Of Ways and Language

It was the summer of 2003. I walked barefoot on a California beach for the first time in my life. Saw the dusk in awe, no photo or video would do it justice. And I preferred it that way. There is no closer experience than actually being there, a cynic would say. But the changing colors… was it dark orange..? Was it blue-ish with a tone of yellow in some spots? What was I truly seeing?

It felt strange, limited, to see the words I tried to use to describe my experience sag in their attempt to faithfully describe the occurrence. Then it felt like whatever I couldn’t describe with words diluted noticeably faster from my mind than other portions of my memory. Will a concept I can’t describe or label with words cease to exist? Or did I just bump against the edge of the frontier between language and experience?

Maybe I was experiencing the world through the language with which I was taught to understand it. My eyes would then gravitate more strongly towards the things I can conceptualize verbally, and mainly ignore those I cannot. Words thus wouldn’t merely describe reality, but strongly contribute to its creation.

“The map is not the territory” – Alfred Korzybsky

So, words and symbols are just maps that aim to represent a reality that can never be so reductive as to permit capturing even a fraction of what it is, …rather than what is, they trap what we can point at, not what we can live.

And yet, we usually behave as if the opposite were true.

We argue over definitions as if sharpening the map could somehow make the terrain less wild. We inherit categories—love, success, intelligence, freedom—and spend years optimizing within them, rarely stopping to wonder whether the category itself has already constrained the range of what we’re capable of perceiving. It’s not just that language fails to capture reality; it quietly edits it.

At some point, I started to suspect that the problem wasn’t simply that words are insufficient—but that they are selective. They illuminate certain patterns while mercilessly casting others into shadow. And once something falls outside the reach of language, it becomes harder to notice, harder to remember, harder to even believe it was there at all.

To me, this raises an unsettling possibility: what if entire dimensions of experience are effectively invisible to us, not because they are rare or abstract, but because we lack the linguistic scaffolding to hold onto them?

This is where things begin to turn, and I start to lose sleep.

Because if language shapes perception, then expanding perception may require more than just “paying attention.” It may require stepping outside the default vocabulary altogether—suspending the so-human reflex to immediately label, categorize, and conclude. This isn’t a proposal to reject language, but to loosen its grip.

To see, for a moment, without immediately translating into concepts and then automatically contrasting against our preconceived notions of what reality is, but actually what we believe it “should be”.

The kind of seeing that doesn’t rush to name the color of the sky, but lingers in the ambiguity of it—where orange bleeds into something unnamed, and the unnamed doesn’t feel like a gap, but an opening.

And maybe that’s what I brushed up against that evening in 2003.

Not a failure of description, but a glimpse of something prior to it, assuming any type of order be it chronological, cross-sectional, or otherwise.

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There’s a quiet tension here that has echoed through philosophy and art for decades. Albert Camus, a foreigner in our world, was concerned with the limits of language in confronting the absurd. For him, the human condition is defined by a mismatch: our craving for clarity against a world that refuses to provide it. Language, in that sense, becomes both a tool and a coping mechanism—it gives structure to the chaos, but at the cost of flattening it. The moment we name something, we make it bearable… but perhaps also less true.

A similar unease appears in some of the work of Georges Didi-Huberman, who explored how images—and by extension, words—never fully disclose what they show. There is always an excess, a residue that escapes interpretation. To look at something, he suggests, is not just to understand it, but to confront what resists understanding. Language tends to rush in to resolve that discomfort, to close the loop. But what if the value lies precisely in keeping it open?

Cinema, too, has wrestled with this boundary. Federico Fellini often spoke about the inadequacy of words compared to images, dreams, and memory. His films feel like attempts to bypass language altogether—to communicate something more visceral, more fluid. Fellini seemed to trust that meaning could emerge without being pinned down, that ambiguity wasn’t a flaw but a feature. In a way, his work invites us to experience rather than interpret.

Even in more structured, analytical traditions, the cracks show. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, through the hyper-rational lens of Sherlock Holmes, demonstrated the power of precise observation and deduction. Yet, Holmes’ brilliance depends on noticing what others overlook—not because it lacks words, but because it escapes attention. Language may describe the footprint, the ash, the gesture… but it takes a different kind of awareness to see their significance. The map is detailed, but only if you know where to look.

All of this points back to a subtle but profound idea: language does not merely describe reality—it trains us on how to perceive it.

And once trained, we rarely question the training.

Think about how quickly we move to label an emotion. Sadness. Attraction. Anxiety. Closure. Each word compresses a rich, multi-layered internal state into something manageable, communicable. Useful, yes—but also reductive, like the question of whether we’d prefer to cry on a luxury car or a bicycle. Over time, we begin to feel through these labels, as if they were the experience itself, rather than mere approximations of it that are useful to elicit a debate, yet unable to describe anything close to a reality.

What gets lost in that compression?

Perhaps the very texture of being alive.

That sunset in 2003 wasn’t just “beautiful.” It wasn’t even “a mix of orange and blue.” It was something that exceeded those descriptors, something that resisted being held still long enough to be named. And maybe that’s why parts of it faded so quickly—because memory, like language, prefers structure. It keeps what it can categorize and lets the rest dissolve.

But there’s another way to interpret that loss.

Not as failure, but as evidence.

Evidence that there are aspects of experience that exist outside the boundaries of language—not inferior, not incomplete, but simply different. More immediate. Less filtered. Closer to whatever reality is before we begin to carve it up into concepts.

The question, then, isn’t whether we should abandon language. That would be impossible—and undesirable. Language allows us to share, to build, to connect. It is one of our most powerful tools.

The question is whether we can hold it more lightly.

Whether we can recognize, in moments, that the words we reach for are not the thing itself. That between perception and description, something is always left behind.

And maybe, if we’re attentive, we can begin to notice those edges again.

The places where words hesitate.

Where definitions blur.

Where experience feels just a little too large to be contained.

Not everything needs to be named to be real. And not everything needs to become a post in a blog, such a 2000s thing.

Some things, perhaps the most important ones, only fully exist in the brief, untranslatable moment in which they are lived.