I miss you even when I’m with you. I remember writing that line for myself, many years ago. Miss you because you are not there when I am with you. Or that to be with you is also to miss you; that I have not caught up with you, or that you have fallen behind me. Or is that I have moved, while you remained the same place? Too fast or too slow: I am the one who is out of phase, and it is you who should say of me, I miss you when I’m with you.
Missed: but what was the appointment we were supposed to keep? A phonecall. I’m supposed to give an account of myself, to speak, to say: this happened, that happened. But it was missed, what I wanted to say. Missed – although I spoke a great deal, although I said everything.
Alcoholics are sometimes possessed of a great urgency, a sense that they are on the brink of the truth. Listen to me, listen – dreadful eloquence, drunken belligerance, speech in search of itself and wandering everywhere. True, sometimes drunken speech can achieve a magnificent indifference, listening only to itself, following its steady course. But too often it is garrulousness and resentment, a litany of petty complaints and whining excuses.
How then to hear what keeps itself from speech? How to mark the threshold from which speech would come, and that yet trembles in speaking? I remember the phonecall nearly at the start of Mirror. The narrator speaks, he rambles without break. Speech drifts. From his tone of voice, I would say he is over-conscious, over-aware, that he has seen everything and knows everything. And still he speaks, still he lets his speech wander. Perhaps that’s all that’s left to him. Perhaps it is his chance, as it is the chance of us all.
He remembers; he is allowed to remember. But then – and this is the miracle – speech itself begins to speak. Or rather, the threshold from which it comes lets his speech enter that neutral place, that blankness in which the voice becomes a double of itself, in which it speaks so as to let its tone reverberate, the tone that is more important than anything said.
A drifting voice, a voice adrift: I think, too, of the long Christmas night of Fanny and Alexander, and those who speak until dawn and past dawn, following speech as it drifts and allowing themselves to be carried by speech. What is there to be said? Of what does speaking speak? Of itself, of its failure to arrive at itself.
Late at night, it widens. Late, very late, true speech begins that turns each of us, speaker, listener, aside. True speech, that speaks of itself, of the surprise of itself, carrying the voice and be carried by it. For isn’t it the voice, in its grain that lets it resound? Doesn’t it need what allows it to speak?
But the voice needs speech to be spoken. Needs, then, what cannot be said – or that does not do so directly, according to the order of the day. Speak at night, and you approach the impossibility of speech – the impossibility, that is, of marshaling what speaks in your own name.
You cannot claim it; it does not come to you, does not arrive; it will not return as the falcon to the falconer. And yet it is what speaks with you, even as you speak. What cannot speak speaks by way of what can, and you the speaker are joined by another who cannot lift himself to speech.
Lars Iyer's Blog 