what possibly lies beneath the gender/language issue

A culture's underlying understanding and use of language may be the cause or only the effect of visible cultural problems.  Or it may be irrelevant, a red herring.

Nevertheless, no harm and possibly much good could come of covering this base. In deciding to do so, as I got deeper and deeper into it, I could almost palpably feel scales falling from eyes, my angle of vision kept widening and finally it felt as if a crown of eyes had been sewn all around my head, such that now I am a believer in the essential and determinant quality of this issue.  

If I am correct, how to save the miners, not just the bright, colorful canaries

If words were the things themselves, they would disappear into them, and there would be nothing to say. Words only point to aspects of things not the things themselves. Language concerns an aspect of the whole that sheds light on it without being it, but it obfuscates and finally obliterates the thing it illuminates in eclipsing it. And that is the general state of things.

If you’ve entered an important meeting concerning matters of consequence, and need a chair, you might not see anything there but the generic sittable chairness that we call a chair. You might completely fail to notice and have no memory of the actual object you were using to fulfill the function of a chair. 

In early sacred societies, these generic functional phantoms, these ghosts or spirits, are venerated. That which all buffalos share, buffalo-ness, is the agent of survival, a matter of utmost consequence. To kill one buffalo is to kill great buffalo, who is then born anew. Stripping buffalo spirit of any individuality that has accrued to it refreshes the spirit. As society advances, equation of things with generic attributes that apply to groups of them evolves into novel, pathological variations. Human individuality demands to be sacrificed, destroyed, to refresh the pure divine human or god.

Modern society attests to a burgeoning, but in no way yet complete reversal of this archaic anachronism, which should in no way be romanticized, as it is an affront to genuine spirituality, that ineffable difference that makes all things and instants unique. It is the opposite of the fascistic belonging spirit that makes you disappear into a mob's desire or simply move with a herd and mirror it.  Nor does it follow some tract on how to be a generic rugged individual.  It weaves in and out of language like a guerrilla in camouflage, suddenly possessing the vocal cords, working hands, or dancing feet of the least likely, most likely, or medium likely candidates.  It moveth as it listeth, and where it comes from and where it goes nobody knows, eluding all attempts to define it generically.  Some possess it by usually conforming, others by usually rebelling.  Some are authentic who seem fake and vice versa.  With state of the art discourses and machines, forms most seamlessly conformed to its nature as discerned objectively in the cooperation of all disciplines and trades, including vagrancy, are probably digital facsimiles that cheated and never kissed the beast into beauty.  Though some of us swear we've seen tracks, soon washed away by the wind, and we can offer some scraps of a map that might help you to find such fleeting signs, its existence remains unverifiable, known only in faith and such private experiences.  One's relation to it remains an inviolable secret, not fully revealed even to oneself.  It's the recognition of this free holy spirit that Dante understood as defining the modern, enlightened mind (conceived and gestating in the rise of a singular deity, whose ways are not our ways, whose actions and attributes are unfathomable, and born in the story, regardless of its literal truth, of the son of that god who, sacrificed by criminals, refuses all codified behavior to live and die only for love, that hand held out to a cliff hanger experiencing it the other way around the only anchor) in which even the most venerable pagans in worshipping generic attributes as gods could not participate.  

Though ancients like Homer and Virgil were on the verge of breaking out, humanism (its widely acknowledged father, Saint Francis of Assisi, the opposite of humanocentric) was a narrowly circumscribed development between ancient and modern mechanism.  What humans naturally want to do with their overdeveloped cerebral cortices is ally them with their bodily desires and turn the machine on automatic drive to fulfillment, the person replaced by the machine's code for classifying its needs and desires, those classifications, again, reified and deified.  The high minded enlightened mind throws off the code, breaks the alliance, and is self-determined, where the self or spirit is, again, free and impossible to locate or define.  Many respected scientific thinkers argue that this self-determination in defiance of mechanistic principles is what's dangerously mythological, not the categories of discourse that conspire in the proposal of its non-existence by omitting all that is anomalous and even statistically improbable, from their calculations.  Their position not only ignores the limits of their categories, but it is lethal, defining the human as a zombie in a dream he knows is a dream but is unable to wake from -- whoever professes this and remains sanguine about it is in advanced stages of total zombification --  the other, if an error, mercifully delays debilitating knowledge of that state, empowering the deceived possibly to discover an antidote.

