(Transkript)

hold you breath, in an attempt to stay silent. 

(language in 10 acts) 

ONE 

What language do you dream in? 

The voice, both vessel and tool, changes. Vocabulary fluctuates with the fluency possessed in whichever language is used. 

Often, it feels like I can't be heard or can't precisely describe how I feel in any one specific language. 

Sometimes, it feels like a veil surrounds my mouth, preventing me from speaking through it. My voice dampens the fabric as any noise drowns out muffled through the cloth. 

Isn’t it beautiful to perceive the world in different languages? 

A privilege of some sort. 

I’ve always felt a great sense of gratitude for it. 

To be born in a place where one language is spoken, and to grow up in a place where another is spoken. 

To communicate with my parents in their respective mother tongues. 

TWO 

My mother's mother tongue is Azerbaijani (Azari). It's the language she grew up speaking and the language she uses with her loved ones. It's a language my father doesn't speak, and one my brother and I didn't speak until we were older. 

My uncle moved to Vienna to study when I was around 10. He used to speak to my mom in Azerbaijani, especially when they wanted to communicate in private. 

After some time—I can't remember exactly how it happened—my brother and I realized that we could understand them fully. 

It was like finally being granted access to this special part of our mother that we didn't have access to before. 

An understanding between my mother and us, a bridge to her world, woven tightly with the words she spoke from the very beginning of her life. 

I can still remember how happy I was when I realized that they were speaking in a language that made complete sense to me. Not in a way where I was translating that language in my head in real time, but with complete understanding. The intermediary process of consciously translating a language, which often happens when you learn a new language, wasn't happening. 

In some ways, this opened up another version of myself to myself. 

How do I perceive the world differently and think and feel differently in all these different languages? 

Is there any language in which I feel like I can fully communicate? 

What does "fully" mean? 

THREE 

Page 25: self-portraits and being present/absent 

“A story can represent a certain experience or condition quite differently than academic discourse or a biographical sketch and so it can involve the reader in a different way. It can be just as specific and precise in doing so. Certain things can be said better in one kind of language than another. Making something always has an element of translation in it and, as Winterson says, you should always do it with everything you have.” * 

FOUR 

Page 34: the blackest black, the whitest white 

“He suddenly realises that language, his way into interpretation of reality, is not a cast iron system and that it carries our own contingency within it: language, like us, is unfinished, sometimes paradoxical, flawed, and at times opaque and illogical. But it works – and according to Wittgenstein we should focus on how it works if we want to understand anything at all about it. If we wish to investigate the meaning of a concept, then we should look at how people use it.” * 

FIVE 

The interpretation of reality. 

Mine shifted around the age of two, and again around four. My first and primary language used with my parents was Farsi. Around age two, I started kindergarten and learnt German, and around age four, I moved to another preschool and had to learn English. 

Your reality shifts when you’re in an environment where you don’t understand the people around you. Thus begins the process of learning a new language. But how did I end up in this situation again? When did my head language switch from Farsi to English? How did English become my strongest language? When did it start feeling like I only used German to accommodate the people around me and not to express myself fully? 

So much of language can feel like a tool, a blessing of some sort.

But so much of forced integration can grate onto you until there isn’t much of the “you” left anymore. 

SIX 

A yearning to be heard and understood. 

A human condition. 

It grows within you, the more you delve into new forms of communication. 

Within the boundaries of language, I attempt to communicate through forms and gestures. 

With body language, a language understood by all perhaps. 

Through sounds, shapes, and movements. 

-- 

Unspoken motions linger between us, like the silence of all the languages you speak, dormant in the corners of your mind. 

It will never be enough. 

Sit in silent company as you interpret the words that translate from the movements of your body. 

Can common ground be found between the world and I? 

Can we sing to each other softly without causing a disturbance to the people around us, as they perch on their toes, lean over the fence, and try to watch us speak? 

