Sunday, December 23, 2007

frustrating

I hate the feeling of not being able to say what you mean.

Not being prevented somehow. But just not being able to find the words to say it.

I like words. But sometimes they just don't work.

When I have nothing else to think about (or have somehow convinced myself that this is the case), I think about how different things could be if we could actually say the things we mean. (Maybe I have watched one too many romance movies where the guy and girl are kept apart for an entire 75 minutes because they are both just confused about what is going on.)

But then there is that other problem of not really meaning the things we say.

Maybe we don't value words enough.

Hey, maybe in heaven meaning and words will finally catch up with each other.

Heh, I don't think I'm saying what I mean.

2 comments:

Jack said...

Your comments remind me of Eugene Gendlin and the idea of felt sense--probably the only remotely useful thing I got out of that composition/rhetoric course I took in the fall.
Gendlin suggested that perhaps it's the words we value too much, and that we might worry more about what's implicit in experience, about the ways that the body itself is already always a part of what we're thinking about (and so on in a PoMo psychotherapeutic manner until you get a pseudo-Derridean self-help book that suggests strange procedures like replacing each word you can't get right with a series of five periods.)
I like your "maybe in heaven" spin a bit more, though.

Emily said...

[note: in musical terms, this is more of a fantasy on a theme than a direct reply to Dan's comment, mostly because I've never heard of Eugene Gendlin before in my life.]

I'm afraid that if there was a "which critic are you?" quiz out there, and you took it for me, I would be Derrida... But all along I'm really with Lewis deep down inside, saying that there is meaning beyond words, and that they're imperfect temporary tools to help us to get there. :)

Seeing as how I seem to be mixed up with words a lot, whether lawyering or studying "human communication" or Spanish or Arabic or teaching a speech class or just reading Dickens, I have been working (informally) on my Christian philosophy of words and communication, and however we approach it, I think it should be impossible for Christians to think about words without contemplating the reality of Christ being described as THE Word. If He is the Word, the Source, the Original, the Prototype, they absolutely can't be insignificant or useless. Because of His character and description, we should expect (without bitterness) to mean and to be bound by our words -- however imperfect they seem.