In truth just as a spirit moves a mob, a spirit or energy does inhabit mere generic functional categories that enumerate what is similar about things, but I am not going to worship such a spirit, as I can see right through this demonically misleading practice and observe its predatory viral nature as it appropriates living matter to perpetrate itself far beyond and even reversing the original category’s usefulness.   Recognizing the danger, to retaliate, some people then deny that the original category still applies, when there is no escaping any truth it represents except by altering the physical form dramatically.  An expensive antique chair might be insulted by being lumped together with a cheap ugly one that looks nothing like it, but they are both still representatives of chair-ness and equally partake in it. There is no escaping femininity until my hormones and anatomy no longer manifest it. But I am not woman. There’s no such thing.  No word applying to many defines any one.

Notice how the verb to be is commonly applied to many fleeting or contingent states and correct yourself and others until you and everybody break the habit. In French one doesn’t say that one is cold, but that one has cold, j’ai froid.  I do not say I am Veronika, I call myself Veronika, je m’appelle Veronika and therefore consent to claim attributes, such as femininity, associated with the name. However this burgeoning progress beyond caveman mystification of the functional did not get too far.  One says — je suis française, as if there were such thing.   As if my identity and my affiliations were one thing.  As if I could not differ from those I'm affiliated with, which helps to explain why most people don't.  

This reification of categories in the end only debilitates language. If read properly, taken with a grain of salt, to say I AM a woman neither fails nor fully succeeds in helping to illuminate me, but without this grain of salt, it eclipses me.   I am treated and seen as woman, this phantom ideal of which I am a very defective model.  So I shift to defective human being, I’m not a woman, I’m a human being, then to defective individual, etc. Whatever I am it’s defective. Yet this advanced caveman society demands to find some fixed way to define me, if not as she or he then I’m a they.  It refuses the grain of salt that gets the nutrition of language, otherwise not just tasteless but poison, down.  And that mounts to starvation. 

It is unlikely that we will evolve any faster than our language does, as it seems to carry subliminal messages that determine what we feel, which overwhelms what we think.  Instead of capitalizing "nouns" as is done in German, we should wrap them all in "quotation marks", where my "quotation marks" are so excited about their new job, they're dancing around on the page. I could enclose that last statement in quotation marks, as they're not literally dancing, perhaps, but maybe they are literally dancing.  The present they inhabit is flying by too fast for me to bring these quotation marky phenomena into focus.   But just because I should put all nouns in quotation marks doesn't mean I should never use them.   

The amazing nature writer Annie Dillard describing a solar eclipse, transmits the truly terrifying effect, almost exactly parallel to when a thing eclipses all language that could illuminate it.  Elaine Scarry also equates the increasing defeat of language with acceleration of pain and estrangement.  While shots of gainful pain correspond to blinking to refresh the screen, pleasure may have to search a while, but can always find language, witness all the world’s poetry, not only turning pain to gain but also constantly searching out and pinpointing the next novel nexus of pleasure. Witness also the crying out of the beloved’s name at the height of passion, the absence of any beloved a significant drain on the pleasure of that moment, and to call out one’s own name seems a bit narcissistic. Night time and sleep dim, but in no way put out the light of language, its reflected and refracted forms dreaming or warbling in the moonlight. 

Returning to Dillard, her description will awaken those not yet woke to the terror of a solar eclipse, as it is parallel to the eclipse of language. Once woke to, it’s an experience you should travel far to have and not necessarily want to repeat, though many are gluttons for little tastes of such punishment as purveyed in what’s called Dionysian art, wild orgies, etc. — meant to eclipse language and awaken those insufficiently sensible to the overwhelming full body experience of scrambled eggs for breakfast. For woke ones such as us, a whiff of cherry blossoms carries the risk of a heart attack, where Dionysian orgies leave us either cold as ice or very annoyed as when attacked by mosquitos.  Perhaps you do not wish so to wake…yet. Still, you should have a taste of it to make an educated choice, or get gladly to know it will wait and still be around for you to embrace in the extreme joy and relief of old age.  My buddies tell me that I should have waited, they say I’m missing a whole world of fun..  I say youth is wasted on youth.

