It’s a funny thing, words. Strange how they lose their meanings the more you stare at them.
This is not a normal article, I don’t think.
I’ve tried to write it several times. I keep deleting it and starting over, sure that there’s something more I want to say that I’m spiraling towards and yet never quite reaching.
Each time I get closer and closer, but I never quite get there.
There’s a concept in math of boundaries — the idea that certain equations will interact with a graph in a very specific manner that allows them to approach a number but never reach it. Imagine a line swooping down from a nearly straight vertical and becoming almost parallel with the horizon. With every inch forward, it approaches true horizontal, but by the very nature of its function, it will never reach it.
It can get so close that the difference is only noticeable on an infinitesimally small scale, but it will never reach it.
Words are sometimes like this. They spill and spiral from my mouth and hands, but no matter how much I write they never quite reach the point. They never quite say what I want them to say.
I don’t talk much around strangers. The problem is worse when I’m talking, I’ve found. I’ve always had a hard time having conversations and as an extension of that, writing dialogue. The trick with writing or talking is the ability to sculpt all the wet clay spilling off my tongue into something recognizable. I’m still practicing how to do it.
The problem I started out with was blocks of texts like monsters of raw square marble swallowing up the page. They were rigid. People didn’t talk like that. They didn’t go on for paragraphs without end unless they were reading off a speech.
Conversations were meant to flow, like rivers winding back and forth across the countryside. Each participant spoke only a few sentences at a time. The rivers of my own conversations were rarely so calm. Either there was no water at all, or the words spilled out over everything and I just kept talking and talking and the sentences would become so long and convoluted that you could hear each anxious breath in every syllable just hoping someone would understand what I was trying to say but —
The point was never quite reached.
The world we live in is fascinating. The further you break it down into its constituent pieces, the less it makes sense. Like staring at a word for too long, the more we zoom in on what makes our reality tick, the less it looks like anything we recognize.
At the level of quantum physics, the world exists only in the sense of probabilities. Particles are only particles under certain circumstances. In reality, they act more like waves. At that level, we can only know a particle’s position or velocity, but never both at the same time.
Like waves crashing down on a shore, we can know how fast they are coming, but because of the length and area they take up, there’s no definite position of where the wave is. Like a rock thrown into a pond, creating ripples that extend in all directions, we know the exact position of where the wave began, but the velocity is not definite because the waves are rippling out in all directions at once.
Perhaps words are better described like particles are waves. Maybe on the smallest level of existence, they don’t really exist at all either. Maybe all words are is rain on still waters, and you can either know their position or where they are going but never both at the same time.
In the end, all written languages are just collections of symbols we’ve agreed to use, usually to represent spoken noises that we’ve also agreed to use. Words are further broken down into morphemes, which are the smallest units of words that still retain a meaning, and from there, into phonemes, which are the most basic building blocks of words, often sounds or motions in the case of signed languages.
At the level of phonemes, there is no meaning attributed to each sound. There are an estimated 800+ phonemes across all known languages, though most languages only make use of about 40 of their choosing. Phonemes are each, in a sense, infinite in their usage. They could be anything with the right combination of other phonemes beside them. The phonemes make morphemes, the morphemes make words, and the words are bound by symbology into what you are reading right now, painted onto this corner of the internet.
It’s a strange thought, how nebulous everything is when you break it down so far. How sometimes the world only makes sense mathematically.
At an atomic level, you never actually touch anything, you know. Your electrons are interacting with your surroundings at all times, pushing them away from you just as your surroundings react in kind. At the atomic level, there is a barrier between you and anything you touch.
Like the equation approaching a boundary but never reaching it, so do the electrons approach touching but always repel each other away just enough that true atomic contact does not happen.
The combination of the movement of your electrons and the state of the world at the quantum level suggests that all humans are in truth is just patterns of energy.
It suggests that all matter, in general, is just patterns of energy.
So what are phonemes but rippling, wave-like patterns of energy themselves — fragments of infinite possibilities? Not quite the same as matter, sure, but in a sense, not all that different?
At that point, what are phonemes and their symbolic representations? What are morphemes? What are words?
If they are patterns of energy like us, can they interact with us? Can we hold them and yet never quite touch them?
Do they repel us just as we repel them? Do words lose all meaning as we stare at them because the longer we do the closer we get until their metaphorical electrons and ours cannot stand to be any closer?
What is communication between patterns of energy that can interact but cannot touch?
I don’t know.
And still, the point is elusive. I approach closer and closer, but never quite make it to that little idea that sparked it all. It evades my attempts to put it down on paper.
Its electrons push against mine. It doesn’t want to be known.
If you’ve made it to the end of this article and are confused, that’s okay. It might be the closest thing there is to a point, really.
The point isn’t that you’re confused, but I don’t expect confusion to be an uncommon byproduct of what I’ve written so far.
These are just… thoughts.
Thoughts don’t have electrons, so far as I understand, though at this moment (1:30 AM, as of writing this) I’m admittedly not sure what a thought is biologically and neurologically speaking.
And yet I feel the point still stands in the scope of metaphors and similes, and it lives a strange kind of life there.
Today is not writing advice. It’s not a story or an explanation.
In the end, it’s more of a question.
The question put simply is “Can you hear me?” and more complexly, “Is being heard even possible?”
The question is all at once a mix of “Am I doomed to never quite be able to say what I’m trying to say?”, “Is there an unavoidable barrier that keeps me from connecting to other people in a truly meaningful way?” and “If there is, is it unique to me, or does everyone feel this too?”, which in the end are some of the questions literature and language are perhaps most perfectly poised to answer.
That’s all writing is, really. A call into the void, saying “I feel this. Do you feel it too?”
It’s okay if you don’t. It wouldn’t be a question if there wasn’t more than one answer, after all.
In the end, there may be no point.
No true answer.
Either way, thank you for reading. I’ll see you all in the next article.