What is offered in an analysis or exploration of meaning? Should I say the problem of meaning or the problem of language? I have yet to clearly define the twos separability. ‘Energy begets clarity / energy, like poetry / or prayer begins / in the body / it begins when you drop into where you feel / what you know you know but cannot accept’, I wrote earlier. I wonder if this is also true about language. If language, like poetry or prayer, begins in the body, where then do we search for meaning? Does it too require a release or an acceptance of what it’s offering? When I say you have sacrificed nothing is that something you hear or feel? And if I said the God you pray to does not care about poetry? The other day my mom was explaining to me the importance of taking time with the decisions we make, that rushing into a future can bring an unknowable disruption. She shared a Somali expression that illuminates this risk; geedkee orod laagu fuulo, orod ba lagu so dega; the tree that you climb fast you will fall off of just as quickly. She considered it a necessary lesson about starting a romantic relationship and I understood it to be an expression about the consequences of rushing into meaning before you’ve sat with its unknown. I’m compelled to say something about how meaning is a vowel, an open sound that stretches beyond language. Instead I say: “I never want to get married.”

What is it to be in an analysis or exploration of meaning?

It is when your reality shifts from the unknown in search of a more visible clarity, of what you thought you understood.

It is irreconcilability as a framework in order to expose or identify that understanding.

It is the process of extracting, of reading then re-reading, saving pieces of information that feel loosely relevant then returning to them with a much sharper focus. It is confounding and mystifying, it expands and pours through without relief.