A speech about speaking and language, written for Experimental Theory Workshop (ViCCA), 2016/03/23.
Warning: This is going to be Heavy Meta.
*
What is my goal?
What do I want to tell you?
What’s the most important thing I want to share?
Thinking about this, I constantly hit my head against the wall of speech.
I’m interested in going beyond language, beyond spoken word.
But I don’t want to perform to you.
Not in this context.
So I couldn’t help thinking of speaking about speaking.
And now, it seems that’s what I’m doing.
Speaking about speaking.
And language.
Think of language as a combined lego puzzle chess game.
A power game to a few, maybe a way to spend the time and have fun to some,
and to others a compulsion to fill the void between the moments, the void between you and me.
Think of speech as a live construction of a four-dimensional image according to a ten-dimensional blueprint that is constantly mutating.
What you get is a snapshot, or a screen capture.
*
Speech is slower than thought.
It’s like a drippling stream from a bubbling spring.
Or trying to push a snake into a pipe as they say.
(And, as you can see, I rely on pre-processed thought, written words.)
*
In the beginning was the word: the big bang of pixelated thought.
Words as pixels, and as such inadequate,
no matter how high the resolution.
*
What was before the beginning?
A world without words?
White noise of silence.
Feral,
unordered,
uncivilised,
unpredictable,
flowing freely,
unjaggedly,
beyond of the grid of words.
But now, as I clumsily speak of the unspeakable, you get a bunch of pixels,
from which we together form an image,
that may or may not make sense.
*
Nobody handles any language perfectly, not even their so-called mother tongue.
There are always dark areas, dead pixels, flaws in the grid.
English, as I speak, a kind of universal language or lingua franca,
generally speaking (no pun intended),
feels like standard definition compared to the full HD of one’s native language.
Still, that’s what we use now, to share these images from our minds.
And it’s ok, it’s still an image.
Shared.
From our minds.
*
Language shapes thinking.
While thought is originally fluid, the mind adapts to situations,
it gets used to bitmapping,
and we gradually forget that it’s just a crude approximation of reality.
*
So, this is all heavy meta, and nothing else.
Screen calibration, measuring resolution, scanning depth of color.
Let there be silence again.