Experience and words are not the same

The longest obituary will never contain a life

“I know that travel is valuable because most knowledge can’t be written down.”
–Sasha Chapin

You could go to the Amazon rainforest.
Or you could read about it in a book.
Do you think there’s a difference?
Your body already knows there is.

(And if you think they are the same,
Use my coupon code,
Go buy this helmet,
And never speak to me again.)

If you think they’re not the same,
You already know this bitter fact:
That words are woefully imperfect.
Experience and words are not the same things.

Words aren’t worthless, of course.
Metaphors heave light onto darkness.
Laws let you sheath your swords.
Poems carve beauty from the mundane.

But words are not what they measure.
A waterfall is meaningfully different than “falling water.”
Heartbreak is always peculiar to the ballads voiced in her name.
The longest obituary will never contain a life.

Words are technology, nothing more.
A mind is a private tornado even to yourself.
Your therapist is a mortal with problems, like you.
She cannot read you, and you are not your thoughts.

Even if you read every book ever written,
You would glimpse only a sliver of human experience:
Namely, the fragment of history someone wrote down.
(Don’t forget to tip the patron saints of lost time.)

And if you hurled every book ever written into a machine,
You’d have yet another technology,
Predicted to destroy our way of life.
The know-nothing that makes nothing, but words, words, words.

The know-nothing is your boyfriend who won’t shut up (about taking your job).
Neither waterfall, nor rainforest, nor heartbreak
Can be experienced from his precious plastic helmet.
Nor will it protect him from This Life.

Next time a friend has a profoundly meaningful experience,
Don’t ask them to render the experience into words.
Invite them to remember the feeling in silence.
That’s where the answer lives, if there is one at all.