Page 52: the waves 

“the beauty and difficulty of language is that you can never say exactly what you want to say: you always say both more or less. Less because a word, as Wittgenstein, is a signpost (and not the thing pointed to); more because language takes us beyond the individual – words always include all kinds of cultural and social connotations – and they can sketch a new world.” * 

Page 80: dialogue as therapy 

“To understand therapy as a dialogue does justice to the role that language plays in our conception of our environment and ourselves. The relationship between experience and reality is generally represented as follows. Our experience is strictly personal and individual, but we can convey it to others by means of words. The words we use point to things around us: objects, emotions, relationships, and so on. But that is a misleading picture. I can use words to sketch a map of my feelings for you, but those words are not the same as the feeling. They never completely coincide with what is happening – they're not a horse, but an image of a horse, and at the same time they give us the possibility of describing that horse again, on the basis of her scent, the soft hair on her nose, other earlier horses, the colour of her coat, the way she raises her head and looks at you. 

All the thousands of little pieces show something. Each reader or listener links them together in their own way. Language can bridge the distance to the other and at the same time it separates us from them – just as our skin does. 

Those with more words at their disposal don't necessarily have a richer emotional life than others (music is as rich as language; different languages offer different forms of expression; and many animals have languages without words), but they may possess a richer palette to interpret that emotional life and give it meaning. 

In his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein says that although mental experiences may be private, language is always necessarily public. It is impossible to speak of a private language. Language is, therefore, not only a framework for describing your experiences to others, but is also a grid within which you shape those experiences for yourself. Although we can think in music and images, the way that an event or an image is made concrete always takes place in the words you learnt as a child. 

In "The World is a Word” Patricia De Martelaere says that this is why we always see the world through the words of others, that is, via the culture that already existed. Words don't literally point to things; because of their cultural dimension they also make them. To see a tree as a tree classifies a whole category of plants, which could, in fact, be structured differently.” * 

SEVEN 

Quietness, a silent protest. An image of a feeling, fleeting. 

Use your words! 

I whisper incantations to myself, ones that could draw a line around my being. To be safe in silence, to protect others from my thoughts. 

How does it feel to not be heard? I overextend myself in an attempt to hold onto every word you say. To understand, to listen to you, and for you to not feel ignored. 

Does this action eat away at my very existence? 

But how could I reject you? How could I disappear when I hold in my hands so many tools of communication? 

It is always between A and B and never A or B. 

It is within the uncertainty of the unknown, the breath I take before I release, the few seconds it takes for the thoughts to build in my head. That is where it lies. 

In moments not unlike this one. 

Listen to me inhale deeply, 

Inhale.

Watch the cogs of my brain be pushed into motion as the blood runs through my veins, and I exhale without making a single sound. 

And again, inhale, exhale. 

Stay silent, protest. 

Feel everything and yet stay stoic. Give and never take. But take as much as you can. 

A paradox of here and there, constantly in motion. 

This way you can stay just outside the confines that they try to tie you to. 

In a constant fight with yourself and yet yourself reflects and projects everyone around you. 

Now you’re questioning your existence. 

EIGHT 

Are you listening? Can you hear it? 

The silent pitter-patter of footsteps, not quite in reach and not yet far enough. 

A dialogue with oneself. 

Speak one, speak two, speak three, speak four, speak five. 

Lean into the weight of your memories. 

NINE 

Page 104: the memory body and recurrent depression 

“My body is made up of everything I have experienced, and everything I now experience resonates against that background. Old feelings are like the bottom of the sea more than the strata of the earth: they’re stirred up by new feelings and then settle again, but just that little bit differently.” * 

TEN 

Deconstruct. 

The tension that holds it all together welcomes you. 

You stay bravely within the lines it served you with. 

Minimal, take apart. 

The more you move forward, the more silent you become, the more calculated, the quieter. Here lies a single layer, one that has completed a full turn, returning to its starting point, except the point has shifted, and the beginning no longer leads to the end, and the start no longer holds any particular meaning.

The single layer seems representative of the entire process. 

The tension has been released; there is no longer a need for the numerous movements that once held the past islands together. 

The single layer feels more fluid, moving in a way unlike its predecessors, without intention. It remains flowing. 

A final release has been granted, in a river just like this one.