420. Pointing To Reality

Reading a text that describes the beauty of a summer day, we automatically begin to imagine it. The warm breeze, the sound of a fountain running, the air rich with the scent of growth, the blinding sunlight, the taste of ice cream — through words, these things can come to life as though we were actually experiencing them. But if we were then asked if our imagined experience was real, we would likely respond that it was not.

Without prompting, the distance between an imagined experience and a real one might go unnoticed. The day described might feel so close to one from memory that we relive that past reality as part of our imagined experience. This is the power of language, to transport us through the representation of old experiences into new versions of those experiences, while drawing our attention to some particular aspect of them.

Language works in this way regardless of its proximity to reality. Even when we read a perfectly realistic description, we are still not experiencing the thing itself. All language is metaphorical, an abstract relation formed between memory and imagination. A collection of these abstractions can be thought of as a kind of theory. When we write about an experience, we are giving our theory of that experience. When we share this theory with others, we might find that their experience aligns with our theory or we might not.

Everything we do with language is a way of pointing towards something that has nothing to do with language. A story is a kind of theory that describes a series of connected events and points to how those events might be experienced. Every text is always an attempt to help us notice something we have not yet noticed, which then causes our future experience to be transformed.

In the end, words, texts, and language do not matter. They are merely signposts, pointing the way to something beyond, to something more than language. It is always the experience of life that is meaningful, the act of being in a world that is both self and other, the visceral contact with all that is joyful, beautiful, and true.