Artikel
The Sound of Language and the Sound of Things
18 januari 2006
I think that we can look at the history of western society (I don’t know the others well) as the history of the progressive intrusion of meanings over other modalities of perception of the world (anti-hermeneutic modalities). I think that Leopardi’s anguish in the face of the dominion of the ‘spiritualist’ commerce of his era, or to go back in time, Petrarch’s polemic against aristotelism, belong to the same type of discourse. They are two stages in the awakening of consciousness on the part of some, regarding the enormous stakes involved in the age-old battle between the mentalist (and utilitarian) claims connected to the use of knowledge and the claims that aimed at the social development of the perceptive faculties tied to the body. The latter were always on the losing side since they were constitutively anti-authoritarian.
This is also the dreadful history of the social decline of poetry, which after Dante had to retreat in defence of the senses and of subjective perception (psychology), or sell itself at a loss as the handmaiden of some type of knowledge or power.
So-called civil poetry, the one most implicated with the world of meanings, makes little sense because in the best of cases it tells us what we already know, and this seems to me a very poor task for a poem. Only he who has nothing to say worries about what he will write. True poetry can only be born of a subjective world that is so firm in its psychic assumptions that it has no need to think about or take care of itself, as it has no need to say “I am here and not there,” or “I think this and not that,” etc. Only he who already has everything can afford the (necessary) luxury of being generous. Poets who are tormented by the need to say something are those who lack something fundamental: they are unresolved individuals who are not able to provoke a growth of reality but who suffer their own idiosyncrasies and imbalances. They are in search of something that is too ephemeral and subjective to be truly useful to us: they do not go outside themselves.
Let’s think instead of the world of Dante, but also that of Petrarch, Ariosto, and Leopardi: everything in their texts indicates that they were born of a solid, monolithic, and healthy subjectivity, which is sure of itself despite appearances. It is only from a world like this that we can learn and touch the true lack, that which is capable of touching us all because it belongs not to the psychology of this or that individual but to the anthropological meaning of being in the world, to the nature of things. We could try to define this lack as the essence of mortality, or of temporality.
This lack lies at the bottom of every natural language: it is that which is removed in the age-old communicative use of language. This is how the language of communication in reality doesn’t communicate very much: the possibility of true communication, of a true sharing, has been lost along the way. Through a sort of deafness toward language, we forbid each other a priori to have the possibility of human contact that is not fictitious. There is no contact, in fact, if not in the presence of mortality. It is our being for death that unites us, and it is the awareness of the passing of time that confers truth to our relationships, in the dimension of an encounter with a common destiny.
It is the task of poets to uncover this missing bottom in the mechanisms of language. Poets are those who are strong enough to not let themselves get distracted by their respective personal and individual faults, and who manage to concentrate, if only for a few fractions of a second, on the essence of temporality. (It is for this reason that in poetry the theme of memory is so important: Mnemosyne is the mother of the muses.)
I manage to distinguish clearly enough between at least two spheres of inquiry in this field, even if the distinction only serves my purpose, and I believe that there are also two modes of inquiry or founding perceptive attitudes (which are really complementary).
First sphere of inquiry: one can grasp the essence of temporality by stopping. The elocutive slowdown that is obtained at the intersection of a particular order of words with a rhythmic configuration and a particular order of intonation of the verse (or the sentence), perhaps together with even a slight semantic ambiguity, procures a rest, a light self-reflexive implication in the photo syntactic chain, a difficulty of pronunciation that usually has to do with an ‘artificial’ lengthening of the quantity or the duration of vowels. The amount of violence that language undergoes in this process depends on the poetics of the author, on the width of the gap with respect to a presumed degree zero of language. I would only add these days that the experience is all the more difficult, interesting and meritorious, the less the language that is used distances itself from daily registers of syntax and vocabulary. The less violence there appears to be on the language, the greater the illusion of its naturalness, and the greater the possibility, not only to address everyone – that is, to recreate a community dimension for poetry – but also to carry out a socially useful function by introducing the dimension of silence directly into the body of the language of communication and promoting its redemption without the reader’s knowledge. I think that this silent reappraisal (not an ennobling) of the cliché through formal mechanisms is an obligatory passage for socially committed writers of our time and that here and not elsewhere, is where we gamble on our work’s claims of realism and ‘civil’ values.
