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I am going to regress a bit and go back to Zadie Smith’s “Fail Better”. There were many things that I loved about this piece but, one of the things that struck me right away in reading about Clive’s creative process is that: language is incredibly limiting. In the story, Clive discovers that he needs something more than simply “the right words” to describe what he feels. Zadie writes that Clive found it difficult to describe his main character’s silk blouse, her pencil skirt, and even harder to get under her skin. When I write, I experience these same feelings of frustration & restriction that Clive experiences in writing his novel. Sometimes when I try to describe something I have experienced I feel that words are not enough, that there is something that language can’t fully capture. This course focuses primarily on storytelling…yet I have found and continue to find that words alone can’t paint the whole picture. And as a dancer, when this happens I rely on movement  to express whatever I might be feeling.

In many ways I agree with Wittgenstein’s theory that human beings are trapped in a fly bottle of language. Our whole world is built around language and because of this we can never escape the restrictions of language. I don’t believe there is any one right truth but, I guess my question is, can we express or truly capture individual truths even with the restrictions of language? Does the evolution of stories have to do with this attempt to reach beyond language?