23 June 2022

Silence féminin: Linguo-speechlessness

Dariia Kuzmych, Nastia Teor, Teta Tsybulnyk
Silence féminin: Linguo-speechlessness

 

Tremor of limbs [instead of] words

Dariia Kuzmych

 

***

The span of wings 

The span of an eyelash

endowed with a clear-cut shape  

To pour water, 

elllllll

 

twisting the eyeballs 

towards the jaw, 

to feel the teeth with the tongue  

to twitch a muscle, towards her, following the ground, 

facial muscles, especially around the eyes

 

Then. Exhale.

Biting the right cheek, to clamp the lip with the incisors. 

 

What is the point of the deed? 

To know irrefutably 

To exist in the same time, that is 

beyond the time 

neither in filling nor in emptying. 

 

But! The process of emptying leads to a point; 

from this point an Apple Tree grows. 

 

What’s with it? 

Everyone who feels 

the blissful pain 

Worships it. 

And me. Where? Where do I go?

 

To a place where the eyeballs twist. 

 

***

 

Beyond the frightening irreality. 

It’s just the rationality of pre-definitions. 

The definitions of sound are bristling, unable to express anything. 

They cannot jump into the hissing of the sound, being too cautious. Close the curtains of perception and acceptance. The voice of the falcon frolics feverishly.

Wake up strongly in the morning at six o’clock and forget to be apparent, said a certain Ч. 

Spatial tension takes the breath away. 

I like the sound of words, I don’t need their meaning. 

Often glancing at the clouds and puffs, lethargy passes, comes out-out-out and from within. It was a matter, a matter that slept during breaks between matters. 

I’m neither an anchor nor a dictator, I’m not dictating. I like the sound of words apart from their meaning. The tremor of the limbs has a sound too.

 

A sky full of meaning is actually beautiful. The deja vu of celestial bodies can be calculated mathematically. But I don’t know how. “Whoa-oh-ooh,” I think about all of this. 

Stir, shuffle, sizzle, shishch! Shish shchastya shcha. Squintiness squints late at night in a muzzle. 

The keyboard inspires all these words she gives birth to. 

Numbness blindness when the Sun shines bright as die Sonne. Then only the Sun exists. When you look directly at it, you see nothing but the bright light of this Sun. Everything is spotted just like this.

 

***

 

The reason for misunderstanding the dependencies among themselves lies in the delay of moonlight within sight. This light takes on a shade of pink, and you meet dependency again. You feed it with your own non-prayers. You are the one to blame. 

Stop making fun of Shush sh sh. It’s impolite. Invent the gray-greenness of the acquired Completeness. The dreams there may all have a red tint. Keep silent before coloring and then stop by for a visit to Certainty.

For a hundred and fifty years you’ve been affected by days of enormous hypocrisy. 

Think of what is better: sitting Around in a cubic white space not getting out of it, wrapping yourself in a point on a programming grid. Or jumping around the city searching for a delicious Latte, yet, not understanding which gap in the grid to cling to. It’s certainly delicious but always remember the depth of each point in the grid to understand it more deeply, like Big to Small and vice versa, in Saint Sebastian’s Prayer picture. By the way, go and see it. First, think deeply on this point, swim on the surface of the grid, tensioned with a cup of delicious coffee.

The fluffiness of the pillows under your head; today, in the afternoon, they nailed you and you could not escape, oh, you wanted to scream. The fractality of what is happening in the dream was striking upon awakening. And the feeling in my gut was nasty, very complex, chaotic, foul.

 

Dariia Kuzmych hat seinen/ihren Status aktualisiert. 

 

urgently find the purest in the depths of your pupil and stop there, inside, for 44 seconds, forgetting to think why. Then bite your tongue and observe the sensations. Strong, bitter green tea is also good for the tongue. before biting.

 

08.04.2012, 00:57

 

***

 

The completion of pre-definition in the understanding of mediocrity. The Penny-likeness of a refined word emerges by rounding its forms and terminologies through the gaze of one eye. A lightline inclines by means of her voice, but it doesn’t revive. The light is noisy, cutting the room and leaving scratches and holes behind. It doesn’t let  those who are small and strong fall asleep.  Everyone is trying to stop the inevitable. They are trying to ensure the Continuity of the systemic interaction of the planet’s inhabitants, excluding the planet itself. She doesn’t suffer, she doesn’t care, the epidermis is being renewed. 

 

<…>

 

Tremor of limbs [instead of] words. 

*** 

 

Біль не має мови, а звуки могут топорщиться. 

Косноясность 

самопереклад 

у самоперекладі я переінтерпретую 

не даю відбутись мові 

 

Pain doesn’t speak any language, and its sounds shred. 

