Words

For I am an engine and I’m rolling on
Through endless revisions to state what I mean

Words are… not enough, I think. I don’t ever seem to be able to say what I’m trying to. I can get at the edges of it, but the things that matter – what those are, I don’t know – sits in the stutters and pauses and on the blank space on the margins of this page.

And that makes sense, right? To you?

If you see something, like a yellow flower poking up out of a green yard, or a cat sitting on a blanket, you have that image, you own it in your head. But there is no conceivable string of words that could give that image to someone else, no matter how proficient you are with descriptions. I can tell you that I saw a bird today, I can give you the scientific name and the age and coloring and the exact latitude and longitude of where she was flying, and you’d hardly get closer to what was actually there.

That’s a bunch of words to say, words aren’t great for information transfer. Not as much as I wish they were. Whenever anything is communicated, we bite at the edges of the real we have in our heads until we have a functional, yet destroyed, bit of data that someone else can do something with.

That’s how it’s supposed to be. Call it evolutionarily expedient or a tower of Babel situation, but we just aren’t meant to communicate everything. We can’t. And my above examples were about very, very simple things, concrete things, observed things. We all know what a bird is relative to other animals, or what colors look like relative to each other. It might not be accurate, but you can construct some kind of image from a sentence. But when it comes to feelings and thoughts, I suppose, I don’t know if anyone has ever accurately said what they mean.

How could you? How could you take the endless streams in your head, the ones whose shapes and forms came long before language, and give them to someone else? How would you even be able to package those up? We created this short hand to get at what we mean, “I miss you”s and so forth, but does that even approximate what we feel? Can you ever distill thoughts, all the histories and hopes and expectations they come with, into words?

I’m just tired of words. Maybe I’m just tired of wanting to be understood beyond what words allow.

But who knows, there’s something romantic and affirming about people coming together from all of these approximations. Maybe the miscommunication, never really getting to form a sentence that covers everything you intend, leaves a lot of space for the other person. Maybe those near-hits of meaning, the little pieces of shrapnel that whizz past each other’s ear, maybe that’s what we are to each other – vague ideas of something more, something realized. I suppose it’s egotistical to desire a way for me to contain all of myself in a string of words and have someone understand that the same way. It doesn’t quite leave room for anyone else.