23.10.2023

I always find myself at a loss for words with language. I appreciate the degree to which words enclose inside them history and the relations that determine the shape in which language is given to us. In language, words swallow other words; meanings have meanings in them, like Russian dolls. However, on the cold screens, words are given to us in immediacy, as if language and therefore the world is as two-dimensional as the letters that rest on a page. We read terrorist as if history hasn’t bent each letter to its shape, as if there aren’t people at the end of the fingers that type each letter out, place them amongst other words, giving context or denying it.

Deep down, we know how animated the world words refer to is. We know how much happens behind words, those spoken and unspoken. We know what happens in the velocity of the air that parts from lips, when we speak or breathe, or that turns inwards and sits in our chests like a constriction if we hold the words in. There are meanings, and the reverses of meanings - in tonalities and intonations, we share a different kind of knowledge, more immediately felt. In reality, definitions of words are rendered secondary to how the meanings form. The great religions have crowned language as the hiding place of God, but what hand writes the letters on the page? It is us who hide in language, the way we dance with it, sometimes slow and sometimes fast. And sometimes, we stand still with language, with it resting on our palm because words do not suffice, like when tragedy is too big to put into words.

In those moments, it isn’t that the world ceases to be, or that the relations that bind it together are weakened by the sudden silence. It is in a silence that language gathers its force; it is the pull of the wave back from the shore into the ocean so that another can come crashing onto the sands. Sometimes, an experience too hastily described can be distorted through words. Naming things has great power, like calling something a war, evoking a prosthetic memory of a unity that binds us to some by naming something else enemy, some history where mass-murder has been wrapped in the shiny cellophane of victory and freedom. The dance never ends, however. Time weaves together language and experience, generation after generation. Each of us partake in this, either following choreographies whose architects we may not even know, or choosing to follow the rhythm that runs deeper, reverberating from the core of the earth, reminding us of the freedom to move.

Emotional irrigation systems are created through narratives. The stories we tell ourselves become like ploughs that dig into the soft soil of human experience. If we are not careful, feeling seizes to wander, to try and describe what it sees and feels. It retreats to the barricades of language, uses words like assault weapons to create distance between us and them. Without the freedom to find its own way, emotion seizes to seek its counterpart in fellow humans, but rather directs its full force against that which it pretends to know, because it has been given a name.

The immediate effect of this is the flattening of the truth. In justifications of tragedies and trauma, reality becomes impoverished, both for those who are discriminated against and those who seek to benefit from it. There is indeed something hollow about our use of language now. We were meant to communicate intimate histories, moments where something is felt so deeply that we wish to create a dwelling-place for something we deem precious. Thinking we become principal owners of a collective experience by capturing it in words is a colonising impulse, a blind greediness that rips a plant of its roots and watches it wither. Language cannot replace the moment in which it gets birthed. Words cannot make up for how utterly irreplaceable it is, how easily these moments may not take place because man-made destruction is willing to sacrifice them, on the altar of progress and capital.

How impoverished our world will come, if we only have time to describe that which happens on the abstract plane, in the economy or the nation, those religious realms that pull at the strings of lived reality like the will of God once moved the limbs of peasants, guiding their actions without ever showing face. All the while, our emotions flow through the irrigation system, our need for love, the hunger to grow in our spirits, as bell hooks names it. It is this hunger that searches outlets, whilst the barren landscape of profit births yet another wave of the same hunger unfulfilled, all the more ravenous, while nation tears at the fabric of human existence.

So we go in circles, short bursts of emotion that return to their sender, a short-circuit. They circle the epicentre of our anxieties, or that which these ruts have rendered unspeakable, insofar as we have been made to believe that that which can be made extinct in language does not exist at all. But we know that which goes unspoken shapes the world. The irrigation system overflows, and in those moments, we have the opportunity to find one another again.

From the river to the sea.