Re: <documenta X><blast>Words Wearing Us
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 09:33:18 -0400
> ** as we wear language it also wears us, and to replace the word,
>the very fine visually rich word WAITRESS with the non-word "waitpersons,"
>is to erase its beauty of connotation, and its richness of history. Some-
>thing M. McLuhan would have disapproved of vehemently. As if one could
>replace the word siren and its referents with some neutered word; or
>perhaps replace the lovely drifting word nymph with its centuries of
>imagistic connotation. How can one do this without falling into the worst
>sort of conformity to politically
>stero-typed postures?
>
>> evening's crowd. McLuhan opined "well, you see, they're wearing us". >
> ***********************************
> As M.M. points out so succinctly, the waitresses were wearing
>their spectators, just like the words we and others speak and write, wear
>us. If we don neutered and emptied words, what do
>they reveal to the reader? Do we see desirable, interesting, challening,
>striking, loving, desiring, wanting, ugly, shapley, radiant bodies, or do
>we see the conforming body of the late 20th. century? Words are also
>bodies with sexes and places, names and colours. Why deny that, and try to
>dry clean them?
> Better that we let the words speak, in the same way that we let
>bodies speak. In the similar way that we let spaces speak as we penetrate
>past the dead holes of subject-object splits and disavowals. If we see
>words like a lover sees her beloved, we laugh at their desires, at their
>unities and splits, their histories and richnesses instead of wanting to
>repress them. Either not speak the word one finds offensive (euphemism is
>awlays there as a handy tool), or choose to be ironic. But to replace the
>richeness of one noun, with the drabness of a non-word (really an
>Orwellian no-speak nightmare), is to do a disservice to oneself and to
>language.
> "they are wearing us... says McHulan" ... Now let us continue to
>wear the words, and be worn by them like sheets and garments, like games
>and caresses, like teeth and charms. To speak the space of words in their
>interior movement, to shudder at their inner desire, to let the space
>between them filter through to us in their inter-subjectivity and tension.
>Then their auras, their halos will join us, and be one more piece
>carrying us on our adventure to a new world.
> "All words are restless grains and gods waiting to be opened."
> CD.
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
HaHaHa! Marvelous... my intent in employing the lifeless noun-oid
"waitperson" was ironic... but I had no idea it would elicit such a
response... exactly so, however, and therin lies the crux, ground into the
fabric of our everyday language, of the way our culture has been extruded
into an altogether new and hopelessly banal cartoonocracy.