The second sphere of inquiry has to do with the relationship between words and things. The world is made up above all of things. Things do not speak, but they have a language and a reason for being. They are there to remind us that it is possible to be silent. I am aware that those who use the language of written communication (journalists, literary people, philosophers) or oral communication (chatterboxes) with ease, not only are generally not good listeners of language – that is, they live in a dimension of total subjection to the linguistic institution and its clichés – but also usually have a terrible relationship with objects used in daily life. They break them, ignore them, treat them badly; they see only their function and often, for this very reason, don’t have a good relationship with them, and need someone who is capable of solving practical problems. This is the reason why it is necessary to be wary of the category of inept poets, those who would not be capable of hammering a nail into a wall or making themselves a fried egg: they are people who don’t love language. He who loves language loves things, he who knows how to listen to language knows how to listen to the silence of things. There is no love without the physical and there is no poetry without a physical relationship with things and with language, which is its rational allegory. It is through things that temporality enters into language: it’s necessary to touch words as if they were things.
Now I’ll come to two perceptive attitudes that the strong poet can assume toward things. It is difficult to describe that which occurs exactly in the short circuit between perception and writing. I think, however, that intense concentration is one of the ways to listen to the temporality inherent in things: when our attention is so concentrated on an object (it doesn’t matter if it’s physical or metaphysical), we manage to extract some new properties from it. Poetry is, therefore, the fruit of sounding great depths; but that which is acquired in intensity risks getting lost in the vastness of a barely defined horizon.
The other perceptive mode or temperament, which is the one I prefer, consists on the other hand of the momentary intensification of a ‘distracted’ inclination toward things: distraction does not set itself against attention as much as it does concentration, it is in sum, maximum and simultaneous attention toward all the things of the world. That which is lost in intensity of sensation is gained in vastness of horizon, in relational awareness. In this inclination, our encounters with people, objects, animals and sentiments, are always occasional, casual, and disturbed as they are in life. In order to tell you about these encounters I have written Ritorno a Planaval and I am not ashamed to ask you to read it.
Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo, 2004
First published in l’Indice, issue 11, November 2002 (p. 41)
"It is not true that we live in an empty world. Or rather, it’s true, but by saying it we haven’t done enough to explain the true nature of our malaise: our world is badly made not because it lacks meaning, but because there is too much meaning," writes Stefano Dal Bianco in this essay from 2002.
We are bombarded by meaning, every day, at all hours of our lives. We spend our time interpreting the signs that the world hurls at us, we interpret everything, we analyse everything and everyone psychologically, everything turns into knowledge, everything that cannot be reduced to any one of the codified types of knowledge tends not to exist, it loses all rights of citizenship. Only that which can be uttered, classified, or exchanged matters. And the quality of the meanings in question, be they ephemeral or not, is not very important. From this point of view there is no difference between a television variety show, a book by Habermas or Cacciari, or even a religious function or a new age music piece: everything is dominated by meaning. I think that we can look at the history of western society (I don’t know the others well) as the history of the progressive intrusion of meanings over other modalities of perception of the world (anti-hermeneutic modalities). I think that Leopardi’s anguish in the face of the dominion of the ‘spiritualist’ commerce of his era, or to go back in time, Petrarch’s polemic against aristotelism, belong to the same type of discourse. They are two stages in the awakening of consciousness on the part of some, regarding the enormous stakes involved in the age-old battle between the mentalist (and utilitarian) claims connected to the use of knowledge and the claims that aimed at the social development of the perceptive faculties tied to the body. The latter were always on the losing side since they were constitutively anti-authoritarian.
This is also the dreadful history of the social decline of poetry, which after Dante had to retreat in defence of the senses and of subjective perception (psychology), or sell itself at a loss as the handmaiden of some type of knowledge or power.
So-called civil poetry, the one most implicated with the world of meanings, makes little sense because in the best of cases it tells us what we already know, and this seems to me a very poor task for a poem. Only he who has nothing to say worries about what he will write. True poetry can only be born of a subjective world that is so firm in its psychic assumptions that it has no need to think about or take care of itself, as it has no need to say “I am here and not there,” or “I think this and not that,” etc. Only he who already has everything can afford the (necessary) luxury of being generous. Poets who are tormented by the need to say something are those who lack something fundamental: they are unresolved individuals who are not able to provoke a growth of reality but who suffer their own idiosyncrasies and imbalances. They are in search of something that is too ephemeral and subjective to be truly useful to us: they do not go outside themselves.
Let’s think instead of the world of Dante, but also that of Petrarch, Ariosto, and Leopardi: everything in their texts indicates that they were born of a solid, monolithic, and healthy subjectivity, which is sure of itself despite appearances. It is only from a world like this that we can learn and touch the true lack, that which is capable of touching us all because it belongs not to the psychology of this or that individual but to the anthropological meaning of being in the world, to the nature of things. We could try to define this lack as the essence of mortality, or of temporality.
