2.8
Thisness and its metaphoric structure subvert attempts to capture the experience in language. This is part of why it’s difficult to explain the transformative experience in words.
Language is rooted in particular gatherings of beings/being. It’s not that language is placed overtop of the world, lain down over things. Rather, the ontological gathering of beings (§2.5), wherein things are gathered as the things they are, also gathers language; for there to be a word for a thing, it must appear as amenable to language. What we encounter is already ‘in’ language: it can already be spoken to, even if the word is lacking or uncertain. This includes the structure of grammar: for example, in English and some other European languages, this is a noun-thing; this, a verb-thing. The structure of the language one is immersed in is deeply rooted in a particular gathering of beings.
Nonetheless, while beings are gathered, and language too is gathered, there can be a slippage between the two — for they live different lives. Languages fit the world just so. But beings have different faces: different aspects can dawn. When this happens, when a new wisp or fragment of beings and world becomes manifest, we may be able to speak to it only by shifting our language.
It’s also undeniable that there are things we cannot put to words and not just because we cannot find the word right now. – A being, any being, is always revealing aspects and projections that escape any language. Much of the experience of a particularity, of a thisness, escapes language.
Lyric language, as Zwicky points out, tries to precipitate just such an experience: rather than trying to precisely index the experience, we realize we can properly speak to it only if our language takes on the form of the experience in its expression, reverberating through to the listener.[1]
Lyric poetry often deploys metaphors, which short-circuit our regular linguistic pathways and thus our perceptual/ontological pathways. They short-circuit the calcification of language (tied to calcification of thoughts, perception, ontology, and so on): i.e., the ruts of our linguistic use that preclude us from sensing other aspects of things around us.
[1] ibid, LH68, LH73, LH111–2, LH133, LH155, LH181, LH216, LH219, LH239. Zwicky, The Experience of Meaning, p. 27–8, 31, 44.