradually, and also in bursts, the incipient word begins to assume clearer form, accruing facets and depths, taking on an increasingly discernible overall structure and forming a center of gravity around which a continuing flux of discrete and momentary impressions and elements revolve and come into an array.

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“They called me the Obscure and I lived in the Light.”

Saint-John Perse, Amers

Patience creates possibilities for discovery. Well before language expands outward to meet reality, inner knowledge and silent understanding may awaken and persist in the ample room of mind and reality. The creator must be willing to become tongue-tied. Being still, the creator may then closely trace subtle tongue-tying energies. Into this experience, the creator steps forward knowingly and dumbly, and plays back impressions, “reconstructing a slow-motion picture from ‘stills’ of various moments in [memory]” (Rosenblatt, 10). Persistence of concentration and allowance of receptivity make propitious conditions for inner knowledge to become clear and communicable.

The elements of mind–concepts, perceptions, and interpretations–that coalesce to form a new word often begin as “Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow / Out of a storm we must endure all night…until / The bright obvious stands motionless and cold,” (Stevens, 306) with the new word, the emergent “bright obvious,” accomplished by virtue of resilient concentration.

An incipient neologism may eventually owe aspects of its communicable form to features of ready-to-mind, established language, but in order to emerge, the creator of the inchoate word, a nebulous inner concept, must mount a connected series of momentary, conscious resistances to pre-existing order, which otherwise all-too-quickly absorbs and masks the novel in consciousness.

Creation thus involves wide receptivity but also nimble resistance to automatic tendencies. Completing the circle of approximate but non-circular perceptions, one may glimpse only a wafer-thin circle, a surface circular glare, while missing the shaded spiral staircase that plunges down or vaults high behind the partial wafer-circle image, correctly perceived but wrongly taken for whole.

Standing in a prolonged presence of initial confusion, a creator opens a background screen of alertness against which one may notice seemingly chaotic forms appear and hold their particular identities, dream-like, rather than mindlessly disappearing into the finished forms of approximations, i.e., of words that in ordinary circumstances may seem to suffice but which partially cloak the real.

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“[A]ll our thinking is of this nature of a free play with concepts; the justification for this play lies in the

measure of survey over the experience of the senses which we are able to achieve with its aid.”

Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes”

Creators accept momentary exile from the useful familiar. Determinedly, even stubbornly, creators hold to the specificity of what they directly sense and experience there. The creator then speaks naturally, but not quite as one is accustomed to speaking. First, one must make words draw out into exile, too, in order to learn new manners and customs, miming the unfamiliar silent forms the creator notices.

Accepting the challenge of temporary confusion, the creator glimpses orders and makes a new home for thought out of initial exile. Creators benefit by embracing confusion and allowing perplexity to hold sway, at least initially, and often intermittently throughout a creative process. “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” Shakespeare’s exiled Duke Senior philosophizes, “Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; / And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in every thing” (As You Like It, II,i, 12-17). The Duke’s exile becomes a poet, a “maker,” fashioning words that flow from perceptions of a world ever outside of, and touching, and entering, a living inner theater.

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“…So, in me, come flinging / Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.”
Wallace Stevens, “Nomad Exquisite”

We find a direct extension of the Duke’s lesson in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remarks on language and nature. For Emerson, nature– “exempt from public haunt”–sparks renewal of the symbolic order. “The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images,” he observes. “A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image more or less luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought…. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind” (Emerson, 52).

Emerson’s descriptions help us to picture an interplay of perceptual and conceptual elements — the “…forms, flames, and the flakes of flames” that “come flinging” (Stevens, 77) in the immediacy of one’s concentration amidst what the physicist Albert Einstein describes, in his remarks on his own philosophy of mind, a “…free play with concepts…” which grants a “measure of survey over the experience of the senses which we are able to achieve with its aid” (Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes”). The would-be language creator summons in exile a spirit of focus and play.

Resolution of this creative process, marked by the completion of a new word, may come after one fulfills a commitment to seeing through the daydream spell wherein the new word takes origin and gathers form. The first person to hear the word will be the silent listener, sensing the word as an inner thought newly ready for sharing, a communicable form. As Amiens, a companion in exile states in reply to the musing Duke, “…Happy is your Grace / That can translate the stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet a style” (II, i, 18-20). For the purposes of play, discovery, analysis, curiosity, and need, this effort to “translate” animates every generation, an essential process in the mind of each person and in the path of each community in attentive contact with life.

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“For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing. So Kurremkarmerruk had said to them once, their first night in the Tower; he had never repeated it, but Ged did not forget his words. ‘Many a mage of great power,’ he had said, ‘has spent his whole life to find out the name of one single thing–one single lost or hidden name. And still the lists are not finished.  Nor will they be, till world’s end. Listen, and you will see why.’”

Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Language represents a fragment of mind, and mind a fragment of reality–but all connect in a living circuit. In the receptive-active creative state, we can experience this circuit as “…alive with an enigma’s flittering, / And bodying, and being there” (Stevens, 468). The poet Wallace Stevens pictures this circuit thus in “The Search for Sound Free from Motion”: “The world lives as you live, / Speaks as you speak, a creature that / Repeats its vital words, yet balances / The syllable of a syllable” (241). We partake of life at this confluence of streams in awareness, called out to expand language by wonder and need, chance and curiosity, discovery and invention. The world in turn takes form and grows many potentials through us as we sift energies and actions through imagination.

Insofar as we need to know more about reality in order to protect the whole of life, we must learn the art of bringing language into fuller contact with the natural order, which we but partly comprehend, often within narrow purposes, our attention shunted into habitual channels out of a blunting perceived necessity, inner voices muted. One spell of attention devoted to deeper listening, however, can be enough to change the flow of becoming and to make room for new ideas and paths of action.

