Once, there was no distance between word and thing. The word clung to the thing like a shadow, like skin, like a glove fitted to the hand. Say "kettle" and the kettle appeared; name and object were bound together. Each thing had its own word, and each word had a specific thing. The name seemed to hold the thing in its proper place, in such a world where the word itself was the thing's address. Not so now. Now the word does not come and merge with the thing; it merely comes and sits beside it. Not on its body, not around it, only at its edge, slightly removed. Like some stranger arriving at the wrong door and pausing there. The word "kettle" and the object on the table look toward each other, yet it seems neither truly knows the other. It feels as though the old household of word and thing has broken; they are in the same room now, yes, but no longer part of a shared life. This is merely a civil coexistence at a distance. You cannot say "kettle" with eyes closed anymore. Nor does it feel right to say "not-kettle" either. It looks like a kettle, works like a kettle; it heats water, makes noise, sits on the table. And yet the name no longer settles on it; like water rolling off an oiled surface, it slides away. Perhaps if you did not look at it, it would still be a kettle. But as long as your eye remains fixed upon it, it ceases to exist within its name; it becomes only a nameless thing that boils water, makes sound, sits silent in the stained place on the table. Nameless. You too are becoming thus, day by day. The house itself seems slowly to become a houseless thing. Not grey and color, but greyness itself. What remains when the name departs—that indefinite, homeless presence. Yet the mind does not stop. Though it should have, along with everything else. It did not. Suddenly, abruptly, the old words surge back, used long ago, memorized, thought, debated, uttered sometimes with love, sometimes in self-defense: existence, God, time, being, causality. Once behind these words lay apparatus, arrangement, the vast architecture of reason. Like cathedrals, each word standing in its own appointed pillar. Now they have collapsed. No spire, no foundation, no design. Only the rubble of fallen words. Then they come, like a monsoon torrent from the hills. No dam, no channel, no direction. One crushes down upon another, rolling, surging, breaking, scattering. A waterfall within the head, yet this water has no familiar source, no mountain, no definite mouth. Its own source, its own erosion. Where it comes from, where it disappears—no one knows. At last it fades like a dried-up stream that has slipped beneath the sand. Existence. Let us say, existence. Then individual. What does individual mean. Then divine. What is divine. The divine's indifference, its silence, the labor of thinkers, skulls, territories, proofs, stone, vast cold, vast darkness. The words scatter like water from a broken pipe in all directions. Pedantic words, philosophical words, words from the academy, which once were for you material, shelter, building blocks. Being and time, being and nothingness, being against being, the secret exchange between nothingness and being, all once held meaning through drawn lines, marked distinctions, ordered hierarchies. Now they come faster still, and as they come, they lose their faces, lose their sense, lose their borders. Essence mingles with accident, cause becomes effect, logic melts into illogic.
# ON GREY MERGING WITH GREY
Grey merging with grey, everything dissolving into one.
And then the word—that word which once held the world together, bound it thread to thread, imprisoned the scattered body of experience in the fixed net of terminology—it ceases to be a word. It becomes merely sound.
Gradually it fades. Opens. Opens where. Where. Unfinished. Labour. Whose labour. Unfinished. Word. Unfinished. Everything crumbles away into sound; not merely meaningless, but into some stratum before meaning itself. The state before naming. Vibration before measure. In the house, in the skull, by the sea’s edge. Only sound. That sound which was once a word, now not even that; as you were once a man, and what you are becoming now cannot be precisely stated. Perhaps only an echo, a faint utterance, a sound dissolving away.
This dissolution—from word to sound, from sound to almost nothing—is language’s fate too. Like a river: clear at its source, growing murky as it flows, until at last in the delta it is a river no longer, losing itself in the sea’s immensity. Perhaps once you chose this very ending for yourself. Or there was something like choosing then. Back when choice still lay within your reach; before the stopping, before decision vanished from your ledger.
