The Using of the Words

A friend sent me pages from something they are writing some days ago. I read them in the morning and understood, for the first time, that their sentences move the way they speak. I had read their work before I heard their voice, yet I had to hear them first, and then read them again, to understand it.

A person is a weather system. You can stand in someone's prose and know what the air is doing.

This is the thing language was supposed to be unable to do. Wittgenstein spent his life arguing, in one form and then another, that the words we use do not contain meaning the way a cup contains water. Meaning is not inside the word, waiting to be poured into the listener. Meaning is what happens between us when we use language together. There is no private content that gets transmitted intact across the gap between two people. There is only the using, the practise, the shared form of life that gives the words whatever weight they carry.

By this account, what I felt reading my friend's pages should not have been possible. The state of their specific thinking and inner world should not have crossed the page. And yet...

The contradiction is the whole problem. Language is incoherent in the sense Wittgenstein meant. No sentence I write contains my state of being the way a vessel contains a substance, the reader cannot unpack me from the syntax; and yet language is the only tool we have. There is no other medium by which one interior reaches another. We have the words, which fail, but we have nothing else.

So the question is not whether language works. The question is what we are doing when we use it anyway.

Ram Dass writes that the only thing you have to offer another human being, ever, is your own state of being. I read this line some time ago and have not moved past it. It seems to me that what he is describing and what Wittgenstein is describing are the same situation seen from different sides. The words do not carry the state of being. The using of the words, the offering of them, the choosing to send them, that is the offering. The state of being is not in the sentence. It is in the act of writing the sentence and sending it.

There is a fear that comes with this; not a large fear, only the small daily ones: that the offering will arrive as nothing, or as the wrong weather, or as something the reader cannot stand inside. The fear does not stop the offering, and the reaching is not separate from the fear. The reaching happens with the fear in the room.

I write sentences and I do not always know who reads them. I send them anyway. Every writer I love is doing the same thing. The pages I read this week were a friend's offering across a distance that should have made the offering impossible, and still the offering arrived. Not because the words carried the meaning, but because the using of the words was the meaning, and I was there to receive the using.

the sun moves and yet stands still