Language looks like (but is not) connection.

There is the playful voice of authority that mocks the essence of meaning, that teases with two-dollar words and a preposterous confidence in grammar.  Convinced by its own convictions, this voice of reasoned lies ties together prejudice and rumor with a salivating eloquence.  Science and opinion blur the fervent desire to communicate with the zealous need to persuade; facts are tactless intruders upon the seamy rhetoric of the reckless orator.  

But what alternative?  Language is not equipped to convey truth.  With meanings mutating both in clamor and in silence, words are a school of slippery fish.  They fight their way past the weir only to spawn a new vocabulary, one more awkward and less precise than the one that went before.  This is inevitable. As we accumulate history, our words become complicated by context.  Experience muddies everything; black and white fold together to make a heart-felt gray. 

A child, limited in experience and understanding, concisely conveys his wishes:  "I want water."  A lifetime of subtle corruption and the obvious becomes adulterated by a myriad of questions:  "Do you want or do you need?"  "For what purpose?"  "In what form?"  The desire to enhance understanding is responsible for illuminating the very deficiencies that it would supposedly cure.   How can such simple clarity leave space for this inquisition?  And while this construction is as primary as human communication can get, the majority of our interactions--personal, political, spiritual, emotional--require a common idiom that is impossible to achieve.  

This is not a tragedy of human isolation.  Actually, this knowledge is central in approximating empathic conversation;  if we can remember the limits of language, we can listen to the meanings as they sit on the individual tongue without our own presumptions clouding what enters in.   Where people assume a mutuality in definitions, in language, in ideas, they fail twice:  first in hearing what the speaker is attempting to communicate and second in steering our attention away from them onto our own concerns.  Too often, we make our listening into an act of cannibalism.

Speaking, on the other hand, becomes a numbing hum of hypnotism.  We mesmerize others.  We mesmerize ourselves.   When the tongue is glazed with authority, only one outcome is permissible.  Every sentence is an arrow seeking the ratification of belief.  And words have the luxury of shaping the target as they quiver on the tongue.  Suspended in the air, they continue to move the mark (perhaps nearer, perhaps further away) to meet the trajectory they have chosen.  Words are a well-aimed dart dipped in dark intoxication.  One wants to believe, because one wants to.