Language and the unsayable
Reading paths · 8 stations · 6,892 words · 30 min contemplative traversal
- 01the shape of what cannot be said
- 02A Return to Form
- 032025-01-29
- 04About the Inadequacy of Attempting to Communicate Grief through Art
- 05To Speak, To Listen
- 06Notes on Inhabiting
- 07Declarations_Of the body
- 08Declarations_Of linguistic cartographies
Hop 01 the shape of what cannot be said
If we say that identity formation is wholly based on the understanding of how language works, then it is also a matter of forming one's own relationship with language, of how words are defined by a meaning-making consistent with one's own worldview. Change a definition, reframe the world within a new system of language, and the world appears different than it was before. A person changes with it. Immensely.
Hop 02 A Return to Form
It is often an idea that spurs my desire to write. An idea so unprocessed, it linguistically dissolves upon writing a word about it. The moment I start to write is the moment where the desire fizzles out, and the idea becomes unknown even to me. It is as if my thoughts chose to be swallowed by obscurity. Auto-forgetfulness, self-abnegation, and self-erasure are some of the things which I can describe this…
Tangent this note links to 2025-01-17 · On the death of David Lynch, a station on Film as philosophy.
Hop 03 2025-01-29
All my recent observations about the world, myself, and other people has always led me to the problem of interpretation and the language used to interpret it. In language, I do not mean a country's distinct system of communication, but one's own personal way of communicating with the world. There is always a specific language that we develop for every person we know, with every topic we engage in, with how we look…
Tangent this note links to on twitter drama_no.1, a station on Technology, simulation, and the machine.
Tangent this note links to Technology and its Discontents, a station on Technology, simulation, and the machine.
Hop 04 About the Inadequacy of Attempting to Communicate Grief through Art
Of course, I will always come back to you but only insofar as you wear the clothes of the transcendental signified. You are only you when you are stripped of everything that is you, who becomes everything and everyone at the moment of meaning’s abnegation. We only exist in language and linguistics is the only relationship that connects us. But what about its grammar? What are the disguises that we inhabit to make…
Hop 05 To Speak, To Listen
I am on this streak of reclaiming myself, if not my sense of self. I guess the latter carries more truth than the former because to reinvent my sensibilities is more important and meaningful than trying to capture an old self that was lost. I cannot always drag a corpse to my body for sentimentality and a sense of familiar comfort. There is no kind of reinvention that occurs without self-examination. I am able to…
Hop 06 Notes on Inhabiting
The body refuses to be metaphor. Even as I write this, a tooth aches in protest, marking territory. Even as I try to make sense of living inside skin, my left knee catalogs its scars — childhood, bicycle, sidewalk, grief.
Hop 07 Declarations_Of the body
The body opens like a house with too many doors. Each morning I count the ways light enters—through eyelids, through pores, through the spaces between fingers when I hold my hand against the sun. The windows are clean but something is always missing. I check the mirrors: my reflection shifts between prisoner and guard.
Hop 08 Declarations_Of linguistic cartographies
The body keeps its own history. Not in straight lines, but in fragments, in whispers, in the language between breaths.