10/10
The fragility of words
10 March 2010
Words can easily break, since the relation between form and meaning is arbitrary. Moreover, a word that does not hit its object, is superfluous. Language as a whole is misused by daily gossip and the boulevard press. Since a long time, the problem to recognize the forest starting from the individual trees has become obsolete. Our problem has become now not to overlook the trees when we believe to recognize the forest. However, since it is basically enough to associate any form with a certain meaning, language can become a master of its own. The dadaists had shown that sense and meaning are creeping back into language by the back-door, after they have been thrown out by the main entrance. Schroeter systematically combines more or less senseless speeches to unfitting persons. Also purposely, their moving of the mouth does not correspond to the words we hear - and not even to the texts that they sing. Compared to language, music has at least one dimension more: the melody. Like the sounds of the words, so the parts of the melody endow speech with sense, but with their own sense, and this new sense may be our last hope after we have recognized that our everyday language has lost its proper sense. Like the words, their sounds, detached from their meanings, float along as water does, so the characters are not strongly differentiated anymore. They seem to be individuals, but they share their identities, they participate in one another in an eternal exchange.
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