Wisdom from a Wendell Berry essay

Once we allow our language to mean anything that anybody wants it to mean, it becomes impossible to mean what we say. When "homemade" ceases to mean neither more nor less than "made at home," then it means anything, which is to say that it means nothing.
-Wendell Berry, "In Distrust of Movements," originally published in Orion, and anthologized in The Best American Essays 2000.

Materials and meaning in art

From Thomas Howard's Dove Descending: A Journey into T.S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets':

“…Eliot’s material is words, as marble is the sculptor’s and notes the composer’s. It is not as though words are mere instruments or just the lowly handmaidens of meaning. Words are the thing. When we visit Chartres, we do not dismiss the stone and glass as the mere stuff of something infinitely greater than stone and glass. The cathedral is stone and glass. It does not exist at all without stone and glass. We cannot drive any wedge of meaning between the materials and the glory to which the building testifies. The whole thing is glory, under the particular species of stone and glass. The same goes for notes in a concerto or divertimento, or swipes of oil and pigment in a Vermeer. The material constitutes the modality under which we perceive the thing itself.”