I have long struggled with the limits of language. When wanting to express certain realizations or states of mind, I used to forever add innumerable parentheses and clarifications, especially when something sounded too simple or too cliché, because I couldn’t accept it no matter what. There comes a point where even this dichotomy needs to be transcended since it adds too much unnecessary complexity and prevents clarity, as well as true living.
To say “There is only life” without any further explanations.
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I ended up doing translation work because I looked for an additional way to earn my living. I have since understood it fits perfectly with my recurrent obsession about language and how it works. Oftentimes when I translate a text my mind becomes blocked and I experience some sort of cognitive dissonance. All of a sudden I don’t understand the connection between one word and another, although in a “normal” state of mind it would make perfect sense.
I’ve said it before, that language strikes me as a bunch of gibberish, and that there’s actually nothing logical about it. I find it extremely abstract and in many regards arbitrary. It only works within an accepted framework, but the framework itself, along with its rules, is very arbitrary. Because I could very well come up with a whole new language, with a whole set of different rules – and it would still work. Language only works because we charge it with certain commonly accepted meanings, but in itself it has no meaning. Between language and life there is a chasm, which the mind and its mechanism of abstraction (which is its modus operandi) covered with an equally abstract blanket.
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That which is not experienced consciously is, in a sense, lost (and what is lost can be retrieved.)
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I don’t believe reality is logical. I believe we rationalize things and that we need to do that – there is a practical utility to it, even when it comes to our emotional life (in fact, in many cases, it’s first of all here that this need becomes vital). But I don’t think reality in itself (for lack of a better term) is logical. I tend to believe there are some sort of laws or principles of the universe, but I don’t believe they have much to do with logic.
(Featured image: © Anca Tăbleț / Viziunea Interioară)