Category: Speaking

Waiting For …

Two old men are waiting by a leafless tree. Meanwhile, there’s time to occupy – but how? Old jokes and pratfalls, comic banter and more sombre set pieces; cross-talk from the music hall, with a straight man and a funny one;  pratfalls and horseplay from the circus. Then there is Pozzo’s phonily academic speech with its quaquaquas, its pathos, grandiloquent but also windily empty.

It is as though we are left with Shakespeare’s mechanicals but without the action they parody. Endless, issueless, like all comedy, Godot returns ceaselessly to that moment after the banter and horsing about: the shared, same milieu, the same scrap of a world, or of a world worn away to reveal a country road and a tree that on the second day of the action has unaccountably sprouted leaves.

A shared fragment of the world, fateful, inevitable as the waiting place to which the speakers must return: this is what remains in the drama of the piece like a fact. Sooner or later, speech stops and it is the country road, the tree, in leaf or not, that reveals itself, fateful and omnipresent.

Unless it is the other way round, and it is speech to which the two men return – idle speech, empty speech in which there’s no topic that cannot be pulverised into material for banter, and it is the dust of words that matter. It is this same inevitability that returns to its place even as one day seems very much like another (but leaves have appeared on the tree), one day like any other spent in waiting (although when Lucky and Pozzo return, the former is on a shorter rope, and the latter has gone blind).

Unless that fatefulness is thought from the banter of Vladmir and Estragon, that is also a kind of waiting, of language as it babbles and murmurs before it becomes firm and decided speech. Of the fact that there is language and that it alters even a milieu as barren as the one Beckett places before us.

Those who look to his play for high seriousness, for the theatre of the absurd, for the absence of God might be unwilling to rest in puerility, but it is in the puerile that it finds its truth and precisely in the absence of its object, the impossibility of that adequation that would let the speakers speak of the thing itself. For the thing itself is that speech and not as it merely reflects a world, but changes it.

Rhubarb, Rhubarb

Beckett’s bowler hatted old men fall far short of listening and being silent, which Heidegger commends as the way in which we might become attentive to what is being spoken about, the matters themselves. Idle chatter, he says, forgets that experience of uncovering to which language might attend, as long as it is spoken in one’s own name. Gerede, idle chatter, can be returned to Rede, discourse, logos; one might speak as the they-self as it is involved and absorbed in Das Man, anyone, the ‘they’ or by laying claim to that existence that is always mine.

Then one must move from speaking idly to others, passing the word along to that solicitous speech that exhibits an appropritate considerateness and forebearance, assisting others to lay claim to that potentiality-to-be that permits them to take over their own possibilities. But authenticity, for Heidegger, is only a modification of inauthenticity; there is the risk of falling back into aimless chatter, and therefore of falling away from the things themselves, and therefore from thinking.

In Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno refocuses our attention on idle speech as part of his more general attempt to rethink political praxis. For him, the Fordist conception of production is defunct, but not the Marxian analysis of labour-power which, indeed, completes itself in our world. Why so? Labour power, says Marx, is ‘the aggregate of those mental and physical capacities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being’. As such, it is more suitable than ever as a name for the changed conditions of production, which now refers to the most generic aptitudes or capacities that have been mobilised in contemporary capitalism.

As the aggregate of these ‘the most generic aptitudes of the mind’ – ‘the faculty of language, the inclination to learn, memory, the ability to abstract and to correlate, the inclination toward self-reflection’, this ‘labour as subjectivity’ – the potential of the living body can be bought and sold like any other commodity. Life is the productive potential that money as the measure of exchangability can capture – but now as it is understood in terms of ‘the totality of poietic, “political”, cognitive, emotional forces’.

So it is that the post-Fordist model of production is now projected ‘into every aspect of experience, subsuming linguistic competencies, ethical propensities, and the nuances of subjectivity’. Sociability and intelligence are not specialised duties, but dispersed everywhere. Cooperation is the mode of work; we speak and think in the same way, depending upon logical-linguistic constructs, upon linguistic and cognitive habits in potentia.

Virno’s broader aim is to indicate the possibility of a retrieval of the recapture of human potential. Why, then, his appeal to idle speech? Precisely because it is without foundation, without a secured correspondence to what Heidegger might think as the things themselves, idle talk points to the chance of the invention and experimentation, to a kind of communication that does not merely reflect the world as it is, but acts to transform it.

