To speak is to remain alone

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life


Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare

When I was a teenager I wrote a story about a painter that killed himself. One morning he left his house laughing, and took the road. His son asked his mom why did Dad laugh so weirdly, she didn't know what to answer.

Somewhere in the story Wittgenstein's canary appeared. Actually twice. The first time alive and the second dead, when he was one of the gods of solitude. The canary died of nihilism, he didn't want to eat. He wanted to be nihility. The only words that he knew were “shut up, shut up”. He didn't make it. We are condemned to be. Some of you to be there, some of us to be here, surviving between the puddles.

Žižek points out pretty well, Why does Wittgenstein insist in the ethical character of remain silent there where one cannot speak? Is it clear that there where is not possible to speak, any intent of talking is worthless. So where is the secret? That we cannot speak doesn’t mean that we cannot make noise, break some glasses in others peoples’ rooms. The ethical stance that Wittgenstein sustains before silence, is the hypothesis of love. There is love, and there we should be silent. If we speak, on the one hand we will say nothing, and on the other, we will break the silence. Wittgenstein wasn’t able to do it, to be fully himself, and he kept talking, kept writing, kept speaking.

We know we should remain silent, at least for pudency. We enter in worlds where words are required to be said, and we say them without the slightest remorse. The world of Law, the world of work, family, the couple. I love you, I cannot stop saying that when I’m drunk.

Then why do we talk? We even try to create our own alphabet. In the hope that some day, someone will come and will understand our words. If even so.

We talk because we are afraid. Afraid that beauty and murder can go by the hand. That reason is not enough, and that the world won’t be better. We talk to keep the silence away, in the background. Like in the movie Son of Men, where reality is covered by the incessant talk, to cover the unbearable nature of the real that lies there, just a few meters behind.

Because it is in silence where the gap is shown entire. That slight distortion in reality, that we try to encapsulate with the word I, me. The contradiction that world, structured in the way it is, is due to my sensorial, and here we should also add symbolic, structure, and that this world, which is nothing more and nothing less than the dance I make to be myself, is pointless, senseless, meaningless.

In the same movement, that one of self-creation, I create a world that is at once full of sense -it is a World- and meaningless. And that lack of meaning belongs to something in me that goes beyond any grasping on me that I could have. In this way we must read Vonnegut’s talk in The Sirens of Titan, where the protagonist tells himself that, sometimes, you are not just a victim of destiny, but his most brutal executant.

Now, this intrinsic contradiction stems from the fact that we are living Beings. The angst that this contradictions entails comes from the fact that we are speaking Beings trying to fill the gap between the world and ourselves. This gap cannot be filled. Can the angst be surmounted? That is the role of the world. The only world I mean. The world inasmuch as society. The gap, that is inherited by the world in the form of social antagonism, cannot be resolved. Nevertheless, sense can be find. That is what I mean by dream the nightmare.

Speak. Wittgenstein’s canary used to say once and again in his golden art nouveau jail: “Shut up, shut the fuck up.” Wittgenstein never really got what the canary was saying. There comes from the enigmatic last sentence of the Tractatus.

A bit like Nietzsche’s umbrella, the one he forgot one day somewhere, the one which Derrida remembers us about. Something whose meaning we never fully develop, where something always remains hidden. A bit like love.

That would be equivalent to say that philosophy just plays around the idea of love, but never loved. Never failed to fall in. The distance from distance that Derrida recommends in order to enjoy the seduction of women, of truth. A distance from distance which is not a simple approaching, a double negation that is not an affirmation. Typical logic from the eighties’. We must overcome this logic. And put what in its place? I would go for a bit of real love, a bit of love for the real.

In the same book, Vonnegut, by the end of it, when father and mother are living in Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, and his son left years ago to live with the big birds... one afternoon, from a not so far away mountain, we hear the son to say: “Thanks father and mother for the gift of life.” Art not just as that what resists death but also as that whose purpose is to assure life’s dignity.

And we already said that love was what resists death with all his being, love is that that resists, endures. Endures what? Time, at least. How it endures it? Creating. Creating what? The love relation. As we said, love and life share the same circular and self producing logic.

How else are love and language related? The question should rather be where are they not related, but nevertheless, let’s try to articulate the positive question. Language is what makes the way for love to fail, to fall. The subject falls due to the way things are said, and not said, by the other. One falls into the trap of the other’s tongue, and not just by kissing. That is the way seduction works, that is, lead in another way, in one’s way, in hers way.

We like to play with our tongues, and not just by the old and good licking and sucking, but by another -a bit more subtle, and a bit more old- way. To relate, in both meanings of the word, the licking to the being. The only way to lick an other being is by putting her first in the web of our tongue. So she can find herself there, in the game of tongues, between the wet network that words build.

What she, and for that matter I, finds there, is, of course, not what she was looking for. At finding herself there, she finds but a gap, because she really finds her self there. There is nothing but the gap, between speaking beings inasmuch as living beings, and in the couple as the coupling and mirroring of two living and speaking gaps.

And it is there then, when we should hear Wittgenstein and remain silent. Because the body remembers love like turning on a light. Here Hegel was right: love corresponds to ethical life in the form of something natural, as natural as turning on a light. But there is no such a thing as nature, the philosopher will cry. Of course not, but that Hegel wasn’t able to know it.

Silence is temptation and promise. Temptation of what? Of positing the two as the one formed by the union of two ones, as a positive entity where my oneness is negated in its own demanding. Promise of what? A promise that ensures the not happening of something, namely time, death. Silence is what saves the secret of love. And it hides it in a safe, unnamable, place.

The use of the word place here seems a bit unfortunate. The place, of course, is the intercourse. The real intercourse. That which doesn’t bear almost any relation to the tongues playing with each other, and to the bodies, that can or not be sweating -depending on the modality of the fantasy that the couple enacts- neither need they to be near. The real intercourse is the story that is told before and mostly after, one year after, twenty years after, and all the dreams that it conceals.

That story is mostly dreamt, as in the book of Schnitzler: she dreams, about an orgy, between the trees. Couples fucking all around, and she is not able to distinguish any more where does she begin and where do the others start. A place where there is not time neither space, and where she felt horror, shame, and anger -before fucking-, followed by a happiness and freedom that certainly nothing can compares to it in the conscious experience, and about which words are not suitable -after.

A dream whose weight is so unbearable that the doctor must scape from it into the world. A dream so unbearable that we feel desolate after reading it, just due to the unconscious exercise of putting ourselves in the place of the doctor. The dream that she had, was ungraspable as truth. That was the dreams of reason two centuries ago, that the woman was there, she wanted something that we could not comprehend, and that she was the truth. So, as long as the truth was concealed by the desire of woman, we could not do anything about it, about her. After all, we still keep asking ourselves, Was will das Weib?

But dreams, sadly, always come to an end, even tho “kein Traum ist völlig Traum,” no dream is just a dream.

By now, we should know, the truth does not go anymore for the name of woman. One needs courage -or let’s say it properly, one needs to have the balls- to say the truth. To say our dream at loud voice the morning after. But first there must to be a night. A night where you take her, and she takes you, not at the same time, and not in the same way, but she takes you, so both of you can finally dream.

Dream of? Threesomes. The third virtual point which serves as support of the factual relation of the two. A cause, the cause, since there is only one world, and this means, first of all, that we have to learn to love again, love anew. A third point that can hear what the silence has to say, and that can bring together, supporting the fantasy, the couple -the revolutionary couple.

Photo by Bernhard Ellefsen