When I feel them, I am always feeling my human translation of them
into wet cold small things
Language originates from the mouth. It comes from within, obeying the speed of the body, the dexterity of hand and the formation of the palette. But whereas the voice, the organic form of language, has the power to connect bodies at the site of their juncture with the outside world – ears and mouths – language as an abstract and totalising system enacts a kind of conceptual violence apart from the body.
Spare and pregnant spaces
excavate the pre-history of communication offered as the passage of meaning from one body to another.
Speech leaves no mark in space: like gesture it exists in its immediate context and can reappear only in another’s voice, another’s body, even if that other is the same speaker transformed by history. But writing contaminates, writing leaves its trace, a trace beyond the life of the body. Thus while speech gains authenticity, writing promises immortality, or at least the immortality of the material world in contrast to the mortality of the body
To reiterate; writing contaminates, writing leaves its trace
the space between the abstract order of language and the material substance of a world that glimmers far beyond it
we find ourselves asked to return consciousness to the body
its inscribed histories and ultimate mortality.
