I’ve read somewhere that it is the language that determines for us what to write. For this reason, the Socratic philosophy could have been written only in Old Greek and the Nietzscheian one – only in German. This is true. My experience proves it:

Once I was writing an allegorical fairy tale about a community that lived in the desert. I decided to create a language for them. By “language” I mean here the established system of metaphors, i.e. I wasn’t going to invent words, rather to take the existing ones and alter their meanings. I did it. But you know how it happens — as E.H. Gombrich states, every discovery in art leads to a new problem. The problem arose in my case too: in the language of the community there were no nouns for “woman” and “girl”; instead, they used the adjectives “beautiful” and “nice”. I was very proud of this invention, as it was meaningful – the community was strictly patriarchal. Respectively, the fact that they denoted women with adjectives was of a great moment. The problem was, however, that I had to make these adjectives to function as nouns in a sentence, which is not a common thing for Georgian language. That made me anxious.

So, in a chill summer evening I was sitting on a wide balcony of my house in Kvareli, Kakheti and was trying to reckon some examples of adjectives functioning as nouns. Only one word occurred and this one was from Kakhetian dialect: people call the grape juice “Tkbili” in Kakheti. “Tkbili” is an adjective and means “Sweet”. This was too concrete, though, almost like a term – it’s only the grape juice named that way, not a fruit juice, in general. In my case, however, “beautiful” denoted all girls and “nice” denoted all women, not just certain kinds of them.

I kept sitting and thinking and suddenly the word struck me. It was an adjective, but was always used as a noun. The word was “Mandilosani”, literary meaning “the one who wears the headscarf” (“Mandili” stands for “headscarf”, the suffix “-osan” designates the ownership in this case). “Mandilosani” is a synonym for “woman”.

And I realized: I hadn’t invented anything. My “invention” had existed long before I wrote the story. It was not me, who was shaping the text, rather the language itself. While I was afraid of breaking the borders of the language, it turned out that there was no border.

Writing is a process of interaction between the language and the one who writes. I’m still careful when it comes to coming out of the language (you need to be courageous to come out); but I know for sure: even if I do it, I can’t escape far.