Poetic Asymptote
Approaching the Unsayable
Image Created by Author. © NJ Lit & Phil 2025. All rights reserved.
There's a beautiful paradox in poetry, but the concept stretches beyond the page and across the human experience. The greatest poems don't explain, they approach. They edge toward what can’t be captured. They reach toward the unsayable, brushing against something profound, something we’re intuitively familiar with but struggle to articulate.
But what exactly is "the unsayable"? Answering this directly feels paradoxical—like describing silence by speaking. Yet, I’ll try, knowing full well that each word is an imperfect step toward something ultimately unreachable.
Have you ever been arrested by a song? Suddenly, despite everything else vying for your attention, you find yourself slipping inward, to space of intense beauty and appreciation.
Perhaps it’s unexpected, somewhere wholly ordinary, as in a crowded airport terminal? Fluorescent lights overhead, neighboring travelers chatting about their lives—entirely different worlds from yours, boarding announcements for loading flying busses, the roar of jet engines and rolling suitcases dragging across tile. You’re mid-errand, mid-thought, and suddenly the music catches you. Grabs you by the feelers. You drop inward, as if through a hidden hatch. And everything around you transforms into living art. For a brief moment, you glimpse into something deeper, amiss but essential, bigger than yourself but intimate, and yet…indescribable. This fleeting moment is a brush against the unsayable.
They occur just outside our normal register, and yet, somehow, we’ve all had them. Maybe when you’ve encountered an unlikely form of beauty* you couldn’t explain. Or when you loved* someone (or something) you’ve never met. Or when the word grief* was too small hold the experience. Perhaps we try to group these moments all together under umbrella terms: Beauty. Love. Loss. But sometimes our words shrink in the presence of what they point toward, or falter under unrecognized nuance. Given enough time, maybe we will expand our collective lexicon to bring a couple of them down to earth and cradle them with nomenclature.
Which begs the question, how many unsayables are out there? How many unsayable truths float just beyond our linguistic grasp?
One possible example is déjà vu: an uncanny, eerie sense of having already lived a moment as it unfolds. I’m still impressed that we found language for that fleeting feeling. We caught an unsayable, like a fae in a jar, and gave it a name. But even with a name, we don’t agree on what it is. Is it memory? Premonition? A glitch in the matrix of time? We’re still guessing. Still circling the curve. Like déjà vu, the unsayable is a real experience, yet beyond the bounds of language.
Maybe there's a whole plane of the unsayable. Not too unlike the akashic records, but instead of housing history & knowledge, perhaps it’s where poetry, music, and art originate before being filtered into form. I don’t know, but if such a place does exist, I would imagine access demands something from us: stillness, clarity, and a kind of mental youthfulness; a plasticity, an openness to wonder. A willingness to be unguarded. The ability to stay curious and admit openly that you don’t really know anything, and everything is possible. Because in the end, everything in this life is hypothesis.
And perhaps when we stop insisting on certainty, when we lean into the strange play of being, when we allow ourselves to marvel at the mundane, that’s when we are closest to the unsayable.
Approaching the Unsayable in Your Own Writing
If you're a poet, a writer, or a creative spirit, here’s how you might deliberately approach this ineffable place:
Cultivate Mindfulness: Take Notice.
Practice Proactive Silence.
Play! Stay Curious.
Listen to Instrumental Music.
F I N A L T H O U G H T Like mathematical asymptotes—lines that endlessly approach a curve (or zero) but never reaches it, our words may never fully capture these moments. Perhaps the greatest gift poetry gives us is permission to linger in uncertainty, to appreciate something without the compulsion to completely define it, or name it.
Because the unsayable, by its very nature, doesn’t want to be fully said—only approached, again and again.
If this resonated with you, Please tap the heart, it helps me grow as a writer. I’d love to hear your experience in the comments.
Yes to this! So glad you opened up a discussion about the ineffable, wonder, sublime, and how we as humans and poets need each other to fully grasp our experiences. Endlessly fascinated with this theme.
This is such an interesting concept, and I appreciate how you were able to articulate it! Thanks for sharing!