Out of Context

He knew no words to describe the beauty of this planet. He could say it was awesome, majestic, quirky, sweeping...but in the end he knew that no thousand words of his could describe even a single-frame picture of this place adequately. The flood of adjectives and nouns were not enough to convey the tiny sparkling lakes tucked away in the artic north, little vales of paradise hidden in the glacier-tortured landscape of tossed rocks and twisted shrubs. No mere sentence of his could begin to shine with the variety of colors found in a simple sunset at the end of the day. His vocabulary would not drown the listener in the deluge of a morning's pounding rain, and that would be the only way it would be sufficient. Unless he could invent words that would immerse his audience into this world of deep, crystal green seas and skies of spacious blue, they would not be enough.

That was the problem, wasn't it? The words he needed were not those Cybertron had ever needed to invent. Oh, yes, Transformers had visited Earth before, and perhaps some of this spectacular beauty had found its way into the local tongue of the world, but he seriously doubted that much had remained of it by that time. If he remembered his history correctly, by that time humanity had been convinced it was separate and above this mudball they owned. By that time, they were wreaking as much havoc upon the world as the Decepticons ever had. He wasn't surprised that his words were lacking; they were spawned in cities and metal, and not meant to be forced upon another world so different than their beginnings. Cybertron, for all its stark lines and precision building, had not a fraction of the--the SOMETHING he found by standing in the shadow of a haunting, tangled tree as a nearly full moon rose.

Yet for all the lack, he could only shudder at the abundance in his language. Words of hatred, war, and anger poured from metallic lips, shaped by a world born into slavery. How strange words of gentle admiration felt as they were shaped by his tongue! What shame he felt that he could relate a battle with heartrending detail and still be unable to describe the breathtaking joy of standing at the sandy edge of a cliff overlooking a shimmering ribbon of river winding through the midst of a desert. He couldn't decide if it invoked pity or horror that sorrow and fury could be painted into nauseous life before his mind's eye using effortless words, but once he left this planet he would have naught but a fading memory trapped in his head. Mouth agape helplessly, he would try to tell of the happiness the sight of sunlight piercing through a cloud could bring, but the words would stick in his throat and fail to illustrate the picture only he'd be able to see.

If psychologists said the hallmark of intelligent thinking was the ability to think in words instead of images, he felt sorry for those who truly believed that definition. Without a proper language to think in, there was no other way to remember his time on Earth. To try and exchange such stunning splendor for words would only cheapen the end product, because there was no way to go back to conceiving the picture without the words attached afterward. Once labeled, the wild spontaneity that was part of this world's appeal would be tamed, and therefore what he saw in his mind would no longer be true to the original. He knew no language wide enough for a true trade; instead, he struggled with a tongue forced upon the world by those who wanted to reshape it under their control, robot or human. As he strained at the task, he suddenly realized that the hallmark of intelligent thinking was the ability to USE words…and to know when words were just a means of communication.

Tigatron smiled at the lush grass around his feet. He'd never be able to tell another why the sight of a field of vegetation filled him with wonder.

Some things had to be seen to believe.

"I know no desert language. I struggle with a tongue forced on another continent, with words spawned in green forests under gray, soggy skies."
--Bowden

"Some memories you don't want to put words on…because that would change them…By naming the inexpressible, you lose it." --Edison Ripsborn