Since We Have Been a Conversation – Speak, Object

A conversation in objects in Devlin Shea‘s animation “Two Eggs in America“:

“Since we have been a conversation and have been able to hear from one another…” (Holderlin) The philosopher Martin Heidegger in his essay Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry wrote:

We — mankind — are a conversation. The being of men is founded in language. But this becomes actual in conversation. Nevertheless the latter is not merely a manner in which language is put into effect, rather it is only as conversation that language becomes essential. What we usually mean by language, namely, a stock of words and syntactical rules, is only a threshold of language…. The ability to speak and the ability to hear are equally fundamental. We are a conversation — and that means: we can hear from one another. We are a conversation, that always means at the same time, we are a single conversation.

Beyond prepositions, in Heidegger’s vision we are united in existence by language — we are not simply in conversation with one another, we are a conversation already, a single conversation. We can hear from one another because we share this same existence, the conversation that we are — and the more we listen and speak, engaging in enlivened language, the more we acknowledge this connection.

But it’s not quite as simple as just talking and listening more. “Where the human faculty of speech is present and is exercised, that is not by itself sufficient for the essential actualization of language — conversation.” (Heidegger) This is in part because the “single conversation” we are — this unity — also includes the world around us and the gods.

… the presence of the gods and the existence of the world are not merely a consequence of the actualization of language, they are contemporaneous with it. And this to the extent that it is precisely in the naming of the gods, and in the transmutation of the world into word, that the real conversation, which we ourselves are, consists. (Heidegger)

And how do we begin this conversation with the gods and the world (of which we ourselves are already part)? Just as in ancient times, we begin by paying attention to the world around us — by reading and listening to the signs — and by interpreting these signs intuitively and poetically. As Heidegger put it:

The speech of the poet is the intercepting of these signs, in order to pass them on to his own people. This intercepting is an act of receiving and yet at the same time a fresh act of giving…

As poets and artists we observe, and we interpret what we observe creatively. Yet it is difficult to hear what objects say — to really listen.

The artist Renata Szur during a recent residency at BAER gathered stones from the local Icelandic landscape and wrote down what they said, displaying both rock and written speech as an installation.

Reminiscent in tone to Vasko Popa‘s poems of speaking bones and cosmically humanized objects, Szur’s stones blur the human and mineral experience — making each overheard stone seem at once charmingly accessible and delightfully strange.

A few excerpts:

Stone ( nr. 10 )

Just an endless bumpy road,
and the tinkling of silent bells in my head…
A garnet in my right leg,
a dynamite in the left.
Under my feet
I see a thin line of snow.

* * *

Stone ( nr. 7 )

The sea melts into the sky
And I think of our conversation with her
On solitude,
And I think of our argument with the others
The way I live…
If I stop numbering the cracking,
I can easily draw a straight line
anywhere around the joints.

* * *

Stone ( nr. 8 )

If I was beheaded,
the day would be much easier.
I shrink like a snail.

* * *

Stone ( nr. 5 )

There is a drop of melancholy in the air.
As the land sucks up the sun
So does the cold sea enter in me.
After my skin swallows up the water,
I wish for more…

Walking on the stones with bare foot
Feels like being a mountain,
Which suddenly disappears on the horizon.

I lick an uneven white line off my skin
And put my shoes back on.

The artist Devlin Shea addresses a different kind of object-human conversation in her animation poem “Expansion.” Shea’s work reminds us that although we are a conversation, part of what we share in this linguistic existence is what is difficult to express and differentiate.

Only where there is language, is there world, i.e. the perpetually altering circuit of decision and production, of action and responsibility, but also of commotion and arbitrariness, of decay and confusion. (Heidegger)

“It was hardest in the winter.” (Shea)

“Full of merit, and yet poetically, dwells man on this earth.” (Holderlin)