Indeed, I’ve been eager to explore genuine meaning beyond specific languages—a concept reminiscent of Plato’s ‘idea’ that we can never fully grasp.
Sometimes, this quest leads me to deep pessimism. I particularly grappled with this when I was creating novels in my twenties, feeling frustration and agony over the inconsistencies between meanings and the random structures of words, including phonemes and sounds, used by different people from different backgrounds, social classes, or personal particular experiences accumulated throughout their lives, even among those who speak the same language. For example, to me, ‘love’ encompasses the meaning of ‘humanity,’ ‘willingness to dedicate’ and ‘philanthropy’, but many people tend to reduce it merely to ‘sexual relationships’ driven by mischievous hormonal impulse, which I still find hard to accept. This disconnection was difficult for me to bear, and I grew frustrated with the arbitrary links between meanings, sounds, and words. I often created several protagonists in my novels who developed acquired aphasia due to their feelings of betrayal and mistrust regarding g this randomness in meaning and language.
After reading Han Kang’s *Greek Lessons,* I decided to stop writing on my own. The work offers stunning insights into the primitive anti-language realm of the unconscious mind, which lies hidden beneath the structured, language-driven human consciousness. Her protagonists tenaciously attempt to reveal inconsistencies of their world, often pushing themselves to extremes in their struggle against cognitive—and sometimes physical—violence. They drive themselves into ruthless self-experimentation to confront the contradictions of the world around them in this process. She articulates the topic I had been trying to explore with such intense beauty in her poetic prose.
It felt perfect, and I no longer felt the need for my own work on this topic, although I still love my novels! lol
© 2024 Isha Green. All rights reserved.
The terror was still only vague, the pain hesitant to reveal its burning circuit from the depths of silence. Where spelling, phonemes and loose meaning met, a slow-burning fuse of elation and transgression was lit.
- P10
The night is disturbed.
The roar of engines from a motorway half a block away makes incisions in her eardrums like countless skate blades on ice.
The lily magnolia, lit by the glow from the street lights, scatters its bruised petals to the winds. She walks past the voluptuous blooms straining the branches and through the spring night air, which is thick with an anticipatory sweetness of crushed petals. She occasionally raises her hands to her face, despite the knowledge that her cheeks are dry. - P13
There is evil in this world, and it causes the suffering of innocent people.
If God is good but unable to redress this, he is impotent.
If God is not good and merely omnipotent, and does not redress these things, he is evil.
If God is neither good nor omnipotent, he cannot be called God.
Therefore the real existence of a good and omnipotent God is an impossible fallacy. - P29
Your eyes widen when you are genuinely angry. Your thick brows rise, your lashes and lips quiver, and your chest heaves with every breath you gasp. As soon as I returned the pen, you hastily scrawled in the notebook:
In that case, my God is both good and full of sorrow. If you are attracted to such nonsensical arguments, one day your own real existence will become an impossible fallacy. - P30
That when the most frail, tender, forlorn parts of us, that is to say our life-breaths, are at some point returned to the world of matter, we will receive nothing in recompense.
That when the time comes for me, I don‘t see myself remembering the full range of the experiences I‘d accumulated up to that point only in terms of beauty. - P94
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