Saving the materialists

[Federica]

I was certainly wrong to the extent that I said we should try to resolve this issue from the intellectual perspective alone, without trying to understand the higher cognitive experience of at least the Imaginative spectrum (or the Intuitive as Cleric has pointed to). To the extent any of your posts focused on that spectrum, I was wrong to say you shouldn't be doing that. I think we both used Steiner's quotes which were pointing in that direction as well.

Ok, so you are confirming that it's a fitting reading of your thoughts to say that first you spent a long series of posts banging on my head because I was wrongly and foolishly “comparing apples to oranges” (with which you meant mixing diffferent levels of cognition in the protein metaphor), only to end up saying that Cleric has been comparing apples to oranges all along, and that, actually, comparing apples to oranges is amongst the most appropriate and sublime things to do.

Just let's pause for a second and appreciate how you operate.... and what's mervelous, you are still finding the courage to put black on white that the question is now that I should realize this and that

[AshvinP]

I was certainly wrong to the extent that I said we should try to resolve this issue from the intellectual perspective alone, without trying to understand the higher cognitive experience of at least the Imaginative spectrum (or the Intuitive as Cleric has pointed to). To the extent any of your posts focused on that spectrum, I was wrong to say you shouldn't be doing that. I think we both used Steiner's quotes which were pointing in that direction as well.

Ok, so you are confirming that it's a fitting reading of your thoughts to say that first you spent a long series of posts banging on my head because I was wrongly and foolishly “comparing apples to oranges” (with which you meant mixing diffferent levels of cognition in the protein metaphor), only to end up saying that Cleric has been comparing apples to oranges all along, and that, actually, comparing apples to oranges is amongst the most appropriate and sublime things to do.

Just let's pause for a second and appreciate how you operate.... and what's mervelous, you are still finding the courage to put black on white that the question is now that I should realize this and that

No, Federica... why is this so hard for you to understand?

"Comparing apples to oranges" = equating verbal/pictorial amino acid sequences with the secondary structure of imaginative scenes! This is what you did (all the way up to your last post to Cleric), but Cleric never did that. There is nothing appropriate or sublime about doing that, rather it reveals a profound blind spot in one's thinking. It is the classic error of confusing the contents of one's mental images for the mental imaging process itself, confusing what one is thinking about (via words, pictures, etc.) with what one is doing in thinking.

Do you get it now? (I suppose not, because 'getting it' is tantamount to confessing there may be a blind spot that needs to be illuminated)

If you don't get it now, then I am done for now, because I truly didn't intend a secondary discussion exactly for this reason. It was clear to me that there is much more chance of progress with Cleric, because you simply don't seem to try and resonate with the folded structure behind my words objectively anymore. I hope you will get back to his extreme example, like you said, and that he may follow up with additional thoughts.

[Federica]

OK, the reason I presented more 'flattened' examples was because I was trying to point at something very specific, yet the simplicity of the example backfired. What I intended was to distinguish on one hand the full spectrum experience at any stage of consciousness from ordinary to Intuition, and on the other the different ways in which we can represent aspects of these full spectrum experiences in symbols that utilize some more limited palette of our ordinary consciousness.
...
My point was only that from within the intuitive higher experience we paint both the visual and the verbal symbols in a similar way, in the sense, that in both cases we make an Imaginative representation. In a way, they are like the amino acids. But as far as the inner experience is concerned, when the Initiate lives in Intuitive consciousness and extracts the representations, this doesn't feel as if our verbally speaking ego has been pushed away into the periphery and we experience it 'from a distance', weaving in higher-order Intuitions which trickle down the gradient and we see how they become words sub-cycles when they pass through the (now foreign from the higher perspective) Earthly ego. It's rather that Intuition can speak directly through our ego as words or visual symbols.

Thanks for the transparency, Cleric. I follow what you describe and understand what your intention was. Would you say it’s possible that, whilst the Initiate finds the concentricity you have described, the normal person may get caught in a linguistic sub-cycle? In the same way that an Initiate - having extended control of thoughts and practically no will-of-the-wisp thoughts - doesn’t experience the thought cycle (continually reincarnating in the thoughts). or any other cycle, like the normal person does, who traverses the deeply unconscious zone of the cycle? After all, I have never been discussing the experience of an Initiate (obviously) but only the way language has come to work in our time for humanity, in order to explore what could be ways to recover its original nature, or redeem it. It starts from understanding how it works at the intellectual level. for normal people of these times.

