confession

I don't get the Tractaus. I am utterly baffled by the form. I do not grasp, except in the most rudimentary way, what is meant by "a picture theory of language." The text seems, on the one hand, almost inhumanly logical -- like something generated by a robot or a computer -- and on the other hand to gesture, startlingly, in places -- toward poetry and feeling: "there are indeed, many things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." Wittgenstein sometimes talked about "the more important unwritten second half" of the Tractatus -- ie, the realm of ethics and metaphysics to which he points but of which he insists we cannot speak. It seems to me that the dominant note is quite similar to Marianne Moore's "Silence" ("the deepest feeling always shows itself in silence..."). In Wittgenstein's text, as in Moore's we have to read silence in addition to reading the text itself. And once we do that, we will, according to Wittgenstein, be able to "throw the ladder away." I'm interested here, in the idea of limits: the limits of language, the limits of the world, the limits of thought and meaning -- and the profound way in which a limit always also suggests something beyond. I'm also interested in the relationship between thought and feeling in Wittgenstein's, which seems to me deep, complicated and strange.