още едно for the sake of quantity
Dear Lorraine,
I herewith start this letter to you, and hope you will read it to its end. I hope its meditative nature will not deter you, and I hope you will understand me. I hope and I hope, and this all that words can do.
Language, this ancient human development that enables us to reduce reality to comprehensible units and thus constitutes the major branch of communication, has exposed its immense potential with the invention of its graphic representation: it now presents an almost omnipotent utility for trapping information outside the individual’s memory. This essayistic letter will deal with the aforementioned „almost“ and how it excludes the expression of human emotions from the world of words; it will try to explain the author’s conviction of the futility of fiction of any form, or even the verbal communication of any kind of non-abstract reality.
There are two kinds of information that one might attempt to clutch with words alone. One is that of abstract ideas; concepts that originate from the same intellect that developed language. The other kind of reality is that of the indescribable, namely, human perception which includes not just the information gathered by our five senses, but also all emotions and “thoughts” that one experiences on a sub-conscious level. (I hesitate to use “experiences” here, since experience is actually the mostly involuntary and unconscious conceptualization of perception. I did use this word, yet ask you to differentiate between the experience that is mindful and serves logic and that which is intuitive and serves, most probably, survival.)
Language is a tool of the practical intellect that gives names to this part of reality which is purely abstract, conceptual, and which, in fact, cannot be expressed by any other means but language, since those concepts are part of language and do not exist outside of it. A thing is not its name; it is its essence. Thus only the thing which is in its essence its name, can be named. To express a thing which is not its name one needs to find a metaphysical language, the language of essence. (Which would be the language that Jehovah must have spoken when creating the world, though delving further into this idea would be an unneeded digression.)
The tragedy of literature is its naïve assumption that it can in fact express essence, while really it only hints at it, and it does so, even in its most celebrated representatives, very vaguely, I am tempted to add. A name relies solely on the reader’s prior experience and intuitive knowledge of the thing named to serve as a suggestion of it. No word can truly express the essence of a thing which has such; therefore, no one can know anything that he has not already known if he is only fed with language. Language can only remind us of what we know, but never teach us anything new. One can delve into irrationally long descriptions of something, but if the reader does not know it beforehand, all words will be fruitless. Even the most elaborate of descriptions will only present a set of names to assign to the new name, but the reader will never truly know the essence of the thing until he has actually felt it. (How, for example, would one go about explaining the color red to someone blind with words alone?) It is completely true that one who has not loved will never feel anything when reading even the most involved love story or poem. But to prove this commonly acknowledged idea is not the aim of this contemplative letter: this letter wants to explicate why even the most passionate of lovers should not be surprised if he finds himself indifferent to such a story.
Language is like math: an abstract entity that is defined by its own rules and can define only itself in various depths and directions; any relation it has to anything outside itself is only indirect, secondary and subjective. The attempt to express anything non-abstract with language resembles the attempt to assign a mathematical value to love or to the color red, for example.
This is why I see myself crashed between two moving walls, one being language’s inability to express my actual emotional condition, and particularly my feelings towards you, with sufficient accuracy and objectivity; the other is your ever so hopelessly obdurate desire to hear me formulate my emotions in words. You refuse to understand that for me reducing my feelings to mere words would be like telling you “My love for you equals 76” – what good would that do except set concrete abstract boundaries for my emotional scope? I refuse to be bound by words. I refuse to live and feel in those narrow rails set by language, but will experience life as it is, as it was, before Adam named all things and animals in the garden of Eden. I will not give names and will thus never leave this blissful land of freedom.
Hence I ask of you, dear Lorraine, to do the same, or at least not torture me with requests for the fatal reduction of my feelings to a few syllables. I could tell you the magical words any minute; but the very minute I utter them, they will die in the air, leaving only gray ashes that the wind of time will disperse; and with my words, the essence of my emotions will be redefined by language, and will from then on be subject not only to the limits of language, but also to all of its ambiguities, misinterpretations, subjectivity, and paradoxes. How easy it is to toy around with a grand and vast emotion or feeling when it is reduced to four or five letters! How easy it is to misspell it! Giving a name to the essence of state of mind will bind it to context stronger than any other chains. It will be dependant on the words surrounding it so much, that it will lose all power it used to have on its own. It will become just another knot in the web of language, this web with huge holes of ambiguity and subjectivity that tries to catch essence to no avail, for that would be like trying to eat soup with a fork. Let us not eat our soup with forks, Lorraine! (The preceding sentence is meant only as a demonstration of how ridiculous language becomes the moment it is used to express anything but the abstract.)
I feel that the only power of language with regard to the expression of emotions is its capacity to be used in forms that have meaning on their own, not just that of the words inside; a limerick is pleasant to the ear without being all too meaningful; a poem can be beautiful even when the actual meaning in it is completely nonsensical and hopelessly self-absorbed (T.S. Eliot comes to mind); a love letter might be a sentimental and melodramatic mess of ambiguous and powerless statements. I suspect that you might in fact not be craving so much for the words themselves, but for my utterance thereof. Thus I am writing this letter.
Please accept this love letter from me; this love letter wherein no words of affection are to be found. Please do not deem it inferior to any other love letter ever written, for I assure you as strongly as I possibly can by means of these feeble words that it is written with the same indescribable feeling that has fuelled all other true expressions of love ever made.
Think me no fool – I am completely aware of the idiocy of this letter, but let that very idiocy stand as a manifestation of language’s inability to serve as a communicator of true essence.
Now that you are almost through reading this letter, please fold it again, and put it back in the fine crimson envelope that I spent so many days choosing. Then seal the envelope, and put it, if you will, somewhere in your room. Soon you will hopefully have forgotten or forgiven the ridiculousness of its content and will be left with a love letter from me, which in itself says more, I think, than any words I might spell out in it.
I will not surrender to the pressure of convention and will not precede my signature with the commonly used and misused closing “Love,” but will simply put my illegible yet calligraphically fine-looking signature beneath this, let me assure you once more, love letter.
Leroy