Now coming to your example of someone who recalls some pornographic content (which I would deem is not common, because for those who consume such contents mere recalling would simply defy their purpose: they would just consume some more instead. But let’s suppose). When you say that the protein metaphor is applicable here too, because there is a ‘grammar’ to that pictorial flow, I think this is only meaningful if the protein metaphor is flatten to a mere microscopic scale. IOW, its 3D aspect is not necessary to describe that image flow (as I said for the silent film example).
"Isn’t this an example of degenerated pictorial thinking/imagination?" Definitely, it is an example of degenerated contents in the pictorial flow. But there is nothing wrong with what you call the grammar of the flow. Only the content inscribed in that pictorial vehicle is wrong. Indeed, what I was arguing is that in the case of verbal language it is different. There, the vehicle itself has problems. Not for the Initiate, but for everyone else. That is, there is something inside the abstract constitution of verbal language (grammar, syntax, combinatory character) that creates an additional layer of disconnection from original experience/meaning, which is independent from the intention at the level of the thought, and may combine with it.

Lastly, coming back to the shoelace example, I don’t understand why you say it’s flattened. I don’t think it is. I think it’s illustrative. As I wrote, I think it shows very well that the words by themselves are abstract, and need the pictorial flow to be made concrete and alive. Do you agree with that? What I mean is: I am left wondering if you just picked these examples too fast, and actually agree that the verbal flash “shoelace tying” is abstract, thus more estranged from the real experience than the pictorial flow, or if you think like Ashvin, that the issue is once again me and my rigid comprehension, and so the examples "backfired" only in the sense that they were not the most ideal to help my understanding? (please be straightforward here Cleric, if you can)

[Cleric]

Thanks for the transparency, Cleric. I follow what you describe and understand what your intention was. Would you say it’s possible that, whilst the Initiate finds the concentricity you have described, the normal person may get caught in a linguistic sub-cycle? In the same way that an Initiate - having extended control of thoughts and practically no will-of-the-wisp thoughts - doesn’t experience the thought cycle (continually reincarnating in the thoughts). or any other cycle, like the normal person does, who traverses the deeply unconscious zone of the cycle? After all, I have never been discussing the experience of an Initiate (obviously) but only the way language has come to work in our time for humanity, in order to explore what could be ways to recover its original nature, or redeem it. It starts from understanding how it works at the intellectual level. for normal people of these times.

Now coming to your example of someone who recalls some pornographic content (which I would deem is not common, because for those who consume such contents mere recalling would simply defy their purpose: they would just consume some more instead. But let’s suppose). When you say that the protein metaphor is applicable here too, because there is a ‘grammar’ to that pictorial flow, I think this is only meaningful if the protein metaphor is flatten to a mere microscopic scale. IOW, its 3D aspect is not necessary to describe that image flow (as I said for the silent film example).
"Isn’t this an example of degenerated pictorial thinking/imagination?" Definitely, it is an example of degenerated contents in the pictorial flow. But there is nothing wrong with what you call the grammar of the flow. Only the content inscribed in that pictorial vehicle is wrong. Indeed, what I was arguing is that in the case of verbal language it is different. There, the vehicle itself has problems. Not for the Initiate, but for everyone else. That is, there is something inside the abstract constitution of verbal language (grammar, syntax, combinatory character) that creates an additional layer of disconnection from original experience/meaning, which is independent from the intention at the level of the thought, and may combine with it.

Lastly, coming back to the shoelace example, I don’t understand why you say it’s flattened. I don’t think it is. I think it’s illustrative. As I wrote, I think it shows very well that the words by themselves are abstract, and need the pictorial flow to be made concrete and alive. Do you agree with that? What I mean is: I am left wondering if you just picked these examples too fast, and actually agree that the verbal flash “shoelace tying” is abstract, thus more estranged from the real experience than the pictorial flow, or if you think like Ashvin, and say that the issue is once again me and my rigid comprehension, and so the examples "backfired" only in the sense that they were not the most ideal to help my understanding? (please be straightforward here Cleric, if you can)

I think that what I tried to go into in the last few posts is something like this: Let's step a little back, put aside for a moment what goes through how many layers, and whether the words are degenerated or the grammar. We can first consider a simpler case - existential flow that primarily consists in sensory perceptions and more or less reactionary inner activity. In other words, we do not put deeper intellectual thought into planning, weighing things, and so on. Now such a flow - since in its essence is the World flow - is infinitely complex. Yet, for our simplistic life, only certain meaningful units stand out - things that we recognize, the intuition of what we can do with them, etc. This is the flow of our life in the most general sense. It's like saying "I don't know what reality is, I don't know what it is made of, whether it is top-down or bottom-up, however for my ego it consists of meaningful handles that I recognize and that I can drag against and navigate. What is 'in-between' and 'around' these handles, I don't know or care."

