” Orwell did state succinctly what seemed to me at the age of eighteen, the pivotal point in my life when I first discovered reading, the most profound revelation: “To expand language is to expand the ability to think.”
— Salisa’s missive to Andre, 12 Feb 2020
And I am tottering around the edge of the substance of thought shared here. Understanding, as I’ve experienced it, and it is something experiential to me as well, becomes most remarkable as a mode of cognition when one feels around the concept, passively running the gamut from the most immediate and visible to the most far-flung and the most subtle. I am hopelessly attracted to the speculative and the imaginative over the factual and the analytical. But like you I have been called an omnivore, perhaps because I think days are too long and life is too short to be otherwise… “
” Steep in the coding work so I hope you can pardon me for the intellectual lapse, the lack of metaphysical subtlety, that gets substituted in place of the ineffable profundity of which we are nevertheless trying to speak and capture, the essence of which redefines what ‘true knowing’ may mean to man (‘knowledge’ is a loaded term, and in the eye which canvases the whole from the summit of exceeding height, ‘facts’ of and about the world—about the transient, the concrete, the physical and the historical—may come to be of no fuller and richer significance than mere factoids, as dry and shallow as marshland during the incipience of arid summer, as small and impuissant as rain-filled gutter is to boundless ocean; in the light of this it is not ‘knowledge’ towards which I seek but ‘knowing’—genuine knowing—which in this sense I equate with ‘understanding’, an act which can be described as great and true and measureless and timeless)...
It is fretful merely to mention, or even to allude to, the meaningless technicality which is the core essence of my soon-to-be professional vocation. Nothing else anchors one to the bounded present and pointless utility (not an oxymoron) than what I do, unless it is with the aim to serve a higher purpose…
I love the attitude that despite the formidable vigour displayed in reverence towards world and ideas gives place still to light humour. Only pedantic stuffed shirts denounce without exception the supersession of truth by humour! Such persons would as well condemn the artistic license to tinker with words, to transfigure verbs or make an act out of nouns. As with any worthy poet or a mind poetic in nature and brimful of meaning, do reconfigure a word and violate the linguistic bounds as much as one’s caprice allows or as is deemed appropriate! “
— Salisa’s missive to Andre, 20 Feb 2020
Salisa lohavittayavikant 