"Yours for the Telling" by Raymond Queneau

-1973
-a kind of "choose your own adventure" in the form of footnotes underneath "Brief History of the Oulipo" by Jean Lescure.
-"'It would not seem that the composition of poems arising from a vocabulary composed by intersections, inventories, or any other process may constitute an end in itself.'"
-"...like mathematics, literature could be explored.

There are a few things that make this article particularly intriguing. First and foremost, "Yours for the Telling" is this weird little choose your own adventure blurb inserted at the bottom of a history of the Oulipo. Assuming this was an active decision on the Authors' part, what exactly does this insertion achieve? While the historical document is very interesting, the footnoted "Yours for the Telling" is actually more engaging. It establishes boundaries and gives the reader a minimal amount of power by simply offering 2 choices at each intersection. It's disgustingly simple, yet it's still more engrossing than the article itself.
Second, the historical article explores language as a set of limitations, which is something I feel like I've been raving about in this blog for months. And such limitation is illustrated beautifully. The author asks the reader to consider a stomachache. The word is incredibly vague and does absolutely nothing to convey the specific pain one feels when experiencing a "stomachache" beyond locating it to a general section of the human body. Furthermore, the article explores language as a concrete object, something to be manipulated and reworked to discover new modes of representation, to redefine/reconfigure perception.
Burroughs, in his article about the cut-up method, expresses similar ideas. Even if the object of language is made abstract, language itself is concrete enough for the human brain to try and cope, to attempt to decipher and find meaning in the object.

Yet, if language is an object, is it not subjected to the human projection of meaning? With physical objects, people make certain associations. A bicycle, as viewed/experienced by a person is not just a bicycle but also a hypertextual/metaphysical construction of the object based on memory and associated memory. Now to read the word "bicycle" has the exact same effect on human perception, including the mental fabrication of the image of a bicycle.
But language attempts to objectify some extremely abstract concepts such as human emotion, and in that sense, literary language could actually be too limiting, couldn't it?

So where do we go from here? What happens when we find that literary or even sensory language doesn't cut it?

Prediction:

You want to know exactly how I'm feeling emotionally? Send me a link to your emotional database. I'll forward it to you. Feel for yourself.