Considered for itself, idle talk ‘resembles background noise’, Virno says; it is quite insignificant, and yet it is also that repository for ‘significant variances, unusual modulations, sudden articulations …’; a noise that is no longer linked to anything specific, as a drill is to drilling, the roar of an engine to a motorbike, but to the aimlessness of chatter.

Think of the ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’ of the extras who speak behind the main actors. It is the background from which speech emerges and that speech carries with it that is important.

The Virtuoso

Reading Sinthome, we can understood how this background is found between language and the agent as each term is precipitated out of their interaction as that space of engagement in which each term is altered. It is a question neither of agent nor world by themselves, but their interaction, understood as an emergence in which we cannot distinguish the active from the passive as, for example, Kant does in the distinction between the spontaneity of the understanding and the passive receptivity of the aesthetic of intuition.

How to think that receptivity that involves both an aesthesis, understood etymologically as a sensing and the production of form that might be thought in terms of an aesthetic making? Sinthome gives us the example of the artist who gives form to the medium which in turn gives form to the artist, joining both aesthesis and what we know as aesthetics. In a sense, we produce ourselves as a product and as that changing locus of production we also are. But that also means we are produced – and that production sets itself back from a particular faculty that might be exercised through an act of will.

As such, it is unsurprising to see Virno appeal to the figure of virtuosity to think the ‘between’ of speaker and language, as a generic faculty of the human being that is part of the armory of labour power, of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’ as it operates without script, being improvisational and open ended. But it is, Virno explains, precisely in its capacity to improvise that virtuosity becomes servile, handing over the generic potentials of life to labour power.

How might one engage the performativity of language? What remains of it as a capacity to transform the world. Perhaps idle speech provides a clue. The idle speaker is the dunce of language – one might think of Shakespeare’s mechanicals, of Hardy’s peasants, or of the figure of the idiots, who always come in pairs, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wandering the halls of Elsinore castle, or Vladmir and Estragon by the side of the country road. The dunce is also the philosopher’s double, the buffoon always returning, as in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, to trump seriousness, supplanting the affirmative ‘yes’ to the lightness and laughter of singing and dancing by an ass’s yee-haw. And the idiot is also the repository of prejudice – the lynch mob, the basest manifestation of the commons that Hobbes so fears.

As such, Virno’s multitude may appear to be the idiotic double of the lumpenproletariat Marx compares to the sober and reader working class – Napoleon’s army in rags, those thieves and scoundrels who are the botched double of those ready for revolution. But Virno’s working class do not stand opposed to the multitude he attempts to think; it is just that with the broadening of the notion of production, the nature of engagement, too, must change.

Until language, one of the faculties of labour power is understood no longer to simply facilitate the transmission of relevant information between sender and addressee on the basis the common understanding of the world, but as it grants the chance of a new sense of what is held is common.

The Tenacity of Speech

Language, for Virno, does not describe the world or represent it, but changes it, selecting and making salient that slice of chaos to which it gives consistency. Virtuosity, then, is not rendered servile; it escapes that absolute interweaving of the pre-individual with the individual – the complete fit between potential and execution where all the powers of the human being are bent towards productivity. But how does it do so? In what way does it manifest itself? As what is rejected, excluded, idle …

A clarificatory point from Sinthome: ‘To ask what someone’s research or philosophy is, is to ask them to simultaneously formulate a proposition and state the sense of that proposition. Yet I can say what I mean or mean what I say, but I cannot say what I mean and mean what I say.’ Then I only know what I’m working on once I’ve finished work; the preface to a book, making sense of the project as a whole, comes after the fact, after the book is complete. But how do I make sense of the commonplace, without which there would be no sense? How to render the murmuring of language explicit?

I can only know the pro-ject as a re-ject, as what will have already have happened for speech to get underway. But can I ever say the sense of what I say – of what is said by means of speech, and by means of those commonplaces that permit speech? This is the importance of idle speech: it is set back into the invisible commons that unites us before and beneath what is grasped as labour power.

In the end, the tenacity of speech is positionless, ungrounded, the play of shadows on the walls of the cave. It appears only after the fact, doubling up what is said by way of moving away from the background of the hubbub of speech, bubbling and fermenting without issue.

