Unsaid Words

Last week I was fortunate enough to take part in a whisky tasting.  When I say tasting, I mean more of a pre-meditated binge on single malt, interrupted from time to time by witty banter pertaining to Scotland.  Whilst fond of whisky, my taste is still very much at the nursery stage.  No, that’s too hopeful.  My whiskey knowledge is not only pre-school, but a conceptus, germinating slowly in the womb that is my palate.  I feel I’ve ventured onto risky ground speaking of foetuses in conjunction with scotch; never the twain should meet, except in a strictly metaphorical sense.  I am, after all, a medical student first and foremost.

As the evening went on, something occurred to me.  In truth, several things occurred to me; principally that I’d been disguising my silence with regular drinking, resulting in my relative drunkenness; but there was something more.  Whilst I often could not articulate the difference between two whiskies in terms of smokey notes, gravelly undertones, sherry cask strokes and peaty tickles, more often than not I could taste it.  There was a gap between my experience and my expression of it, before which I was left helpless.  Something was evading description.

I’d had this experience before, albeit on a more profound level and in a more sober state.  Standing before some of the masterpieces in the Louvre or the National Gallery I’ve been filled with something deeper than words, deeper than thought.  Actually, I have the feeling there were some thoughts along the lines of ‘move out of the way you knobhead tourist’, but that was only on the most superficial of levels.  In my depths the art had evoked a response that I could experience and know fully, yet which I could not explain to a friend who, being a philistine, did not feel the same way.

Are these unspoken experiences confined to the realms of whisky and visual art?  I think not.  It could be argued that every human expression, such as the use of language, is the child of an internal notion, an idea, or a form.  Whilst this internal realm can be affected from the outside (by art, music, sport…), its complexity can never fully be expressed or realised by another but ourselves. Perhaps such expression is more complete in some forms than others; a piece of poetry may more easily be able to convey the complexity of one’s feelings than a mathematical algorithm, for instance.   This more wholesome form of conveyance is still however imperfect; in order to be effective, it has to be imperfect.

I am asking this: what gives rise to all outward expression?  What is the ‘inner consent’ that gives birth to the word ‘yes’, or the inward experience of unrequited love that gives breath to a sonnet?  What form do these pure feelings or notions or ideals take, if not one of words with their syntax and grammar?  Do the offspring expressions tell us fully of the parental concepts?

A particularly pertinent example of this separation between our surface expression and foundational happenings, is desire.  Ask a man what he wants and he will no doubt reel off one thousand and one needs, hopes and dreams: an external expression of his hungers.  Then ask the same man to try and put his finger on the basic root of his propulsion towards these things, to try and understand what it is to want without language  and he is likely to find himself on unchartered waters, unsure even of what he desires at all.  Give it a go.  What is it that you really want?  Even with your most superficial desires, what is it within you that gives rise to them?

 

What if Homo sapiens had not developed a capacity for language; would our internal experience of the world be any different?  It may be worth considering how much of our lives we pass living in this exterior façade of imperfect expression without truly connecting with or considering the base level.  It seems that language in particular can cloud what is going on below the surface within us, often being empty and vacuous rhetoric.  Perhaps we should spend more time trying to come to terms with the powerful currents under the surface rather than simply paddling in the superficial ripples.  Perhaps this is a value of silence that the world is all too ready to forget. 

It seems that this deeper arena of unsaid giants concerns everything in the human experience: from basic motive to our knowledge of the world.  What would happen if we were to occasionally bask in the simple beauty of pure concepts, happy to keep them unsaid?  What if we connected with our core desires that drive our life instead of being content with shallow wants?  What if we were to sit in the difference between Glenfiddich and Glenfarclas without saying it, without spelling it out, without caging it?  I dare suppose that a life containing such contemplation would be all the more wholesome for it.

Needless to say, I was put to bed by 10.