When one is alone enough, one finally begins, again, to write. At the end of a dry and wordless spell lies the feeling of returning home after a long trip, being able to converse freely in one's native tongue - no longer having to take the same care with which one handles fragile tableware at someone else's dinner party in handling the most basic of expressions.
But speaking in a second language offers a kind of defense, that excuses ambiguity, convolution and other such obscuring elements of speech. A lowering of the listener's expectations that enables one to say: "Yes, well, perhaps I am not being entirely clear...but if you only understood my dialect, I could paint it all so beautifully - as an artist in his element - and surely, then, you would understand."
How often one feels as a foreigner in another country like a locked chest of antiques - commonplace items, carried into another culture as the most exotic and mysterious of treasures. And again, as children - how we invent secret codes to encrypt our most private and hidden thoughts; we scrawl them across our diaries in invisible ink. How we mourn the great tragedy of translation - because that which cannot be translated is of the highest value, locked away in the vault of another language for safekeeping.
And we are all multi-lingualists in this sense - each of us operates in a multiverse of symbols; each set of meanings a language of its own. A language of thought, of emotion, and then of behaviour. A language of religion, of culture, of place. And we guard, with all our different modes of being, a single one that is no longer a collection of descriptors, but that described.
Grids upon grids, as Foucault describes, placed one atop the other over history, to provide us with new ways of knowing - and describing truth. Organising the world, delineating its boundaries and demarcations - yet it seems now, there is more to be known than ever before. I love thinking of the idea of the universe continually expanding through time and space, as if mockingly, ridiculing our attempts to contain it.
For now we see in a mirror dimly - awaiting what? The gathering of reflections into their very object, the subject itself. Symbols come boldly into their meanings. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us... when the shifting shadows that herald an oncoming light are finally dispersed, scattered into the wind, when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away... when meaning arrives in the full force of its substance, rising through fissures to the surface in a tide - submerging description, language, forms in its course - sweeping over all things, and finally to carve, across the flat and formless ground, the shoreline of eternity.