Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Síða 204

204
WINDY WORDS: TOWARDS A PNEUMATIC LINGUISTICS
own poetry as monologic, single-voiced. But how does the reader
intone the king who disappears as soon as the whole word is
spoken? How is the Ah of ah, my dear (rhyme and reiteration of the
earlier apostrophe, O my chevalier) to be spoken aloud? Here are the
points in which language has the upper hand, transcending the
abilities of the individual poet and of the individual reader, and
transcending the greater context of which it, language itself, can
speak in words. This transcendence is pneumatological, both word
and spirit.
In fact, this synthesis in one term is unavoidable. For we cannot
accept that these movements be wilfully ignored in a treatment of
linguistic structure – or for that matter that they are confined to
so-called ‘poetic’ language. They exist in the puff of all words, the
non-materiality with which Heidegger imbues his understanding
of Saying, of the thought which he and his interlocutor in “A
Dialogue on Language” are so loath to address in material words
(Heidegger 1982: 1–54). But at the same time these words depend-
pneumatalogically-on the animal bodiness of the verbi flatus.
If we are to justify the synthesis, I believe we may do so by
pointing to the autonomy of language, its existence prior to
utterance, in the understanding of Heidegger’s or Gadamer’s
formulation that man does not speak language: language speaks
man. Is there a bodily sense in which we can accept this approach?
III. Where is language?
There is no seed as fertile as the seed of language. It travels without
wind or current, and takes root in any soil. Its spore lies dormant
where mankind has not yet trod. Yet when I asked, in disbelief,
Ubique? and the answer came at once: et hic, I felt a mild surprise;
for here, at least, on the mountainside, I had expected silence.
How foolish! How feeble my concept of silence!19 The wind
whistled in my ears, and amongst the stones; a plover was calling.
My silence was merely an absence of language, even simply a
constitutive pause in the dialogue, the pause before the careful
19 “Silence as emptiness, as absence of discourse, seems to be beyond modernity’s means of
attainment” (Lock 2001: 76).
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