|Epilogue|
Speaking Privately | Last page from yet ‘untitled’ Cat-book
To Readers
Last few years has been extraordinarily productive, thanks to less and less traction in the real world outside and confining myself to things which meant the most to me. Although, things I write about are also the things which belong to the world.
As I offer you this book in certain gratitude, I nevertheless doubt - if the space I have confined myself in, still has a dialectical relationship with the real world. Or at least this space still belongs to the world outside. The feeling is similar to that of being folded againset oneself, as freedom to be and prison of being touch each other like fabric of the same cloth. Could it be a method to madness or would that only be a “method of a madman”? Have I found something or have I lost everything and yet have everything as a mental-image, a flickering memory? A slippery-traction? More than testing your patience with this text, I am testing my own ability to speak in a tongue which I hope hasn’t become strictly private.
I often speak first, then listen to myself and lastly; write. As I speak my jumbled thoughts and follow them in writing, my writing comes as limped as my lisp. I struggle with drafting and editing, until I regress to reading out-loud, than reading quietly. Reading such, the first person is evoked with his lisp, limp and method. But I admit, it just could be private ways of a madman.
Reading demands discipline, and writing- a very critical discipline. Skill may follow if redundancy is performed with a nudge, ever slightly different. Yet one only gets pulled in their own gravity, an assured assimilation. I often wonder to what extent animals use language. I talk to my cat all the time, and she talks back to me, yet we understand each other differently. At least I know, my language is as private, as her seems to me. We do share semiotics to some extents but our inadequate communication relies on more than one mode, language being the most inefficient one, yet with seductive aesthetics. In all that I fully agree with later Wittgenstein, that language gets the daily things done and language isn’t full measure of a man but his tool to dig the real (I made the later part up). Writing is a solitary business which has a paradox at its heart. It is done in private, yet it constitutes of things said and done. Having a reader is as much a previlage, as writing itself. To have an access to two rival domains- speak in a native tongue, and speak your mind- a lonesome animal. Readers should be able to decide if I speak one or none.
I go out with friends, who keep assuring me that my language could benefit from some privacy, and not the other way around. Their shared confidence deters me from sharing my work with them, something I have always done in private. So here, it is for you to have, and to judge. Read aloud, when it gets louder.
