Between saying and the said

Language, this play between saying and the said
– Lucian, yesterday I asked you two questions, the same I asked the day before… to which, despite long speeches… you did not answer. Must I remind you of them?
– Please do…
– Tell me… in the name of our friendship… what did you mean yesterday… and before… when you spoke of consultation? And… why did you not answer me about the drawings?
– Ah… language.
– No, I am speaking of drawing… of image… and of consultation…
– Yes, another in-between, perhaps the deepest, the most dangerous, the most fertile.
Language is what happens between the thing and meaning, between the body and the world.
– And the drawing… or the image, if you prefer!
– It is a pass. A passage of being.
– When I speak, Lucian, it feels as though it is not I who speak, but something passing through me… and also… dare I say it?
– Dare! Dare!
– A speech that crosses us, seeking its path in our breath.
– You see, Ignatius, there are always two edges:
the saying and the said.
– There is also you and I and… forgive me… the edges of what?
– Two sides… if you like. What I say, and what is said despite me, despite you.
– And it would be, if I understand, between the two that language truly speaks.
– The saying is the living gesture of speech; the said is the trace, the result, the fixed form. But the life of speech rests between the two: in the pulse, in the movement from saying to said. Language is not a tool: it is a theatre of passage.
– Like in your consultations!
– Exactly. Each word is a stage where meaning risks itself, stumbles, invents its form. And the beauty of language is that it always misses, just a little.
– Like when you refuse to answer me!
– Like with your thoughts… there is always a remainder, a gap, and it is that gap that keeps speech alive. If the word said everything, there would be no speech left.
– It would be the death of play.
– That is why to speak is to desire. Language is the desire for meaning: never fulfilled, always on the way. We speak to reach, but we never fully reach. Like you, forgetting who you are and why you came here…
– I don’t understand!
– You are Ignatius… one of my patients…
– ???
Ignatius loses his breath. No sound leaves his mouth.
– It is in this space of imperfection that the human being lives, creates, loves, dreams, Ignatius. And there is this paradox: language separates us, yet it is also what binds us. Between us… between you and the other, no fusion is possible.
Stunned, sealed in silence, Ignatius cannot move. And yet, from far, far away, a word begins to form — one he does not yet understand.
– There is the word… the one that now escapes you… The word is a fragile bridge thrown across the abyss. A bridge of air and sound, but sometimes stronger than stone. Language is also memory in act. Listen to speech… Each word comes from afar, from other mouths, other times. When we speak, we summon centuries without knowing it.
Ignatius, motionless, lost in thought, no longer knows whom to trust. Should he believe this man he thought his friend, who clearly is not?
– The word “love,” for instance, Ignatius, is a mille-feuille of centuries and skins. Yet each time we say it, it is new. Because it passes through this saying, this voice, this moment. As my friend Daniel Sibony says: language is a chain of passes.
From mouth to mouth, generation to generation, speech circulates, transforms, plays.
It is the world’s play speaking through us.
And if someone asked me: “Where is true language?”
I would answer: in the gap… but also in the image…
At these words, Ignatius regains some colour, imperceptibly. He stirs, and slowly finds the words that had fled him.
– Between what I meant and what I said.
Between what I said and what you heard… there too is a gulf in which, it seems… you could also be trapped or simply lost! For perhaps you guessed it… but I saw hints — leafing through your notebook — suggesting you might well be the author of the images you brought me!
The moment, as one may imagine, was not simple.
– It is there that life lives, that desire burns.
There that meaning dances, like a flame between two breaths, Ignatius — yours and mine. If I draw in my notebook… I am not the author of those drawings you bring me. If I reproduce them, it is to make them speak…
Language — even the language of the image — is the in-between par excellence: neither pure spirit nor pure body; neither pure truth nor pure lie. It is the movement in which the world tries to say itself, and fails just enough to continue.
So yes, to speak… or to draw… is to play. But it is a serious play: where one risks one’s being with every word.
– You must always play with words, Lucian!
– And the day we stop playing with words, the day everything is said, may be the day the world stops speaking.