how could speech exhaust the meaning of speech? - nikos stangos

How Could Speech Exhaust The Meaning Of Speech?
by Nikos Stangos




The platitudes of truth --

That was the beginning.

Now we can only turn back to

Deceiving words, the first ones,

Their acts and objects

pacts of symbolic exchange,

The most commonplace facts

That lucid writers glorified.

Certainty was constantly

Renewing itself, feeding on

The only knowledge:

That that was the way.

A most transparent truth

Its domination over the real

Capable of annihilating it

Like him, born of pain.

Ah, the deceiving spirit

Suddenly like him, born of light,

The fact that merely dazzles

And takes its place out of necessity.

You sat smiling

Spoken to rather than speaking

Turned against the good, 

A false renunciation.

And where is truth,

The meaning which goes unrecognized?

A closed circuit locked in

Ceremonial lies, obsessions at night.

Parent speech -- the monologue that activates the actor:

The birth of truth is speech

Neither true nor false

Imaginary nor real.

Tonight's disclosure is

A recitation in high voice

Produced before an audience --

Mass inertia.

It is made up history

And it is like an indirect quotation:

The chorus on the stage and the spectators'

Language emulate the truth of revelation,

Promises of a future, of reality,

Questions of recollection

Against promises of the future:

The proof, the turning point, the theorem

Through which we guide our steps

From month to month,

The hidden objects,

This act then is an act of history, or

Falsehood, a sacred lie,

What has been written down.

I do not know which history, or

What meaning is reestablished,

Common wisdom proclaimed that ever age

Had found its own philosopher.

Our recent past has revealed

This to be more speculation, without dignity.

Your words bear witness now,

This turning aside from reason

In the domain of pure language,

Submitting to ambiguities.

What is this place?

Here imagination is in the monarch

In his brilliant robes,

Rules of marble spaces

Where what appears is false

And what is false is truth,

The light changing direction

As usual revealing and concealing.

Your hero is a retarded child,

The master of relations,

Who studies his gloomy space

Future catastrophes, decaying words.

This place is empty.

What is going on?

We want the meaning that eludes

In such heroic impersonations.

Come close, come close.

Unwillingly we run away.

Night gathers, gathers,

Icy winds, whirl, whirl.

A large body is cut in fragments, freshly butchered

Is floating horizontally towards us,

Its wounds dripping deep red

Denials, fresh flesh food.  

"There, there, thousands

Of infants, in their swaddling clothes

Float by, a knife plunged deeply

In each infant bosom."

This is, you say, how language functions.

Can we convince ourselves of the necessity

For such spiritual catastrophe?

We are the prisoners of a closed circuit.

Back to the function of words:

The void which speaks words

When finally the day of destruction 

Will arrive, glorious in its conceit,

An instrument of healing or

Of search in words uttered as words

Within ourselves and giving speech to void

In suspect words when silence fails --

This is the ritual of murder,

An appeal to truth

Through which other appeals

Will find -- or think they find -- a faltering expression.

Hopeless mirages, fantasies, deceptions,

The silence spoken by the void which speaks

In tongues and borrowed words.

The artifice complete.

Such gifts which are condemned to fiction,

Narrations of sleepwalkers, moments

Which look like secretive encounters

Are the birth of what we think is truth expressed in words.

The testimony of reality is heard

Invoking past ambitions, making choices

Which charter the domain

Of false and glittering transactions.

Inscriptions are deciphered, traces read,

Their meanings growing out of longings

For love, closeness, forgiveness,

Only symbolic isolations will remain, as memories.  

The structure of a sentence

In our sight, a dark, fleeting reality

And also an obsession

With meanings which resist all change.

Regression, repetition, rhetoric,

Seductive metaphors sought in a dream,

The object of desire with single phrase

Which will contain all meanings.

What we were taught were double meanings,

Unstructured texts of deep symbolic lineage,

Symptoms of language with split figures,

Ambiguous numbers which conceal the real.

Secrets then glean in their masked words

When deceit dazzles with its forgeries,

The lucid writers hiding their laws,

Authors of phantom books of random choices.

And we in our innocence, curiously to learn,

Murmuring syllables we think reveal bright actions,

Crave for a language that belongs alone to the language to language,

Speech that enunciates such longings but does not replace them.

We think we've forged symbolic pacts with language,

Creators of a world of words taken for things,

Legible structures of incestuous marriages

Of images in words, of the one truth.