Expressing The Aesthetic    Our language is limited. How often do you find that you have experienced something very special, but when you try to share that moment with someone else, words fail you? It is, by definition, impossible to express the ineffable. The magic of the aesthetic experience often seems ineffable: difficult to understand and virtually impossible to express. However, unless we decide to live a life of solitude, to experience but not to share through our limited powers of communication, we had better keep on working on our words and our images. You will notice that, in order to convey the meaning of the aesthetic moment more clearly, both Keith and Rebecca resorted to the descriptive devices of imagery. Analogies, metaphors and similes are among the literary techniques that can be used to clarify and enhance mutual understanding. For example, Keith equates his running experience with a drop of rain falling from a cloud and Rebecca describes the tenacious group cohesion of the basketball team "as a swarm of bees moving so fast they seemed to fly". Comparisons will help to convey meaning, but there is no substitute for a full and comprehensive vocabulary. This Aesthetic Alphabet might help:
 

A	action	artistry
B	balance
C	clothing	color	context	control
D	danger	disguise	dynamic
E	efficient	effort	emotion	execute	expertise
F	flow	fluidity	force	form
G	grace
H	harmony
I	ideal	illusion
J	joy
K	kinesic
L	lovely
M	might
N	natural
O	original
P	poise	power
Q	quality
R	rhythm	risk
S	shape	skill	speed	strategy	strength	style	slickness
T	tactics	tempo	tension	timing
U	unity
V	victory	virtue
W	winning
X	Xellence	(sorry!)
Y	youthful
Z	zeal	zest

    The Aesthetic Alphabet is only a beginning. You know words that can help you to define a moment of beauty but which don't appear on this list. Use them in conjunction with this alphabet to augment your vocabulary and enrich your aesthetic expression.
Exercise 6: Try describing a beautiful movement experience, selecting qualitative words carefully from the alphabetical list and from your own vocabulary. Allow your imagination to range through images that will help you to bring your experience to life for the listener.
Discussion: In a very real way you are "playing" with words as you creatively reconstruct a beautiful moment in meaningful language. You are authoring poetry in motion. This description is poetic in that, just as the movement experience itself defies and transcends the medium of words, so the words you select should transcend the mundane and prosaic. Phrases such as, "it was neat (nice, cool, awesome, etc.) that might be adequate in normal conversation, don't come close to capturing the magic of an aesthetically pleasing experience. Even the most poetic language rich with imagery and carefully selected descriptors will fail to do the experience justice. Words, as a form of symbolic communication are simply not fully adaptable to the language of sport. The marriage between artistry in action and the articulation of action through words is strained.
    The reconciliation of movement and it's expression has been a project of pioneers in the human movement field this century. For example, Rudolph Laban developed a movement notation system which has informed the evolution of modern dance and branches of pedagogical theory, Eleanor Metheny proposed a general theory of the meaning of human movement consisting of kinestructs, kinescepts and kinesymbols, which she named kinesthesia and the field of Somatic Studies has continued the process of appreciating and expressing the lived-body experience with the prompting of such leaders as Tom Hanna and Sy Kleinman. Follow in their footsteps as you seek new and better ways of experiencing the joy and beauty of your movement experiences and as you develop more refined ways of understanding their significance in your own life and of giving them meaning through dialogue.