How do creative writers describe things that are undescribable?

How do creative writers describe things that are undescribable?
It seems lazy writers put it up to, "you had to have been there."

What are some good examples of impossible, maddening, and simply unknowable things being creatively written about?

Pic related. Unimaginable colors.

Dante describing the Paradise

if things are described they are describable.

Look at some of the Zen poetry and whatnot. Usually the way to reach into indescribable phenomena is creative use of paradox and opposites.

If I remember when I get home tonight, I'll post an immaculate paragraph from Stoner that this question reminded me of.

Good question, unironically activated my almonds. I'm trying to think of an experience that would be truly ineffable, but it's difficult. I think many times it's just a lack of sufficiently broad vocabulary or experience base upon which to base metaphors that drive towards the said experience. I think almost anything would be describable by creating and clearly defining a dialectic system designed to get close to it conceptually. But I can't deny that there are probably things that are inherently unreachable with linguistics. They'd almost certainly have to be those weird kind of qualia that can't be visualized in a platonic realist kind of way.

Kafka (speaking to female)
>You are the knife with which I explore myself

Kerouac
>Suddenly one night after supper as I was pacing in the cold windy darkness of the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the ground and cried "I'm gonna die!" because there was nothing else to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh inhospitable Earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like milk in my eyelids and I was warm.
After rereading this it sounds a bit dramatic but it's what leads up to it that makes it great.

DFW
>I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children’s lives, profilgate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children, conforming to every last jot-tittle in any conceivably definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a) … (g).
>Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous? Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal treatment but somehow that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificent mother? Probably not.
>But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent, if that’s the child’s view of himself?

Admittedly these are shit examples but this thread is barren

>you are the knife with which I explore myself
holy fuck that's accurate

you say it was undescribable, and then describe how it made you feel

I think describing an actual thought is nearly impossible. Not what you're thinking of, but the form of the thought itself. Maybe that seems faggy or wrong.

We don't yet know what the limits of language are, but we do know that we aren't even close to finding them. What makes authors great is finding new ways to use language and record their thoughts. Any language can be expanded and used in a new way

Is this good enough reason not to read DFW?

Quotes from IJ prob aren't going to lure you in because I see it as more of an overall experience and I want to say no, he's worth it, but idk man just read what you wanna read.

>he never took psilocybin on atrocious amounts

I did that just a month before quitting a literature career for cinema. We can develop great art with words, but those always remain as mere sterile symbols. It's by sound and image that man will most successfully achieve the depths of the unconscious. I find it really unfortunate that in our age Literature is still the most well explored art media.

I miss shrooms, haven't had them in years. I remember taking 25i and talking with my friend about the archetype of morgan freeman

Wow DFW really hit home for me.

"Literature is still the most well explored art media."

is it?

everything can be described but it's only description, not full and real episteme

I like to think about that google deep ai frog gif and I describe it with "no definable lines" and "nauseating static" and basically adjectives in weird places. "vibrating hair" and stuff like that. You got to be vague, because no matter how detailed your idea's are, they're always limited by the reader. If you don't leave it vague for the imagination of the reader to work off of, it stops being weird and mysterious.

Negating as description does just this. Lovecraft uses it to overwhelm you with the unknowable. Basically talk about what it isn't in a way that the opposite of the negation reveals the obscure.

This is not not it, but almost nothing like what it isn't....

Yes, though Dante resorts to the physical form of light to portray the incorporeality of Paradise, he does so with reason. This is built on the medieval light metaphysics put forth by thinkers such as Robert Grosseteste: light is regarded as the first and highest form, distinct from all other forms of matter, bearing semblance to the angelic order of the intelligences. It has an analagous relations to these forms, "light is incorporeity itself." This is also driven by the centuries-old equation of the Godhead with the metaphor of the sun - one cannot bear to look at the sun directly, underscoring the ineffability of God (the divine darkness which is really a superabundance of light), but one can 'see' the emanations of light that proceed from the sun. Indeed, it is light itself that enables the faculty of sight in the first place. It is itself the condition of possibility for all vision.

As undescribable. Really, it's that easy.

If you wanna get on that hot shit just refer to it as "the outside".

>We can develop great art with words, but those always remain as mere sterile symbols. It's by sound and image that man will most successfully achieve the depths of the unconscious.
This.

You try your best and fail.
It’s an old “trick,” it is taught in literary analysis in my country.

From Stoner:
>He spoke of the loneliness of his childhood in Ohio, where his father had been a fairly successful small businessman; he told, as if of another person, of the isolation that his deformity had forced upon him, of the early shame which had no source that he could understand and no defence that he could muster. And when he told of the long days and evenings he had spent alone in his room, reading to escape the limitations that his twisted body imposed upon him and finding gradually a sense of freedom that grew more intense as he came to understand the nature of that freedom - when he told of this, William Stoner felt a kinship that he had not suspected; he knew Lomax had gone through a kind of conversion, an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words, as Stoner himself had once done, in the class taught by Archer Sloane. Lomax had come to it early, and alone, so that the knowledge was more nearly a part himself than it was of Stoner; but in the way that was finally most important, the two men were alike, though neither of them might wish to admit it to the other, or even to himself.

I'm working on a story about a forest, but instead of trees filled with spears and blades, instead of bushes it's filled with barbed wire. It's been difficult to describe a forest without trees, wood, branches, leaves.