Love
"We looked at each other, afraid to speak, afraid to load our feelings into words in case the words cracked and split. I pinned my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Hold in, hold in, one creack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me. Fed on, what is vital is sapped. I decrease. It increases. Bowel to brain of me, this pain. What words? What words can I trust to convey this fragile heart?
Stopper it up, heart and words, give the pain nothing to feed on. Still now, my still heart. I will counterfeit death as my father counterfeited life. On that continuum we meet.
Grandmother and I sat face to face over the sepulchral plastic of the breakfast bar. Common and rare, to sit face to face like this. Common that people do, rare that they understand each other. Each speaks a private language and assumes it to be the lingua franca. Sometimes words dock and there is a cheer at port and cargo to unload and such relief that the voyage was worth it. 'You understand me then?'
I wanted her to understand me. I wanted to find a word, even one, that would have the same meaning for each of us. A word not bound and sealed in dictionaries of our own. 'Though I speak with tongues of men and angels but have not love...'
'I love you.'"
- Death, Gut Symmetries, Jeannette Winterson
Indeed. Perhaps, after exploring the vagueness and vagaries of language, we come back to the conclusion that the word that engenders the most sympathy, that enjoys the most commonality of meaning, because of the universality of the experience it describes, may well be love. The most precise word, the seed for sympathy, something to base our communal construct on, to overcome the isolation of consciousness. The only word that everyone understands, that is the common point to build our shared and constructed reality on, a connection solid enough to bear the weight of the illusion of substance.
"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends."
- Death, Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson