The Shapes of Things

During the Chinese class tonight, I was reflecting on my previous blog related to the educational psychologist Rhoda Kellogg, in particular her observations on how young people acquire the ability to make symbols. Kellogg's theories about the kinds of archetypal images and shapes that children are forming an early age suggest that they play with collective meaning before those meanings coalesce around conceptual objects. For instance, children experiment with what Jung referred to as "mandalas"--divided circles which illustrate a balanced matching of halves in one complete cycle--long before they understand that what they are drawing are "geometrical shapes known as circles". 
   Reflecting on my own experiences in practicing the formation of Chinese characters on a draw computer media, I would theorize that learning a language also requires the ability to experiment with shapes. Forming the characters becomes a way of connecting with the inner shapes, be they the graceful swishes of a long line or more circular patterns. It's also this formation that seems crucial to the embodied aspect of language and writing in particular. Unless I am actually forming the characters, I don't have that continuous feedback loop which directs or guides the hands in shaping the characters. This takes away the sense of randomness and creativity, or play, that a language might entail.
   I am also reminded that words themselves might have meanings which are embedded in their formations. These "meanings" are more primordial: they don't relate to the agreed upon meaning that a particular word has, but might relate to the deeper meanings of the shapes coming together. It's much less apparent that this would happen in the English language than in the Chinese language, since the latter tends to be more image-laden. However, I can see how all languages might entail an encounter with the felt meanings of shapes and forms. Even writing as a physical act is a sort of art, in the sense that it creates forms which in turn guide the awareness to very nuanced, subtle and hard to trace meanings.