whatever is unnamed

Glebe 1999 ... walking down some street, some side street, looking for Marianne

"Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language -- this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable".

- Adrienne Rich.

I love this quote. because its true. Because it means all the stuff unsaid, unwritten, unshown, is lost to us, lost to a future and maybe even lost to a reality. Because if it wasn't ever said or written or shown or depicted or remembered in some physical form, it simply doesn't have presence any more (and I am NOT talking about memory - which might be more important than a said word or a written word or a camera click or a painting - just what is tangible and will outexist our mental rentention). And that LANGUAGE is complicit in this is undeniable.

Language as a social construct simply means that when we don't have the words for it, we don't have the social understanding for it in this day and age, in this society ... so whatever exists outside society's ability to imagine or understand, is also lost in this way. And scares the shit out of ricebag more than anything. Because society today (Western Society today) presumes we live in some sort of progressionist universe where we're just moving forward all the time in some kind of unstoppable momentum ... and that view is not only totally unrelaistic, its wrong!! We only know the tiniest miniscule of what we and the planet is capable of and its our total and utter ignorance which we bolster and hold onto with the twin-claws of science and logic ... yadda yadda yadda

Yessah ladez and gents - ricebag is itching to go on a rant but time does not permit - lucky you!! (And just so the awful cruel irony doesn't escape you ... what I had to say will go unsaid ...)