(Sense, for Heidegger, depends upon that which we project – our understanding of something which grants our entry into what is possible for us, for each of us. Is the re-ject, here, a name for what he calls thrownness, for the fact that we always find ourselves in a given situation, and ultimately that we exist at all? For the thrownness into language that cannot be taken up in what leaps ahead of us? As project we are still in the throw, as it draws us back into what is impossible to grasp and mobilise. And in the throw of what is named as idle speech, that Cratylean river which undoes the being-there of the speaker. Dasein given to the Dasein of language, as it cannot be spoken in the first person. And this being-there of language given between us, in that space named by the tenacity of speaking …)

(Sense, for Hegel, perhaps, that is given at those moments when what has happened assembles itself into a thesis – when it comes together to reveal itself as a position. Sense looks for itself, pro-jecting itself ahead. But there is the threat of what remains as non-position which is never simply antithetical. The return of the re-ject, of the blindness of unformed matter, of worklessness and not work … the Egypt of Absolute Spirit, of blocky architecture in art, of the murk of language lacking form, and this spoken between us, shared, as it delimits the possibility of Sittlichkeit and its equivalents, as this names the customs and traditions of life in common.)

Between Us

As such, idle speech is continuous with thought and action with respect to the saying of sense. Zarathustra’s speeches are one with the mutterings in the market square; Hamletis one with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the mechnicals say the same as the aristocrats they parody. The old men who wait for Godot still speak and to one another, and in so doing, also speak sense as the hope that bears all speech.

Communication is something, Sinthome has said on numerous occasions, directing us to the necessity of understanding of how sense is given in an act of saying, and that this saying bears what is said. Saying, here, is not to be thought in terms of a particular quality of the Other with whom we communicate. It is that communication, understood as the tenacity of speaking, that is important. It is from tenacity that the Other must be thought and not the other way around.

Think of a conversation that enfolds its speakers into that intimacy which belongs to it rather than them. Where speech seems to rise up of itself and continue of itself, lapping between the shores, and allowing them to be shores only because of its lapping. Speech owned by neither party, idle chatter, where it is keeping speech up in the air that matters, but now it is speech which keeps its speakers afloat so that they sink back, when all is said, into a silence that seems to fail what held them together.

Between us: this is what does not cease to appear in idled time as it escapes the shared task or project – in puerile time, idiotic time as it sets itself back into that background noise out of which relationships form and into which they disappear.

Waiting For …

We cannot wait for sense to speak sense. Or that sense already says itself in what is said, as the hope that bears speech not because it waits for something determinate, but because there is speech and there is language. There is no Godot to await, only that banter, the tenacity of speaking, that waits without waiting for anything in particular, holding itself apart from the projective time of labour power, and depriving it of that potential that it seizes for itself.

(The return of what is rejected in speech as it is shared between us. Of the most generic, the most common, with respect to which we are each no one in particular, Das Man …)

(Returning, speech as it cannot be stated in a proposition, since it is what bears the sense of any position. Tenacity as the sharing of sense.)

But how to think this waiting in turn? How to think what happens as speech? The twentieth century discourse on Messianism provides a clue. Outside of Rome, at the city gate, among the lepers and the cripples the Messiah is already present, binding his wounds one by one lest he be called at any moment.

The Talmud presents a conversation between Rabbi Joshua ben Levi and the prophet Elijah, who asks the rabbi he will find the Messiah sitting at the gates of Rome with the lepers. In the Talmud, Elijah is asked by the rabbi, ‘When will the Messiah come?’ and ‘By what sign may I recognise him’?

Commenting on these passages in The Writing of the Disaster, has the first of these questions asked to the Messiah himself. Among the beggars and the lepers at the gates of Rome, he is asked, ‘When will you come?’ For this questioner, the Messiah’s apparent presence before me is no guarantee that he is there.

Perhaps we should understand this passage in terms of Levinas’s account of the relation to the Other, which Blanchot will think in his own way. For Levinas, the Other enables that call by which we meet it in response; the encounter enables what as it were slips away from the encounter. It hollows out that ‘now’ in which there can be a response, bootstrapping the condition of its own possibility. Here there rises up the a priori as it is experienced a posteriori – the condition that enables what is to happen.

This is Levinas’s way of presenting the tenacity of speech in its give and take, as it is more than the substratum of labour and does not disappear into an account of the project modelled on the concerns of the solitary individual. Sense, for him, must be thought first of all from the relation, and not the terms of that relation – that is, in terms of the ‘and’ of you and I as we are held together in the tenacity of speech.

