Looking back at the time in 2023 when I receiving chemotherapy, I can remember it felt horrible. I have a sense of what that horribleness felt like, and I’d know the feeling instantly if I felt it again, but I can’t describe it in words, because it was unlike any other sensation I have experienced. To myself I call it the ‘chemo feeling’, and I know what I mean by it, but there are many different kinds of chemo, and people react to each kind in many different ways, so what I call the chemo feeling is not necessarily the same as anyone else’s, and most people haven’t experienced chemo at all. At the time I sometimes said that it was a bit like nausea, but only in the sense that they were both sensations that, while not painful, were nevertheless pervasive, unpleasant, debilitating, poisonous. The ‘chemo feeling’ was actually something quite distinct from nausea. (Sometimes I felt nausea as well, but that’s another story.)
There is a school of thought which says that reality is entirely mediated by language, that a thing is brought into existence by words. But actually surprisingly little of our experience can be named. Take actual nausea for instance. If you say ‘I feel nauseous’ people know what you mean because everyone has felt nauseous at some point. But suppose you had to describe the sensation of nausea to someone who’d never experienced it. It would be impossible, like describing the colour red to a person born blind. Words only work by pointing at things that our listener or reader already knows about. (This is presumably why we tend to talk about character traits and internal states, which can’t be pointed at, by analogy with things that can be: I feel trapped, he couldn’t contain himself, she was a bottled-up sort of person…) Trying to describe the ‘chemo feeling’, I had nothing to point to.
This can be true also of pleasant feelings. Sometimes I wake from a vivid dream. I remember the dream’s events and characters, but I also remember a powerful mood or feeling, which was different from anything I’ve experienced in real life. If I try to tell others about the dream, I can describe the events and characters, but the mood is impossible to name because there is absolutely nothing I can point to which is comparable. I think this is why other people’s accounts of dreams usually seem so tedious. They can’t tell you the one thing that made it powerful to them.
This limitation of language makes being a writer difficult. It’s one of the reasons you are always being forced to compromise, giving up what you ideally wanted to convey, and settling for a rough approximation. (This post, for instance, will end up saying something rather simpler than I had in my mind when I started writing it.) But I love the process, the challenge of capturing as much as possible of what I meant to say, in spite of the constraints. (Describing the planet Eden through the eyes of people who’d never seen Earth was a particularly interesting challenge, because I’d forbidden myself all sorts of obvious reference points that would be familiar to the reader.)
Visual images do sometimes seem to convey more than words, I think. You can pack a lot of things into an image which it would be too cumbersome to put into words. I discussed a picture by Tintoretto in a post here once, but I couldn’t begin to name the mood that picture was able to almost instantly evoke in me, any more than I can pin down the feeling of a dream. (Whether that mood was the one that Tintoretto intended to evoke, is of course another question.)
Below is an image I generated some time ago, when I was playing with the Wombo Dream art app and gave it the prompt word ‘nausea’. Weirdly, seeing as it is made by a machine, it really does seem to capture something of the feeling (I suppose it has adapted a human-made image from somewhere). But I don’t know if it would do so for a person who had never experienced nausea themselves.
‘Nausea’ generated by Wombo Dream AI.
