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Snow

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It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature. Borges

Eight lines from “snow is english” by Eugen Gomringer. As he profoundly conveys, snow is first and for all a word of the English language. What it [supposedly] represents or the particular existence we are encultured to associate it with [e. g., white flakes made up of hexagonal ice crystals] is secondary to its being. Snow with its indispensable Englishness does not have a ‘place’ in most trusted dictionaries of other tongues. Its translatability, which might seem to weaken its Englishness, desperately enhances it. To translate, one always has to return to the concept, undo the linguistic abstraction, and track back the literary code to its origin. The apparent impossibility of such tasks leaves little prospect to translation: Gomringer’s poem [in each attempt], despite its formal simplicity, slips away from the translator’s hands. When attempted to find what it corresponds to in another language, snow just cannot remain snow.

Snow, itself, cannot mean: it does not have its own initiative to mean anything at all. We make it mean something. Yet it is not simply a tool that we possess and with which we communicate. Rather, we are possessed by it since its acquisition by us in the unknowable phases of our childhood. The particular language, through which we are socialized, builds our perception [and not just the other way around]. These white puffy particles falling down from the sky have already been given a name: radically reduced to a four-letter code with a particular pronunciation. Just like my mother, my mother tongue is a given, a pre-disposition I am born with [pulled into] which fundamentally limits the possibility of my having other dispositions. Once I call snow snow, I instantly secure it almost like a permanent code that has to be visited and revisited each time I mention snow. The recognition that “snow is snow because people call it that way” is of miserably no use. As soon as I adopt the name given to those winter particles, I am encapsulated in the pre-constructed snowness of them. There will never be another name [AN ORIGINAL ONE] in my relationship with snow after this eternal calling.It, as Heidegger puts it, becomes the cub of my existence. In other words, I cannot go out of the speech bubble [or THE LINGUISTIC CONTEXT] I am in: not a temporary entrapment but precisely an endless, unending, perpetual, lifelong sentence [“life” in the prisoners’ lingo]. A profound manifestation of this imprisonment unfolds when you ask why you call something something. I call snow snow because it is snow, isn’t it?

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6 years ago, Joseph Kosuth, a conceptual artist, hanged a 41,5 x 63 cm image onto a wall, which was linguistic rather than pictorial. The piece was a text from a novel whose title Kosuth chose to keep anonymous.

The text read,People don't really talk to each other at all. They don't think of something to say, choose the words to express it and then carefully pronounce those words. They use language to disguise meaning as much as to convey it. But other things tell us what they have in mind - and sometimes we have no idea of what they are. I heard myself say, although I could not have said quite how I had acquired this information, "You're saying Paul has a kind of ... secret hideout? Is that what you are saying?"

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To write a dadaist poem: that is to make no sense at all,

Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you
are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that
make up this article and put them
in a bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer,
infinitely original and endowed
with a sensibility that is charming
beyond the understanding of the
vulgar [TRISTAN TZARA, 1924, “To make a dadaist poem”].

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iskeleti tintin nagbada nuga dada helikoskos
Özgür Soğancı– 2004