Tongue-tied obscurity Self-translation

          in self-translation I re-interpret 

          I don’t let language happen

 

***

 

Excavated texts from the times of post-traumatic syndrome: when you are marginalized, suspended in anticipation of re-collection. Bodily rupture-disjointedness is reflected in words and non-words, whether you hide it or not.

Abruptness in the text protects me against immersion in the infinite number of years ago, in the Untitled episode, which unfolds in time and fills in the emerging gaps. Here I am, here he is, we go hand in hand. This abruptness is a cracked surface, it consists of platforms that sometimes touch each other in places of splitting. Development of the topic is possible through the connection of such platforms – stitching, merging, or colliding. You can still stand with different limbs on each, to maintain balance. These are all tricks, you malign like a trickster. Platforms float – ligaments stretch. Freezing entails recovery.

Archived papers, crumpled notes, torn pages, faded notebooks, digital files without dates, emails to the future, screenshots of Facebook posts, and before the emergence of these forms – a live journal addressed to nobody with several subscribers and reports of staying in a confined space. Abysses in time with no traces in the records – when the space captures and gives no hope for the recipient. Different people are involved: the so-called Pötr Tarakanovich, Sarah Kane [Psychosis 4.48], a man in a hat, a man with two necks. With two necks and two pharynges, he uses them in turns. Two necks grow together – these are the trunks of trees growing side by side. Another one emerges – a hybrid with acquired skills and qualities. She runs away from others, she is detached and emancipated. She becomes familiar. All roles have a caption in the lower right corner of the A3 sheet of paper in the album full of schematic drawings. A self-portrait, the caption says.

Mixing song excerpts into a sentence, screaming between two speakers – at least it’s the three of us, at least together. We scream together to ease the pressure. Now these songs may be embarrassing, either because of the narrow Eastern context or because of destructive ideas and the desire for self-destruction. Swings flew, yet, without passengers, without extraneous movement, on their own, on their own. (From a famous song by Egor Letov).

“Good bye, my friend!” 

That’s how every post to nothingness ends. 

 

*** 

 

Wandering around the room, counting corners with a gaze; light that falls on certain sounds – here are the sentences-ropes, with their help you can get out of the room. 

Your style is characterized by focusing on nouns in all three languages:

-keit
-ність
-ство  (-ness)

 

Tremor of the limbs – all these ння (ing)

tetralingual eroticism, 

love-driven focus on mistakes.

 

***

 

Abandoned at a tender age, one of the native languages seems so uncomfortable, so unlearned, so “at a tender age.” 

 

(to protest against the definition of native language) 

 

If for a third of life for each, the native parts of these gaps will have their native languages. To jump between them to rediscover oneself / sich be-empfinden / sich befinden / sich wiederfinden.

And corporeal metaphors, the constant return to comparison with the body, from which words can come out, they grew up in isolation. To speak in corporeal metaphors: 

– careful, the nazisprache is approaching (one German poet tells you). A third language, a foreign language, allows two native ones to be placed on the same pedestal. I sway on the waves of both, and sometimes dive into a foreign language, it eliminates contradictions. Due to the detached properties of others, the methodology in verbal expression of thought is to love those closer to the body, just like your own shirt. And all of them either remain, or become, tongue-tied.

 


 

Movchky chuly movy

Nastia Teor

 

 

Natasha: How can the body sound? Why do words suppress the body? Can the environment express what we cannot feel, or say? 

 

Nastia: At first, I wanted to write a text about different types of speechlessness that develop as a result of different gender socializations and identifications. At the preparatory meetings for this zine, we talked a lot about speechlessness familiar to many women, and I noticed / felt that I was familiar not only with a feminine, but also with a masculine speechlessness. But my starting point was the polar opposites and I saw it as a problem. So, this text is an attempt, or a suggestion, to break this kind of polarization. As the events accompanying writing of the text developed, I discovered new productive aspects of some types of speechlessness (quite many of them, from my perspective) as processes that are distinct from different ways of speaking but do not necessarily serve as a guarantee of silence and emptiness. Just like speaking doesn’t always guarantee connection. For example, words don’t always help to connect with the forest, people, other territories, animals, and your body. And I am certain that the boundaries of my body coincide with the boundaries of the environment around me. There is no opposition between us because we are either one thing, or we are many of something. That’s why I cannot take the environment and express something through it but I can watch my body extending further beyond my skin, and this in itself changes a lot and can open new doors. So, I need to water a plant on a balcony to let it know that I care and get charged with its calmness for a couple of hours. In this case I don’t translate “I care about you” into another language but use another method relevant to the situation. There are few articulate words in the “MOVCHKY CHUTY MOVY“ text as I feel the impossibility and unwillingness to speak this way on a chosen issue. I don’t think that words necessarily suppress the body. It’s just that in this case, for me, using only words is an unreasonable restriction leading to a dead end because the way of speaking doesn’t correspond to the subject. As if instead of watering, I diligently wrote letters about my care to the petunias on the balcony.      

