Imperceptible. I was skimming through photos of an event hosted by the UofT - MSA Magazine (The Muslim Voice) and I recalled my piece and how reflective it is of the smiles on people’s faces. The thing is, how we portray ourselves in moments of immeasurable joy or sorrow, the feelings that emerge at the glance of an old friend, a new lover, a beautiful scenery – all these things are uncontrollable. They are stripped of preparation of correct posture, accurate word choice and all notions of political correctness. They are simply, emotions. However, when we speak of poetry, prose or even language, we are forced to shape how we portray ourselves and our thoughts to the outside world. But what we’re really doing is taking the moments, the flashbacks, the scenery, the glances –everything that instills an uncontrollable reaction, be it a smile, tears, anger, or peace – and making it understandable to those who cannot feel exactly what we feel. It’s always been ironic that we require polar opposites to understand the value or misfortune of happiness or sadness, of wealth or poverty, of absence or presence, respectively. Now the question becomes what if we only had these feelings to go by and no words to convey them? Would we feel as loved, as happy, as hurt as having someone explicitly make known his/her feelings through a verbal sentiment? Unfortunately, it’s hard to believe we would ever know what love is without that proclamation by our significant other, our mother or our best friend. Our society has become limited by communication, which in turn, leads to miscommunication and misunderstanding. But the most beautiful thing is, the knowledge that even with these misunderstandings and miscommunications due to a language, text or distance barrier, the emotion would not – and does not - disappear. Our emotions do not dissolve at the loss, or expense, of our words. Our thoughts do not need to be accompanied by our language – we think and feel, regardless. However, if we do intend to express our thoughts into words, our language is indeed dependent on the existence of those feelings. In other words, we may not be able to say what we feel, but in order to say anything, we must feel it first. Fortunately, or unfortunately, languages have attempted to verbalize emotions so specific that sometimes a single word may be too restricting. Consider the fact that great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause such as the ache of the soul or a longing with nothing to long for, has been familiarized in Russian and not in English. Or how a word describing a state of fear or distress created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery can be used in a sentence in Czech. It just goes to show that maybe the language we speak may not have a word for what we feel, but someone else in a different part of the world feels the exact same way. The only difference is the ability to express it - in a word. The greatest thing I’ve ever been fortunate enough to understand, although it is difficult to grasp in this day and age, is the notion of being loved without being told “I love you”. Few people, really and truly, have ever told me that they loved me. I’ve continuously lived in my own world of wordless love in which people do not say those three magical words that people often use as a last resort, but it is embedded into every action, every look, every touch and every single way a person can express the emotion without saying a word. “I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.” — Jack Gilbert -M
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 20:28:40 +0000
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