Tuesday, March 23, 2010

There is the imprisonment of language.

This refers not just to the specific expressive capacities and lacunae unique to a given language system. Imprisonment consists also in your need to use random sounds of arbitrarily designated significance within a pre-determined net of syntax in order to shape individual sensations and feelings so they can be experienced and shared. Memory without language is unknowable; in the absence of language, the confinement of apparent individuality is absolute and indiscernible. Accepting the strictures of language permits you to receive experiences thus encoded. Thus to receive a world, to ameliorate a loneliness that is fathomless, normal, incoherent.

Individual experience before language is sensorial, emotional, prompted by, inextricably bound to what we might call the limitless and ceaseless phenomena ‘other’. Unshared it remains inalterable, inassimilable by memory, a riotous and activating fluxus. An animate void.

Therefore implicit in the imprisonment of language is the promise of a freedom.
Partial, it is true, but sparing you the worst. Perhaps exchanging a worse imprisonment, solitary, silent, disembodied, for a music, a dance, a swirl of transformations that though transitory, lingers in a mysterious realm of promise and somehow remains always unbearably beautiful.

This, as you hear the clarinet, look through the bars and see the dancer place her foot upon the stage.