A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Sixty-One

I don't know if any of what I wrote last night seems sensible to most people.  For me, the essential point is one that I find very hard to articulate, as it is very much about the nature of language and is thus difficult to grasp with the tools that language provides.  A large part of it is the recognition that thought and experience, at least as we know them, essentially exist within language.  We don't look at the world, but at the world as mediated by and described through language.  If we do not have words for something, we often will not be able to consider it, but when the concept is introduced, it will be everywhere.  Even beyond this, though, we know that thought as we experience it requires language.  To me, this suggests a strange truth: when we discuss the material world, the real world outside ourselves, we are distorting thing because language those things exist outside of language.  They are real and material and are not intrinsic to the linguistic world, can only be observed and decoded through it.  By contrast, thought is an artifact of language, as is our internal experience.  This suggests, at least for me, the potential value of an approach that seeks to rely upon and utilize most those tools of language that focus on the internal aspects of experience as the only things which language can accurately contain.