Teaching a voice to speak ‘language’
Let us imagine for a moment that each voice is a living being, completely autonomous from the person who emitted it. Let us also imagine that this strange being harbors within itself a powerful desire to learn a language—an idiom which, for convenience, we will call language—and that there was, or has been, a moment in every voice’s life when it did not know, or did not yet know, how to speak language. If we take such a voice in its pre-language state and break it into pieces, reduce it to tiny fragments, and if we take those tiny fragments into our hands and observe them, feel their color, their temperature, we notice that they contain a mysterious energy, a kind of electric charge, which, without our being able to say whether it is hot or cold, sweet or salty, makes them appear “charged”, full of potential and desire.
Now, if we wanted to take care of such voices, we would face the question of how to teach them to speak language. We might even feel inclined to make this gift, to welcome them into the world and make their existence—amidst a multitude of other voices that already know how to do this—easier, or—using an expression in language—more articulated.
Yet, the point of this reflection is rather to remind us that perhaps there are voices that have no desire at all to learn to speak language, and that perhaps it is they who, holding us—not literally in their hands, for they have no hands, but in some other way that is theirs—wish to take care of us and teach us to feel something that, for us, who for the moment speak and think almost exclusively language, might resemble being something else: savoring the taste of a question, inhabiting a forgetfulness, delighting in a misunderstanding, conjugating the proximity of a being, and other things of this kind.