Silence of the Man

The great religions hold that there are some things we can’t talk about. Plato and Aristotle and Wittgenstein thought so too. Any sentient human being also knows this.

That’s one cause of silence, and a good one. But another – and your reference to a place of need suggests it to me – is that experience which is too immediate, too raw or too confusing just isn’t yet ready to be described in words. Memory and distance are needed. Wordsworth spoke of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”. Words, even when they depict harrowing or merely dreary experience, have pleasure as their effect and raison d’etre. Whereas unprocessed experience has no raison d’etre at all. It is the “etre” without the “raison”. It may occasionally give pleasure, but more often boredom or pain. While we’re enduring unmediated Being, we need stoicism or courage more than words. Maybe we even need a dose of religion. However, having come through any particular patch of experience, the survivor longs to tell the tale, in more or less skillful words, whether it be tragic or comic. If told well it will give pleasure in both the telling and the hearing, will redeem experience itself. That’s why words exist, and why we can’t do without them, and why the greatest of the arts is literature. –So speaketh Parson K.J.

Reply