[The Fall, Camut, A]
Thursday, 24 June 2010
...of ignorance
Your right: his silence is deafening. It's the silence of the primeval forest, heavy with menace. It surprises me at times, the obstinacy with which our uncommunicative friend insists on giving the cold shoulder to every civilised language. His work involves serving sailors of all nationalities in this bar - which for some reason or other, though we're in Amsterdam, he calls Mexico City. With a job like that, wouldn't you think his ignorance might be a burden to him? Imagine Cro-Magnon Man taking rooms in the Tower of Babel. He'd feel a little out of his element, to say the least. But no, this fellow doesn't feel like an exile, he just carries on regardless.
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I did a search on language on your blog which came up with a couple of entries including this one. What follows is not so much a response to it as an attempt to expand on silence and its potential for communicating with the other - and for finding harmony with him/her. This is not the brutal silence of ignorance but the recognition of the limit of the spoken word for harmonious communication between us.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading Luce Irigaray again lately - in the preface of 'Etre Deux', she celebrates air as the undivided fluid density that is the prerequisite for growth and sharing. If plants co-exist without difficulty, she says, what about humans? How do we share the air surrounding us, between us? How do we communicate without breaking the fragile envelop that nourishes us in our state of contemplative unity? Do our words carry the same air or a different one? Is this air good for life?
- and if you remain silent, doesn't that mean that you are short of words? and if you sing, could it be that there is more air in a song - beyond words?
'Your silence and my contemplation co-exist. What also exists is the almost absolute silence of the beginning of the world. In an equal measure, before everything is said, a dense cloud of air, almost immobile, floats on earth. The vegetal universal breathes already, and we, maybe, are wondering how to speak, how to speak to each other, without suffocating it.' [my translation]