Monday 30 April 2018

Sculptural aspects of language

Two texts from Between the Lines that depict language and writing as something that is tangible, akin to a sculptural process:

On writing, by Max Frisch, (one of my favourite writers) describes vividly that the substance of a text lies between the words and lines. "[...] language is like a chisel, which pares away all that is not a mystery, and everything said implies a taking away." The art is to come as close as possible to the surface of this mystery, to reveal it without scratching its surface, a surface that has no substance "[...] it exists only in the mind and not in Nature, where there is also no dividing line between mountain and sky."
From: Sketchbook 1946 - 1949

Thoughts on words, by Naoki Higashida, compares spoken language to a blue sea in which you can swim, dive and resurface.
From: Fall down 7 times get up 8, a young man's voice from the silence of autism