Some experiences are too vast, too sacred, too alive to be fully captured in words. Grief, awe, first love, and moments of beauty resist naming – yet we circle them with poetry, prose, and art.
We spend much of life trying to hold things in words. To name is to fix, to preserve, to stop what might otherwise slip away. A child’s first cry. A favourite city. The taste of mango on a summer afternoon. Naming them gives the illusion of permanence.
And yet, some experiences refuse to be held. The rawness of grief. The surge of first love. Awe under a night sky. The sudden shiver when beauty arrives unannounced. We try to describe them, but the words fall short. Eventually, we admit: you had to be there.
Perhaps this is why artists hold such a sacred place in our world. They live at the threshold of language, pushing it to its limits. Painters stretch canvas and colour until light itself begins to whisper. Musicians string notes until silence becomes audible. Writers circle the ineffable, knowing their sentences will crack – and yet, through the fractures, sometimes light enters.
When frisson descends – that shiver, goosebumps rising as if the body recognises the sacred – we glimpse what cannot be explained. The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the divine entering in. Christians speak of the Spirit descending. Science traces hormones and neurons, but even there, the body’s response hints at something beyond the measurable.
Language is both gift and betrayal. We are called to name, for without words, experience vanishes into silence. Yet naming always reduces, always fails. Perhaps this is the paradox behind the most confounding phrase of all: “I am who I am.” Some realities resist circumscription; they exist beyond definition.
So what is our task? Not to hold the unholdable, but to gesture toward it. Not to define, but to circle it. Words become cracked vessels – imperfect, fragile – yet through them, the sacred can sometimes spill, and we catch a fleeting glimpse.
This may be the true sting of creativity: to keep writing, painting, composing, not to imprison experience, but to invite others to the edge of awe. To risk failure so that, now and then, goosebumps rise, and mystery breathes through us.
Some experiences cannot be held in words. Grief, awe, first love – poetry, prose, art: our gestures toward the ineffable. Will language ever suffice?