“To speak of oneself in a language different from that of one’s ancestors is indeed to unveil oneself;
it is not only to emerge from childhood, but never to return to it.”
Pain is what sets narrative in motion, and narrative is what allows us to overcome the contingency of the body and give it meaning. The word gives body to the gesture and contradicts itself: the gesture incorporates the word. The relation between body, word and world places and displaces us in resonance with the meaning of what is said and what remains unarticulated, as well as with the impossible to say, stammering and the unnameable: that which has no name, that image we lack.
Perhaps this is why it is through our body that we give meaning to the words we hear or read, to what we say and summon, like someone wandering, and also to what we leave at the margins, in silence, suspended. The end—at last, in the end—of the word is the beginning of silence, and silence itself is the origin and end of the word. This is stillness; this is silence. Each sustains the other, in resonance.
The omnipresence and fullness of silence deliver the body that writing requires. Writing itself does not silence the voice; it awakens and summons it. It is the voice that knows the language which names things and grants them presence. The strangest feature of language is that it is constantly obsessed with its own impossibility.
Thus, in naming, saying, directing and pointing, language can act only by assuming at once the absence of the thing and its presence. In his theory of gesture, Giorgio Agamben speaks of the other side of language, mute and never exhausted, and proposes that Samuel Beckett’s sleepless figures, at the edges of sleep, become gestures that allow the solitary spaces of interiority to be brought into view within representation.
Agamben’s account of gesture is useful. For him, gesture is an originary language of representation, a stratum of language that is not exhausted in communication and that captures language, so to speak, in its solitary moments
. Gesture is linguistic, but in a mute and primordial sense. By suggesting that gesture is the solitary and mute origin of language, he points to the possibility of a language that might bridge the private interiority of sleepless states. As such, no reconciliation with sleep can be given language in the ordinary sense; it can only be populated with gestures.
To think of writing as a bodily gesture may reveal a path of reflection between the polarity of what can be grasped of the body, in the attempt to understand ourselves from within, and a pause in the journey among the different depths that gesture designates and seems to offer. A body that lets itself be caressed by the word is no ordinary gesture. Every body contains at least one silent gesture. This requires an attentive and willing body, stretched towards what escapes it. Writing as inclination. Perhaps we should understand writing with the body, as though it were itself a body, laid out. To do so—to understand writing with the body and undergo it if necessary—is an exercise in displacing the site of resistance constituted in the encounter between body and language.
If writing truly occurs in a fold of time, that fold is summoned twice over in the utterance of the written when one person’s voice speaks another’s writing, thereby unfolding and refolding the word upon its silence in order to delay the germinal gesture of return towards disappearance, like a sock on a Sunday.
To write from the site of these uprisings, understood as ruptures, must be a natural response to inclination. In inclining, the body is indeed closer to the other towards whom it stretches, delivered to its most stable—tragic—position and bearing the axis of its own gravity. To incline in order to bring cracks closer, to suture and to feel wounds is a sensitive practice inhabiting writing, along whose path the echo of suffered pain resonates.
Melody and word summon us to consolation. If Hamlet was created upon the pain of losing a child, what else can(not) be written? There is no word for the state in which a parent loses a child. There is no word for this particular pain. Some pains have no voice. Silence.
This is the only meaningful absence: etymology can go no further. While dealing with my tumour, I also had to endure this possibility: my son, too, wanted to bring his pain to an end. He tried to take his own life. He survived, and so did I. Perhaps we need to speak more about the inevitable. Love is a suicide of the suffering body. One cannot live with one’s back turned to love. One cannot live with so much pain. Before pain, I lie down, I love. I recline, I rest. Listening no longer depends on you alone.
“And love entered my heart through my ears.”