On Language

He sat down to write. What else was he going to do? Wanting to deceive them, or perhaps himself, of the true narrative, he wrote as if constructing a short story. This was to be a short story about a man in search of truth, in search of meaning in a world that often felt more alien than familiar. The search takes place under the brutal weight of jealousy and is colored by fear. 

This man in the story wished to see himself as Diomedes, tearing into battle to fight Gods and heros, but truthfully he felt more like a small child, void of the appropriate faculties for dealing with hardship. But this was not what the story is about. It is about language. In the story, the man suddenly felt himself so very far away from all that was of comfort, disconnected from his family and, laboring along with a broken heart, he struggled to reconcile his decisions with his current predicament. But, feeling it was all too autobiographical, he, the writer, decided to write about language instead. Anyway, he was tired of feeling sorry for himself, knowing it only lead down a frightful road. So he wanted to make this more optimistic, even if it betrayed, to some degree, his true thoughts.

He endowed his character with experience in these matters. He, the character, had been living on the street where one goes to feel sorry for ones self. He had been living there only a short while this time, but had spent a few years there in the past. But though this man didn't control his own fate, which was, after all, the job of the writer, he knew he wouldn't be on this street for long. He knew how to manage his internal rust. He knew because he had been there before. On this street. In this place.

But experience alone, the writer thought, was not enough to guarantee survival. If anything, experience without a mechanism to understand that experience was worse than no experience at all. Imagine knowing what was happening to you, yet having no way to deal with it.  The writer could think of nothing worse. Consequently, neither could his character. Sadly, they, the writer and the character, both had the feeling they knew someone like that. So what was it, that would make it different, more bearable this time round, wondered the character? To which the writer replied: language.

Last time he, the character had loved, loved and lost, he was totally inexperienced and didn't have any kind of guidance for dealing with these things. He had taken a few extreme measures to gain attention and to express his deep pain. He cut himself; nothing dangerous, though. Just enough to see a bit of blood, and to get the source of his misery to notice. He also medicated himself on a regular basis.

But that story was a cliche if ever there was one: young man suffers angst and goes on a years long self-pity binge until one day he decides to change things and be his own master. Anyway, a character is never his own master. That is the job of the writer. So instead he, the writer, focused on what was different now. Now he, the character, had language. He had learned, through friends, through his own travels, and through his intellectual mothers and fathers, to construct something out of this pain. He now spoke out about what he was going through, he put pen to paper and read books and watched movies to see how others dealt with it.

Though this made him, the character, a fairly selfish guy, something which he, the writer, despised, it was only a temporary narcissism. But what was it about language, mused the writer, through the character, that made this lost love more tolerable? For one thing, in the immediate, physical context, it meant that he, the character, would be able to formulate words to express his feelings, which acted as a release mechanism. Language was a sort of valve on his internal, emotional pressure cooker. It was a button he could press whenever things got to gloomy and his throat became constricted as a result. 

Moreover, language allowed him to make meaning out of what he was experiencing. He could look back on memories and see where the source of the pain was; see which decisions had gotten him to this point; and he could see the correlation between cause and effect, helping him to see why something had happened. He didn't have to just sit there, cursing the writer for this injustice, as a martyr of his own pain.  He could pick himself up and know why it happened and accept his own responsability. That, according to the writer, should be hailed as progress. Of course, it wasn't an instant remedy for how the character felt, but it was a remedy none-the-less.

Language did one more thing for him, the character. It made him more self-aware than he had ever been in the past. Language connected him to his identity and allowed him to find theories and other narratives, other characters and other writers, who could show him all the possible ways to move out of the neighborhood. Through language he could identify with experience, or perhaps, he could twist his experience to fit a narrative that offered some way forward. Language allowed him to deconstruct himself and then reconstruct himself however he felt it was appropriate. This process allowed him to inhabit this pain as an experience, as he would any other experience.

Language, the writer and the character thought: what a wonderful thing! With that, aware of his own language and ability to control it, the character climbed off the page and slaughtered the writer. What a narcissist!, he thought. Imagine taking up that much space to write about yourself and your pain. Imagine putting me, the character, through such a cliche ridden story, so full of gloom and doom! Bah! There must be more important things to write about.

So he sat down to write. After all, what else was he going to do?