This simple flow is what I presented as the growth and transformations of inner experience. The lawfulness of transformations can be called life's 'grammar' - the way conscious events follow each other and relate, the way they tie with sensations of pain and pleasure or higher emotions, and so on. All of this, I mention in the most general and loose way. The point is to feel our flow through life, and even though we know that the World totality is incredibly complex, from our egocentric perspective, we navigate that flow by recognizing certain meaningful unities (like job, eating, driving, meeting friends) that we grab at and possibly push and pull at so that we can steer the flow. Of course, I describe this in our phemenological style, but what I point at is the naive experience of the flow. I don't know what a car is, whether it is material or dreamed (I don't even ask myself such questions), but in my naive experience it is something that rings as recognizable and comprehensible and I know how to utilize it such that I steer my life in a direction
I feel desirable.

Intellectual life can be considered as a 'picture-in-picture' mode where within the texture of the primary life-flow we also experience modulated mental images of that flow, which represent whole scenes. The goal is to grasp in this way meaningful unities of greater magnitudes and eventually rehearse certain steering patterns (planning) that we may then try against the primary flow.

My main point is that this mental rehearsal largely mimics the 'grammar' of the primary flow. This holds true even for verbal thinking, which in this simplest sense can indeed be seen as tokens that focus into symbols the intuition for the various meaningful unities and their dynamics. As such, verbal grammar is not that far removed from the 'grammar' of the actual lawfulness of the primary flow. Yes, there are certain specifics, such as whether we put the verb in front or behind the noun, how we place suffixes, how verbs change according to tense, etc., but at its basic use, verbal language is a means of depicting the primary flow and seeking more involved ways of navigating.

Now at least in my view, this more specific grammatical structure of language is not that of a problem. People don't get entangled in verbal thinking because they become trapped and waste all their mental energy on whether to put the noun before or behind the verb. Language tightly symbolizes the meaningful unities and transformation that we recognize in the primary flow. In a sense, the structure of language grows directly from the flow. Language is limiting only if we forget that its role is to make verbal pictures of the flow, not to reduce the flow to sounds. It's not the grammar of language that incites us into doing that. The same holds for thinking in visual pictures. A lady thinks about the dress she wants to buy, she tries to imagine how she'll look. Even though she probably accompanies this thinking with verbal words like "I hope they still have that dress in the store. I'll look fabulous in it!", there's no doubt that, even if dreamily, she pictures the form of the dress, the color, how she wears it, and so on. The same goes for the guy who thinks about buying a new sports motorcycle. Maybe he too verbalizes the mental flow but he also dreamily pictures twisting the throttle or catching the looks of the bystanders. The crucial thing to recognize is that whether we speak of these things or we picture them, we do so by following the 'grammar' of life, through the rules of the meaningful handles 'dress', 'motorcycle'... I don't mean the words but the experiential stuff around which our life revolves.

It is obviously true that in a sense, it is easier to think in words. If nothing else, for most people the sound of the inner voice is more tangible than imagining the dress in color and details. But it is still true that the words and the dim dream-like pictures go together. I can imagine that a woman can be thinking "Should I put the red one or the green one?" completely verbally and having almost no consciousness of the visual image of the dress that she is choosing in her imagination. But nevertheless, let's step back and consider: is this caused by too convoluted (too removed from the primary flow) linguistic grammar? Would it be too different if the woman was picturing the dresses in full vividness? To an extent, there will be a difference - the flow of being would be richer, more colorful, and so on. But the meaning of this more colorful thinking remains pretty much the same. So it's really the 'grammar of life' that is structured in this way - what we recognize as meaningful within the primary flow and how we are willing to push and pull against the handles.

