#unsayable

Pride Month Spotlight: New Non-Fiction Biographies What Kind of Queen? A Royal Biography of Drag Queen and Activist José Sarria by Kyle Casey Chu and Andrew W....

And everything that once was infinitely far and unsayable is now unsayable and right here in the room.

“Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and... return empty-handed. But—I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.”

In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world--to close the gap between ourselves and things--and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our inability to do so. Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.

It is not the unsayable but the sayable that constitutes that problem philosophy must at each turn confront again. The unsayable is in fact nothing else than a presupposition of language. As soon as there is language, the named thing is presupposed as the nonlinguistic or the unrelated in which language has established its relation. The presupposing power is so strong that we imagine the non-linguistic as something unsayable and unrelated, which we somehow try to grasp, as such, without realizing that in this way we are simply trying to grasp the shadow of language. In this sense, the unsayable is a genuinely linguistic category, which can be conceived only by a speaking being. That is why, in a letter to Martin Buber of July 1916, Walter Benjamin could speak of a 'crystalline elimination of the unsayable in language': the unsayable does not take place outside of language as something obscure that is presupposed, but, as such, it can be eliminated only in language.

Is the poem saying something that, before it existed, was unsaid, unsayable? Or is the poem making room for the unsayable to exist more freely, with all its fuchsia tentacles waving?

ਆਖ਼ਰ ਕੀ ਹੈ ਇਹ ਪਾਣੀ ਜਿਹਾ? ਅੱਖੀਆਂ 'ਚ ਆ ਜਾਂਦੈ!