The Spiritual Interior of the Word

Over the past thirty years, as I have deepened into studying the art and science of connection through a number of trans-disciplinary lenses, including the linguistic, I have been intrigued by lexical gaps in the English language, places where it is missing words. If a language is a map, a net, and if as Wittgenstein suggests, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world¹,” then the places where a language has holes in it–the gaps in the net–tell us the limits of the world people speaking that language are trapped in.

A lexical gap, by definition, means that someone else (some other language) has noticed that something exists or could be differentiated, and yet there is no word for it in the language that you speak. Perception is often fused with language in very profound neurological ways. There are cultures that don’t differentiate between the colors blue and green: people who grow up in those languages are unable to distinguish between the two colors. Is that language or optics?

This is what Wittgenstein was pointing at. Linguistic limitations become neurological and metaphysical. Physics tells us that the world is made out of quarks and atoms. Wittgenstein, and John² before him, would have us believe it is woven from the cloth of words.

One of my particular fascinations has been the study of ways of knowing that are missing from the English language. This is due in no small part to my own journey of self-discovery, which began in earnest when I started meditating seriously around the time I dropped out of Yale University, and started having experiences daily that I could not translate into English.

Because I could not say what I was experiencing in a language that I could communicate to anyone else, the beginnings of my developing an interoceptive vocabulary made me feel more alone, which was surely ironic. When I was twenty-one, sitting at a coffeeshop with a poet, a man of leisure, and several other free spirits who had the luxury of engaging in meandering conversations at 10 am on a weekday morning, I was introduced to the Japanese word kotodama.

I think about this introduction as though it were to a person.