The most abstract words are rooted in concrete concepts. Break down the etymologies and you find simple actions like pushing, throwing, pulling, taking, placing, climbing, looking, going, and coming and simple relationships like over, under, back, across, together, apart, away, toward. All this simple roots converge as words like twisted filaments in continuous strands of thread, which also converge as the fabric of sentences, paragraphs, texts, canons. This fabric is draped over chaotic and formless experience and drawn tight to give life tangibility, form and continuity.

I like to think mythically about the roots of words as corresponding to simple, chaotic animal impulses of the spirit, which are drawn out, twisted and spun into coarse and fine strands of intelligence, which form the cloth of culture as the threads are interwoven, unraveled, combed out, knitted and knotted, torn, sliced, ripped, stitched, patched over, braided, embroidered and embroidered upon. And the articulate threads are only the weft, woven into a warp of colorful, unspeakable feelings and tacit actions waiting on the loom as the background of language and ourselves.

We often confuse formless and chaotic experience with our own tacit forms of response, and fail to notice that intellectual order and verbal articulation are not identical.