The Names of Thoughts

Spoken language is a beautiful, hopeless attempt at expressing thoughts with small movements of our faceparts and air. Out through the mouth; in through the ears. Written language is a beautiful, hopeless attempt at expressing the same thoughts and actions with notation on a surface, made by hand. Out through the hands; in through the eyes.

We come to writing after speaking and spend much longer acquiring it. The thoughts are first and we learn their names. We get more organized on paper, learning to spell the names of our thoughts; arranging them in straight lines, more or less. And this changes us.

By reading, we might learn words that we’ve never heard before and might not ever speak out loud. This is the same as studying a picture of a hotel where we have never stayed: recognizing a place without quite knowing what it feels like to arrive there. Dictate a thought onto a screen and you might feel the strain of trying to adopt the device register. (Perhaps yet another form of language that has yet to be formalized or maybe just a parlor trick, like juggling chainsaws.) In any case, it, too, feels strange: out through the mouth, in through the eyes.

Our speech and writing evolve, but are never quite the same because they can’t be. They are from different worlds; they are different worlds. Where the ears must be quick, the eyes can linger and return. Where the mouth and tongue must be agile, the hands can pause indefinitely to fidget and fumble.

This would probably sound very different if it weren’t written down.