You chose poverty. Not the poverty of want, but the poverty of utterance. You were born into a language, your mother’s tongue. It was the language of gardens, of thickets, of thorns. The language of tree-shade, of earth-smell, of your father’s warm back. That language was lush, abundant, strangely overflowing. There words were excessive, paths of speech were countless, in every alley waited a fresh metaphor. Beauty was so thick it nearly smothered truth; technique so deft that to utter anything simple became nearly impossible. Your mother’s tongue bewitched you. It seduced with eloquence, said more than it spoke, dressed emptiness in silk and adorned it.
One day you understood: within that very eloquence lay hidden falsehood. Beauty was concealment. The more that could be said, the less remained to say. Language buried emptiness beneath its own riches, as graves hide beneath flowers. Then you chose another tongue—one not yours. A language where you are poor; nothing beyond necessity belongs to you. There, technique cannot save you, because the language is not your native refuge; there, you cannot be eloquent even if you wished, because that very capacity the language withholds from you.
You chose a foreign language to impoverish yourself, to strip away that veil of beauty concealing emptiness. To say less, so meaning might be more; or to say nothing, so that nothing itself might be grasped more truly. A language not your mother’s, not yours, not anyone’s—merely a tool. A poor tool, a dull tool, one that aches in the hand. It cannot carve beauty; it can only cut, can only hack at truth the way an axe bites into wood. And that truth is ultimately emptiness—what beauty had hidden all along.
This is why you chose poverty: the poverty of a foreign tongue. As later you chose the house, the chair, the grey; the poverty of dwelling, of sitting, of greyness. All the same choice’s extension: standing with the less. A less that trims, removes, diminishes, discards, until meat falls away and bone shows through; until at last only emptiness remains.
The language in which this is being spoken is not yours. The house you sit in is not yours. The life that was unfolding is not yours. All of it is other, all of it borrowed, all of it a temporary arrangement around emptiness.
And it was within this foreign tongue that you encountered the hardest truth. Having abandoned your own language, having sought shelter in another’s poverty, you discovered that Void—the one affluence had kept buried all these years.
The Void, which was always there. Beneath words, beneath beauty, beneath the mother’s tongue, beneath the sweetest utterance. That Void which is finally more true than all things, which needs no language, yet can only be touched by the poorest language, the meagerest, the most worn utterance.
In the end, there remains only a sound. Issuing from some instrument, but why, for whom—no one knows. Perhaps there is no reason. The gull calls because it has a throat; the sea stirs because it is the sea; the house stands because once it was built for someone to sit in. But you? What were you for? Once, perhaps, it seemed there was a purpose. Now you cannot remember it.
What remains is only the going. The work. The turning. The repetition. But for what, one does not know. Why, one does not know either. One cannot even say with certainty whether there ever was a “why” at all. Perhaps the going itself was its own reason; the going itself was the destination. Now the going has ceased. With it has ceased the wandering of purpose.
What remains is only the house. The chair. The cup. The sea. The gull. This much.
The gull does not know it is a gull. A name is man’s discovery; the bird has no need of it. This ignorance is its liberation. Look out the window. A white being drifts across the grey—light, weightless, like a kite without string. No one holds it, no one flies it. It hovers, but it does not know it hovers.
The gull, the wind, the grey sky—all seem as one; knowledge has not yet divided them into separate things. There is a freedom in having no name. There is a liberation in having no word for oneself. Simply to be, without the burden of knowing by what name one is. And you know that you are you. This knowledge is your prison.
Knowing, the endless knowing. A knowing that adds nothing, changes nothing, serves no purpose; yet it does not cease. Even when all else stops, the knowing does not. Like some final wheel that will not break, will not rust, will not accept decay.
There is no hand to still it, because that knowing is you. You are nothing but knowing. Without knowing, you are not. And if you were not? Then there would be no problem. The gull has no problem, the sea has none, the house has none.
The problem is only yours, because you know, and the knowing cannot stop. The one who knows cannot stop being. This is the problem. The only problem. All else is merely its branches. Like water from a tap: once it begins to fall, it does not cease; it drips, and drips again, and again.