Sense is not a punctual occurrence which can be assembled in the present or enduring in the manner of a temporal becoming. It cannot finish or accomplish itself since it does not produce itself in time. In this way, it is a taking up of what had already begun, falling back behind the power to begin as it is held back from measure of labour power not as determinable occurrence, but the repetition of what was never brought to completion.

Then the encounter in question has in some sense always preceded itself – it has carved out in advance that faculty that renders it possible to encounter the Messiah, and shows how what had originally unfolded gains a new sense, a new investment – and that this, indeed, is the very sense of the new as it reveals the hidden condition of what has begun without ceasing. That is, what is re-jected, and can only be known after the fact, doing so after this fact, this encounter.

‘Anyone might be the Messiah’, says Blanchot, ‘must be he, is not he’. The Messiah might be me, says one Talmudic commentary. What matters is not the presence of the Other, but the relation in which the Other is experienced as the rejected origin of sense. Tenacity is the time of the saying of sense, of the ‘there is’ of language above and beyond the content of what is said.

Idle thoughts, not arguments.

Think of the situation of the beloved who dislikes being addressed as a particular – as a woman (let’s say it is a woman) who does not want to be merely one of a series whom her would-be lover has loved. Uniqueness is all; the singular is all – whence the impossible attempt, for the lover, her seducer to find the words with which to sing of what she is.

The lover’s speech is bent towards the singular. No coincidence that the beloved (this is a cliche, I know) wants the lover’s speech tends towards a pledge – that the stages of romantic love rise to a decision in which each party is joined by the perfomative of what they say (‘Do you take this woman …’ – ‘I do.’) In this way, the particular (words, which the lover can always use as tools of seduction) are bound to the singularity of the performance. Marriage is only supposed to happen once.

Think now of the lover who will not commit. No pledge – just unctious words, words that seem to promise nothing at all, and for which nothing is ever at stake. The lover is unserious – that is to say, his speech assumes no responsibility. He is a rogue, a cad (what a cliche!).

I want to make another turn: to think not of the attitude of one who would use speech, but of man who is used by it – or rather, of a kind of speech that lets itself reverberate in ordinary speech and perhaps as the ordinary in speech. Here, it is neither the content of what is said nor the perfomance it accomplishes that is important. Unless it is possible to think this speech act in another sense, setting it back from human agency, until it names only a pledge that belongs to speech, that speaks with it …

A pledge? But to what? And for what? A pledge of language to itself. To withdraw into itself. Of language disappearing into itself, and forgetting to refer.

I want only to invoke a speech without commitment, without seriousness; not the speech of the vacillator, for whom speech is nothing, but the vacillation of speech, that never settles, never commits.

From where I sat, very close to the stage, I saw the shadows of her harp strings fall across her face. And, earlier, the lacquered wooden body of the support act’s guitar flash out as it caught the light. Wonderful to hear Emily with the whole orchestra there – that song, and the last one on the album, are the ones I really like. But Only Skin is too long for me – my concentration lapses – and I don’t like the strings on that one.

And what of the others? I think it’s just Emily is the one, a song for her sister – a song of remembering, almost remembrance, and aren’t you suppose to write pieces like that for one dead? Isn’t she, Joanna Newsom, too young for those kind of memories – too young to be caught back and fascinated by the past? But then I remember that children, too, live a distance from the past, and with a sense of loss.

Didn’t I, as a child, dream of a narration that would stop at nothing, that would double the whole day, but then, in its doubling, would make the day other than it was? For wouldn’t the narration be part of what had to be narrated? Mirror fell into mirror, and I remember my joy at this thought, back then at junior school. I was going to set down what Chocca said – so called because his skin was brown, but not unaffectionately. I thought, he’s the key, and I think what I sought was his unobtrusiveness, as if by noting down what he said, I would have seized also on the inconsequentiality of the whole, doubling it, and letting mirror reflect into mirror.

That’s how, I think, I learnt the superficial can have a kind of depth. But I also remember learning by watching a family friend the art of lightness in conversation, of wandering from topic to topic like a robin alighting and then moving quickly away to alight elsewhere. A flurry of wings – activity – and a little pause for stillness, and then another flurry, and so on. Light speech, lightened speech that froths around us like the bubbles in that Rolling Stone video.

