Parole Parole Parole
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563, oil on panel
Every day we talk, we conversate, we communicate. With our friends, our lovers, our relatives, and above all, with ourselves. Every day we use words. Thoughts and words overwhelm our minds and our days, they overwhelm me as I write them - and as I listen to Parole Parole by Mina - and you as you read them. Parole means words in Italian and from now on I will use parola (or its plural, parole) to refer to it, because I love this parola and find it purely poetic.
Parola derives from the Latin verbum, an analogue of the Greek logos, a lemma that indicates not only the name, but everything. Parole are everywhere, parole are everything.
Questions and explanations, messages, symbols, meanings – this is the fabric of human sociality. The symbolism of the term parola represents the boundary between human and animal: on the one hand the rational and speaking being, on the other the beast.
Nevertheless, the symbolic language with which we express ourselves is a purely human construction, a mere invention, and as such confined by our imagination.
‘To talk’ metaphorically means to run from one parola to another and this suggests – it only suggests because it cannot really say – that it’s not possible to communicate clearly. That a complete harmony between signifier and signified, between significante and signifcato, between being and expressing what one is, between saying and wanting to say, is simply not possible.
So, I wonder, if the words we use to communicate are bound to remain in limbo, even when we talk about the simplest, closest things, why do we persist obstinately to talk?
One of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska, portrays the eternal conflict between saying and wanting to say in all her poetic oeuvre.
Particular, in her poem The Tower of Babel, two lovers try to talk to each other and inevitably fail: “What time is it?” “Oh yes, I’m so happy” says the first verse. The two continue to speak in what is ultimately the most honest way possible: questions are followed by answers which have nothing to do with what was asked. They talk about two different things; they talk two different languages.
Serenely, they abstain from reaching the long-suffering point of contact, but in the last verse, the poem ends “I don’t know what time it is, and I don’t care,” so the two lovers find each other after parole, parole, and parole.
The parole of Szymborska's verses do not mean or want to mean anything: they simply are. Finally, one can appreciate all the beauty and musicality of parole, because they sound sweet and lovely once relieved by the weight of meaning.
The title of the poem itself deserves a reflection: The Tower of Babel, in all its tales and versions, represents the point in time and in history when communicating to understand one another has become impossible. It is the creation of that void, that exists between all men, eternally separated from one another, originated by the fascinating invention of language.
Alexander Mikhalchyk, The Tower of Babel, oil on canvas
This same idea can be found throughout all Literature and Cinema.
Franz Kafka and Albert Camus are two writers who have shaped my approach to the parola and so, to the word. They also can be considered two great masters of the literature of incommunicability.
Indeed, in the famous conclusion of Kafka’s novel The Process: “Logic is no doubt unshakable, but it can't withstand a person who wants to live.” Joseph K., the protagonist, tries to explain himself throughout the novel without ever succeeding and we, as readers, tangibly perceive the incommunicability of his innocence and the frustration which it generates. Language is a matter of life or death.
The same happens in the existentialist masterpiece The Stranger by Camus: Mersault is condemned because he refuses to take part in the game (of life) and dies because he refuses to lie and consequently, to speak.
Cinematically speaking, also, Elisabet Vogler, the well-known stage actress protagonist of Ingmar Bergman’s most acclaimed film Persona, is silent. Other characters convey to us that she is unable to communicate without lying. By not speaking, she doesn’t have to pretend to be someone she’s not; she can just exist. “Being” being whatever it is.
Is it possible to live a life in which our exterior and interior identities are perfectly in sync with each other? For our own benefit or the benefit of someone else, we suppress certain memories, emotions, words, and sensations. Isn’t that just the way of things? Intentionally or inadvertently, does our environment prevent us from being true to our genuine self? In the end, it is impossible to be who we really are. There is no way to genuinely know another individual. There are always things that remain unsaid, ideas that remain unsaid, hopes that remain unsaid. And as long as we remain unsaid, not being able to know ourselves, we’ll never be able to know others. It is impossible for anybody to totally reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings to another person since human nature vehemently opposes it. Symbols to symbols and real to real.
Maybe it is necessary to accept a different reality: that, unconsciously, signifier and signified, word and object, reality and language simply belong to two different worlds. One as image of the other, but never coinciding. It is the case that the symbols remain so. That the reality, below and above the symbol, remains unexpressed, alleging, omnipresent.
I was ten years old when I started my first piano lessons. The first thing I learnt was that you can't play music without counting. No music without numbers. The music score always starts with a time indication. And yet, I've met musicians who don’t count numbers when they play or sing. Rhythm is rhythm, and it has nothing to do with numbers. Once this idea is accepted, the opposite sounds absolutely absurd. So, there is, it exists, and it's possible, a universe where symbols belong to symbols and music belongs to music.
Why not do the same with reality and language if you can do it with numbers and music?
Can you truly embrace the parola as a symbol? If that's the case, why keep talking, writing, and communicating? What exactly is the point? And how can we not succumb to an easy and obvious nihilism after these trivial reflections?
Rewatching Bergman and reading back Kafka and Camus, I understand that parola is also, and foremost, responsibility.
Marten van Valckenborch, The Tower of Babel, 1595