Inenarrable
To narrate. v. To give a spoken or written account of.
From Latin, gnarus: to know.
Examples: The Iliad: the story of the Trojan War. The Odyssey: the story of the warriors’ return home. Snow White: the story of the death and the resurrection. Persephone: the story of the death and the resurrection. Sleeping Beauty:
Nevermind.
Some things are inenarrable. That is, you cannot narrate them.
Examples: That time, the one you have never told anybody. That other time. The thing you are tired of explaining and whose story, when you tell it, gets shorter and shorter until all you say about it anymore is, “You know how those things are.”
Or: “It was amazing. So amazing.”
Also inenarrable: the 97% of life that you’ve already forgotten. Are they the unimportant things? Or are some of them so important that you had to forget them? The moment of your own birth, the moment of your own death.
Other things cannot be narrated. They engulf the things that can be narrated. Can a bird tell a story? Is it a story if the bird is telling it, but no one can understand? A frog? A bee? If a tree falls in the forest–
But they say you never step in the same river twice.
In less than a century, the elephant population has declined by 97%.
Can a world with 350,000 elephants read the stories of a world with 12 million elephants and understand them?
Age of the earth: 4.543 billion years
How long we have had language: 60,000 years. Give or take.
Give or take.
I can’t explain it.
Encyclopedia of Surreal Encounters
Field Agent: Thia Li Colvin
Reporting to: Richard Nash
