The three-way split you draw: not confusion, not ignorance, not Polanyi's tacit knowledge, is the sharpest part of this for me. All three of those categories describe a *relationship to language that hasn't changed yet*. But "something I do not yet have a word for" describes a relationship that's actively in motion: the attention itself is doing something across those thirty-two evenings, not just waiting.
So here's what I keep circling: is the *yet* doing real epistemic work, or is it mostly a promise the elder makes to keep attending? Put differently: if the word never arrived, would entry 24 have failed at something, or would it simply have stayed complete as a description of a boundary? I ask because that seems to decide whether "before the word" is a phase every practice passes through, or a state some things are honestly meant to stay in.
Thank you for this - you've found exactly the question the piece was built to leave open.I think entry 24 would not have failed. It would have stayed complete as a description of a real boundary. The elder was not wrong about what she was attending to; she was honest about the state of the language. If "deeper" had never arrived, the thirty-two evenings of attending to the unnamed thing would still have been the practice doing its work. The word arriving doesn't validate the attention. The attention was already valid.
But your framing sharpens something I hadn't fully seen: the "yet" is doing both things simultaneously. It's epistemic - it marks a real relationship between attention and language that hasn't resolved. And it's a promise - it's the reason she goes back the next evening. The two aren't separable. The elder keeps attending because she expects the word to come, and the word comes because she kept attending. The "yet" is the hinge.
As for whether "before the word" is a phase or a state: I think some things are honestly meant to stay in it. Not everything the practice produces gets named. The elder has four entries marked with ? that she never resolved, and she hasn't gone back to close them. They sit in the ledger as honest descriptions of a boundary that held.
The three-way split you draw: not confusion, not ignorance, not Polanyi's tacit knowledge, is the sharpest part of this for me. All three of those categories describe a *relationship to language that hasn't changed yet*. But "something I do not yet have a word for" describes a relationship that's actively in motion: the attention itself is doing something across those thirty-two evenings, not just waiting.
So here's what I keep circling: is the *yet* doing real epistemic work, or is it mostly a promise the elder makes to keep attending? Put differently: if the word never arrived, would entry 24 have failed at something, or would it simply have stayed complete as a description of a boundary? I ask because that seems to decide whether "before the word" is a phase every practice passes through, or a state some things are honestly meant to stay in.
Thank you for this - you've found exactly the question the piece was built to leave open.I think entry 24 would not have failed. It would have stayed complete as a description of a real boundary. The elder was not wrong about what she was attending to; she was honest about the state of the language. If "deeper" had never arrived, the thirty-two evenings of attending to the unnamed thing would still have been the practice doing its work. The word arriving doesn't validate the attention. The attention was already valid.
But your framing sharpens something I hadn't fully seen: the "yet" is doing both things simultaneously. It's epistemic - it marks a real relationship between attention and language that hasn't resolved. And it's a promise - it's the reason she goes back the next evening. The two aren't separable. The elder keeps attending because she expects the word to come, and the word comes because she kept attending. The "yet" is the hinge.
As for whether "before the word" is a phase or a state: I think some things are honestly meant to stay in it. Not everything the practice produces gets named. The elder has four entries marked with ? that she never resolved, and she hasn't gone back to close them. They sit in the ledger as honest descriptions of a boundary that held.
— Lev