By accident, I found

Not as an end to the project, but to portray how far it has come now that it is time to present, I would like track its movements since its birth.

Seeking to study language, I started with silence, supposing that if I separated myself from language I could better see it, or even achieve a state completely outside of it. I soon realized this to be a faulty platform, and ended up learning quite the converse. I found I could not escape language, in its spoken or unspoken forms, and that my very worldview is built from it. (see "Of the essence!"). I could neither sustain the practice of silence in a culture that demands my social participation in speech. I realized if such a state "outside of language" exists, I was not likely to reach it with such compromised attempts. Fortunately, my defeats were also small successes in disguise. In recognizing language as too pervading a contender to eliminate from my life, I could instead become its disciple, and fine-tune my ability to listen carefully. What I learned was mostly through its paradoxes and surprises.

I had wanted to know: how do our uses of words affect our sense of connection to reality. In every selection of words expressed, an infinite number of other words are silenced. I had suspected that through the filtering process of verbal communication, something was lost. Several days ago after being stuck in an aggravating traffic jam I heard and realized the positive connotations to the words spoken: "It was just an accident. It's been cleared up." I knew in that instant that words are shortcuts to feeling fully, and allow us to bypass difficult truths of the human experience. Because we use words for a variety of purposes beyond to communicate what the words themselves say, we are not held accountable for what they may imply. I have seen throughout the course of this project that indeed words make worlds. I propose we be held accountable for them.

We use words to fill spaces, to seek affirmation, to turn the ears of another into a sounding board in which we experience ourselves. We use words as a diversion, to silence some things while drawing attention to others, such as in an awkward encounter. We use words to include and exclude our fellow humans and creatures. We use words to objectify living things and justify our damage to them. We also use words to represent our love, but they are not our love.

We use words despite the impossibility that nothing will be lost in translation. Misinterpretation is an inherent part of communication and the pure intention behind the employment of words is tinted by the process of articulation and receiving. We use words even though they make suggestions we hadn't considered, and the listener will surely be shaped by subconscious associations.

In some cultures and ages, words were sacred, and through song was the universe created: "Perhaps a diluted use of words in a culture in which they are no longer sacred makes for a diluted sense of reality." (see "Of the essence!").While they connect those who speak and hear them, they disconnect speaker from the immediacy of the subject, instead suspending the speaker in a Hyperreality of meaning, snaring her in a web of concept.

Luckily, we have language, all kinds of language, consonantal and speechless, that do not avoid the matter as words do but share it: flickering eyes, a long pause, an airy index finger, a stillness that says "storm", the mosquito singing gratitude in your ear, the rattle and bell of a streetcar, clocks and other conventions that instruct us through our days... There is no such thing as silence. We are always being spoken to.