Part 4: At the Threshold

Which brings us to:

the look in the eye/I.

Tell me you don’t know this:

you flood – you are filled up with an exceedingly distinct comprehension, you are “in it,” “getting it,” for now, let’s say this is a “profound sensation.”

simultaneously (usually) you are experiencing what seems to be an all-over, thorough-going “impression” (or impressions), this all meeting in what we are calling “profound sensation,”

inner and outer; incoming outgoing; expression impression, these are overwhelming and gravitate to interpretation and communication, expression and recording or description, in signs or series of signs and gestures.

Might be through sound or gesticulation, a color shaped, an action or behavior…these interfusions come out / in all the time, it is what it is to be living, it makes us who and what we are, the world and ourselves, to the world and to ourselves.

 

Words are the signs that conceivably might carry the largest amounts of this sensation…could they be found, or adequately arranged. It would incarnate this experience – give it body and form and objective factual existence among I and not-I.

Animals shriek, bark, run, tussle, shiver, bite, rise up, lay low, paint, scratch, gesture and so forth…but human animals have this additional matter – concept-conveyors and description-declaimers – able to stand in solidly, as beings, for gestures, sounds, colors, actions, emotions, events, and so on…separately. Words.

Outside rushing in and through, inside processing around and out, the threshold filled with signs like skin…thoughts, perceptions, emotions, sensations, commands, refusals, representations, questions…apparently everything that can happen in this mutual conditioning of person and world can be lexically signed.

The threshold double-passageways of terms.

Promising…exciting….intelligible….and yet?

Would you not agree that the moments the word-beings actually seem identical to the enmeshed flow are extremely rare?

You see her, or have seen her so long, you gaze, smell, listen, observe. You touch her, you are touched by, you taste her, this intimate between…you must convince her, exclaim to her what goes on in this…

you stammer or embellish, metaphor or moan, sing, laugh, cliché…

but it does not come out “right.” The arguments are unjust to the message intended. The emotions pour out through the sieve of the letters as you say them…uncontained, unconveyed, “at a loss.”

Or you read Heidegger or Pessoa, Blanchot or Lorca, you are moved and all the lights come out as in Spring, the sense of their words courses through you like brandy…you call your friend, you begin to sputter, attempting translation, your words sound foreign, unconvincing, unclear and inane…it is impossible to paraphrase – “unintelligible and untranslatable but not incomprehensible” after all, you “got it,” you’re suffused with “it” – the comprehension, reciprocation, “profound sensation” of the mutual conditioning of self and words/world…isn’t this what words are for? And yet…

This is the threshold of creative language. For speaker/writer “new layers of reality and insight have opened up” – language is required to factualize, birth this presence…but all the language you know seems unable…

Which brings us to:

the look in the eye/I

Tell me you don’t know this…

N Filbert 2012