Christina Tudor-Sideri

Language Wants to Fulfil Itself

Within the realm of impulse, language intones the death of absence. In the blue hour, language  puts on the mask of the Other. For the duration of an embrace, language answers the question  of Being. With words harvested from accidental pages, language rewrites itself into the passage  of time. From Éluard it takes the hands. It takes the hands and places between them not a city  but a heart; not a broken bond but the only bond. Bruised by the missing God of Jabès, language  turns feral in the mind. As desire, language recognizes in itself the primary obsession of the  child. Its evasiveness flames the dark. At night, language comes and asks the body: Is this what  it is to be inseparable from the soul? In the morning, language rips itself from the voice like a  skin, exposing silence, exposing rawness, and tenderness, and something altogether new. From  Dante, language learns how to make the candle ready for its flame. From Bachelard, it takes  the pen and writes: solitude is death itself. Between presence and absence, language forgets  itself and becomes the written word of Celan. From Duras it takes the vast emptiness, the  possible book, the something-terrible-to-overcome. In letters, language collapses not on the  page but on the bodies of lovers, word upon word, one phrase cradling another inside the ever narrow postal tube, like longing limbs in search of reciprocity. There is no letter of the lover  without the letter of the word. No Time without the time of the heartbeat that measures it. Sitting  in the garden with Wittgenstein, languages gazes at trees that will never be. Think of your life  without it, writes Carson in her ode to sleep. Without rest. But think. Think of your life without  language, scribbled in the sand on some beach from the past. Language itself has written it. It  has written it knowing no such possibility exists, not for as long as the text is written and the  text is read. Nonbeing, darkness, death. Calasso. Lispector. The raw state, the after state, the  state before all things and after all lovers have taken their last breath. And in that state,  language—a ghost to itself. From Blecher, it dresses the body of the here-and-now. Language,  a ghost in the dress of the sea. Language, rising from the ocean like a lighthouse. Common  language, literary language, historical language, poetical language. The language of pain and  pleasure, of wounds that throb and fingers that burn. Language, a cosmos, a sea voyage;  language, the sea itself, and, above all, iconography. A homecoming. Language, the poem  taking note of itself, taking note of this distance, this time zone inhabited solely by two beings;  the poem, together with its reception. When the sea cannot be reached, you cannot imagine that  things go on. From Cixous, it learns how to arrive. How to arrive after having run since the  beginning of time. How to arrive and breathe its last breath and revive on your lips. From  Blanchot it takes this creed: it wants to fulfil itself. It takes a definition outside of the text: the  murmuring voice of an ancient past. From Bonnefoy, it remembers the haunting: wind through  the memory of the house. Wind that wraps around your throat and from this tightness births the  word anew. From Bachmann, it takes the possibility of another gait. In poetic pursuit, language  walks and walks and continues to breathe. To find the Seine again. From Derrida, it uproots a  souvenir: it is still up to us to exhaust language. Think of your life without it.