Words Breeding Emotions

 I read Aqsa Ijaz's  Language, Emotions, and The Desire to Exist out of curiosity. I did not expect much. Instead, I there are ideas buzzing in my head that may not leave.

Some high points:

Despite language getting in the way of my own emotional expression, I argued in a recent public lecture—standing on the shoulders of a twelfth century Persian poet, Nizami of Ganjeh— that language itself makes the experience of our emotions possible. 

Language, or to use Nizami’s infinitely baffling word, sukhan, I proposed, is the epistemological tool, a distinct mode of cognition, that makes emotion knowable.I persisted in suggesting that language bridges the gap between the ineffable feeling and our constantly thwarted desire to name it properly, to know it. 

But there were questions. How does epistemology, poetic or otherwise open our mind to the nature of being? Doesn’t language veil our emotion rather than revealing it? Don’t we constantly use language to distance ourselves from the murky reality that is the self?  

For Nizami, the primacy of language in mapping the contours of our being as it experiences emotions is non-negotiable. In fact, he goes as far as to insist that our existence and the cognition of love unfold only within the structures of language. ....

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In his review of Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, Thomas Harrison notes that assigning the right word to feelings is the first productive step in mapping the inner landscape; the second is finding the right definition, which as C.S Lewis notes in his brilliant book, Four Loves, is the hardest task for the human mind. We, with our impoverished lexicons, are generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than define and describe what goes on in the murky underworld of the self. As Harrison aptly points out, the precision and thought we invest in packing our Amazon boxes is rarely something that finds its way to how we map our inner lives. This is probably why our heavily medicated depressions today do not yield beautiful texts such as William Styron’s Invisible Darkness, André Breton’s The Verb to Be, or W.H Auden’s The More Loving One, which at one point in the Western cultural history made English language reverberate with the precision and tactility of darkness. 

One thing I did in prison was look up words. It was one way of unsnarling the mare's nest that was my mind. The criteria was whether I could give a dictionary definition (or, often enough, an y coherent definition) of a particular world. One word that I noticed was mortified. It was not a word that came quickly to the tip of my tongue. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was an emotion we no longer recognize. I think certain behavior by some of our public figures has only cemented my opinion: Lauren Boebert escorted out of “Beetlejuice” musical in Denver after “causing a disturbance” and After Hamas onslaught, Trump criticizes Israel, calls Gallant a ‘jerk’. The comment above about "impoverished lexicons" brought this to mind.

I suggest reading the whole the article, unless you worry about having to think.

sch 10/14