What we’re looking at
Words are meaningful only because they stand for something greater than our conception. Like salmon swimming upstream, my thoughts keep trying to retrace their steps back to the source. We’ve become so accustomed to the words we use, we’ve forgotten what it was like without them. They’ve now supplanted that experience—the very one that gave them birth—and have usurped its place as the basis upon which we found conception.
Before they came, we did not know. And when they came, we learned to know. Both were present then. The words of knowing stood, each in sharp relief upon a firmament of not knowing. They were treasured as exceptions to the norm. Overwhelmed by our unknowing, we approached the words of knowing with great care, always asking, “What do you mean?”
This is what we’ve forgotten. We now approach words thoughtlessly, like masters dispatching slaves. “We know what they mean,” we tell ourselves, “what further regard do they merit? Get to work!” We trample on our words without respect—for how can we respect something whose reason for being we have forgotten? Cobbling them together as mere pavements for our strident purposes, we disregard them as base reality; homogenous bricks for satisfying our desire.
But once they were not answers; they were questions. They stood like bookmarks, reminders: “Here is a mystery to be examined.” The entirety of the unknown was just too vast to take in whole. So we parsed it out into smaller units. Any mathematician solving for multiple unknowns understands this approach. While the fundamentally unknown is unknowable, its various elements—all mysteries unto themselves—appear to relate in knowable ways. This perception of pattern gives rise to ratio (a is to b as c is to d), and ratio, which is reason, to word. This is what we’re given. All that we have named, all that we think we know, is nothing but our equational notations organising the patterns we see swirling in the ever-abiding mystery of our existence.