Atmospheric Storytelling
Verbal versus Felt: A reflection on intimacy, silence, and understanding
Language is often treated as the primary source of connection, yet language extends far beyond words. It shapes how we perceive, interpret, and experience our emotional reality.
Verbal language is the conscious act to create connection, however, connection alone does not guarantee understanding. Understanding is felt, and often subconscious. While connection initiates our emotional experience, understanding is the anchor that makes connection sustained and real. Connection can exist before articulation, and found within presence, rhythm, silence and observation.
This piece reflects the experience of a building connection between two culturally distinct individuals, French & American, despite limitations of verbal communication. The language barrier redirects communication in other ways, relying on body language, tone, and silence.
The silence within the piece reflects an intimacy that develops slowly, felt rather than spoken. This silence strips you of the ability to explain, perform, and in turn forces you to be situated within yourself. Connection moves from its natural reliance on verbal communication, towards perception. The comfortability found in the in-between.
The emotional language begins to carry more weight than the words themselves. The feeling and atmosphere becomes the shared language that carries the mutual understanding, which in turn creates meaning.
Language, then, produces your perception to the world around you, but connection transcends linguistic structure.
The structure of a language influences not only how we communicate emotion, but how we experience it internally. In the English Language we identify with our emotions, saying, “I am hungry”. While in French the emotion is moving through you, “J’ai faim”, which translates, I have hunger, the emotion is more fluid, and less distinctive to the individual.
These linguistic differences do not definitively determine one’s emotional understanding, but offers a glimpse into the internal point of view that the language lends its experience to through its structure. The French lens subtly frames emotions and sensations as experiences one has rather than identities one becomes.
To create meaning within a connection, this requires a shared understanding. Understanding cannot be achieved through processing of words alone. Understanding goes beyond the literal, intangible to physical reality. Rather, true understanding is felt, does not require explanation, a subconscious act. This piece strips the reliance on verbal language to communicate meaning, removing performance and enforcing simply being to take priority.
Meaning is created within a connection, through shared and felt perception, not simply through mutual vocabulary.
Language is multi-faceted and requires an understanding that transforms speaking into seeing. Understanding does not solely derive from hearing someone speak, but learning how to situate ourselves within their point of view, seeing how they see.
This is when intimacy begins, when understanding ceases requirement of constant translation, when connection becomes a calm knowing, where pressure dissolves, and is replaced by genuine presence.
