There are no natural speeches. As a medium, I am the site where the
Other speaks, not as a singular voice traceable to some pure origin, but
as a multitude. I am legion.
We take it for granted, as a
matter of course, that whatever it is we do is grounded in the natural.
Look at the ease by which I say what I say, or think what I think.
Discourse is what others do. I, on the contrary, speak. The other's
utterance is a recitation of heard and overheard language, a relay point
of rumors.
My speech, meanwhile, is pure expression, the
exteriorization of an originary interiority, whose rise to the surface
is like the natural flow of a spring or geyser. I don't recite, I speak
freely as myself. The thoughts that flow out of my speech are as natural
as the air and sound which accompany or compose their expression. Truth
has the same effortless facility as my breath.
When we assume
tacitly that our speech is natural, we mean that it is a discourse
without history, without a past, without guile. It is purely innocent,
as expression of self evident, unbiased established truth. If I am
reciting at all, I am merely restating the already obvious natural order
of things and ideas. Stating is not a performative... It only reflects
and does not recreate or reproduce lived reality.
---
A culture defined essentially by its construction as memory and memorial
is set, by a tautological extension, against the forces of forgetting.
But forgetting, then, is a real element without which the culture of
memory and the memory of culture lose their reason for being in various
forms of ritual, art, education, recitations, songs, representations,
commentary, journaling, recording, reporting, and so on. Time and space
are accompanied with aide de mémoire facilities, tools, techniques and
technologies.
Forgetting is at the core of our cultural dynamic, of
language and the practice of languages. It is that chasm we wage war
against, a history more enduring than human time itself. Writing
paradoxically unites them as the practice of both remembering and
forgetting. The pain of loss is as equal, and almost indistinguishable,
from the pleasure of recovery. Metaphor is the marker of both the
proximity and distance of that which is most culturally and consciously
significant and signifying.
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