1
We yearn for a more primitive language than our own. Our ancestors speak of an age in which words unfolded with the serenity of the plains. It was possible to follow a course and roam for hours without losing one’s way, because language had not yet split and expanded and branched off, to become this river with all the riverbeds of the world, where it is impossible to live because nobody has a homeland. Insomnia is the nation’s most serious disease. The rumbling of the voices is continuous, its permutations can be heard night and day. It sounds like a turbine running on the souls of the dead, Old-Man Berenson says. Not wailing, but interminable mutations and lost meanings. Microscopic turns in the heart of the words. Everyone’s memory is empty, because everyone always forgets the language in which remembrances are recorded.
2
When we say that language is unstable, we do not mean to imply that there is an awareness of the modifications. You have to leave in order to notice the changes. If you are inside, you think that language is always the same, a kind of living organism that undergoes periodic metamorphoses. The best-known image is of a white bird that changes colors as it flies. The rhythmic flapping of the bird’s wings in the transparent air gives off the false illusion of unity in the changing of the hues. The saying is that the bird flies forever in circles because it has lost its left eye and is trying to see the other half of the world. That is why it will never be able to land, Old-Man Berenson says, and laughs with the mug of beer at his mustache again, because it can’t find a piece of land on which to set down its right leg. It had to be one-eyed, a tero-bird, to end up on this shitty island. Don’t start up, Shem, Tennyson says to him, trying to make himself heard in the noisy bar, between the piano and the voices singing Three quarks for Muster Mark!; we still have to go to Pat Duncan’s burial, and I don’t want to have to take you in a wheelbarrow. That is the meaning of the content of the dialogue — it is repeated like an inside joke every time they are about to leave, but not always in the same language. The scene is repeated, but without realizing it they talk about the one-eyed bird and Pat’s burial sometimes in Russian, other times in eighteenth-century French. They say what they want to and they say it again, without the slightest idea that they have used nearly seven languages through the years to laugh at the same joke.
That is how things are on the island.
3
“Language is transformed according to discontinuous cycles that are reproduced in the majority of known languages [Turnbull notes]. The inhabitants can instantaneously talk and understand the new language, but they forget the previous one. The languages that have been identified so far are English, German, Danish, Spanish, Norwegian, Italian, French, Greek, Sanskrit, Gaelic, Latin, Saxon, Russian, Flemish, Polish, Slovenian, and Hungarian. Two of the languages that have appeared are unknown. They shift from one to the other, but are not conceived of as distinct languages, but rather as successive stages of one single language.” The duration is variable. Sometimes a language lasts for weeks, sometimes just one day. The case of a language that remained still for two years is also remembered. But it was then followed by fifteen modifications within twelve days. We have forgotten the lyrics to all the songs, Berenson said, but not the melodies. Still, there was no way to sing a song. You would see people in the pubs whistling together like Scottish guards, everyone drunk and happy, marking time with mugs of beer while they searched their memories for any words that might go with the music. Melody has survived, it is a breeze that has blown across the island since the beginning of time, but what good is music to us if we can’t sing on a Saturday night, in Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s bar, when we’re all drunk and have forgotten that we have to go back to work on Monday.
4
On the island they believe that when old people die they are reincarnated into their grandchildren, this being the reason why one can never find both alive at the same time. However, since, despite everything, it does occur at times, when an old person sees his grandchild, he has to give him a coin before he can talk to him. Historical linguistics is based on this theory of reincarnation. Language is how it is because it accumulates the remnants of the past with each generation and renews the memory of all the dead languages and all the lost ones. He who receives this inheritance can no longer forget the meaning that words had in the days of his ancestors. The explanation is simple, but does not solve the problems posed by reality.
5
The unstable character of language defines life on the island. One never knows what words will be used in the future to name present states. Sometimes letters arrive addressed with symbols that are no longer understood. Sometimes a man and a woman are passionate lovers in one language, and in another they are hostile and barely know each other. Great poets cease being so and see other classics emerge in their own lifetime (which in turn are also forgotten). Every masterpiece lasts only as long as the language in which it is written. Silence is the only thing that persists, clear as water, ever the same.
6
The day’s activities begin at sunrise, but if the moon has been out until dawn, the yelling of the youths can be heard from the hillside even before then. Restless in those nights full of spirits, they scream to each other, trying to guess what will happen when the sun rises. Tradition has it that language is modified when there is a full moon, but this belief is belied by the facts. Scientific linguistics holds that there is no correlation between natural phenomena, such as the tide or the winds, and the mutations of language. The men in the town, however, still observe the old rituals, and every night that the moon is full they stay up, waiting for their mother tongue to finally arrive.
7
On the island they cannot picture, they cannot imagine, what is outside. The category of a “foreigner” is unstable. How they conceive of their homeland depends on the language spoken at any given point in time. (“The nation is a linguistic concept.”) Individuals belong to the language that everyone spoke when they were born, but no one knows when that particular language will return again. “That is how something emerges in the world [Boas has been told] that appears to everyone in childhood, but where no one has ever been: the homeland.” They define space in relation to the Liffey River that runs through the island from north to south. But Liffey is also the name of the language, and all the rivers of the world are in the Liffey River. The concept of borders is temporal, their limits conjugated like the tenses of a verb.
8
We are now in Edemberry Dubblenn DC, the guide said, the capital that combines three cities in one. Currently the city runs from east to west, following the left bank of the Liffey through the Japanese and West Indian neighborhoods and ghettos, from the origin of the river in Wiclow to Island Bridge, a little below Chapelizod, where it continues its course. The next city appears as if it were built out of potentiality, always in the future, with iron streets and solar energy lights and disactivated androids in the cells of Scotland Yard. The buildings emerge from the fog, without any set shape, sharp, shifting, almost exclusively populated by women and mutants.
On the other side, to the west, above the area of the port, is the old city. When you look at the map you have to keep in mind that the scale is drawn according to the average speed of walking a kilometer and a half per hour on foot. A man comes out of 7 Eccles Street at eight in the morning, goes up Westland Row. On each side of the cobblestones are the gutters that lead to the shores of the river, where the singing of the washerwomen can be heard. A man going up the steep street toward Baerney Kiernam’s tavern tries not to hear the singing, hits the gratings of the cellars with his walking stick. Every time he turns onto a new street, the voices grow older. It is as if the ancient words were engraved on the walls of the buildings in ruins. The mutation has overwhelmed the exterior shapes of reality. “That which still isn’t defines the architecture of the world,” the man thinks, and goes down to the beach around the bay. “You see it there, on the edge of language, like the memory of one’s house from childhood.”