What does Language do? What is it good at/for?

It works with sensory data which it divides and fractures into discrete packages (I wonder if Language actually does this directly rather than our brains doing it and then turning the data into Language).

It categorises, classifies and defines.

Defining is the act of making distinct from something else (Derrida, La Saussure) – the act of separating, fragmenting, then relating – bringing back into relationship but within categories.

It has evolved, like everything does, as a mutation that favours survival.

In this case it serves to protect from Everything, Reality, or the Real by fragmenting it into words. It protects us, or the Psyche from the Real. The Real is overwhelming to the Ego. Therefore Language will/can not describe the Real, or Everything, only its components that can be apprehended by our senses.

So Language is not the correct tool for apprehending Everything, only its ingredients.

We are necessarily outside of Everything because of Language. Language does this in order to save us from annihilation when confronted with, or finding that we are a part of Everything and therefore we are Everything and not Something (Spinoza’s and Deleuze’s Univocal Immanence?).

On the other hand,  if according to Sufism, the Apparent is a bridge to the Real, and Language describes the Apparent, is Language also a bridge to the Real? Or a path to the bridge?

In fact If we take ‘the Apparent is a bridge to the Real’ to mean that while the Real can not be apprehended directly  but requires the Apparent as a mediator, a bridge (over what? the Void? The Abyss? That is, madness, or oblivion for the Ego?) then can we say the Apparent requires a bridge to the Real made of Language? or is Language a thicket of brambles blocking our path to the bridge? Am i in danger here of only addressing Latin/indo-european language? Are there languages, Arabic, Basque, that are able to make the sounds and shapes of the non-apparent/material?).

Language is, like us, on the outside (transcendent), yearning for the inside (immanent). Or rather, we are on the outside and language is of the outside as inside there is no language. And therefore no art.  The outside is, therefore, a great place to be for an artist. The stresses created by these dynamics form the landscape which poetry describes, and on which we place our sculpture.