This is what I wanted to point out, that our focus should be first and foremost in expanding the field of attention to the flow, having an interest in awakening to new meaningful unities in-between and around our familiar handles (liminal spaces), which gradually lead us into the subtler aspects of the flow. Of course, if we want to have only verbal symbols for these unfamiliar aspects of the flow, that's a problem. It's a problem in the same way as if a woman is being told by a friend about a new type of clothing 'xyz', which, however, she doesn't want to picture but is satisfied only by having a name for it. She doesn't know how that xyz will look on her because she doesn't want to picture its shape, color, etc. This is what Steiner speaks about in the quote. There are plenty of people who are satisfied by having the words for astral body, etheric body, etc., and make combinations with them, and this is the same as having the name of xyz without wanting to enter into the full details. Nevertheless, I still maintain that this is not a problem with language itself. It's not that the grammar is broken and we are tricked into sticking only to xyz and not wanting to picture the piece of clothing. It is nonsensical to say "I very much want to understand what xyz is, its shape, color, how it feels to the touch, and so on, but the nature of verbal thinking prevents me from doing so." It prevents us only if we have no interest in understanding what the words symbolize, it's not that the grammar of language somehow forces us to remain with the words only. Instead, we should focus our energy on examining the language of the flow of life itself. If we do that, we'll see that our verbal language is quite capable of symbolizing it. It's not like it adds an encryption layer that no longer has any semblance of the primary flow.

This is probably my central message: that our focus should be on examining the flow of life - even in its naive secular nature - its 'letters', its transitions, in their full experiential spectrum. Then we'll see that verbal encoding is not the culprit. It is our desire to 'speak' (live) that particular language of life, with all of its familiar handles. The lady who wants the dress or the guy wanting the motorcycle are not tricked by language to do so. They just want to live through that life language, to experience its letters. Verbal language only follows suit and symbolizes the life language that interests us and that we want to experience. As such, if we think that there's something in the structure of language that is broken and prevents us from knowing more intimately the primary flow and even its deeper aspects, we create an obstacle to knowing our deeper soul nature, which is the one wanting to live the ordinary language of life.

[Federica]

Language is limiting only if we forget that its role is to make verbal pictures of the flow, not to reduce the flow to sounds.

We must, as it were, go back to a time in which man felt in the word itself all that he experienced in his soul as sound, to a time in which there really was a true language of sound. Today there is no longer a true language of sound. We have instead an intellectualistic language which only serves to express concepts and thoughts. And this is the reason why today in recitation and declamation people no longer perceive the artistic, plastic element in language, the musical element, the form-giving element, but make the mistake of looking only for the meaning.

[Cleric]

We must, as it were, go back to a time in which man felt in the word itself all that he experienced in his soul as sound, to a time in which there really was a true language of sound. Today there is no longer a true language of sound. We have instead an intellectualistic language which only serves to express concepts and thoughts. And this is the reason why today in recitation and declamation people no longer perceive the artistic, plastic element in language, the musical element, the form-giving element, but make the mistake of looking only for the meaning.

I get that. And no one disputes it. What we dispute is whether the structure of language in itself is the reason for everything else to be lacking, or it is the general grammar of life in our age, in its full spectrum, that simply has no incentive to evolve language (because language as it is serves adequately the interests of the modern ego. If I have words for red and green dress, what more do I need to think about them?).

So to enter in greater concreteness, can you identify something in the present structure of language that prevents you from approaching the deeper musical reality of the Logos?

[Federica]

So to enter in greater concreteness, can you identify something in the present structure of language that prevents you from approaching the deeper musical reality of the Logos?

I think I already expressed that quite clearly, for example in what I proposed to call LaaS, Language as a Service, here, which of course hints to the Ahrimanic degeneration of contemportary linguistic use. I will also try to write something new, however, the follwing that I wrote a month ago is still a good way to word my experience.

***

To continue the reflection on LLMs and the nature of language, I believe there are at least two ways in which nowadays the nature and potential of language can be missed, and essentially are missed. The question is not straightforward because of how language intersects our spectrum of activity in between thinking and feeling.

