From Bruno Schultz in The Cinnamon Shops (Polish Sklepy cynamonowe):
The core of reality is meaning. What has no meaning is not real for us. Each bit of reality lives inasmuch as it participates in a universal meaning. Old cosmogonies expressed this idea with the phrase: “In the beginning was the Word.” What is not named doesn’t exist for us. To name a thing is tantamount to encompassing it in a universal meaning. An isolated word, a mosaic piece, is a recent product, result —already—of technique. The primitive word was a meandering spun around the meaning of light, it was a great universal whole. In its common acception today, a word is only a fragment, a leftover from an ancient and complete mythology. Hence this tendency in it to regenerate, to grow back, to complete itself in order to return to its whole meaning. The life of the word. The life of the word consists in its tension towards thousands of combinations, like the pieces of the quartered body of the legendary serpent which groped for each other in darkness. This complex organism has been torn up into separate words, into syllables, into everyday discourses. Used in this new form, it has become a tool of communication. Life, the development of language, have been pushed unto the utilitarian path, subjected to foreign rules. As soon as the practical requirements are relaxed, however, as soon as the word freed from constraint is abandoned to itself and re-established in its own laws, a regression happens in it. It tends then to complete itself, to find its ancient bonds, its meaning, its primordial state in the words’ original land-—then poetry is born.
Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning that occurs among words, it is a sudden burst of primitive myths.
When we use common words, we forget they are fragments of old and eternal stories, that we are building our house — like barbarians— with the debris of statues of the gods. Our concepts and our most concrete terms are distant derivations from them. Not an atom of our ideas that doesn’t come from them, that is not a transformed, mangled, changed mythology. The most primitive function of the mind is the creation of tales, of “stories.” [….]
Tirelessly, the human mind adds its glosses to life—myths—tirelessly it tries to “give meaning” to reality.
Meaning is what pulls humanity into the process of reality. It is an absolute given which cannot be deduced from other data. Impossible to explain why a thing seems “sensible” to us. To confer meaning to the world is a function which is inseparable from the word. Language is a person’s metaphysical organ. With time, the word coagulates, it stops carrying new meanings. The poet gives back to words their ability to conduct, by creating accumulations in which new tensions appear. Mathematical symbols are a broadening of the word to new domaines. Painting also derives from speech when it was not yet sign but myth, story, meaning.
Words are usually considered to be shadows of reality, a reflection. It would be more correct to say the opposite! Reality is a shadow of the word. Philosophy is fundamentally philology, a deep and creative study of speech.