“the void is waiting for vocabulary”
-Edmond Jabes-
Hundreds of thousands of bloggers just today. More hundreds of thousands of words. If internet and web cloud technocommunication virtuality haze space signifies anything to me it’s an enormous, incalculable black hole. Like numbers of the dead in war-torn countries, the mind numbs, is unable to actually perceive, barely conceive the truly vast amounts of language traversing the aether even as my fidgety cursor leads me on.
Greyscale. Fog. If we could layer the sentences uploading and downloading each nanosecond we would create a gigantic palimpsest of shadows and abstraction. With all of these voices, all these digits and copies and pastes and links and quotations and -ipedias of information flooding, flooding, pouring forth…who might hear? How will your line or my line, each individual’s arrangement, profession, offering into the dialogue/multilogue languaging necessarily is – find a hint of an echo, a reverberation, let alone a true response?
“There are many more languages than one imagines. And humans reveal themselves much more often than they wish. So many things that speak! But there are always so few listeners, so that humans, so to speak, only chatter in a void when they engage in confessions. They waste their truths just as the sun wastes its light. Isn’t it too bad that the void has no ears?” -Friedrich Nietzsche-
Void: deaf and hungry, is that what I’m understanding? Like black-hole-vacuumings…taking everything in without distinction, churning it up like a sink-e-rator, farting it further through the absence of space?
And what of Jabes…a seer…some hopeful pseudo-Biblical desert screamer…personalizing the void? Trying to soothe or encourage us in our madness to express, uncover, discover, be acknowledged, be heard – urging us to seed the void with our words? A void without ears waits for language – what does this mean?
“the whole struggle of literature is in fact an effort to escape from the confines of language”
-Italo Calvino-
“Any page of writing is a knot of silence unravelled”
“Letters give form to absence”
-Jabes-
Closer…at least to some thinking…that this reaching, this stretching, this hope beyond hope and irrational exigency to language language language this world…is also to get further, farther out, farther in to our world in its muteness. Void might be empty, deaf, dumb, blind…and our language, our images and movements and sounds might cohere once in awhile…if only…this cosmosphere of chatter (i think i’ve even read “blogosphere” somewhere) might possibly torque us forward, pulling from our mouths languagings that belong…”to make writing appear, is not to dispose of privileged knowledge: it is to discover what everyone knows but no one can say. It is to try, just once, to raise the veil which maintains us in an obscurity we have not chosen” (Philippe Sollers)
So everyone, keep feeding the sphere, fertilizing clouds, singing into the canyon…the void waits and waits and will always be waiting (else it could not be void)…there seems to be something Promethean, mythic, human about the effort to fill it, one word at a time
“the blank page, the void where everything is called into question”
-Ronald Sukenick-
“and you’d know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say”
-Denis Johnson-
“mysteries are problems that encroach on their own data” (George Santayana)…
to be continued