One way to misuse language is what Cleric referred to as “verbal tokenization”, when we are “too lazy to think in pictures”. I believe this dependence on tokens extends beyond episodic laziness. It's also a generalized phenomenon. It consists of the concrete difficulty, without proper spiritual development, to come to the reality of a collective concept (such as for instance the concept of triangle) without pictorial thinking and eventually imaginative approach. Without that, the word “triangle” remains a mere word, as Steiner says. As a consequence, the common denominator among all triangles is experienced as only a verbal symbol. The sense is that the only collective element is the mere token. This is one major problem of our language habits. And, even when pictorial thinking and imagination are worked with, this imprisonment in the words-in-themselves tends to persist. It’s a pervasive linguistic modality of today, that does not just dissipate the moment the power of images is discovered. We still tend to externalize language to the space of words-in-themselves, where we use it as mere encoding of abstract, unpictured, definitional, operable concepts.

In this modality, language is the arranger of an intellectual life, spent in an internally coherent, but rather isolated layer of experience, with little etheric resonance. Perhaps we could call this modality Language as a Service - LaaS. The idea is that language becomes hosted in a functional, readily accessible space, but that space is not grounded in owned imagination. It resides with an external provider. It’s almost like we pay a periodic subscription to it, in order to be granted access to its mechanistic-linguistic logic, as a modular service, for the purposes of ordinary communication, and intellectual viability. Our ordinary self scampers in that space, using the ready-made, proven functionalities - the verbal links - rather than making them anew every time, out of active soul substance. We take home the practicality on the one hand, but also pay for it, in diminished soul substance, so that the direct connection of living concept to word is essentially lost (or never found). Maybe the metaphor of building a website with Wix or Squarespace can work. It’s convenient, it gets results, but the more I build, the more I complexify the linguistic construction within the pre-made architecture, the more I am locked in, and the smaller the chance to know what background understanding and what work it would take to steer the front-end in full autonomy of expression, away from dependence.

The other problem we face, strictly connected to the first one, when we are used to the practicality of Language as a Service - when we trade our labor-intensive first-person activity against easy, pre-assembled verbal modules - is the disconnection with feeling. This is probably just the other side of the same disconnection. When we are not aware, or not attentive to, the responsibility to use language as a felt expression of the soul, the connection word-sound-feeling that makes the spoken word a testimony of the individual human heart (also as part of a human group) remains unrealized. Even when it is realized, it's still very easy to lose it. This has little to do with vague feelings and etched soul pathways. It’s rather the lack of experiential knowledge of the creative connection between the heart and the word - through sound. As a modern habit, it boils down to treating words as mere verbal symbols. This habit misses the conscious experience of the powerful divine prerogative (made available to humans as language) to re-create the world (the concepts, the ideas,...) out of oneself.

That’s what language can achieve for man, simultaneously to its quality of facilitating living thinking. In and with its quality of facilitating human thinking, language puts this higher prerogative into our individual and collective hands, so that we put our unique stamp on reality, or re-form it, re-create it, in words, out of ourselves, out of our unique self, unique in its individuality of soul and also in its belonging to groups. This inevitably relies on the experience of sound in language (sound and all its inherent qualities). If this essential, feeling-nature of language is ignored, I believe language becomes like a sort of leakage for the soul. Spiritual efforts get constantly diluted and blurred in the captivity of LaaS.

In this context, I believe that LLMs actually are the true-size, mirror manifestation of this epochal tendency to use words-in-themselves, words that we have renounced to enliven with home-made activity, vertically connected, and imbued with both living thinking and living feeling. LLMs constitute the accomplished cultural output of our modern language use as mere, functional encoding. Though they may feel less immersive than VR, I believe LLMs are actually more immersive than VR, if we don’t restrain considerations to the purely sensory. VR, as we know it today, directly addresses the sensory spectrum of our perceptual flow, while thoughts and emotions are affected as a consequence.

However, as subscribers and habitual users of Language as a Service, all our mental pictures, our entire perceptual spectrum is taken care of directly, in verbalized repurposing. And I think that LLMs can be seen as the neat rendering of this mode of being, to ourselves, in the technological space. It’s like a VR-at-large. VRAL? (it's 'fun', in Swedish, vrål means something like "horrible scream"). Anyway, it goes one notch deeper into the capture of our flow of becoming. Is the next notch going to be what Levin is working at, targeting the will? I guess so.

[Federica]

PS: I hope it's clear how LaaS is something distinct from "the grammar of our modern soul life". It's more like an Ahrimanic spell conjured and added on top of it, as an additional means of diversion, to drag us further away from the Logos.

[AshvinP]

So to enter in greater concreteness, can you identify something in the present structure of language that prevents you from approaching the deeper musical reality of the Logos?

