The insufficiency of language

In an earlier entry I said

Is this why the Gospels sometimes seem to have a surprisingly matter-of- fact tone? Some states can't be extracted to dessicated words. The full state of the body, the mind, the whole can't be encoded in the ciphers we see with our eyes, trying to reconstitute the original. Only the greatest poets, writers, and artists come close, and they require audiences with their antennae all finely tuned.

Today I read in Borges' Selected Non-Fictions an essay called John Wilkins' Analytical Language, which Borges closes with this luminous quote from G.K. Chesterton:

Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colors of an autumn forest.... Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

Last night we watched the movie Iris, which is about Iris Murdoch, the strength of her mind, her personality, and her command of language, and the loss of these as she succumbs to Alzheimer's, lovingly accompanied by her husband John Bayley. In a late scene she's sitting on the sand at the beach, tearing pages from her notebook and paperweighting them with stones, and in a moment of frustrated lucidity she lifts all the stones and lets the paper fly, saying what words cannot say for her. At another point I wanted to say, placing myself in the scene, that words aren't necessary. There really are just these existential pleasures of company. One of the hardest things about Alzheimer's may be seeing the transience of thought -- seeing it disperse like steam instead of bubbling noisily, persistently, and containedly in the pot. And realizing that all our thoughts are like this, in the long run. Unless we write them down for others.

September 13, 2002 04:12 AM