What Shows Itself

When I shared Race Bannon's essay earlier today, I pushed back on where it landed — gently, I hope, because it's a lovely piece. Then I did the thing I should have done first. I read the source he was quoting.

It's a short, generous gloss on Wittgenstein's most-quoted line: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Reading it didn't soften my disagreement. It sharpened it. Because the piece does something quietly slippery. It braids three different ideas together and calls all three "Wittgenstein."

The first is the early Wittgenstein, the Tractatus. There, the line is a claim about what can be stated — propositions that picture facts. I made this case already, so I'll be brief. Wittgenstein's own conclusion is that the things that matter most can't be stated at all. They show themselves. The unsayable is not the nonexistent. It is the important part.

The second idea isn't really Wittgenstein at all. It's Sapir-Whorf — the notion that different languages carve up different worlds, that a concept easy in one tongue is impossible in another. There's a weak version of this that's true. Language tilts what you notice. It does not wall off what you can live. The Greeks had more words for love than we do, and it did not make them better at it. A grammar can nudge attention. It cannot fence experience.

The third idea is the one I skipped the first time, and it's the one that matters most — because it's the later Wittgenstein, and it's the part the source actually leans on. The Philosophical Investigations. Meaning is use. Language games. Forms of life. The claim that our world is constructed by the linguistic practices we engage in.

Here is where the slip happens. The source slides from "the world is built by our practices" to "the world is limited by our vocabulary." Those are not the same sentence. A form of life is a practice. It is the thing you do. It is not a word list.

So grant the whole constructivist case. Grant that we build our world through what we do together. It still doesn't arrive where the argument needs it to. Because my world is not short on practice. Leather family is one of the densest forms of life I know. It is built from protocol, ritual, a collar, a kneel, a look across a bar that says everything a paragraph couldn't. The relationship is constituted by the doing. The noun is optional. Most of the time the noun never shows up at all, and nothing is missing.

I'll concede the one fair point, because it is fair. Naming can help. "Chosen family" did real work the moment it had a name. "Polyamory" let people find each other. A word can ratify a thing, make it legible, let a scattered people recognize themselves. That's not nothing.

But notice the order. The families existed before the phrase. The love existed before the lexicon. The word arrived to ratify what was already being lived. It did not conjure it. Naming is recognition, not creation — which means the practical lesson runs backwards from where the source lands. Don't wait for the language. Live the thing. Let the words chase you.

The most precise language my world has ever spoken is wordless. A boy kneeling. A flag in a back pocket. A hand on the back of a neck. None of it would survive translation into the dictionary, and none of it needs to. It shows itself. It always has.

That isn't the limit of my world. It's the proof there's more of it than language was ever going to hold.

Sunrise over Rehoboth Beach on Sunday, May 3, 2026.

A much needed reminder of renewal and optimism after tragedy.