I think I already expressed that quite clearly, for example in what I proposed to call LaaS, Language as a Service, here, which of course hints to the Ahrimanic degeneration of contemportary linguistic use. I will also try to write something new, however, the follwing that I wrote a month ago is still a good way to word my experience.

When you write further on this, I ask that you provide some more concrete indications/examples for how LaaS influences you in spiritual life, for example when reading through Steiner's lectures or essays on the forum. What within the structure of language consistently derails you from approaching the deeper contextual meaning? Perhaps you can provide a specific passage as an example.

If that is generally not a problem, is it because the author (Steiner, Cleric, etc.) has sufficiently 'spiritualized' the word-sequences so that the additional Ahriman factor ('on top of' our etched soul pathways) are not much of a derailing threat, whereas the word-sequences of a theoretical scientific paper or newspaper article have not been so spiritualized and thus remain a threat? If so, what precisely makes the difference between how the word-sequences were condensed such that one remains a threat (above and beyond our derailing soul tendencies) and the other has been mostly neutralized?

[Federica]

So to enter in greater concreteness, can you identify something in the present structure of language that prevents you from approaching the deeper musical reality of the Logos?

I want to add some more personal observations. To be clear, the "structure" of language - not in itself, but in how it is used nowadays - is an obstacle to living thinking primarily (as I tried to characterise above) not to living feeling. Living feeling is hampered by our lost sensitivity to sound and rhythm. These are two things, though they are somewhat connected.

On the side of feeling, I don’t sense the direct value of the uttered sound other than dimly. Even less, do I sense it with the inner voice, and with written text. I mean that, beyond their disambiguating character - they allow the almost infinite variation of verbal tokens - the sounds of vowels and consonants are felt as more or less equivalent. With big efforts, and thanks to Steiner, things may slightly evolve, but I am struck by this insensitiveness to sound in language (yet, one has to become aware of the insensitiveness, before one can be struck by it).

For this reason, I am left with a sense of being sucked into sort of a condition of falsehood, abstractedness, superficiality, mannerism, still-standing, separated from the full and real experience. This is very tangible in prayer, for example. And here I particularly recognize what Steiner says, that translations are always possible, sure, but the valence of the translated verbal sequence is inevitably diminished and warped, especially for prayers, poetry, and any verbal sequence that is meant to be uttered, and has value for its power to uniquely connect the direct experience, through a pictorial flow and feeling.

However, this problem is overcome entirely when for example I try to concentrate on an image. No matter how unsuccessful that may turn out to be, there is a level of directness and reality in the image that is simply inaccessible through the mediation of verbal linguistic tokens. They simply have a persistent LaaS character. To be clear, I don’t mean that such character is inbuilt in the genius of language itself, but it feels overwhelmingly present in language that has been stripped (like it has in our times) of both its foundations: feeling (through sounds) and thinking (through the pictorial flow). This stripping is perceivable at various degrees. It is strongest with prosaic language, and with written text. It also depends on the ability of the individual, of course. I don’t want to be misunderstood here, so I repeat: it is not an inherent quality of the genius of language, but it’s an Ahrimanic, materialistic influence that affects language in our time, especially prosaic language, though different people are affected differently, like not everyone is inclined to a materialistic worldview (but the linguistic deception is much less obvious).

In many situations, the tokens are fine and even indispensable, for example now, when there is not much feeling involved, and when there is a specific effort to write out of real experience, that is, to contrast the tendency to abstractness. But even when feeling is not in focus, the abstract, almost self-generating character of prosaic, especially written language (which I tried to describe in the post above) is always in ambush. It's almost like a word is able to pull the next one 'by itself'. We could pause effortful and practical thinking, and the sentence would still go on, and make some grammatical and syntactical sense. It's almost like we have become ourselves something of an outlet for LLM linguistic output. We are more and more captive to the evil of our own Ahrimanic invention and keep going around in circles in its interior. We could almost go entirely to sleep with real, living thinking, and almost none would notice, not even ourselves. Words would be thrown out regardless.

I probably shouldn't, but I still hope these words provide some better sense of what I have been unsuccessfully trying to express for so long. By the way, if anyone knows a prayer that is particularly poetic, or a poem that is particularly prayer-like, even in languages I don't speak, I'd be interested. For a while, I have been starting my day with a prayer in a language I don't speak (I hope to prevent ironic comments by saying that I know the translation).