Language is Everything
A Series of Posts: Thinking About Voices & Bodies
In a previous post, I wrote about some of Merleau-Ponty’s (mid-20th century Frenchie philosopher guy) ideas on the inseparability of body, mind, and experience—this concept is central to his interpretation of phenomenology (6 syllables! Whew!), an elusive and ambiguous term for which he is famously known. In bare bones terms, phenomenology is about our direct experience of life—or in slightly headier terms: our direct, embodied experience of existence. Hang on to your hats, folks!
For Merleau-Ponty, ‘language is experience’ and is part of our experience of being in, and with, the world. Or really, it’s sonority that we’re talking about here. The sound of language calls for an exchange or ‘passage from the word to being and from being to the word’ (Lefort, xxix)—in other words, language traverses body and voice—connecting my body and voice to yours in a kind of sonorous birth of ‘wild meaning’. (Merleau-Ponty, 155). On this of voicing language, Merleau-Ponty conjures Paul Valéry’s rad 1921 poem, ‘La Pythie’ (The Pythia, a Greek python-inspired seeress—yeah!):
👆🏻Misha Music Mini / Micro-Opera: 12 seconds
The end of the original Valéry ‘La Pythie’ reads:
‘Holy Language…
Behold a Wisdom speaking forth,
A Voice, stately and resonant,
That knows itself, as it rings out,
To be the voice of no one now
Except the forests and the surf!’
(Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody translation, 2020, 466).
This post is a (very!) revised, expanded, wandering, and slightly irreverent (and thus, reader-friendly) fragment from my recently approved doctoral thesis, ‘Vocality as / in Composition: solo and collaborative creation of new postopera works’. Bath Spa University, UK.
Cited Sources for The Interested, Curious, and Bored
Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘The Grain of the Voice’ in Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, 179-89. London: Fontana Press Harper Collins.
Lefort, Claude. (1964) 1968. ‘Editor’s Forward’; in The Visible and Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, xi-xxxix. Originally published in French as Le Visible et l’Invisible, 1964 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, xi-xxxix.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964) 1968. The Visible and Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Originally published in French as Le Visible et l’Invisible, 1964 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris.
Rudavsky-Brody, Nathaniel. 2020. The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry; A Bilingual Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Penton, Misha. 2021. ‘Vocality & Embodiment’ in ‘Vocality as / in Composition: solo and collaborative creation of new postopera works’, 25-7. PhD Diss. Bath SpaUniversity, UK.