Róbert Gál: A Word Is the Image of a Word

XIV

"Living in truth" is just as impossible as "annihilating truth by fabricating lies." In other words, to live in truth is in fact a tautology; it is derived from the fact that "live" is an imperative and "truth" an individual and spiritual matter. On the other hand, "annihilating truth by fabricating lies" is a claim whose obvious fallacy in no way casts doubt on the fact that truth is an "individual and spiritual matter," nor the fact that it is impossible to fabricate something that has already been created, and from which we ourselves are essentially configured...

XV

By aesthetizing the inane we have opened up the passageway to passions that have today climaxed in horror and pornography. There is no escape from this sphere of the explicit's influence, save perhaps by imitating the implicit, such as through poetry.

XVI

Because a word is the image of a word, a mute thought does not exist. —

The materialization of mind into word is the basic premise of the spoken's meaningfulness, which, like a quantum of energy transferred, grants the word action-becoming potential.

And this is the word's greatest threat: its negative imperative. For each word constitutes within itself a notch, the unmistakable sign of that which it confirms, as it denies — the sign of a reality expired. And whereas it is possible to fight what has been only with what is, to insist on the spoken only becomes possible: by uttering a word. But this, however, could give the impression that the word we're talking about is the sole one and that it is our task to reproduce it exactly, nothing more. This impression is correct. The primary sign of incommunicability is incommunion, occurring always as a direct consequence of: the false reproduction of identity (and thus becoming diversity).

XVII

Whereas movement is continual, its hidden law is its invisibility. Any attempt to arrest it therefore entails exposing the eye to immobility — Ladislav Klíma's spasm of light. The blind fall into the distance mutely signals the former spirit and pathos of memorabilia...

Not even one broken heart has yet to annul the necessity of the blood's circulation, a cycle whose beginning and end come together at the finish line.

XVIII

The statement "Intolerance is the daughter of ignorance" is founded on the assumed transparency of the unknown that knows about itself, whose defense instinct against being known is identical to the knowledge of the absolute division between "not yet" and "no longer," whose entry is the threshold to pain, referred to as vulnerability, the only variable of the body occurring in time, the only certainty whose measure is both spirit and soul, joined together in absolute union — a union of both request and denial.

XIX

Time and space are (co)equal. The sensitivity of the body's surface, protecting as it denudes, is proof. Thus enabling the exposure of what it protects — as well as denudes — to the elements, pressure, and other symptoms of the self, of even what directly houses this self.

In other words: the basic property of place is age; and the basic property of time is memory. At the moment both these properties come into contact, their differences are annulled. Age loses memory and memory forgets age. What remains is the silhouette striding in the distance, the point-becoming child-universe, a locus that time does not shift, nor even deepen.

XX

The Creator's only limits are the boundaries of our imagination. And as these boundaries are continually changing, so too, along with Creation, the form of the Creator.

XXI

Ridding the concept of freedom of a certain artificiality requires a particular insight and, above all, time (in both the literal and figurative senses). Freedom itself is bound to time, as if it belonged directly within it, as if it were its prerequisite. Let us express it in this way: the awareness of freedom's inextricability with time, as well as the awareness of its "availability," presents its own territory of the concept of freedom, whose origin is found where the focal point is the sum of one's experiences, that is, the very ability to experience — an ability whose premise is a gift of God, as it is a (quantitative) component of time.

This, then, gives rise to the paradox that "one cannot be freed from freedom," the consequence of which, among other things, is the fact that one feels pain. Pain is in some ways the condensation of time, a state produced by the fact that time is lacking.

Thus freedom is everything that through its efficacy undermines the effects of pain, while at the same time preserving its aforementioned inextricability with time.

From Signs & Symptoms, published by Twisted Spoon Press, Prague 2003
Translated from the Slovak by Madelaine Hron