"The poet is outside language." - Jean-Paul Sartre (in What is writing?)
Are we really? Can a fish be outside of the water?
The fish may project its mind outside the stream and dream of being another or nothing, but can it really be out of the water? Isn't the fish water itself?
The fish may project its mind outside the stream and dream of being another or nothing, but can it really be out of the water? Isn't the fish water itself?
"For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The speaker is in a situation in language; he is invested with words. They are prolongations of his meanings, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. He manoeuvres them from within; he feels them as if they are his body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly aware of and which extends his actions upon the world. The poet is outside language. He sees the world inside out as if he did not share the human condition, and as if he were first meeting the word as a barrier as he comes towards men. Instead of first knowing things by their name, it seems that first he has silent contact with them(...)"*
Does the poet die every time we speak? Is it common to all humans to experience a constant clash of the internal and the external worlds? Why should this happen?
Maybe if we got used to speaking with silences in images instead of certainties in abstractions we would reach a far more conscious state of being. Less clashing and more embracing between brothers and sisters, of the so called human condition.
What do you think?
K. Alves G.
*Excerpt from What is writing? by Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, 2000, Edited by Clive Cazeaux - Routledge.
