Language

What is contained in
Words, if not the
Links to snapshots
Of experience?

Something parallel
Would be the traces
Of electricity
Without conductors.

Touch and you feel it
Stay away and the warmth
Will only smoulder
For a few more minutes.

We need a script
And a script needs us.
If there are no props
How will it flow?

If velocity can be blurring
Can the numbness survive?
Will the toasted cracker
Soften eventually?

Granting freedom to the question.
Letting it fly and sit at a height
The thin air will prove weak
The taste will only survive.

If fragrance can fly with the wind
What of thoughts in transit
From the head to the nerve-ends?
Infections caused by affinity.

Language communicates experience
Words are transport
But in themselves empty.
Speech cannot be transcribed.

The body, the inter-body,
The magnetic and the transpired
Are all proximity-based
And musical.

Constructions of language may work very well in ordinary situations. But sometimes translation becomes too taxing and language seems too slow.

But what is faster? And how shall we talk if we cannot use words? This is a fundamental problem. A battle between instinct and cultural limitations.

If we manage a way to deal with these limitations, we will clear a bottleneck for the flow of cultural material. This bottleneck has led to numerous struggles in the past.

Media have emerged from different abilities to clearing past this bottleneck. But if media is immaterial and the only material in question is the immanent emotion.

Or instead of being idealistic, the limitations of communication should be realised and accepted? The unnecessary ideal of human presence explaining all else might need to be put at rest.

Between these two options there is a third possibility that opens up. Within an interpretive framework, a range can be marked. The absolute certainty of language and visual culture's comfort with ambivalence lead to a stand-off.

Such a stand-off can only be cleared with an abandonment of all positions. No strategy will work, else in the iterative history of attempts of appropriating communities and cultures, such strategies would have become methods.

The intensity of personal voice cannot be stretched in such a scenario. It is not going to be resolved with virtuosity but with a ease with loose adaptation.

What do we remember? Do we remember conceptually intense narratives, or do we remember narratives that we cannot fully understand but we are still fond of. Experiences cannot ever be parsed fully. But in the unparsed magma of happening that becomes experience, what are the handles available for marking a known territory. How does unfathomable experience get pegged in one's interior world?

Do we cling to language as a safety-net? Are we afraid to understand what cannot be articulated in the construct that we are familiar with? Is understanding an act of authorship in a different way than the production of happening? If, for a moment we agree to move beyond language, what is the nature of the actual risk?