i may or may not have a real problem here.

I have spent so much time thinking about language lately. It's interesting how a notion that started out as a sentence in a Faulkner novel turned into a thought one year ago. Then into a perspective on love and the meaninglessness of words. Then into a consuming and personally-defining idea. And I have been thinking about how the idea that words are futile is perhaps the most solipsistic, selfish, self-involved, culturally-fragmenting idea possible. If words mean nothing, we may as well never communicate with one another. However, I do believe that non-verbal communication and the simple day-to-day feelings that we experience mean everything that words cannot handle. It isn't that humans cannot communicate our feelings effectively with others, it's that we can only do so when we decide that words are not the correct way to handle this communication. Words are simply symbols for gut reactions and intense emotions rendered inexpressible by the complexity of the human mind. As Kenneth Burke puts it, humans are the "symbol-using animal" even though we are also the "symbol-misusing animal, inventor of the negative, separated from our natural condition by instruments of our own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, and rotten with perfection."

But for all of this cynicism it isn't true that we are simply separated from our natural condition. Or at least, it isn't true that we have no solution for this. I think recognizing that language is bounded and honoring our limited capacity for understanding will connect us to others in the end. I don't think that this comes easily. It only comes when you are honest with others about this, and that, of course, takes intimacy and time. But I can't live my life thinking that there is no way to communicate my happiness. When I think about it, I know that I don't believe that my happiness is inexpressible. I just know that it isn't expressible through words. That leaves a million other ways of approaching my destination, if there even is a destination after all.

Related to this, I read a fantastic piece about magical realism in The College Hill Independent. Here is a short excerpt written by a Brown University student named David Noriega and here is the full article.

"When Gabriel García Márquez delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1982, he was issuing a plaintive warning as much as an expression of gratitude. On behalf of the generation of Latin American writers exaltedly categorized as ‘magical realists’ by the academies of the First World, he dispatched this simple caveat: Be careful how you read us. Be careful, because the magic and wonder you have so consistently gleaned from our words is not a mere stylistic indulgence; it is the only way we have found to interpret a reality perhaps too grim and violent for you to understand."

But if the only words that these writers can use to explain their unimaginable pasts can be exploited and commodified, how are we ever expected to comprehend each other's experiences?

And I have two more points to make before I return to my real life:

1. I need to stop reading so many modernist novels. I blame them for all of this self-reflexive pondering.
   
2. Why is the College Hill Independent so fucking amazing? I could never imagine such a beautiful piece of literary criticism running in the Daily Bruin. Put quite honestly, one never would. We don't do book reviews in our paper. Granted, this paper was (they don't seem to be putting issues out anymore, wtf!) a joint effort between students of Brown and Rhode Island School of Design and it isn't their official school paper, but I wish there were something so beautiful and intelligent that I could hold onto here in Los Angeles.