I have been preoccupied with a morbid thought ever since I began writing about the limitations of human language. The fact that language sometimes falls shorts in expressing what we think and feel is by no means a novel idea. Philosophers, immemorially, have debated on the nature of human language and perhaps ironically have attempted to demonstrate through words how inadequate they can be. This realization is quite frightening, partly because it implies that regardless of how clearly or brilliantly we endeavour to express ourselves, the essential substance of our experience will remain within us, forever inaccessible to anyone outside our physical self.

However behind this peculiar idea, something even stranger was peering through. I have always conceived words and perhaps even thought itself to be categorical in nature. Words, to me, are a vessel of thought and through its utterance we differentiate human experience. By ascribing symbols to objects and communicating those symbols with each other, we attempt to share our experiences hoping atleast tentatively to bridge the gulf that separates one individual from another. But the purpose of words and as an extension of thought itself is to grasp something for what it is in its “totality”. We do not rest content with symbols themselves but through them always try to portray and infer the objects they represent. Through differentiation, we want to find that which is being differentiated.

This relationship between words and things also seemed to belie the relationship between form and substance. Any work of literature, art or music harboured this essential quality of trying to grasp substance devoid of form. Through words, we try to negate language. Through music we try to transcend sound. Through art we try to push the boundaries of space and time. Every human endeavour is a constant striving to negate form through form. However, the laws of perception dictate the impossibility of apprehending such a formless entity. And besides, differentiation is also the essential condition of human existence. Without form, substance is merely a seething mass of nothingness.

It seemed to me that all of human activity was essentially an attempt to undo the evolutionary gift of consciousness to strive towards this nothingness. We are clearly separate from each other but there is something in us that yearns to be one. That yearns to return to the oblivion from which it sprang. That yearns to remember life before remembering. Such an inexplicable yearning which peered through all human endeavours makes life now for me all the more frightening.