Dosti Regmi
Will words ever truly represent reality?
Who will truly understand what you say or want to say? Sometimes, you may not even find someone to listen to you, just like the cabman Iona in Anton Chekhov´s short story “Grief.” The cabman’s son recently died. The cabman desperately and unsuccessfully tries to talk with the people he meets and tell them of how shattered he is. No one bothers to listen to him, and he ends up talking to his horse, which does not interrupt him and chews his grass and breathes on him.
Even if you get lucky enough to express it. Will the word represent your true thoughts? Suppose you feel uneasy with someone in a relationship and are trying to observe and understand the relationship. A friend comes and tells you, “How can you even survive in this relationship? It’s a toxic relationship.” The introduction of the word “toxic” makes you align your evidence to match it and forget the evidence that does not align. So, is the word helping you see things clearly and freely or is it just categorizing things and aligning yourself to one party? Words and thoughts are deviations from the truth.
Words can represent everything except one thing, what is.
How do you describe the shade you felt under a tree on a sunny day with a gentle breeze blowing? Try words. Then even show pictures. Even videos with drones. Put everything in a 3D cinema with a similar rock you sat on at a similar temperature. Can you still simulate what you exactly felt? Apart from the physical environment, what about the mental environment you were in?
By wording, labeling, and drawing a conclusion, we are driving ourselves away from reality. Reality is unspeakable. It is inexpressible. Silent observation without predetermined thought and of course, words, the tools of thoughts, will lead to more authentic observation of reality.
In his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein says, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. We must pass over in silence what we can’t meaningfully speak of”. After writing his masterpiece cautioning people from using language impulsively, he took intellectual exile and went to live in the village as a recluse and did carpentry and manual labor.
He says by sharing words we are sharing our pictures about something and the receiver can have a different picture of the same thing. This shared language can only express the shared world. But I think no two persons share the same world when it comes to the very personal sphere. Regarding radiological report writing my mentor used to say, don’t write subtle, mild, or significant in your technical report writing. He is true. My report will hold ground only when the reader and I share the same words and the same pictures about what the word represents.
Ludwig claims language can only picture concrete facts about the world and it does not include ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and religion. His radical claim is that our biggest questions about meaning, ethics, metaphysics, and value have no answers. We simply can’t discuss them. The world has no inherent meaning. We project it onto it. There is no cosmic justice. The karma and “what goes around comes around” are just wishful thinking.
Language can only portray hard facts and logical interconnections. It can’t capture subtle metaphysical truths, ethical imperatives, or subjective aesthetics.
There is a difference between told reality and lived reality. It can be shown just like love can be shown but not told. Love is what love does, not what love says. In creative writing classes, there is a mantra: In literature do not tell anything, just try to show so the reader can not only read but live in your novel.
Our world stretches only as far as we can meaningfully describe in words. The remainder persists as an unfathomable mystery, glimpsed but never grasped.
I believe in Solipsism, the view that only the self exists while the external world is an illusion. We live in our personal reality and collective illusion. No two persons in this world share the same world. And how can I describe this consciousness and awareness? It is beyond the frontier of language where the truth resides. The truth is here now that I can be sure of and the underlying self is beyond the flux of changing thoughts. Words, language, and logic are the tools of thoughts and the language itself is not neutral and flawless. Words are just the tools of thoughts and hence I cannot rely on the words for sure in this sphere of my personal experience.
My awareness stretches only for 3-10 seconds. That is the time of my working memories, like when I see the trees from my moving vehicle, hear a bird chirping, feel a breeze on my face, feel the love in my lover’s eyes, or between hearing a telephone number and jotting it down on paper. Anything striking and vivid would be stored in the long-term memory and have its own biases because I have to deem it meaningful for I have been carrying it for so long. A person with pathological hoarding disorder will also have a thoughtful reason that the garbage he collects at home is dear and valuable and will be useful in the future. The problem is hoarding fills up the space and without space, no freshness will blossom.
