Socrates and I

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began,

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet,

And whither then? I cannot say.

__J.R.R. Tolkiens

One sunny morning last week, woke up by a sunlight, I was thinking when, to my complete astonishment, into my bedroom stepped a well-known ancient thinker, Socrates, not looking any diffferent than his statue that I saw in Greece in 1983. And he had taken out from my bookcase a copy of Cratylus by Plato and said in ancient Greek Gestural Language (please allow me to translate to the best of my understanding), "Hey Buddy, in this book, Plato got a lot of things right but he left some points out of focus. Let me explain some of them."

After philosophizing with Socrates, I’ve come to the following short story about American Sign Language (ASL) storytelling art:

I am a well-claimed ASL storytelling artist whose magic helps my audience to understand the language and culture of the Deaf. This magic also raises a larger question: What then is ASL? My reply is that we must simply trust our other senses, yet whatever we perceive only reflects our personal reality filtered through these senses. ASL is not a spoken language; since ASL is a visual-gestural language, voicing is not included.

Even the most intelligent among us can mistake spoken sounds for reality. For example, an acquaint of mine with cochlear implant (CI) told me how she had witnessed a little girl with CI speaking. She couldn't believe it so she ran to her hearing mentor to see whether or not it was real. She did it because she's still stone-deaf, which makes a lot of sense.

I encouraged you to visit my blog as if Socrates himself had written them. Because, in a paradoxical way, perhaps he did.