october 17, 2020
I've been struggling to find non-cliche descriptions of some of my recent mental shifts. In the process of that struggle to find the exact right words, I get further and further away from being able to invoke the sparks, the warm wash of realization.
The effort to describe a subtle experience is basically an exercise in revisionist history. For every word conjured, instead of asking "does this match the feeling I had?", every word is compared to the last one ("Is this closer than that?"). By this process, we attach ourself to the latest random phrase instead of marinating in the delicate mix of emotions and physicality. In an attempt to grasp at even one part rather than forget the whole thing, we oversimplify to the common denominator phrase.
It's like the process of taste-testing words to describe an experience leaves a coat over your tongue, till the original taste is less distinguishable from the coat of random words you picked to try and imitate it.
The other funny thing is that we trust that our intuition did generate the right description for the most prominent aspects of that feeling. How do we know that the word didn't just rise to consciousness by chance? The only way to get better at writing is to read more. We need more diverse descriptions to compare against in this process so we don't reduce multifaceted, tactile experiences to the most convenient articulation.
This might be where a lot of the magic of existence gets lost - either in the inability to describe, or the rush to describe it at all.
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