You have been thinking about how writing in its act has come to reflect strength of will and ability to rein the mind back home from its wanderings as opposed to the desperate medium of catharsis that this stint was when it began. This guides one by hand to the memory of revering words, being moved to ache by the juvenile epiphany that the greatest instrument humanity had against its inherent isolation was words. Of the longing to collect as many words as was essential to catapult abstractions across the tall walls of individual containment, of still remaining with the sense of having failed. Of the slow, dismal revelation that words were inert symbols, that they could never make tangible what was intangible, irrespective of how closely one examined a word before offering it to the other or how extensive and careful one’s collection of words was.
What Kim Krizan has to say about the inert nature of words in Waking Life.
Gregory Orr, River Inside the River
Someone is telling you of her travel to Italy for an exchange program. She remembers with fondness the junior doctor she'd spent most of her days with. Of how the young girl had taken your reminiscer on a shopping expedition— she had wanted to buy gifts (she had settled on perfume) for her visiting lover, who lived in another city with his wife and kids. Of asking the Italian girl why she'd covet such a miserable entanglement. Of the girl's simple answer: I'm happy when we're together. All this, transpiring in a battered common tongue, native to neither.
Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (trans. Richard Howard)
You have been learning simultaneous languages at the hospital. You find it amusing that the first set of words you picked up in each language was ‘pain’.
Noppi?
Vali?
Byathā?
Vedana?
you’d ask children, trying to incite the history of pain, its location and severity, while hoping to not misprize it, you were convinced your eagerness to learn a language was impudent given the milieu. To your surprise, you found that your amateur attempts yielded sincere responses. Your floundering phrases, buttressed by clumsier gesticulations, which often end abruptly and apologetically do not estrange you as you'd feared. Attempted albeit hesitant language as a medium of amity.
It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.
— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980
Pickings from French: mer (sea) and mère (mother). Turning them over in your head for days on end. Finding strange solace in this meaningless homophone. One speaks of his free spirited friend, Ella. Another laughs, says ela is leaf in his tongue. You're a happy onlooker.
Quite in love with these pictures of ama (sea women), Japanese sea divers famous for collecting pearls and seafood, whose origins have been dated back to as early as 927AD.
So beautiful, beloved friend 💜