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“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? …[N]ature is already,

in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great

apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“I returned to paint upon the altars / those old holy forms, / but they shone differently, / fierce in their beauty.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours

Invention of one word places a revealing light on all words. We see that each word–in its pre-emergence and origin, in its growth of identity, and in its paths of continuity and change–draws a current of energy from life and flows in a wider stream of being. Living through a complete cycle of invention, one can more intimately infer the histories and feel the live pulse within each term.

With our sense for language so wakened, we can imbue the shared symbolic order with personal meaning, alive to words’ sources, momentary effects, and framing perceptions and feelings, and we can contribute new elements to the shared lexicon. We can also position awareness in the creative space that opens between a word and the form it represents; we can preserve that space in order to continue tuning the word-world relationship; and awareness can permeate the forms we give to language, with the creator immersing words in a surrounding flow of shaping awareness, alive to the symbolic and to the perceptual.

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She glanced at the billion-channel analyzer, a bank of electronics covering a whole wall…. What if an interstellar message were being received by Project Argus, but very slowly–one bit of information every hour, say, or every week, or every decade? What if there were very old, very patient murmurs of some transmitting civilization, which had no way of knowing that we get tired of pattern recognition after seconds or minutes? Suppose they lived for tens of thousands of years. And taaaaalked verrrry slooooowwwwly. Argus would never know.

Carl Sagan, Contact

If we imagine a mind that can simultaneously attend to phenomena ranging from the infinitesimal to the cosmological, then we can fathom layers, and structures within the layers, and connections among the layers, that call for new ideas and thus for new words to describe worlds within and around us. Life moves inward and outward into these layers and structures and invents within them, too.

We can expand our capacity for invention by becoming alert to built-in features of attention that helpfully frame but also subtly limit our thinking. Rhythm, timing, tone, graphemes, phonemes, and morphemes, as well as surrounding contexts, such as our conditioning memories, physiology, and habits–all of the features both built into and surrounding our words–automatically condition how we invent. Altering any one of these elements non-intuitively, such as stretching the time over which one hears or speaks a word or sentence, in order to perceive or convey a different meaning, can sensitize us to more possibilities, perhaps to realities that only ponderous long-term or extremely short-span thinking can accurately detect and understand.

The useful, subtle, conditioning frames that automatically guide invention may be the hardest factors to notice and control within the word-creation process. We require the frames, but they seem to operate from back stage, behind the field of vision, outside of the circle of lamplight, always entering the stage, the field, the circle, but of their own volition and from many unexpected directions. Trace the directions backward; linger in the impulse that prompts a gesture; study the pattern of light on closed eyes. Here we gain a sense of the guiding frames of the automatic mind. We can then decide consciously whether to accept the frames as they are, or to explore what comes from mindful alterations.

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These notes present some of the strategies a creator can employ to hover in appreciation of distinct perceptions, find fissures in seemingly impregnable conceptual walls, and ponder labyrinths aerially and from within. These strategies can, in turn, help us to sharpen and deepen our vision of reality in each field of imaginative inquiry. First, however, the new words that will entertain, educate, and propel us in our efforts to plumb mysteries and address pressing needs must form in the minds of attentive listeners.

Mark Spring

COMMUNITIES & CONTESTS

Four Contest Categories: $50 Top Award in Each Category

Writing (Grades 7-12) / Writing (College – Public 18+)

Visual Art (Grades 7-12) / Visual Art (College – Public 18+)

The contest is an invitation: learn the game; master the system; sharpen detail-oriented thinking; and join a global conversation about language, mind, and reality.

Nova Musica: if you create a new sound, note, or arrangement of notes, and if you give this musical creation a new word, please feel encouraged to enter the word in the writing contest.

Nova Scientia: if you develop a new word to expand the lexicon in a field of science, then please feel welcome to enter the new scientific term in the writing contest.

Nova Mathematica: if you create a new number, and if you assign to that new number a particular name, then please feel invited to enter the new number/word in the writing contest.

Living Lexicon: if you create a new word (one that you do not consider exclusive to math or science), then please feel welcome to enter the writing contest.

HOW to ENTER a CONTEST

Online conferencing and in-person site visits to schools or businesses may be arranged via email.

Contact Mark Spring, Ph.D., at synergy.creative.learning@gmail.com.

“To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.”
Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)

CITATIONS

Einstein, A. (1970). Autobiographical Notes. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company.

Emerson, R. W. (1982). “Nature.” In Nature and Selected Essays. New York: Penguin Group.

LeGuin, U. K. (1968). A Wizard of Earthsea. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Perse, S. Amers. In R. Lilly (Tr.), Song of the Earth (p. 155). Haar, Michel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rilke, R. M. “To that younger brother.” In Barrows, A., and Macy, J. (Trs.), Rilke’s Book of Hours. New York: Riverhead Books.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Sagan, C. (1985). Contact. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Shakespeare, W. (1997). “As You Like It.” In The Riverside Shakespeare (2nd Ed). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Stevens, W. (1997). Adagia. In Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose. New York: Library of America.

Stevens, W. (1997). “Man Carrying Thing.” Ibid.

Stevens, W. (1997). “Nomad Exquisite.” Ibid.

Stevens, W. (1997). “Pieces.” Ibid.

Stevens, W. (1997). “Presence of an External Master of Knowledge.” Ibid.

Stevens, W. (1997). “The Search for Sound Free from Motion.” Ibid.

Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Boston: Harvard University Press.