The words don’t work

Stories, solitude and risking new languages

Thanks to the impeccable taste and generosity of

Linda’s Culture Thoughts

, I’ve been reading ‘The Dragonfly is the Messiah’ by farmer and philosopher, Masanobu Fukuoka. It’s a perfect book. In it, the writer has a profoundly felt and simply explained encounter with the land. He is floored by it, made newly aware of his creatureliness. He runs to tell people about his encounter, knowing the power of story to change hearts and minds. Maybe just a few others will feel more inclined to live with the earth differently. But every time he tells it, he feels further from the experience. The embodied truth of it wanes a little. He feels increasingly as if he is pointing at an object and describing its size and edges. The more he retreats, the more he is asked to tell the story. He decides he must stop describing and live the thing, moving out toward a field-filled and human-sparse existence on the edges. These paragraphs make up a very small part of a very small book, but I’ve read them over and over and with different feelings every time.

In April, I scooped a copy of Dark Mountain’s manifesto into my rucksack. I walked it up a hill and back down again, before landing in my hostel dorm to read it. This updated edition includes an introduction penned by founder and friend,

Dougald Hine

. ‘The literary tools inherited from the recent past’ he reflects ‘seemed ill-adapted to the times into which we were heading.’ My heart got stuck on the line, so I walked six miles with it before landing in a book shop and buying two, very strange texts. I opened the first of them by a brook and read the first page aloud - the water helps tell it. (Dougald will be delighted to have further enabled my book-buying problem.) Over the subsequent months, I’ve heard a cackle in the silences; especially in my moments of surveying the land for ‘exactly the right word’. Ha! Lately I’ve been writing on the premise that the right words don’t exist and the ways of speaking words are limited in ways I don’t know yet. It’s been odd and freeing and strange and spacious. I’m writing a lot, and it just gets weirder. Maybe that’s what needs to happen? I imagine the emergence of new languages could only sound strange. Especially given the weirdness they’re tasked with describing.

I think it’s probably helpful to carry the assumption that something is lost in telling the story, and that the words for telling it aren’t right anyway. I wonder how many iterations and tweaks Masanobu made before intuiting that words weren’t working this time. I wonder how the story lived with him from then. I wonder how it felt in his system. After many re-readings I’m left with understanding tinged with sadness. I know the feeling of moving further away from something that feels precious and close by naming it. I often wonder what to do with that. But I also want to hope there can be ground between losing what’s special and needing to isolate yourself to protect it - a space to allow the experience to live brightly in one body and glow as a thread woven through community. Could his encounter have been his quiet superpower? A reservoir thoughts, skills and joy to offer into a rich communal life? I trust Masanobu - implicitly by the end of the book - but it’s true that I’m left with dual feelings about his story: both a disappointment at magic leading him into solitude and a delight that the story exists in its rightful shape.

One of the most common questions I hear from artists is ‘But does it make sense? I don’t know how to describe it a in way that makes sense.’ Within the story, I hear a thread of ‘this work is beyond words’ or ‘there isn’t language for this.’ That’s why you made it, I often think. ‘How can I connect with others? How do I ask someone to stay here a while?’, they wonder. And with it a huge and stressful dose of ‘How do I ask people to fund this?’. Invariably, I’ll ask how the project feels - What shapes, colours, textures or sounds make it up? Where does it live? Who does it affect? How? Why? There are no right or wrong answers. I’m just listening for the bit beyond words. The precious part that has to be there, otherwise it’s not the story. Writing the funding application is something else, a totally separate language, shape and design. I could say plenty about that - about how it can force artists to formulate and strategise and perform in ways that they should not - but just for now I want to sit with the fact that there is a story beyond words. Thank god for artists’ wordless stories. Sit there. Live there. Squint sternly at the person who tells you not to. Let decisions and actions and connections flow from it. I think the story worth leaning into offers stillness and sureness in a way that can’t be far wrong. I trust artists with this.

And then there are the people actively creating worlds rather than words. Imagine our perceptions of time, success, progress, speed, work, rest and relationship are handed new constellations; maps, code. Imagine how that would sound, look and feel to receive. This is the work of The Remote Body (

char

) - a space for crip and chronically ill writers, artists and envisioners to shape, test and flirt with new languages that feel true. One of many corners where newness is emerging on purpose. One of many corners I’m listening to. The work of communicating embodied experience as a language is not new and has often met its limits. But limits can be where things get most interesting. The autistic, disability justice blogger Amanda Baggs was featured in a short film released in 2007. In it they communicate using autogenerated voices, tapping purposefully at a keyboard aiming to vocalise their autistic experience. When asked about the film, Baggs noted ‘I communicate best outside of language altogether, but they haven’t created the tools to interpret that.’ Colleagues later described ‘touching, tasting and smelling’ as enabling Baggs to have a ‘constant conversation’ with their surroundings’, going as far as to call this non-verbal information their ‘native language’. I’m so struck by the image of this intuitive and deeply connected mode, and the attention it demands from a listener. And yet, as Baggs explains, their ‘failure to speak is seen as a deficit, while other people’s failure to learn [their] language is seen as natural and acceptable.’¹

The risks of exploring today’s ground with the nuts and bolts left of yesterday’s tools feel pretty low. As I write, in the heady pressure of a pre-storm atmosphere, days after the sun barely set and the full moon was said to demand bravery, stranger things have happened. Stranger things are happening all the time. On a day when my body is honestly telling me it is both hot and cold outside, what’s not to be believed? After centuries of history books written by men with cash, and days after an unfathomable president used social media to let us know he’s dropped bombs, perhaps it has become riskier not to take risks.

Somebody, somewhere, is making something. Right now. Something that has never existed before and will never exist again. They might be riddled with doubt, or overflowing with a new certainty. Either way, if they attempt the impossible task of telling you about it, listen. New languages are being born in real time.

1. Huge thanks to disabled curator Amanda Cachia for introducing me to Amanda Baggs through her brilliant book, ‘The Agency of Access’, 2025.