Of Alternative Means of Expression and the Limitation of Thought

Everything I've written on guitar lately sucks. I can't come up with a cool sounding riff or chord progression, much less an actual coherent song. And I won't even talk about the lyrics. I just can't fid a way of saying what I want to say without actually saying it. Maybe the problem is that I don't even know what I want to say.

I've always thought it was strange when people said things like "I don't know how I feel." How could that be, I thought: you have direct access to all the relevant information. How could you not know how you feel? What a strange world it must be, I thought, to be not even be able to tell me how you feel.

But here I am, and I honestly don't know how I feel. The word "sad" just isn't really doing it anymore. It's not that I'm feeling something deeper or more extreme than sadness - I'm not depressed or anything - but that word just doesn't seem to be accurate. Other words seem closer: nostalgic, regretful, mornful. But they don't really hit the mark, either.

This brings to mind an interesting debate. Wittgenstein argues (at least I think he does - who really knows?) that language must come before thought. For Wittgenstein, it was nonsensical to postulate a thought that was not forumalated in language. This argument always seemed flawed to me, though. Wittgenstein says that you need language in order to have thoughts. But he never explains, and I don't see how he could explain, how a language could come into being without thought preexisting it. Simply put: if we're all sitting around in a Wittgenstein-ian world, pre-language, we can't think. Without thought, how can we so much as have the impulse, the desire, the ability to begin to build our language? There's simply no way to emerge from the pre-lingual stage to the post lingual state. Wittgenstein's analysis is, therefore, I believe, incorrect.

But let's say that thought did come first, as I believe it must have. The question must still be addressed: to what extent can I have a thought and not express it in language form? In 1984, the Party has begun the process of replacing English, or "Old Speak," with Newspeak, a condensed form of English that doesn't have as many adjectives and with a severely restricted vocabulary. Through Newspeak, the Party hopes to limit the range of ideas that people can have, thereby ensuring everlasting control: if the people can't think to revolt, then they never will.

But I wonder if this is true. Let's say that Newspeak eliminated the word "unjust." Would humanity then lose the ability to detect injustice? Or would we still think or feel that something was unjust and then have to talk our way through it, with paragraphs or pages expressing the idea we express now with the word "unjust?" And what if the words that made up those paragraphs and pages were taken from us, too? How could we ever make another human being know that we thougth something was unjust?

So what does this have to do with anything? I don't know really, other than that I feel like any attempt to explain my current emotional state would be . . . inadequate. It would be like using "double-plus bad" when what you mean is "evil." You can add all the superlatives you want to "bad," it still doesn't come close to the meaning of the word "evil."

I don't know, man.