And another memory, very dim, of the dinner party in Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald straining his prose to evoke what he could not show through reported speech alone. Marvellous conversation at the outset of the book, everything right with the world, everything dazzling, and then the long and slow decline: we know, his readers, how it will be. But that is because they did not know lightness: because they sought to be witty or topical – because they wanted conversation for themselves, wanted to seize and mark it, like dogs in their territory. True speech is inconsequential; real speech says nothing at all.

No surprise that it is only by silence that a cut can be made into anonymous speech. Silence – to draw speech back to itself, to summon back its signifying power. Thus, when the call of conscience, for Heidegger, says nothing at all. Nothing: but it is said to a particular person, to you and no other, drawing you back from the ‘no one’ of anonymity.

Isn’t this the hither side of the fear of the masses as it appears in the twentieth century? Two anonymities – one that belongs to the quotidian, to the fallen world of rumour and gossip, and the other to the ownmost self, to Dasein as it is held out into the Nothing. Or, indeed, to the self elected to its responsibility by the Other who speaks without saying a word, who is pure address and nothing more (Levinas) – a silence that once again that is elective, that picks me out.

And it is there even in Blanchot, for all that he dismisses the distinction between authentic and inauthentic speech: the speech of anyone at all, the anonymous hubbub of the masses, is a cousin of the murmuring that echoes, for the reader in literary writing. Echoes and singularises the one who reads, ‘separating him from the others, from the world and from himself, leading him through mocking labyrinths, drawing him always farther away, by a fascinating repulsion, below the ordinary world of daily speech.’ A fascinating repulsion: because literature redoubles anonymity, gives it a thickness, and allows it to tremble in the ordinariness of the words it presents.

Two anonymities: this disjunction is there in Kafka’s Josephine. The mouse singer’s piping is no different from any other, it is anonymous, indifferent, but why is it also celebrated, why does Josephine’s voice alleviate, if only for a moment, the sufferings of the mousefolk? Because in some sense it redoubles the anonymity of their piping; because that anonymity is presented as such.

Strange ‘as such’ that has no substance; strange detour, in which speech wanders without cease. But wandering, now, that is separated from ordinary piping, that has silence all around it, preserved by a margin that sets itself around her piping. Her song is somehow rounded off, completed, even as it allows its finished form to tremble. Perhaps it is that the artwork, in the midst of anonymity, allows that anonymity to be experienced as by a kind of reduction.

Separated from the world, separating itself, set back from the will or the intentions of its creator, the work turns in silence like a salamander in the flames. In truth, it is only a piece of the world – the singer’s voice is no different from any other – that has been suspended from the world, that has changed its polarity. A piece of the world set back from the world – a fragment lost as it has slipped from use: but to what does it awaken me, the one who was called?

I think silence can only name the deterritorialisation of the voice. There are not two orders, speech and silence, but one. Silence fringes the voice as it is reduced to itself, that is, to the fact that it has no final determination, that it wanders in itself, just because it has no ‘itself’. That wandering sets itself apart from what is fixed and determined in the world, but also from the voice as part of the world. Then it wanders apart from determination: that is its adventure. And it carries me with it, that is mine.

But what kind of adventure is this? Silence surrounds me and unlimits me; what I am is no longer what I am. To what have I been awakened? Two anonymities. When speech found you, you also wandered, although this time by yourself. By yourself, but not yet come to yourself. To what does the second anonymity deliver you ? To the discovery of yourself as the place of your wandering.

Picked out to wander, picked out not to come to yourself: you will not reach what you are, as if being and becoming could be separated. You are already this: wanderer, exile, not simply deterritorialised from the world, but becoming with it, plunged back into its streaming. And silence all around you; silence crowns you, fiery nimbus. It burns at your edges.

I was set on fire by the song. I was set on fire by the book: set to silence, set to wandering.

Aimless curiosity, passing the word along: there is a speech that seems to lift itself from the world, that speaks of nothing in particular, or of everything. Rumour, gossip without foundation barely refers to the world, barely reaches it. What does it matter what is said or who is saying it? Infinite loquacity, the desire to help speech along without detaining it in your own name, to lighten speech by allowing it to say nothing.

Thus the conversationalists of Duras’ The Vice-Consul, or India Song. Who speaks? We are not told. Anyone is speaking, everyone is speaking – anonymous speech, anonymising speech in what is spoken is only the turning of rumour, drifting first this way and then another. In truth each speaker is only the relay of speech, saying everything by saying nothing.

