Language doubled, language that no longer disappears into mediation: how does it call you, how does it come to claim you? When the right word does not come, perhaps: when the word that would allow you to speak eludes you and, in its absence, seems to unjoin your capacity to speak from itself. When you stammer, and language seems to stammer, according to a rhythm that interrupts the rhythm of speech. Or is it arrhythmical, the voice that joins yours? Stuttering, hesitancy - distrust the ability to speak. Speak by way of blocks and breaks. Then what you cannot say joins what you say. Speak, and it is not only you that is speaking.
Or - another example - speak by way of what everyone says. Engage gossip, be engaged by the rumour - pass speech along without detaining it; speak of nothing, of nothing in particular, and least of all yourself. Lightness of a speaking that belongs to no one. Light speech, that seems to stream without reference to what is said.
And then there is the speech of the infatuated - errant, wandering because it cannot yet pose what is obvious: the fact of attraction. Speech wanders from what both parties would want it to say. Wandering speech, that speaks by way of what cannot be said. Think of the dialogues of Henry James.
And still another kind of speech - the one that accompanies images, but seems to have little to do with what is presented. That belongs to itself, that clears a space for itself, letting those images become more dense and more strange. The poems of Tarkovsky's father in Mirror. The dialogue in Godard's In Praise of Love. What are they saying? What is going on? And the image of the Seine, the bridges: what does it mean? Errant speech, again. Wandering speech, once again.
And finally, the free association of the analysand, the automatic writing of the Surrealist: it comes close that murmuring that undoes the sense of speech, that seems to indicate a secret meaning only for meaning to withdraw its measure. Who speaks? What speaks? 'A modest recording device', says Breton, and now we cross from speech to writing.
Write, tell, until writing chokes its own channel. Write until the grit fills the filter. What was it that you meant to say? What did you mean to write? Writing lives its own life, away from you. Lives it, and draws what you write of your life into its streaming. Indifferent to you, turned away from you, concerned with itself, only it has no 'itself' and has no face. Setting your life quietly aflame. Setting what you have written coldly aflame.
Or there is a practice of fiction that leads narrative away from chronologically arranged sequences to their interruption and their condition. That speaks of what makes writing strange to itself and its writer as it pushes back before the capacity to speak, to write, was first granted. A before that never issues into a beginning, but accompanies it, doubling, mocking it, parodying the certainty with which it cannot coincide. Dub writing. Hauntology.
Or poetry, performative writing, that burns up a life, sacred speech that catches flame in words detourned from the world, in a naming that names the world's absence, its interruption. Or the painted word, Cy Twombly at the Tate: what is he trying to write, aphasiac, in the half-light. What has written? But writing has written in those blazing words. Writing where words let speak the speaking of words.
Or song, where the voice floods sense with nonsense. Flooded sense, pools where darkness burns in darkness - a singer possessed, dispossessed. Who has lost herself by way of her voice. Her voice is loss. Lyrics that double what is lost by way of that loss. Cat Power. The desolation of singing. You Are Free: but by what freedom? The voice lost in its own corridors. Lyrics lost without sense. But the 'without' blooming like a night flower.
Or the choked blog, like a dawn marsh with steaming fog. A blog running nowhere, standing water, stagnant water. Or that is like rusted metal, turned all colours. Or the objects from Stalker's nightstand underwater. An encrusted hull in drydock. A throat filled with mucus.