There is a vocabulary to the emotions of human relationships and feelings. There are a lot of books about this; many firm, concise sentences have been declared. We may explain ourselves as a single word written one thousand times, or as many do, we may write nothing. There is a certain versatility to the absence of words and the ambiguity of potential explanations. There is a perfect complexity to the formless abstractions that have conquered the uncivilized and turned our fears into markets. I like these a lot. I prefer to think that the mathematicians and physicists keep key formulas ridiculously convoluted so that only a minority finds them accessible. Their language, their syntax, their symbolism just as complicated as the equations that drive our global economy or our interpersonal relationships. Systems as complex and potentially unknowable as the weather. However, the wonder of our contemporary world is not in what we’ve found, but in what we’ve determined we cannot find. Our everyday reason is beginning to move in similar directions.
Listen: I have a lot of things I can’t discuss because the discourse would destroy them. A lot of things that can’t be talked about because they’re too obscene or not obscene enough. I’m wasting time even mentioning them, and it’s a problem we all have, every single one of us whether we know it or not. The variables are all best left as unknowable Greek symbols, inverted in cube roots and imaginary numbers. For the sake of my argument, we are going to substitute the language of mathematics with a bastardized English. I’ve wanted to create a thousand verbs to elaborate upon them. A hundred dozen nouns of materials, shapes, forms borne of emotions, expectations, assumptions, revelations. I’ve wanted to enumerate these visions and graph them from a million data points, between social capital and synthesized personalities. Big numbers to keep me company, wrestling these tiny fragments caught up in pockets of the dark. Hopefully we’ll never be able to do this. These are transformative ideas rather than explanatory ones: these struggles are the conversations we should be having, and we are beginning to realize their importance between hashtags and occupations.
