Wandering Words

Translation reveals how physical and functional likeness code connotations across language and form, affecting encounters even with the mundane. The German »Bakenfuß« (beacon foot) denotes weight blocks as both holders of guidance and warnings of misdirection. They stand their ground with holes for signposts to penetrate – footholds for progress while defensively directing one to retreat, retrace steps, turn back along the unfated path to the present that now couldn’t be otherwise. The subtlest anthropomorphic association transforms passive weight block to bodily mass; in pairs they rest together as if lying lovers longing for a pipe to thread through their meeting chests.

Terms chosen to describe objects often emerge from familiar reference points of self and surroundings. The world is rationalized and defined through the lens of an observer who permeates self into the ontically other to the point its actuality dubiously becomes a figment of mind, a product of perception with no intrinsic realness. When worldly inter-workings beyond mental intervention emerge firsthand, they begin to speak themselves; qualities and causal relations of the external penetrate speech as their own eloquences. Evolving from proximal to poetic, the Metaphors We Live By become the Metaphors We Live By. Cases in which a word has no direct translation or a phrase’s explication can’t quite capture a full feeling demonstrate how deeply they touch experience. Such associations persist in the standard lexicon as the only apt way to describe that connection between outward and inward, reciprocally informing future expectations to impart back on the reality they derived from. Literal and figurative, world and word resonate in equivalence.

Perhaps poetry is actually a philosophical and scientific extrapolation of the correspondence between language and noumena. If reality is in a state of perpetual withdrawal that can’t be apprehended, if meaning is more multiplicitous than can be comprehended, the poet encircles these supposedly absolute limits to peek beyond their threshold and encompass their full volume. Attuned descriptions tapping all five senses act as convergent arguments or mathematical proofs deducing axioms from multiple angles. A play on words or other irony exposes confounding states of logical paradox existing simultaneously, allowing them to vibrate in profundity. Further linguistic blips point to a larger incongruity than could have been intentionally implanted. The poet teases out flukes and unravels insights proving language knows more than its own author, eludes its human inventor as much as the world from which they both transpire and are inherently implicated.

»Wayfinding« itself exemplifies unrealized knowledge hidden within a word since finding one’s way dually requires reversal. Clichés of learning from past mistakes and ensuring history doesn’t repeat itself corroborate the universality of this underlying sentiment that to know where one’s going one must know where they came from. Such encoded reversal is not only a looking back but an inversion from positive to negative. One is equally directed by what they leave behind and aim to avoid moving forward. Back routes and alleyways demonstrate detours as guiding as any promise of what’s ahead. Orienting towards and away from what’s typical, identity is forged by finding who one is as well as who one isn’t.

Perceiving the world backwards and traversing the outskirts embodies a Queer Phenomenology in which elusiveness is present, relatable, even foremost. Like definitions come to define expectations, identity becomes readily identifiable in what’s already out there, though such shared qualities remain unnameable and unuttered, felt instead of labeled or spoken. Those who are comfortable with and find comfort in ambiguity hear the resounding silence of shared sensuousness. The act of concealment is an unspoken but loaded confession — a minimalist queer abstraction in which the physical and causal interconnectedness of objects reflects intimate relationships and the marks they leave.