My Language Is Not Autochtone

The strangeness of our language is masked - to take a term from Pierre Bayard - by our "psychobiographical" relationship to it. It is a relationship which is dependent on our mere lived duration, which installs in us, for each word, the glow of an artificially familiar luminescence.

Imagine: as a very young child you were walking out in some scrub, you pointed to a particular type of flower, and a person near you told you its name was "banksia". The term "banksia", which was not learned from a dictionary, detached itself from some more abstract logos and became embedded, like that banksia's own seed, within your self. In this way, each word, like your parents' very breaths, entered you and assumed its soft seat of intimacy. Later, the terms may detach from you, joining once more that more spectral Lexic to which the poor lexicographers only allude. In short, that word lives in you, but it will not live there forever. Its swollen, fruit-like mass, will be eaten by your estrangement : not negatively, but rather in the budding context of a natural growth.

The scene now is a beach at Grandville, and England rises at a further distance, though this is still, after all, a narrow strait of channel. In our distance now to language, we hold it no longer like a fruit, but like a stone: this pebble which is now outside of our minds, may be held in our hands, and seen in its aloofness with eyes of an eking, epistemological amazement.

The English words I learnt from my mother and father became mine, appropriated, part of my own linguistic Ereignis. Welcome now to darker fields of voyaging language's dissimulating sense. Recently, I have written the English verb "to resume", believing, in the instant of this writing, that this word meant "to summarize"; the crossed connection is the French word "résumer", which my mind, for a moment, situated between the two languages, and weighted its semantics with a double-sense remaining to the dictionaries unknown. In this "between", however, is not empty space, but the birth of a personal diction. It is only autotelic if we ever cease to think that "stone" and "pierre" have no weight.

Thus, simply, the word in that moment became mine, but in another sense: not via the "appropriation" dependent on my lived durée - that is, based upon the phonologies of my own parents' speech - but this time via my own alienation, which is simply to say: the stepping-back into a receding perspective, where all the coast's juttings become wider if less clear. This is no longer a supplied appropriation, determined by my words of birth, but vectored now by my own mind's life, with its degrees of determination, and stubborn calls for love.

It is the mingling of two acts of "enownment", which crossing, create an independent language: the one which lives inside each of us, and which not one resembles the next.

Each of our languages, then, is like each of our faces: marked by the breathings of birth and whatever errancies of our age. Both the eternal and mutable languages, endowed with their two similar types of possession, live then both within us, and it is both frightening and joyful to be separated from them both:

« Denken und Danken sind in unserer Sprache Worte ein und desselben Ursprungs. Wer ihrem Sinn folgt, begibt sich in den Bedeutungsbereich von : »gedenken« , »eingedenk sein« , »Andenken« , »Andacht«. »

So call my parsing diction, my wild syntactics foreign: only know, that in your naming, you are only situating these things deeper inside of myself, where they have their true home, and where the weight of their loving lies.