Everyone has lost a dream to language. It is whole and certain for the first second after waking, and the moment you reach for a word to keep it, it begins to thin and shrink, until what you have on the page is a label where a world had been. The label is accurate. It is also almost nothing. I have spent a lot of my life trusting words, and the thing I most want to keep is the thing words keep failing to hold. For years I thought that was my failure as a writer. Lately I think it is mostly a property of the language I think in, and the culture that raised me to think in it, and I think I can finally say why. Language is the technology we have for moving an inner state from one mind to another, and the move is always approximate. Some of the signal makes it across. Most of it does not. I have written about the visitors who arrive in that dropped part, the presences that reach me as figures and never as sentences. This essay is the other half of that question. Not what they are, but why…
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