Currently I’m reading Rowan Williams’ intriguing The Edge of Words. It is very hard work, partly because he writes in such a dense fashion, but also because a good deal of the material he discusses is drawn from disciplines with which I’m not familiar.* It is a very ambitious piece, in which he draws upon an eclectic range of material from diverse disciplines in order to bring out the complex ways in which language actually works, including studies of autism, poetry and non-verbal communication. It is a challenge to any suggestion that either grammarians or logicians have come anywhere near an adequate understanding of the phenomenon of language.
Although I certainly don’t think that I could give a proper precis of Williams’ argument, one thing has emerged very clearly, and that is that the ways in which language works have far more in common than we might have suspected with the way in which the imagery of the visual arts works. To take just one example: I was impressed by his discussion of “assonance” in poetry (the patterns of similar sounds, such as in rhyme but more widely than that.) It struck me that there are interesting similarities here with the way in which patterns of colour might operate within a composition. Painting is not an oddity in relation to other forms of communication, but shares key features with ways of expressing ourselves which we might otherwise believe to be quite different.
*It takes me back to my years employed as an academic in an interdisciplinary department, in which the majority of the group were philosophers. At least that gives me some points of reference, even if a good part of what Williams has to say is beyond my having a firm grasp of it.