Linguistic Liberation, Part Two

What I have to say is about the things that can’t be said. Deep inside, it’s the same thing everyone is looking for, be it through science, art, religion or something else. We’re all trying to find a way to express that part of human consciousness that can’t be said—sure, it can be done, but it can’t be talked about without grasping vainly at straws. But when we as beings are able to say those things that evade words, then we will have evolved.
I had a conversation recently, with an old friend, wherein I described my passion for linguistics. I was gesturing wildly, trying to demonstrate the scope of what is generally seen as a nit-picking and unbalanced field in the search to quantify existence. “What I think is really exciting,” I said, “besides the actual mechanics of the field, is that when you study language production and distribution, you spend just as much time studying what people choose NOT to say, as you do studying what they eventually do say.
“There’s phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, the main branches of linguistics, but there’s something else, too. Another field that overlaps linguistics, anthropology and sociology, but that won’t be claimed totally by any of them—that’s pragmatics.
“Pragmatics looks at the intentions, the goals, and the millions of subjective factors that influence the way people choose to communicate their ideas to one another. No one will claim it because there’s too much information. It’s like a chaos theory for language—everything affects everything else, infinitely. But that’s what makes it so exciting, the impossibility of it!” By this point I had my coffee in hand, swinging it around dangerously as I spoke. “Pragmatics is how the things that can’t be said come through in the things we do say.”
“That’s exactly what theatre is doing. That’s what I look for when I read a script, not what it says, but what it leaves unsaid, and why.” My companion spoke calmly, almost awestruck. It was that moment that it first occurred to me that maybe everything led to this. We’re all just pointing, by whatever means possible to that bigger, far subtler thing that defies and defines us.