#45 The tragedy of the spoken word

Language helps us describe the world we perceive. Yet in doing so, it closes our eyes, our ears, our touch, and our heart to the parts of the world we don’t have words for.

Every language is a lens on a felt reality within and around us – both clarifying and categorizing the world, and limiting it by the words it has available.

Learning more languages gives you new lenses – and a richer sense of reality.

But just like the structure of our ears limit the sounds we can hear, and the structure of our eyes limit colors we can see, the structure of any language somehow limits our felt experience of the world.

How do we re-access memories, emotions, hidden away in a long-forgotten language?

How do we re-learn to listen to the voices of the wordless world speaking to our animal self… the voices that once upon a time, before verbal language emerged, were all we had?

there’s an eternal song
drowned out by the confines of my mother tongue
a wordless melody that once made sense
until our brain started blurring it with a lens
narrowing it down
neglecting its nuances through verbs and nouns

with all its might language wants us to abide
but the wordless world it tries to hide
will forever be inside

Lukas Van Vyve