A fish underlies the nature of words

please read with audio

I want to describe how I’ve been feeling recently, but I lack the creativity to explain it in the way I’d like to. For me to say those words makes this amalgamation of feelings seem like it's extremely complicated or difficult to understand. But, I don’t think it is. It’s just I can’t describe it. Like seeing the redness of red or the taste of a morning coffee. Qualia that are so obvious and easy to understand as the subjective observer, but impossible to describe adequately.

This train of thought, I guess, just points to the subjectivity of all things. It’s how at the end of the day, our struggles are other people’s strengths. How in a normal conversation, the mental load required to speak even broken Japanese is completely unreciprocated in a native speaker’s mind.

How an ideal grammatical interpretation of a sentence would yield the same surface when spoken out loud, but to a native mind no such interpretation would be consciously present or even known to ever exist in the first place.

This fact to me, the indescribability of subjectivity, is what is so frustrating. That everything on the surface has a seemingly infinite amount of possible theoretical interpretations. The worst part is, I don’t want to believe this is true. I want to believe that if I write words on a page, their meanings stay constant, that they will always describe the state of how things were.

But any ounce of hope I once had about this being true, I don’t think I can trust anymore. I can’t reconcile my experiences with a static order of things. It’s like the words I am writing are the fins of a large fish protruding above the water, but the nature of the actual fish below is for the observer to decide.

Somebody once said that people only listen to music when they see themselves in it. I’m paraphrasing of course, my memory is never sharp enough to remember the specifics, but I like this phrase. To me, it generalises the whole of art as well. In other words, art is only meaningful if the observer believes that they can make out what the fish is underneath the water.

It’s funny, I don’t really like the way my internal voice looks when written down; the way it spirals into complex metaphor and longwindedness. In reality, I am only trying to describe things a child could understand. Feeling frustrated, needy, fearful, unsure. I seem to have a habit of doing this, tricked into explaining universal emotions with overanalysis, thinking that I’ve struck gold. This happens a lot in maths, where the method I’d use would quickly devolve into overly complicated steps. Like how it takes Russell & Whitehead 360 pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2.

“From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1 + 1 = 2.” (from Vol I of Principia Mathematica)

They’d follow it up in volume II with…

“The above proposition is ocasionally useful”

I find it hilarious. I wonder if they were aware of how funny it was at the time? Does an emotion need a mechanistic explanation? Does a number require a 360 page proof?

Maybe the fish was never meant to be seen after all.

Maybe all I ever needed to say was I’m feeling a bit lost today.