This lack lies at the bottom of every natural language: it is that which is removed in the age-old communicative use of language. This is how the language of communication in reality doesn’t communicate very much: the possibility of true communication, of a true sharing, has been lost along the way. Through a sort of deafness toward language, we forbid each other a priori to have the possibility of human contact that is not fictitious. There is no contact, in fact, if not in the presence of mortality. It is our being for death that unites us, and it is the awareness of the passing of time that confers truth to our relationships, in the dimension of an encounter with a common destiny.
It is the task of poets to uncover this missing bottom in the mechanisms of language. Poets are those who are strong enough to not let themselves get distracted by their respective personal and individual faults, and who manage to concentrate, if only for a few fractions of a second, on the essence of temporality. (It is for this reason that in poetry the theme of memory is so important: Mnemosyne is the mother of the muses.)
I manage to distinguish clearly enough between at least two spheres of inquiry in this field, even if the distinction only serves my purpose, and I believe that there are also two modes of inquiry or founding perceptive attitudes (which are really complementary).
First sphere of inquiry: one can grasp the essence of temporality by stopping. The elocutive slowdown that is obtained at the intersection of a particular order of words with a rhythmic configuration and a particular order of intonation of the verse (or the sentence), perhaps together with even a slight semantic ambiguity, procures a rest, a light self-reflexive implication in the photo syntactic chain, a difficulty of pronunciation that usually has to do with an ‘artificial’ lengthening of the quantity or the duration of vowels. The amount of violence that language undergoes in this process depends on the poetics of the author, on the width of the gap with respect to a presumed degree zero of language. I would only add these days that the experience is all the more difficult, interesting and meritorious, the less the language that is used distances itself from daily registers of syntax and vocabulary. The less violence there appears to be on the language, the greater the illusion of its naturalness, and the greater the possibility, not only to address everyone – that is, to recreate a community dimension for poetry – but also to carry out a socially useful function by introducing the dimension of silence directly into the body of the language of communication and promoting its redemption without the reader’s knowledge. I think that this silent reappraisal (not an ennobling) of the cliché through formal mechanisms is an obligatory passage for socially committed writers of our time and that here and not elsewhere, is where we gamble on our work’s claims of realism and ‘civil’ values.
The second sphere of inquiry has to do with the relationship between words and things. The world is made up above all of things. Things do not speak, but they have a language and a reason for being. They are there to remind us that it is possible to be silent. I am aware that those who use the language of written communication (journalists, literary people, philosophers) or oral communication (chatterboxes) with ease, not only are generally not good listeners of language – that is, they live in a dimension of total subjection to the linguistic institution and its clichés – but also usually have a terrible relationship with objects used in daily life. They break them, ignore them, treat them badly; they see only their function and often, for this very reason, don’t have a good relationship with them, and need someone who is capable of solving practical problems. This is the reason why it is necessary to be wary of the category of inept poets, those who would not be capable of hammering a nail into a wall or making themselves a fried egg: they are people who don’t love language. He who loves language loves things, he who knows how to listen to language knows how to listen to the silence of things. There is no love without the physical and there is no poetry without a physical relationship with things and with language, which is its rational allegory. It is through things that temporality enters into language: it’s necessary to touch words as if they were things.
Now I’ll come to two perceptive attitudes that the strong poet can assume toward things. It is difficult to describe that which occurs exactly in the short circuit between perception and writing. I think, however, that intense concentration is one of the ways to listen to the temporality inherent in things: when our attention is so concentrated on an object (it doesn’t matter if it’s physical or metaphysical), we manage to extract some new properties from it. Poetry is, therefore, the fruit of sounding great depths; but that which is acquired in intensity risks getting lost in the vastness of a barely defined horizon.
The other perceptive mode or temperament, which is the one I prefer, consists on the other hand of the momentary intensification of a ‘distracted’ inclination toward things: distraction does not set itself against attention as much as it does concentration, it is in sum, maximum and simultaneous attention toward all the things of the world. That which is lost in intensity of sensation is gained in vastness of horizon, in relational awareness. In this inclination, our encounters with people, objects, animals and sentiments, are always occasional, casual, and disturbed as they are in life. In order to tell you about these encounters I have written Ritorno a Planaval and I am not ashamed to ask you to read it.
Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo, 2004
First published in l’Indice, issue 11, November 2002 (p. 41)
© Stefano Dal Bianco
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