The Unreliable Language
Thoughts after reading Cool Memory by Jean Baudrillard
I first read Cool Memory when I was in high school, a time when information fragmentation hadn't grown so furious. For this reason, I am not opposed to this series of fragmentary thoughts. I think about this series from time to time and feel like they are perfect to read on the subway. So I got the Cool Memory Ⅳ, 1995-2000 when I saw it in a Chinese bookstore last week.
The timeliness of these fragments of text is explicit, and therefore a particular phrase is not representative of the person who wrote it. For words, once attached to the timeline, become rigid and vulnerable, and will be betrayed easily by those who use them. (It can be understood this way: she had this thought in 2000, but she changed her mind and is against it now.) However, when language is produced in the form of sound (spoken form), its nature of vanishing as soon as it occurs makes it jump out of the timeline, it become immortal. You can't deny a thing that has vanished, just as you can't kill a dead man. For this reason, I’m afraid of speaking. I'm afraid of words that wander outside of time, waiting to ambush me and making me a traitor. I use the expression "betray" for both written and spoken language, but the crucial difference is that the betrayal of texts is liberated, innovative, and rebellious, on the other hand, the betrayal of words that have already been spoken, will result in the speaker being accused of hypocrisy by the echo of the sound.
When I was thirteen, I called a girl a slut behind her back, but later on, I found out she was a very nice person and we became close friends. I forget why I said such a terrible word, but that statement and the echoing middle school hallway just jump out at me now and then. I'm not much of a righteous person, I've done things that are not too ethical which I don’t care much about. So I feel so irritated every time when my conscience throws that echo of word in my face.
When I was six, my grandfather passed away. He was lying on that narrow bed in an ordinary afternoon. Four or five people in the family stood around him in such a small room, they didn’t say anything for a long time. Silence was spreading and filling the entire room. The solid stillness pressed down on a little six-year-old body. Then I said, “The teeth of Grandpa are so white”. I, at that time, did not yet know much about death, tried to dispel the gravity of this silence with a playful sentence. How ridiculous! There are moments that should not be disturbed, they deserve to be sustained with a gesture of ambiguity and dignity. Even grief, especially grief. It is a delusion to try to disrupt it with the arm of language. You can’t go back there and change anything. The language, once it has happened, it is confirmed that there is only one possibility for the reality of that moment. The only thing you can do now is to bear with the unexpected attack of the language, to realize that it cannot be erased, and to wait and expect it to grow less and less powerful.
While determined to defend silence, I was overwhelmed watching Ingmar Bergman's Persona, and I was fascinated by the character who refuses to use spoken language. She was confronting the other side of spoken language which I haven’t discussed above, the misinterpretation and adulation that it can, and most likely will, lead to. It is frightening that the spoken language comes out of you and attaches itself to others like a virus, in places where it might be invisible, or it might grow in madness. When it is detached from you, it is no longer under your control. But when they hold it accountable, you are responsible for it, even if the language or the thoughts behind the language no longer belong to you.
Gestures, way of behaving, and expression of the eye…… are safer ways to communicate, for they are attached to the body, occurring continuously, and subsisting on the timeline. In addition, the symbolic meanings they imply are less certain. They are more similar to the shapes of the mind.