#on language

[metamorphesque]

'things there are no words for, but should be', tatheve simonyan

[luthienne]

Tony Hoagland, from Application for Release from the Dream; “The Complex Sentence”

[chthonic-cassandra]

Here, I think it is useful to see how there is also a flaw in language that the neurotic structure confronts. For the neurotic, the flaw is a lack in language, the failure of language to say everything. We speak, listen, write, and language arrives in phrases, pinned down through a process of scansion as we anticipate meanings that only become clear at the end of a sentence. But each phrase, sentence, moment of saying, leaves something unsaid, and unsayable (Rogers, 2006). So we go on with revisions, elaborations, erasures, and questions, endless questions. If something does not make sense, we elide it, or decipher it. Desire unfolds in relation to a silent lack a the heart of speaking and writing. There is always "more."

But in psychosis the unsayable in language does not work this way. Confronted to questions of existence, she cannot find a way in speaking. She cannot scan particular fragments of speaking or writing, or decipher them. Perhaps she hears no voice, but something of the voice arrives in writing, and she hears in words themselves an enigma that cannot be explained. If there are no answers in the family or in society to questions of her existence, no conventional language that speaks to the place of the subject, what is left but to fix this flaw, to found a new language out of a place of impossibilities?

Annie G. Rogers, Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language

[funeral]

Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

[feral-ballad]

Victoria Chang, from Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief; “Dear Teacher,”

[Text ID: “The language of poetry reminded me to stay alive. It reminded me that, when it felt like I had nothing, I was nothing, I still had words. I could ride language as if on a horseback, and it could take me anywhere, including deeply into myself.”]

[griefasagarden]

And I know I will exit / my banner as a bird that does not alight on trees in the garden. / I will exit all of my skin, and my language.

— mahmoud darwish, i have behind the sky a sky, trans. fady joudah

[stillorbitingu]

Vocabulary, Safia Elhillo