Divided

Technologically mediated communication intensifies what language has always done: it isolates, divides, and distances us from one another, and from ourselves, as a necessary precondition for meaningful communicative experience to arise at all. Given the nature of the world, I carry a quiet regret at not having known more people more fully, even while understanding that the same conditions that make a shared world possible also make such knowing difficult, partial, and often unreachable. Communication and social engagement are difficult, fragmented, and uneven as a structural consequence of epistemic limits and relational separation, not as a failure. Knowing is always partial. For knowledge to exist at all, it must be differentiated from what cannot be reached: a constitutively inarticulable metaphysical remainder that the world beyond us embodies, unknown yet essential. This partiality is not static but dynamic—the self-propagation of locally coherent meaning moving through a wider relational field of probability, possibility, and noise, set against the combinatorial multiplicity and logical depth of all possible communication, entanglement, and constellated system states. Incompleteness is not an obstacle to connection or comprehension but their enabling condition, and from the standpoint of embodied human experience, it is also what gives hope its leverage and grants dreams their force.

Are conversations hollow in this sense, requiring personal intent or affect to be translated into grammatical order, into partial, local, or general intelligibility, as a concession to relational, networked, historical, and cultural systems beyond any individual? What we encounter is not simply a gap but a pacing: the lag between what is felt and what can be said. That lag regulates how relation unfolds, how coherence can form without collapsing. This is where identity hardens and softens at once, where self and other blur into symbols, roles, and affiliations, and where belonging emerges through difference rather than fusion. Meaning does not pass cleanly from one point to another; it circulates under delay, and that circulation is what carries significance, experience, and momentum forward.

What cannot be reached is not only a property of the world but of one another. Other people embody that same constitutively inarticulable absence, unknown yet essential, which resists capture even as it makes relation possible. Seen clearly, the same limit applies inwardly: the self is never fully present to itself, never finally resolved. The impossibility of complete self-knowledge mirrors the impossibility of fully knowing another, and it is this shared absence that sustains connection rather than undermining it. We do not meet at a centre. We remain in relation by orbiting what cannot be said. In that paradox lies the only certainty self-knowledge affords: that it cannot be possessed—a fact not rhetorical but structural, and precisely the condition that makes understanding, relation, and meaning possible at all.