Untranslatable

Words are the fog one has to see through. — Zen saying

Author

Lucy Petroucheva
March 31, 2025

A little aperitivo before today’s artifacts 🍷🧀

René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images tells us that a painting of a pipe is not a pipe. You can’t hold it, smell it, or smoke it—it’s just a representation.

The same goes for words and descriptions. I could describe the taste of a strawberry in vivid detail, but no explanation can replace the experience of actually biting into one.

As a lover of philosophy, this is a humbling truth: sometimes, words can only get us so far. Life, experience, and reality can’t be captured in words.

As Emily Dickinson wrote, Nature is what we know yet have no art to say — so impotent our wisdom is.

The artifacts in this post explore this idea.1

1. Poem: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I love a classroom. But haven't you also felt like the young boy did when he decided to see himself out and into the stars?

In another poem, Whitman wrote: “I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp.” Words can’t capture the raw, primal, wild, full essence of a person. Sometimes, analysis2 strips things of their fullness.

2. Buddha’s Wordless, Flower Sermon

They say that this was the origin of the Zen3 tradition:

One morning, near the end of his life, Buddha was to give a talk. Many of his disciples gathered around him as they had countless times before, waiting for him to teach.

However, on this day, Buddha sat in silence. As time passed, the air grew thick with expectation, but Buddha remained quiet.

Then, without a word, he held up a flower.

The crowd grew restless. Why isn’t he speaking? What does this mean? Buddha simply looked at the flower.

Then, one of his disciples, Mahakashyapa, suddenly laughed in understanding.

Buddha handed him the flower, and said to the crowd:

“All that can be given with words I have given to you; but with this flower, I give Mahakashyapa the key to all the teachings.”

Buddha conveyed the ineffable nature of reality—one that can only be directly experienced. And Mahakashyapa, recognizing the simple truth of the flower—obvious, yet so easily overcomplicated—laughed4 with lightness.

3. Sayings from The Little Zen Companion

4. Quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, wrote:

“What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”

A fly-bottle uses sweet water to lure flies into a trap, holding them there until their demise. Similarly, questions and intellectualization can tempt us, trap us, and focus our attention in the wrong places. Wittgenstein wanted to help us escape conceptual tangles.

5. Quote from Christian Priest Thomas Merton

Before we come to that which is unspeakable and unthinkable,5  
the spirit hovers on the frontiers of language,
wondering whether or not to stay on its own side of the border,
in order to have something to bring back to other men.

This is the test of those who wish to cross the frontier.

If they are not ready to leave their own ideas and their own words behind them,
they cannot travel further.

— Thomas Merton

Lucy

1  I didn’t come to this realization gracefully—I tripped over it until I fell headfirst into it. In 2020, when COVID kept us inside, I spent most of my time glued to screens (my laptop, my phone) and disconnected from my body. I hadn’t internalized what it meant to be a physical body in a physical world. I was so used to living in my head, lost in thought and technology, and had convinced myself that everything that mattered—about me and about living—was of the mind. I remember reading a quote that compared a cellphone to a sensory deprivation tank, and later realizing that my entire modus operandi had turned my life into one: deprived of sun, earth, movement, fun, adventure, play, and creativity. Over the past few years, sensuality has become a central focus of my life.

2  Poetry can sometimes tap the raw and primal, beneath analysis. More on that in another post. 🙂 

3  “Zen is the unsymbolization of the world.” — R.H. Blyth

4  “Only celebration can give proof that the real silence has happened.” — Osho

5  “If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence, like the sunlight, will illuminate you in God.” — Saint Isaac of Syria

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