Indifference: voices that rise and fall saying nothing. The decay of speech, but also its rebirth – what is said when nothing in particular is said. To pass the word along; to give rumour the life of speech – entropy, negentropy: how is it that speech lives by dying, that its life is indistinguishable from its death?

Deathless, lifeless, what does it mean to remove the attribution of speech to speakers as Duras does? It is to indicate the indifference of speech, its withdrawal into itself. Itself – but what, then, is speech, when it seems to break itself insouciantly from the world to which it used to refer? Speech lost in its own alleyways. Speech wandering in its own labyrinth.

There is no one here to hear you. But there is no one to speak. No one, anyone – at what point to these words become exchangable? When did they lose their general equivalent? This is what Mallarme fears: crude speech will overcome essential speech, the poetic word will be lost. And it is what worries Heidegger, too: fallen speech, inauthentic speech denies the fact of our mortality that we all share insofar as it would direct each of us to take account of his own singularity, her absolute difference.

But death is already speaking. Death is the forgetting speech bears. Forgetting itself, forgetting everything, it knows itself only in the most unsubstantiated rumours, in the gossip that, in the absence of its object wears away the capacity to refer, until speech lifts itself from the world and streams, glistening in the sun.

Kafka’s Josephine gives voice to anonymity, sings it. But doesn’t she become too greedy for acclaim? Doesn’t she want her voice, whose power is that it is the same as anyone’s to be marked in its difference? Perhaps there is an experience in which our voices are the same. Neutralised – neutered, until they reverberate on the same plain, until all they speak is the wearing away of speech. Who speaks? Anyone, no one. Anyone at all, no one in particular. And who listens?

Late at night, widening: the great speech that speaks without you, and to which all speaking is joined. Late at night, adrift in itself, speech speaks of itself, of the fact of speech and that there is speaking. Because it is only then that everything is said. Only then that speech becomes posthumous, outliving what can be said and what cannot be said.

Posthumous speech, the river that spreads out beneath the sky: Duras reaches it in The Vice-Consul; it is allowed to speak, there and in India Song. Voice without attribution. Speech without speaker: what does it matter what is said? There is speech, the hubbub of speech, but it is only the stammering of the Vice Consul that speaks. He is the only speaker, he and Anne-Marie Stretter.

Their speech is silence; it is the suspension of speech. He suspends speech as he speaks it. It is broken in him, the continuity of things, of time, of speech. And she knows it; only she knows it. What can the young men around her know? She knows; she’s met speech as she danced with the Vice Consul; speech has found her.

Wisdom: she keeps, I think, what the Vice Consul cannot. He is the husk of speech, but she is the one enclosed by its praying palms. Speech keeps her. Speech closes itself at her heart, and she is buried there, inside herself, outside herself, there where speech speaks of itself in his hesitancies, in his inability to speak.

Think back. A hotel room. A phonecall. Remember that. You were half asleep. And then? You opened the door. And then? You were there, drunk and in your jacket. You sat in the armchair across from me, and I listened, half awake. You spoke. I listened to the gaps in speech, its accelerations. You took a bottle of water from the fridge, then another bottle. You spoke, and criticised me for not speaking. But what was I to say?

It was very late; it was early; dawn was coming. Either I’d lived a whole life, or I’d not begun to live. I found a few words. I spoke them; I threw them at speech. But you were the one to whom speech was given. It turned in you. I listened, and thought: you must remember this. Must let yourself be enclosed, must be carried by this memory as between praying palms.

But you were not the husk of speech, and I was never wise. The next day, we met again in the sun. This time, I was to speak; I thought: I must make an offering. Not confidences – I did not speak those, but other things. Until speech flowed like the water in the rivulets that ran along the street. Which one of us was wise? Which one was kept by speech? Neither, I would say. Both, I would say.

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.

Defeat: the sky is too wide, too great. Sink down, lie down. Finality – you have given yourself to the horizon. Everything is finished. I think my favourite works of art are those which begin at the horizon, where others end. That begin with death, with the wearing away of everything. You are here, already at the end. It’s all finished where the horizon is a straight line, diving the earth and land. Over, and before it began.

