If I had more words

I feel I sometimes don’t write because I lack enough words, because my vocabulary is so short, so restricted. If I had more words in my medieval chest, what else would I say with them? Would I be able to describe the beauty that I see, that I hear, that I smell? Would I be able to describe the emotions elicited by these stimuli? How may words does one need? If I were a painter, would I complain because I lacked enough colours?

Words delimit concepts. They anchor them so that they cannot move with the tides of life. They confine them with four walls. You, word, are this and not something else.

Only in poetry words become fluid, with changing meanings depending on the light that illuminates them and the eyes that see them. Poetry cannot be explained because words do not mean what the dictionary says. They express something else. They transcend their own mould to join the word next to them and form a wave, an ephemeral scent that passes and subsides, returning to its container as if it had never left. Yet, that slight fluttering causes a shock wave in the reader. Losing precision in its meaning, the word hits a hidden target that only it sees.

…words do not do the secret meaning any good, everything always becomes a little different the moment it is spoken, a little distorted, a little foolish-yes, and that too is very good and pleases me very much, I also very much agree with the fact that what is one man’s treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another.

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Hesse insists on this idea that wisdom can be found but not transmitted and therefore words are useless in this regard. Maybe wisdom is an experience, not a thought, and therefore it cannot be formulated.

Maybe this is why the unconscious communicates with symbols rather than precise words. These symbols possess something atavistic and universal that needs no scientific explanation because it is understood intuitively. It is known.

The unconscious wants to express itself; it needs to be seen. It throws its tentacles into the air, just in case. It is not enough for it to exist, it needs to communicate with its rational opposite, and above all with its unconscious fellows. A soul speaks to another soul with undefined liquid words that mean something else. And I, a rational mind sheltered behind seven blue walls, open the window for them to pass through and I just watch.

Who knows with what meaning they were said. Who knows what reaction they will provoke in the reader, whose rational mind will perhaps be confused, but whose unconscious will have received that little clue, that sketch of a signal that unequivocally tells him he is not alone.

Maybe it would be better to have fewer words…