Language has the power to brings us close together or keep us worlds apart.
Whether comparing languages, or recognizing the complexity inherent in one's native tongue, our capacity to master this art of communication helps us not only identify with others, but also identify with ourselves.
Our sense of self is framed with the words we choose to use, and the words we selectively cast aside.
Language enables us to distinguish self as more than the communities, or the families, from which we are born, we can leverage the spoken word and explore our evolving sense of self.
Our words carry the power to build and to destroy, to rally and to cut down. We discount the weight inherent in our speech, all the while witnessing the shifting and shaping of ideas, concepts and movements initiated by persuasive expressions of thought. We see ourselves in relation to, and apart from, the signified and signifiers our words serve to represent.
Literary theory frames our transition to the Symbolic Order from the Semiotic Chora.
The Semiotic Chora representing the stage before we each as children acquired language and began the art of self expression with words. The transition from primal to civil as we grasped at language to be heard, feel seen and communicate our perceptions to those who cared for us.
With every word, we were socialized, diminishing our connection to the primal nature within.
In mastering language, we were simultaneously overriding our sensory capacity to connect, to feel and to be seen.
We find our place as signs, in the waves of what is signified, self-identified by the words we grasp, or recognized through the signifiers spoken, a reflection that breaks the glass between reality and perception.
There will come a time where we must acknowledge... that somewhere along the lines, this social and constructed sense of self becomes lost in translation.
We fail to find the words that align with our becoming, we fail to satisfy our thirst to frame our evolution, with what is spoken either to ourselves or with others. Our attempt at feeling seen, being heard and communicating our perceptions fail us. With this feeling of disconnection we are again confronted with our primitive self, when we have grown beyond the utility that language once procured.
This is our crisis, our identity calamity.
Forgetting the self we once were, the version of ourselves that could not be captured with words.
In this moment we are confronted with our nature.
Wild, free and primal.
Without words to share, this sense of self has permission to simply be, as nature is.
Realize, that though language might bring us together for a time, we are still connected in the Semiotic Chora. Still of nature, connected to all that is beautiful and wild, best reflected by the unspoken nature within.
We are each still, and have always been, a reflection of the needs, desires and emotions that will not be reduced to words.
In time, with stillness, we recognize that in this state, we are home. Finding our way is beyond the use of language, reclaiming our primal, is how we find our way back to self.
No words necessary.