In any case, at any age, whether you bore it into boringness or delight it into deliciousness, it is not just your right, but your duty to love and tend Creation, which language naturally and normally illuminates without eclipsing or being eclipsed by it.  It is both your right and duty to sustain this sun and moon in their proper relation and order, by both objectifying the dark opaque material thing itself outside of language, projecting it forth as an object of study seen from  different angles, just as you own that you are made of and walk on such dust, as you and that projection orbit around the Word that brings light to the world — as when the blind deaf girl living in a distraught wild Dionysian state suddenly cracked the code of the word water written into her hand, kissed and grabbed the hand of her teacher and began flying through the world suddenly mapped in her head, each word kissing and awakening the sleeping beauty in all things, language a diaphanous veil, like the gauze floating over Botticelli's nude muses or the mist in the Tuscan hills softening any too strident sensual quality, so that the quiet can now too be heard, everything so equally easy on the eyes, one hardly need blink and one can see minute details miles away as in a landscape by Piero della Francesca. I am not making this up.  This is how language looks when you first open the box or the second time, after you toss away the worn out rag with holes patched with plastic and other alien stuff (or maybe you went to India and had yours carefully embroidered with myriads of little mirrors, there's more than one way to skin a cat) wrestle down the angel blocking the way, and climb a stairway to heaven to demand a brand new replacement, well worth the limp you're stuck with from the angel's zen stick.  Language, the present of presents, revealing/creating the present.

When we come into language we all experience similar wildly mild delight as did that blind deaf girl, psychiatrists call three year olds in love with the world, but it starts growing old and falling apart at the age of four. We fall into sadomasochistic use of language or letting it use us, the world going on and off like an alternating current rapidly depleting the energy source, considering the relatively endless source when the perfectly measured illumination offered by ever newly reborn language radiates as naturally as the sun does. You will need to rearrange the global economy and fire extra synapses to disassemble and recycle the waste from all the machines that now suck up the light of language and divide it into the rapidly alternating form, but consider the long term good and what we owe to the coming generations. Convert back to least false metaphor! re-run and listen to this paragraph every day possibly for the rest of your life. It represents not only an explanation but a model use of language able to restore the garden and establish paradise on earth.

Again, insofar as the word, say, corresponds perfectly to some thing, that thing consists only in what all words have in common, any distinct quality in any word is repressed while the word “word” is applied to it — just as pressing a like button obliterates the difference between different kinds of likes. (A touch sensitive keyboard would help.). The difference between words is still there when the word “word” appears to feature the sameness, and there is  always another replete world happening as language weaves up its own world, but this replete world is not an anti-world defined against, therefore indirectly by language.  This world is not playing while language works, or vice versa.  No, any particular word is still a word in general even as it is itself uniquely, however the brain in rationalizing modality can rarely grasp this — the famous figure flips from rabbit to duck and denies the existence of the rabbiduckt, we flip from being scientists adding up chairs to artists seeing the particular qualities of the chair that’s there, but what’s really wholly most articulately there outside of language, like the rabbiduckt, is also inside of language.  

James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is the most accurate, literal mimesis available, and it is beautiful illuminating and fun, but it is also a sublime failure, where the method that logically should bring the world into clearest focus often dissolves into incomprehensible fog — because language was not made just for literalism.  After being radically re-formed into Joyce’s hammer for hitting the nail on the head, those new words would become generic, and the hammer again ineffective; whereas acting as a web of indirect allusions, winks, and innuendos by which humandividuals recognize each other as other than computers and conspire to maintain the world’s specificity and wholeness comes naturally to language.  All this has a very scientific and logical basis, and is not beyond the capacity of humanity to understand and apply, as I believe will happen spontaneously upon completing the reading of this article with a surprisingly resilient ripple effect, as truth however nuanced and softly whispered possesses a mysteriously mighty power. Still, one cannot expect immediate results verifying the validity and efficacy of my theory. I point to the admittedly less severe case of an old friend from high school who applied Wittgenstein’s theories of language to the problem of verifying causation in occupational disease. His ideas were so complex and nuanced none of his professors could understand them and thought he’d lost his mind, but after fifteen years his predictions were verified, and now he teaches at Harvard.