Ironically, or perhaps rather apt for someone who wrote a conference paper on Truth and Silencing, I’ve been feeling all kinds of blocked when it comes to my thesis writing. For the past two-three weeks, it’s been a sentence or so a day, if I’m lucky. In the past week, it’s been a couple of paragraphs a day. Elsewhere, I struggle with communication. I think of things like the utter failure, the disconnect between the rawness of everyday experience and the rawness of language. It doesn’t always connect. It doesn’t always commensurate.

Description comes in, becomes rather essential, I think. You may have noticed this blog has been using figurative and metaphorical language. I consider these my textual dreamings, overlapping the metaphorical, inner universe and the nuts and bolts of daily existence. Being of a phenomenological bent, I cannot but help transcribe everyday experience into the utter inevitability of geworfenheit that we experience from one second to the other. My world is thus defined by my ontology.

So, Language and Me.

I’m a writer who believes in the many ways in which dialogues both public and personal overlap. I think about this all the time. I think about how the world is both bigger and smaller than what we see. I think about projections and the utter failure of our human minds to fully grok things that are Ready-to-Hand. I can’t help being like this all the time. I am a Heideggerian girl after all.

I don’t post to this blog seeking comfort. I don’t even disclose that much. And honestly, there really isn’t much to disclose! Emotionally, I’m healthy enough. I have a support system, even if it’s mostly long-distance. Mentally, I’m frustrated by this writing block, but I am still agile. Physically, I’m active, and swimming at least an hour a day. Things are getting done, silent moments are being enjoyed. And I am still the person who believes in being responsible for one’s own emotional and mental welfare. Self-care is important. But so is understanding that letting go every now and then has its own virtue.

We have to dance in the sunlight, but we have to be able to embrace the depths of the soul as well. The dark, hidden corners are important. The private spaces are important. Being focused is important. Being led astray to dance in dew-soaked glades that straddle both moonlight and treeshadow, is important. So don’t panic when I dance in darkness, it is but for the moment. In the next, this writer will be basking in the sunlight like a complacent kittycat or mermaid drying her chlorine-tangled hair.

And perhaps some days, I will feel like an encounter with the unknown, or the Void called “The Utter Banality of Existence” tears off one of my wings like a thoughtless boy. Then, naturally, I will have to pick my wing up, fasten it with some scotch-tape. Those days are as inevitable as the days in which I warble to the sunlight, bedazzled by its reflection on water or by the way it changes green into so many shades of dark and light. Language, you are a difficult thing. I love you, and I hate you, as all writers and communicators must, and will. Some days you are as smooth as the surface of my desk. And others, you are as complicated as old tree-bark.

But on certain nights, or gloaming hours, you pick me up gently, give me new wings, all translucent and silvered, you allow me to fly. And everything is okay again. We wipe the slate clean. We settle. We dance this lover’s dance between the unbirthed thought and the polished morpheme, syllable, every aching clause and conjunction. You may be a beautiful failure, language, but when you drop off the tongue, when you ooze onto my pages, I will fall in love with you once more.