Language: What exactky do we communicate?

We use language to fix memories, to construct our pasts, to invent a future. This thought came to me while reading in a story by Malcolm Lowry the description of a landscape I had never seen, of Italy. The words Lowry used named familiar objects and experiences: tunnels, hawks, sunlit green valleys, trains, white oxen. Did, then, these words enable me to see what Lowry saw? No, they did not. For they recalled images from my memory, not his. Then I knew that if I described a train journey from my childhood, I would find myself selecting language that recalled to mind what I remembered. If the language-born image differed from memory, I would select new words, new phrases; and when I had finished my description, I should delude myself into thinking another would know what I meant by it. Thinking this (which took less time and language than it took to write it), I realized that we talk to ourselves. I describe my experience so that I will remember it. And because my language can arouse your memories, I can communicate an idea of a notion of an apprehension of what I experienced. (January 1976)

(See also Steiner’s After Babel, which supplied ideas that made this thinking possible.)

Follow-up 2024: Whatever memories my words call up in my reader, they are accompanied by feelings and thoughts. We remember how we felt perhaps more strongly than the event itself. We also modify our memories every time we reconstruct them, so my words may change what the reader recalls. Our memories must pass the strictest test of all: they must be plausible, and our sense of what's plausible changes with experience and with remembering. It seems to me that the the sanest stance towards our own memories is This is how I think it happened, but I can't be sure. Whoever reads this will agree or disagree depending on their experience of remembering, or of reading, of having their understanding or imagination altered by what they read, or what heard someone say. That we are able to communicate well enough to work together, to continue to love each other, to agree on some notions of how the world works, all this and more seems to me an amazing accomplishment when I consider the certainty that what I intend to communicate and what is actually communicated are never the same.