Joseph Voelbel

The following suppositions were made by the Greatest Thinker in the World: words are not in fact separate, or discrete, as they seem to be nor are they ever strictly literal. Instead, they exist in a continuum of accumulating meaning. This is due to the constant ability to change the meaning of the previous word or words. For example, if I say, “I see you,” the implication is that a person, namely, “you” are being “seen.” And yet, if I add to this statement, “have disappeared,” now an entirely different proposition exists. Further still, if I add “into your work,” this now reverses the meaning again and infers the person is in fact there, but merely “not there” in the figurative sense that they are preoccupied with a particular task at hand and cannot be bothered.

What begins as seen then appears to be not seen, in the end means being seen in a removed manner. Here, in one sentence, comprise three different intents, each new word illustrating further clarity of the former. Because of this phenomenon (the capacity to repurpose the meaning of language that has previously been spoken), it is the author’s supposition that all speech is not composed of discrete articulation, but instead a string of instances of inflection that approach articulation (where articulation confers distinction from other sets of words). If true, then Language cannot carry definite meaning (though it can carry temporal and figurative meaning), because definite meaning, that is literal meaning would mean it would be immune to a redefinition of that meaning, but as we have just demonstrated, all language is subject to be redefined in the context of that which is about to follow it.

Thus, one wonders if humans will ever be able to articulate (make clear and distinct) what they mean at any given moment or maybe instead, can only inflect (color and reform) what they have said and in this manner clarify further what they want to mean with each successive element.

From this supposition the Greatest Thinker in the World surmised that the accretion of all speech, as a function of meaning, will never reach any singular definite meaning, but rather, is only approaching conclusivity, yet can never confirm it. As such, speech escapes meaning.

And yet to chose one word is to exclude another, there is death in speech. However, so long as this capacity to make more life exists (more words), and the vibration of sound the ability to satiate the human ear, then the notion that definite speech has been made will persist, ask publishers, or ministers, but in opposition to this, one might consider the supposition herein, (from the greatest thinker in the world) which is that this consideration is in fact a fallacy.

The author (whom is a far cry from one able to even allege such a supposition) believes, so long as our willingness to make sounds persists, meaning may remain yet entirely formed. Expression here is an infinite journey traversed only covering half the distance to the destination. The unreachability of this final “destination” evokes the holy and ineffable condition of Language (a processes of aggregating sound pockets that morph continually in accordance with greater and greater complex surroundings, enhancing signification in the approach to signification aimed toward some “point” where “words” suddenly “matter”, that is, quite literally, instantiate. And at such point literal meanings would be possible.

Language, as constructed by Sound, is our primary vehicle for signification, though it may not be the mode by which we achieve it. Despite this, it is quite feasible that via evolving communications, the human species might better share not just sound pockets through speech, but more complex linguistic information which contains scent, tactility, and imagery.

Perhaps, in the future, when one says, “warm” another’s temperature will increase and if you describe the sweet smell of butterscotch my nose will taste it. However, even with such enhanced developments as synesthesia, human Language would still be a ways off from complete signification itself, which is to say absolute meaning.

Consequently, words are like legos added onto previous legos of expression in an inexhaustible attempt to arrive at some sort of edifice (meaning via articulation) nuanced entirely by inflection (the coloring of the block) and within this overlapping (the connection between what is said and how it’s meant) there is a necessary enveloping (just as a caterpillar wraps itself into a cocoon), and within this envelopment there is a necessary redefining (the dissolution of the contents within that construct), and from this necessary jump between what one usually says (as a propulsion of what one desires to mean) and what one wants to say, (from an objective consideration of what has expressed by what one said) until ultimately, an articulation has been achieved (this reappears in a metamorphic state).

The Greatest Thinker in the World inserted a point of fact here (if facts can be asserted in a literal sense, because facts, in their traditional sense do not exist as real but merely plausible in relation to what is perceived as factual in the current context of the progression of human gnosis, which itself is continually folding outward from and into upon itself, reformulating its own body, from what has been considered “known” and “true” - e.g., we come from fish, there is no God, there is nothing smaller than the atom, into what may also be true, we were painted by an artist, we are not alone but rather held, the world is infinitely small and vast, and that what is “more than us-ness” is also within us-ness, and everything else is as well, such that what were once “truths” reveal themselves to be theories, and not laws, e.g., gravity is theory and not a law, secretly it is a belief held stubbornly, a little known fact is that the most accurate beliefs don’t come from theories, they come from a fount of inner-knowingness, they come with an internal alignment with the flow of growth, the observation of experience, and the bitter embrace of wisdom), is that if everything ever spoken got wrapped up into one big strand of words and strung itself in circumnavigation around our planet, and then wove its way out from there ascending like a linguistic Tower of Babel, up into our star system and the heavens above, and if this spiral staircase were to become a single monadic implication amidst all the participatory elements contained in that journey, all the legos, every color, then, at that point, — much like the paradox developed by the 14th century thinker Mahmoud Al-Rahamid, (who asked if one could possibly taste their own tongue), — all of humanity would have the benefit of figuring out just exactly what it means to say.