Kathryn Koromilas’ This Absurd Life » Blog Archive

Wittgenstein’s silence

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

I would like to creep back into the blogosphere once again - after a five-month period of utter silence - and announce that my silence was philosophical. I would like to say that words, that language - well, my words, my language - could not show what I wanted to show, could not communicate what I wanted to be conveyed. I would like to say that - in the same way that Wittgenstein once concluded that metaphysics cannot be put into words, that such things make themselves manifest and are therefore shown and not spoken about - my personal metaphysics also could not be worded but would have to be shown. And because they had to be shown and not spoken about, I had to stop blogging to remain silent.

This has not been the case.

There has been no such philosophical realisation. While the blog has been silent, I have not. I have been busy speaking about things in other spheres, virtual and real. I have been typing away utter trivialities, sending meaningless bytes into cyberspace and receiving meaningless bytes back. This exchange has been relentless and, to my continued amazement, I have been indefatigable.

But I rather miss this place. This public monologue, with occassional dialogue on the sidelines. It allows for both silence and noise. Silence in the space between posts - when I can think about what can be said and what cannot - and the noise that comes afterwards, maybe a comment or two.

Posted by By: kathryn | 2007/05/30 | Uncategorized - Poetry - Philosophy - Personal - language | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]

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Debra

Comment by Debra | 2007/05/31 at 10:09:15Quote

What a coincidence, I was thinking about you recently and visited your blog yesterday or the day before.

Good to see you back in the blogiverse
kathryn

Comment by kathryn | 2007/05/31 at 11:37:05Quote

Thanks for stopping by, Debra!
Nick Luft

Comment by Nick Luft | 2007/06/13 at 05:50:38Quote

I find writing a blog — as you rightly call it, a public monologue — is good for me. I find expressing myself in it good for me. That some others read it also, is a bonus.

I used to write up an occasional journal in notebooks, in the days of yore, before the net. I still do resort to handwritten entries in this journal for the really personal stuff. Again, I find writing expresses me to me better than any other method of communicating.
kathryn

Comment by kathryn | 2007/06/21 at 04:50:36Quote

Hi Nick, thanks for stopping by. Yes, interesting that both the public blog and the private journal contain personal material, but we separate between that which we’d like others to read and that which we would rather others not. So when we are doing personal writing we are not always writing for ourselves, but even in our most private scribbling do we still, always, have a sense of the reader? Somewhere in the back of our minds, that this piece of paper/journal might be found and read? To write completely for ourselves, would be have to write and then destroy immediately?

Anyway, I’m reading Fowles’s journals and he talks about the “question of intimacy in style” in a December 1949 entry.

“…the objectivist always writes for a potential reader other than himself; he is never half alone and chez soi, never getting to the rock-bottom of things, for the style affects the expresssion. The subjectivist writes purely for himself, egoistically saying a thing in the way which seems to himself best to express exactly his own view of it. All creation tends to one of these poles, which are, very approximately, classical and romantic. This is an interesting test to perform on all memoirists and diarists.”

Wittgenstein’s silence

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