Men at work
If the cranium were what it seems to be — a hemispherical receptacle, a cavity, a reservoir — learning would be a way of filling an empty space. But that’s not what actually happens. It’s possible to imagine that every new impression digs another hole, bruises the unformed material a bit, empties us out a little more. We’re born full of something — gray matter, water, blood, flesh — and in all of us, at every instant, the slow alchemy of erosion and loss is at work.
Language breaches our direct relationship with the world and words are an attempt to cross the unbridgeable gap: “Mama” cements a fragile bond with the now unattainable breast and “Me” is a mere echo of that face of mine on the other side of the mirror. In prelinguistic infancy, when the shadow of syntax hasn’t yet eclipsed the radiance of the world, the rumbling of rs and the murmuring of ms are enough to say everything. A child, before it can talk, speaks the world — speaks it to himself — with a pointing finger and babbling. But one day the soft sound of the m becomes attached to the a, and is repeated—mama. Then, something snaps. The moment we pronounce the name of that bond, our first and most intimate one, some link with the world is broken.
Names are the glove covering a prosthesis, the wrapping of an absence. A child who learns a new word acquires a bridge to the world, but only in compensation for the chasm that opens up within him the moment that word is imprinted there. Almost all of us have heard the story about our first “Mama” (and we know that the interest of the person hearing it is usually inversely proportional to the enthusiasm of the one who relates the anecdote) but I imagine that very few of us have firsthand memories of our initial unsteady steps through language. Some people compare this initial learning experience with the ecstasy of a creative force inventing a universe. Children, they say, are like poets of Esperanto: their words exist in perfect correspondence with the world.
Hooked on the biblical myth of Paradise, we’d like to believe that the names of things are precise and imperative, that there’s a word in the core of each thing and that pronouncing it is equivalent to unveiling the very essence of the object; that the act of speech is similar to the fiat of the Creator. There may be some truth in this, but the fact is that the process of acquiring a first language is as involuntary as stuttering or aphasia. Rather than a memory of Paradise, learning a language is a first banishment, an involuntary, silent exile to the interior of that nothing in the heart of everything we name. Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything.
Danger zone
There is a poem I like, written by Ghérasim Luca shortly before his death. It’s titled “Passionément” and begins with a stutter:
pas pas paspaspas pas
pasppas ppas pas paspas
le pas pas le faux pas le pas
paspaspas le pas le mau
le mauve le mauvais pas
Luca had been in France for thirty, forty years, his whole life — it makes no difference — when he wrote those lines. He had abandoned Romania, the Romanian language, pursued by the same terror that expelled so many others from their countries and their homes during the twentieth century. Luca wrote stuttering poems full of holes. He inhabited French, a foreign language to him, and carried it to the limits of its syntax, to the other side of grammar. He continues:
je je t’aime
je t’aime je t’ai je
t’aime aime aime je t’aime
passsionné é aime je
je t’aime
passionnément aimante je
t’aime je t’aime passionnément
je t’ai je t’aime passionné né
je t’aime passionné
je t’aime passionnément je t’aime
je t’aime passio passsionnément
One day he jumped into the River Seine. Leaning over the parapet of the bridge, did Ghérasim Luca’s eighty-year-old body tremble before he jumped into the water? Did it stutter like the last line of his poem, which trips up on passio and falls: passionnément? The poem begins with a faux pas, a false step, and everything that follows is a fall. To where? “When a language is so strained,” writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “that it starts to stutter, or to murmur, or stammer. . then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence.” Luca’s poem is the downward plunge of language toward that silence.
Mind the gap
That instant, that silence we leave in the middle of any old sentence: I was standing in. . How do you say it? That rectangular wooden frame, sometimes the way out, but also the entrance. Seuil in French, soglia in Italian. What is the word? It was one of the first I learned — one of my earliest childhood memories is of standing under the frame of a door, while my house trembled and convulsed in rapid spasms.
It was September 19, 1985, 7:20 a.m. People were sleeping, showering, kissing their kids good-bye, seeing them off to school, tuning in radios, making coffee, making love. Then a shock — a blow — so slow — so hard — so deep — and it all came down.
We grew up knowing it could be repeated, at any time. The city could fall apart all over again. It was a temporary, transient, ephemeral place. It’s hard now not to look back on Mexico City without awe — hard not to wonder how it is that the city has really not fallen, imploded, sunk, plummeted, shifted.
It hasn’t. It won’t. But it is full of holes and absences — like a child struggling, scuffling, stuttering to find the right word, to fill a gap.
Building materials
A few blocks from my house are the ruins of a building: a mausoleum for television sets, suitcases, telephones, books, newspapers, dolls, families. The elderly doorman of the property opposite says it was over five stories tall, a very modern building, from just before the big earthquake. Now, the pile of rubble is less than seven meters high and on top of the debris there’s a Mexican flag, cats, political propaganda, a scarecrow, and a couple of dogs called Ponchadura (“Flat Tire”) and Mr. President López Obrador. Hung between two metal bars, a sign announces, “We are in the process of” and the next word has been rubbed out — perhaps on purpose.
We are in the process of losing something. We go round leaving bits of dead skin on the sidewalk, dropping dead words into a conversation. Cities, like our bodies, like language, are destruction under construction. But this constant threat of earthquakes is all that’s left to us. Only that kind of scene — a landscape of rubble piled on rubble — compels us to go out and look for the last remaining things. Only under that threat does it again become necessary to excavate language, to find the exact word.
Watch your step
With that strange impulse that, when we’re incapable of finding the exact word, leads us back to books already read — as if we’d discover there a remedy or, perhaps, redemption — I open my French edition of In Search of Lost Time. This is something I first did in the library of the Pompidou Center, some years ago. I was convinced that the only way to learn French was by reading its writers. Not understanding didn’t matter because the language would gradually seep through into my conscious mind, and all that was needed was a great deal of obstinacy, a notebook, and a Petit Robert—never a bilingual dictionary — in which to look up the words that, even after intense effort, were impossible to make out.