In what voice will you speak of it? How can it be narrated? The blankest voice, the most neutral. The final book of The Sea of Fertility. Or the violent cops of Takeshi’s films. Or the off-stage voice of Tarkovsky’s Mirror: each time it is the horizon that speaks, the straight line sketched in one stroke as by a Zen master. You’ve outlived your time; it’s finished. Over now, and before it began.

There are books that end with wandering and death, but what of those that begin with them? Basho’s last haiku, written as he lay dying in the last of his journeys: ‘asleep, but thoughts wander on.’ What of the book that begins with death, that has already begun there, and without drama? It’s all happened, everything’s happened, death has been seen, and there’s no need for anything else. Speak with the final voice, the neutral one. Speak in the still voice in which everything has been said.

Prophet, of what have you ever spoken but speech? Of what have you ever sung? For speech is already the future; speech returns as what has not yet happened. Speech itself – speech where speech is divided, and in the interval of itself. Interval – isn’t that what you saw prophet, though not with your eyes? Wasn’t it there you failed to see?

The prophet is always blind. The prophet is deaf. He has not seen, he has not heard, and he bears blindness at the centre of his seeing; he hears by hearing nothing. And when he speaks? The future speaks, and between us. Speech, the return of the future, its coming back, and by way of what speaks between us. The future listens to itself. The future awaits itself. Waiting: but who will cross the desert of speech?

The prophet is always a stammerer, no matter how eloquent his speech. He can never speak in his speaking; he lets speech hesitate, as what is said comes apart in his speaking. And even that is not his, his speech. Even that is the desert across which he’ll never cross, and that opens each time you hear him.

And then you know: prophecy is speech; speech is already prophetic, and whenever there are two of us gathered together, the future has opened, and by way of speech. Opened: but with no one to see it. Opened in the blindness at the centre of your sight, and in the deafness at the core of your hearing.

Errant speech, speech wandering. Fascinated with itself, lost in itself, speech is only the absence of place in which everything is lost. The world lost by way of speech; the world unjoined in speech.

Who speaks? What speaks? The one whom all place usurps; the one who unjoins time: I heard it speak in your voice, in the wavering of your voice. Heard it speak, but it was only your voice that spoke, only its speaking, that detached itself from you and wandered without you. I would like to hear you.

One day I would like to hear you. One day, I would like to coincide with my hearing. For isn’t listening, too, to wander? Isn’t listening lost in its own fascination, with its great passivity that spreads everywhere, ice plain, ice sheet that is gap between listening and itself? To speak, to hear: there is never time to speak, to listen. Never a place for speakers, for listeners.

I think this is the source of the legend of the Sybil. She speaks, but she does not know what she says. Speaks in tounges, away from herself. Oracle, priestess, her eyes roll up into her forehead. Speech – but can you hear what she says? Will you ever understand? Oracular speech cannot be heard. Or what is called oracular is speech that has only redoubled its loss from itself, its wandering.

She speaks of what is lost, and what you lose by listening. Speaks of what lost between, between you and between yourself. Yourself: you listen, you wander. No: there is listening, there is wandering. After you can only recall – what? The mystery of the world detached from the world and wandering, lost, in its corridors.

His voice seems fascinated with itself. His voice: lost in itself, wandering in its own corridors. He spoke, but did it matter what he said? The wanderer: his voice lived its own life, and kept him only as its husk. Listen to him and you know your own voice wanders, that it speaks not of what you would want it to say, but only itself, perpetually returning. Only the surprise that it is, the coming to itself of this surprise.

That there is speaking; that there is a voice that bears speech. Bears it, and returns in it, as speech speaks of the communicativity that is its possibility. To have speech, to be spoken: what it says does not matter; that he says it is everything. That it is said; that there is saying: his voice, which still and calm, also trembles. His speech, calm and sure, is out over 70,000 fathoms. 

And when you speak to him? When your voice meets his? Speech speaks to itself; the voice loses itself in the space that is opened between you. A between, now, that separates you from yourself, and by way of the voice. Separation – as though a plain had opened at your heart. As though the winds that blow across the ice let speak that opening.

It speaks, no one speaks – you are divided by what holds you together. Itself: the word has come apart. Whose self? What returns? Division: who hears you speaking? Who follows speech as it is lost in its corridors?

Wake me; I fell asleep in your voice. I slept. No – I found myself already to have slept there. How was it I never knew your voice was watching from the first? And was watching over you, too: we shared it; each of us pulled it over him like a shelter. You slept, like me, in the bower of your voice.