December 13, 2007
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Words express the meaning attached to them. But what if there is a meaning with no word for it? What if something existed there was no word able enough to contain? I think such a thing exists, and there is a host of words that revolve around it, yet do not indicate the thing itself. Consider what you are right now. Through your two eyes, you see a colored reality in front of you. In thought, you are considering this present matter. In the background of all of this are all the assumptions of your life, in the people you know, your maxims about life, and the entire history of a life you have lived up to this precise moment. In actuality, all these things are happening to you all at once at any given moment. To you, it just is. To anyone, it is what it is being inside this body. I propose there are words that revolve around this thing, but none that represent it. We use words like ‘life,’ ‘consciousness,’ ‘perception,’ your ‘mind,’ and other similar words and phrases to dress up the idea with different nuanced attempts grasping for it. But is there is a word that contains the meaning of the thing it is? I think not. When someone says the word ‘life’ in reference to the human experience, I do not think such a reality as that which life is to us actually sinks in. What I think is actually the case is that words are another mechanism humans use to have control. So long as we have words to describe things, as if the things themselves fit into the definitions, we are safe. But just think: there is no word to describe what you go through.
When you think about it, words are quite vague. A word can be used many different ways, and as more people use it in an attempt to describe something different, it becomes less and less a word that refers to one specific thing. We pick up on the meaning of words mostly on a practical level, one that allows for a workable realm of communication.
Imagine a table and think, what describes the reality the table is experiencing? Well, the table isn’t experiencing anything, so it’s just a table. Now think of a human, as in the human as it is as a piece of physical matter. Now, both the table and the human are certain arrangements of matter. But the difference is the there is nothing more to the table than matter, but there is more to the human. What is there more to the human to describe, or perhaps that cannot be described? Well think of the concept, the meaning, the actuality of the thing a human perceives, in as close to its entirety as you can. Examine the sweeping range from left to right of the categories that are contained within the basin of this idea we are trying to pin down. But in trying to, we realize we cannot pin it down. It is too big, too inexplicable, and words too poor a beggar to have the colors needed to paint this landscape of life we can overlook endlessly in every direction. As you exist, realize the state of being you are in is one uncontained in words. There is no word for it; but you know the meaning behind the word that isn’t there, by knowing the thing itself directly.
Further, I think that this thing that is life to you as you are seeing it at any moment, is by definition a very lonely thing. All the facts you have seen in books, all the words you have heard in the past, all the places you are not, have no real state of existence to you right now. When you look around, life to you just is as the thoughts you have, and everything else is in the vagueness of what is classified as ‘somewhere else.’ When you look your thoughts in the eye, and delineate yourself from your surroundings that you had blended yourself into, you realize that all that you know personally and directly are the thoughts that you can experience. No one else can know the thought as you experience it. There is no one else feeling or knowing the meaning that is swirling around you. Whatever it is, as the idea that we said there is no word for, it is to you, and you only.
Much of what I write in my Xanga comes from conversations I have. Earlier tonight when I thought to try and explain this idea to my friend, it accidentally started quite humorously, “There’s this thing there’s no word for, and it’s—well, there’s no word for it.”
As is fitting, there is no word I could think of as a title. This post just is. Ha. I suppose ‘ineffable’ would have worked. The beauty of it is, if you haven’t understood what I’m trying to describe, then that proves my point.
Bye!
Comments (2)
Exactly.
What about words like “uncontainable,” which describe something by saying it is undescribeable? Or expressions like “my present experience”? Don’t those convey a true meaning regarding the thing which you are trying to explain? Is your point then that the only meaning which can be communicated regarding this “us-thing” is that it is undescribeable? That somehow reminds me of reletivistic arguments about how the only absolute is that no other absolutes exist. I don’t think your argument is that we don’t have a word for the most-central “us,” so I’m somewhat lost here. If the meaning cannot be contained by words, it is uncontainable, and so you have already contained it with words.