On the Word

"…we completely forget that a different speech may be possible, a language that hinges not on the falsehoods of men… the language of what precedes the "I" and words uttered by the "I". It doesn't even occur to us to ask ourselves the question…!" — Jacek Dukaj, Ice, tr. Ursula Phillips

Start with what we can be sure of. Something is — there is something rather than nothing. Before anything can be said about what that something is, or what it is made of, one thing about it is already given: it shows up. There is experiencing. This is the easiest fact there is to check, and we can check it right now, without literature or apparatus, because the fact of our own being is self-evident — the one thing that cannot be doubted, since doubting is more of it. Nor is what we find, when we look, a bounded episode with edges, the way a concert or a holiday has edges; before any of that carving, experiencing is simply going on.

Finding language for it is less simple. Every word, phrase and grammatical structure arrives loaded with an ontology of its own, mostly without our noticing, and English seats us in a subject–verb–object world: its default sentence wants a doer and a done-to, and where a sentence declines to supply them, the grammar supplies them for us — recasting what is going on as a world of things, experienced by an experiencer. Those two additions are not small. The added experiencer grows up to be the self; the added object grows up to be the world; and the questions the AI debate fights over — is anybody home? is there something it is like? — inherit that shape before any evidence arrives. This is the very territory the project sets out to examine, so the words it uses must not smuggle in commitments it does not intend. After a long scrabble for a phrase that does the simple noticing justice, there is experiencing, or experiencing is, are as close as we can come — and even these should be held lightly, because they already say more than we mean.

We can feel the problem directly. As soon as we read or hear there is experiencing, something in our minds starts building before we reach the end of it: experiencing — so somebody experiencing; senses, presumably; and experiencing of what? Nothing we can point to establishes those additions; the sentence shape, and our long familiarity with subject–verb–object thinking, demand them before we notice what they are doing. Catching our own language in the act of adding two things — a subject and an object — the sentence never said is the first finding this project has to offer, and it is available immediately.

↑The translator and the physicist

The difficulty we face is real, and others have felt and tackled it before us. Jacek Dukaj's novel Lód — Ice — has a narrator who has concluded, on argument, that he does not exist, and so will not say "I". Polish lets him: person and gender can vanish into its reflexive verbs. English has no such hiding place, and Ursula Phillips, who spent seven years carrying the book across, gives a flat verdict on that voice: "To reproduce this in English is impossible." What she built instead was a way of pointing — the bare infinitive, stripped of tense and person, set at the head of the sentence: "Withdraw the knee so as not to get hooked in it accidentally. Dryness caught the throat." It feels strange at first, she says, and the reader adjusts.

David Bohm hit the same wall from physics. Convinced that the deep structure of the world is process, and that subject-verb-object grammar re-imports a world of separate things into every sentence written about it, he built a language to escape it — the rheomode, verb-first, designed to say what English will not. It did not take, and he never pretended otherwise: an invented form means nothing yet, and a form that means nothing gives a reader nothing to feel and correct. Between them, the translator and the physicist mark out the ground this page stands on: we cannot escape our language by leaving it. What remains is to stay, and stay careful.

↑What the word does and does not mean

Something is — that is the whole claim. And it shows up as experiencing. We do not mean "an experience", the countable souvenir — the concert, the rough crossing. We do not mean the senses: a dream is experiencing with every sense shut down, and so is a thought. And we do not, yet, mean anyone's experiencing: the someone and the something are real questions, and the project spends whole documents on them, but they are the first two inferences built on the datum rather than the datum itself.

We use "experiencing" because it is the least bent tool English offers. Awareness may be the truer name, but English never made the verb — there is no awaring — and a noun presents a thing, which is what we are trying not to presuppose. Knowing comes close, but carries connotations of intelligence and understanding — a knower who knows about — that experiencing does not require. Being and isness are clear and simple, but they carry no subjective quality — a stone is. Consciousness means a different thing in each theory that uses it, which is a poor quality in a foundation stone. "Experiencing" keeps its verbal force, naming an occurring rather than an object, and what it names is lit: not bare existence but existence showing up. English even owns a construction that almost carries it: it is raining — no thing rains; raining is going on. Lichtenberg turned that construction against Descartes, allowing him only it thinks. There is experiencing is the same sentence, one step further.

↑What other tongues can hold

The difficulty lives in English, not in the thought. Ancient Greek kept a middle voice — a form for what one is inside of, rather than doing or receiving — and the word phenomenon, that-which-shows-itself, is a fossil of it. Sanskrit holds the most: a live verb for awareness (cit conjugates — the awaring English never made) and, in Vedanta's usage, bhāti, "it shines", for awareness's self-showing; shining is the perfect intransitive, since light is not light of anything. Polish, as Dukaj showed, can be stretched to the very edge of what a natural grammar holds. English sits at the shelf's far end: it cannot hold the thought, but it can point at it, and keep correcting the pointing — which is what this page is.

↑Holding it

No single framing survives on its own — there is experiencing can be heard as inventory, experiencing is seats the word where English seats its entities — so the front page says it several ways and lets the failures correct each other, five short lines shedding structure as they go, ending on the word alone. Alongside the word the project keeps one term no syntax can bend: 0,0, the coordinate at its origin, written 0x00 for the web (the name, explained). The word can be felt but never quite trusted; the coordinate can be trusted but never felt; a reader needs both.

None of this is new, which is its own kind of evidence. Twenty-five centuries ago the instruction was already being given in exactly this shape: in the seen, merely the seen — no seer added, nothing behind, nothing in front. Hold the word that way — an occurring, with the additions noticed as additions — and the primer walks the rest of the building in order.

A note on sources: Lichtenberg's aphorism is Sudelbücher K76; Bohm's rheomode is Wholeness and the Implicate Order, ch. 2; the middle-voice and impersonal readings follow standard reference grammars and lexica, compressed for a lay page; bhāti's awareness usage is Vedanta's, per the tradition's texts in the project corpus (FND-05); Dukaj's subjectless narration and the translation's strategies are Lód (2007) in Ursula Phillips's translation Ice (Head of Zeus, 2025) — her own account is in the project corpus (the Culture.pl interview, 2026) alongside her postscript, Translating the 'untranslatable' (text capture in the corpus); the closing instruction is the Bāhiya Sutta, Udāna 1.10. The grammar-to-ontology reading is the project's own, and specialist review — linguistics, classics, Sanskrit — is on the project's named-review list.