 


 

Black sun

Teta Tsybulnyk

 

 Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?

(Julia Kristeva. Soleil noir)

 

Silence is the language of nothingness. Drowning in the quicksand of the non-signified. Formless, impenetrable, nonsensical swarming. A black hole absorbing itself.

Silence is also an expression of the unspeakable. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The realm of paradox, the cradle of ambivalence, continuous oscillation between yes and no, boundless potentiality.

Silence, like darkness, is where I can hide, disappear, become invisible. This overdense negativity is potently magnetic. It tempts me to surrender to self-annihilation, feed my flesh to the omnivorous shame, seek safety in the arms of Thanatos, live the days when I don’t exist.

But disappearing is never ultimate. Negativity triggers the dialectics of the seen and the unseen, the present and the absent, which subtly permeate each other. The invisible presence of the unconscious is revealed through a symptom — a scar of meaning repressed into negative space. What hides behind the symptom of silence?

 

 

 

When Hades decided he loved this girl

he built for her a duplicate of earth,

everything the same, down to the meadow,

but with a bed added.

 

Everything the same, including sunlight,

because it would be hard on a young girl

to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

 

Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,

first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.

Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.

Let Persephone get used to it slowly.

In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting.

 

A replica of earth except there was love here.

Doesn’t everyone want love?

(Louise Glück. A Myth of Devotion)

 

Beginning to write is an excessive task. So I approach writing by translating. I borrow the voice of the female Other to overcome my own silence. While I’m a medium, her voice is quietly flowing through me, illuminating mute darkness.

Darkness is not the inert abyss but the active presence. Not the veil of invisibility but a special mode of visuality enabled by the lack of light. The dark reveals what is hidden otherwise. Seeing the obscurity of one’s time and not being blinded by the lights of the century is what constitutes a contemporary, according to Agamben. The underworld, however, is free from the concept of time, like the unconscious.

The chthonic darkness of Hades is a negative space. The realm of unbridled power and opaque desire. The dimension exposed by the ultimate loss of self or the rite of passage to womanhood. Finding myself here, am I dead or divine?

The sovereign of darkness establishes his rule dialectically. He accustoms Persephone to the negative mode of vision, gradually revealing the night. Duplicated in the shadowland, sunlit earth is a total optical inversion, a negative of darkness. Light is just a latent image that needs to be developed to let the real dark (dark of the Real) become visible.

 

 

 

 

Only in photography, when the negative was developed, was something else revealed that, uncaught by me, was caught by the snapshot: when the negative was developed my presence as ectoplasm was revealed too. Is photography the picture of a hollow, of a lack, of an absence?

 

I was the image of what I was not, and that image of not-being overwhelmed me: one of the most powerful states is being negatively. Since I didn’t know what I was, “not being” was the closest I could get to the truth: at least I had the other side: I at least had the “not,” I had my opposite.

(Clarice Lispector. A Paixão Segundo G.H.)

 

I like photographing the night sky with a full moon. Sometimes it seems that the luminous disk against the dark background is not a celestial body but a hole in infinite blackness that emits light. If I make a negative of the picture, a shining black moon will gape on the white background. What is an object then, and what is emptiness? How do you correlate presence and absence?

On the other side of the horizon, the Black Sun is rising. According to Kristeva, this metaphor conveys the psychic reality of a melancholic marked by the fundamental and unsymbolized lack. The Black Sun is the Thing: something that cannot be represented or signified. The light blinding with its invisibility. The present absence.

Psychic fabric unfolds out of the void. The lost object provides the constitutive gap, the point of absence which generates incessant movement around itself. The emerging subject is the process of circling around a lack.

Silence, after all, can also be fruitful, formative emptiness. A psychoanalyst offers her silence as a lacuna in the fabric of speech loaded with ambiguous opacity as well as mirror-like luminosity. Not an absence but a hollow presence that reveals the invisible, invites the subject of the unconscious to speak, makes space for being unknown to Ego. Silence is a mystery that allows me to meet what I am not.

 


 

See other parts of the publication:

Introduction

Part II: Shackled by Writing and Theory

Part III: Nobody Talks About This

Part IV Bedtime Stories

Imprint

See also