Something stands out. I don't spend enough time sitting still and being quiet. I find a lot of distracting noise in my world, and damned little of it helps me get more of what I really want.
The field of General Semantics drew my awareness toward things that occur on the silent, pre-linguistic levels of reality and awareness. The concept is difficult for me to describe, but I'll try anyway. It goes something like this: when I'm sitting at the river, I'm having a first-hand experience that occurs before language. As soon as I translate that silent experience into language, I have changed it, transformed the silent experience into an intermediate form--language. But the experience itself isn't language, isn't the words. The experience itself is what comes before words. It's what is meant by the phrase, "The map is not the territory." The words I use to describe my experience are not the experience itself.
In the film Havana, the character Jack Weil (Robert Redford) tries to convince Roberta Duran (Lena Olin), the wife of a fallen revolutionary with whom he's fallen in love, to leave Cuba with him. Duran feels strongly about the revolution, and Weil, an American, thinks the revolution isn't any of their business.
"Jesus, you can't live ideas. Most thing that are alive don't even have ideas. What's really going on happens before ideas, before talk, before anyone says anything. And after...in the quiet."
