Words. They assign ideas to what is sensually tangible. 

–Kill a deer, and smoke it, slowly– 

With these words I have invoked an image, sensations arise internally, based on understood concepts and word associations. You may think of dusk. Dusk, and a wild landscape. Perhaps this sentence gets you thinking about whispering foliage and acute sense of sight. Primal, earthen, death, life, honor, survival, food, fire. All of these words represent ideas and assumptions that might appear in one’s mind simply by reading one sentence, and marinating on its meaning. But by hearing or seeing this sentence, you cannot conjure up the exact experience of killing a deer and smoking it slowly. When you read about an experience or a thing, it is not you experiencing the thing in its actuality. And if you actually performed this sentence in experience, if you really did kill a deer and decided to smoke it over a fire, you would not simply think the thought of this action to carry it out, you may not even assign words to the ordeal. Words are simplifying. You would be engaged with this experience, not as one notion or action– as is presented in the sentence– but with a multitude of thoughts, judgements, ideas, and movements. Your mind would be in the multilayered sensations of the moment, your hands would be tightly focused on precision, the intricacies and technique that come with stalking a deer, then killing it, then understanding and accepting the death, then skinning and smoking. Yet, in language, a few simple words are used to express this image in its entirety; just a few words can lead us to create full narratives in our minds about a situation. In using words, naturally, the telling of an experience becomes a story and image of its own in the imaginative mind of the story’s recipient, because words, the shared totems of understanding between minds, are used over and over again. The same finite words are used in infinite situations. And, if each word were to be investigated, one would find that each word is used in multitudes of ways. And if each person’s complete understanding and familiarity with that word were to be investigated, the frequency by which they hear and see that word would vary. And the context within which that word has appeared to them would vary. Therefore, each individual’s web of word association– or the words, thoughts, and feelings that one associates with a single word– may be very similar to the word web of others, or vastly different. The collection of word associations, then, form each individual’s ability to interpret language and form thoughts out of presented words. Interpretations in persons, then, can never be truly identical. An interpretation becomes a body of its own in the mind of the beholder. But no one interpretation can be called the fault of the beholder. The words are the blocks that build the edifices of interpretation. They are tools of construction and instruction and worldview. Words are elemental.