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When the inadequacy of words is bemoaned, it is usually some form of a representational theory of language that is being assumed. When, for example, parents confront a tragedy like the death of a child, and tearfully claim that words cannot express how they feel, they are assuming that lan- guage does a pretty good job of conveying their normal, day-to-day feel- ings, but cannot adequately perform that function in their present sorrow because it is too complex, nuanced and deep. In other words, language can represent most ordinary things quite well, but fails with certain extraordi- nary things.

In arguing against ineffability I am going to share in the common as- sumption that language is representational. However, I will not be assum- ing that representation is the only function of language, or even its primary one, but only that it is an important, meaningful and distinctive one.

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AGAINST INEFFABILITY

There are, of course, many ways in which one thing can be said to rep- resent another. A map outlining an earthen land mass can be said to “repre- sent” the USA. The Stars and Stripes unfurled atop a fl ag pole “represents” the USA in quite another sense. And, in yet one more sense, the Secretary of State “represents” the USA at a treaty negotiation. In what sense am I assuming language to be representational?

I do not believe there is any kind of immediate, one-to-one relationship between words and things. Language is not a picture of reality, even in the logically abstract manner Wittgenstein tried to argue it was in the Tracta-

tus. Words are much trickier than pictures in the way they connect to the

world and therein lies their representational power.

Wittgenstein’s mistake is worth dwelling on here because the Tractatus is one of philosophy’s most famous advocates for ineffability, for there be- ing realities beyond language. For Wittgenstein, the most important things in life, things like beauty and goodness, are the very things language can- not touch. Therefore, he concludes the Tractatus with a Zen like endorse- ment of wordless contemplation: “Of what we cannot speak we must be silent.” (Wittgenstein 1998, p. 49) The rest of the Tractatus, everything that leads up to that famous fi nal sentence, is summarized by a correspond- ing sentence in the Preface: “What can be said at all can be said clearly.” (Wittgenstein 1998, p. xxxi) The problem with this is that, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein restricts what can be said to derivatives of simple signs which denotatively “mean” objects in the world. So, he believes that if we have spoken logically and carefully, “there is one and only one complete analy- sis of a sentence.” (Wittgenstein 1998, p. 7) But, as the later Wittgenstein came to see, “simple sentences” end up being constructed not out of words in their living concrete usage, but out of words as abstract logical symbols. No living, breathing sentence, including the fi nal one in the Tractatus it- self, can be correlated with the world in the way the Tractatus envisioned it should be, at least not without draining it of meaning.

But refusing to tether words to a one-to-one picturing of reality is not to set them totally adrift from it either. The model I want to use for the way in which language represents reality is the way in which dance “represents” music. George Balanchine famously described his choreography as an at- tempt to get the audience to “see the music.” (Croce 2009, p. 37) Obvi- ously, he did not mean to imply any simplistic, one-to-one correspondence between bodily movements and musical sounds. Nonetheless, something about the rhythmic interweaving of sounds can be matched (represented) by the interweaving patterns that moving bodies make for sight. I think language represents reality in a similar way.

384 JAMES CONLON

Does it make sense to say that there are musics beyond dance? Beyond being illuminated by dance or even perfectly satisfi ed by it? I doubt it. But is that not exactly what people are saying when they claim to have experi- ences beyond words? In what follows, I want to argue that the powers we readily concede to language in representing ordinary life, apply equally well to life’s rare and dramatic moments. Just as there is no music that cannot be perfectly satisfi ed by a dance, so too, there are words perfect for every moment.

This can be affi rmed, I think, without implying that any sentence, or collection of them, exhausts the moment’s possibilities, or is its moment’s defi nitive truth. There is obviously no one “true” way to dance a given piece of music. The number of ways is limited only by a choreographer’s creativity. In 1941, Balanchine choreographed Stravinsky’s “Violin Con- certo” in a dance he called “Balustrade.” Stravinsky described it as “per- fectly complementary to and coordinated with the dialogues of the music.” (Stravinsky 1963, p. 80) In 1972, Balanchine choreographed the exact same music quite differently as “Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto.” Two very different dances can give sight to the same music. Yet, this does not imply that any haphazard way of moving the body would count as dancing to the music. There are clearly dances that obscure the music or miss its mark entirely. The same holds for a wording’s representation of reality.

I now want to offer three theoretical considerations in support of my claim that everything can be verbally represented, that nothing is inher- ently ineffable. The fi rst two have to do with the infi nite nature of language itself, the third with the nature of human experience. I then want to draw some ethical implications from the fact of language’s inexhaustibility.