Bodies of Text

3/23/02

I get lost sometimes, a little out of touch with myself. I forget and then remember again who I am and who I am not.

A tree is not a tree because we call it a tree.

Words are arbitrary because they have no direct significance to meaning—the idea which they represent. So they are symbols.

Ideas—the way we think—is done with a system of symbols. The intangible is made tacit through symbols.

Symbols are metaphors: a metaphor is an analogy between two different things which share a certain likeness.

In general, symbols represent something beyond words. If we comprehend with words, then something beyond words can be said to be incomprehensible—beyond comprehension.

If words represent ideas then a tree is an idea. Is the tree a physical manifestation of a metaphor? Does the actual thing, just like its name, represent something beyond words? What if we call what we cannot comprehend ‘god?’

We give many names to the same concept.

Human expression only imitates an experience, an emotion, a phenomenon that occurs outside the realm of words. But if behind every idea there is something more that we cannot describe…doesn’t that make it all the same? One. Continuous and perfect. Life as the manifestation of an idea that no one person alone can fathom?

Maybe I’m crazy, but it all comes from a source I can locate within and around me that words fail to explain time and time again. I am not looking for answers, only trying to prove to myself that there is no question.