Jeneva Stone at The New England Review:
Is language adequate to describe experience? Are words good enough?
Of these dilemmas, Sarah Manguso writes: “Nothing is more boring to me than the re-re-statement that language isn’t sufficiently nuanced to describe the world. Of course language isn’t enough. Accepting that is the starting point of using it to capacity. Of increasing its capacity.”
But what if no one wanted to hear you use the language that would describe a particular experience? Or listeners turned away at the mere mention of the single word, itself a single syllable, into which is compacted some of the ugliest of human experience? Nuance, then, is for the birds, startling into a mass that scatters, incoherent.
more here.