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“So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me because I, too, am fluent in silence.”

–R. Arnold

In Lynch’s own speech and in the speech patterns of his films, the impression is of language used less for meaning than for sound. To savor the thingness of words is to move away from their imprisoning nature. Lynch has said, more than once, that he had to “learn to talk,” and his very particular, somewhat limited vocabulary seems in many ways an outgrowth of his aesthetic.

– Dennis Lim, David Lynch's Elusive Language

Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

| Henry David Thoreau, Walden

nayyirah waheed
nayyirah waheed

Computers are doing to communication
what fences did to pastures
and cars did to streets.

On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete. Language itself was transformed thereby from a local commons into a national resource for communication. As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.

I hope that the parallel now becomes clear. Just as the commons of space are vulnerable, and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic, so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modem means of communication.

Silence is a commons by Ivan Illich
2

I have several times tried to think of an apartment in which there would be a useless room, absolutely and intentionally useless. It wouldn’t be a junk room, it wouldn’t be an extra room, or a corridor, or a cubby-hole, or a corner. It would be a functionless space. It would serve for nothing, relate to nothing.

For all my efforts, I found it impossible to follow this idea through to the end. Language itself, seemingly, proved unsuited to describing this nothing, this void, as if we could only speak of what is full, useful and functional.

Georges Perec

“It’s a knowing that I don’t quite have language for” — Africa Brooke

| Oda Sakunosuke, Autumn Halo
| Oda Sakunosuke, Autumn Halo

…there’s no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language… Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself. But there is nothing like that today.

The Invisible Committee: The Coming Ins…