"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture" – Frank Zappa

A tiny preamble:

It is remarkable what occurred to me between yesterday and today. Yesterday I had begun drawing up this text when my pc crashed, with one of those typical and so lovable blue-screens, leaving me sitting in the semi-darkness of my couch alone with my frustration (and tiredness). But straight to the point. I was writing about how language is… how can be said… now the most summarying word is "plural" or non univocal. Computer crashes, now I have to rewrite the same things, but obviously those naughty notions come up with another shape, that is different words, different sentences, other mental structures.

I should be pleased with that, on the other hand is one more evidence about my point. Now free meditations follow.

Once i wrote an essay about Writing. Quite strange that one can write about Writing, or can talk about Language, while it's not possible to play about Music or desing about Architecture. Every tongue has its words, but this is another matter.

Words, yes, writings… It's really the only magic allowed to men. That of producing a discourse, it is an art indeed; while everybody can pile up words together, relatively few are those who know how to create something with even slightly noticeable features.

The arcane of clothing a concept, an idea, with something undescribable… with something aspiring to carry its meaning; a symbol, a synthesis of what it is. Words as bricks, as atoms, as cells… They can be grouped to form living, real, functional structures.

Language exists under the fact that exists someone who can communicate. This is not just banality. It may take uncountable shapes, colors, tongues and expressions, but it always refers to the same underlying truths. And misunderstandings are just consequences of our own imperfection. Comprehension isn't something that language carries along with itself; it's something it encounters, finds, even better retrieve, in the individual receiving the message.

This is obvious examining the languages of nature; the perfect harmony of phyisical laws, how their mutual interaction produces in the end not only an intellective enjoyment in us, but also a deep emotive envolvment, like the one we experience admiring the drapery of the petals of a flower, or an impressionistic sunset or a misterious and boundless starry sky. 

Men would arrogate the right to define what art is – the language – distancing from concrete rules, searching for the abstract, the pure, the mathematic, even chaos. But they do not realize that what they perceive as "sublime" responds to the same rules that allowed their tecnological progress, the very same rules allowing our perception of harmony in music. But this again is another matter.

More: words, speeches, are like snowflakes… They can fall with indifference, loveliness, silently too, and they could even seem redundant, obvious. On the contrary every flake is dramatically unique, even if it belongs to the same family, the same species! Every man has the right to feel pride about his uniqueness, but what modesty induces in us the thought that every year, every day, there's a greater number of unique identities falling from the sky than the ones that are born by men! Thus isn't just a right anymore, but a duty to express oneself, and before (and meanwhile) expression, research, meditation, reflection, to gain insight, first of all about ourselves, then about others.

Utopia! Obviously this is an ideal. How can we ever think about being able to know everything? But this is our nature, searching for indefinite time, human conscience stretches towards eternity just because of this. Or thanks to this. (Never confuse cause and motive).

Back to mutableness, to the plurality shown by speeches (and then by languages containing them): they are like the light, you're lying under a tree and you're watching the sky through the branches and leaves… In every instant the light filtering through them is different from the light in the previous instant, maybe because the position of the parts of the tree moved by the wind has changed, maybe because the clouds moved, or maybe because of the variation in the humidity ratio, or temperature, or the height of the sun, or the chaotic movings of the molecules of oxygen and steam exaling from the leaves, each of them with its own refraction index… Not to mention the physical state of the eye, the electrical one of the nervous system, and the mental state, of the observer.

Anyway, we keep on seeing the same landscape, the same tree, the same picture What a paradox! The very same thing is never the same thing, strictly. And here now that just pronouncing a word alters it: because if the word it's just a series of pressure waves in the air, perceived as sound, what it contains, the meaning of which it become ensign, that vibrates inside of us (and, pay attention, in a different way for each of us). So, what I am saying will never be understood the very same way as I am thinking it (did I discover the obvious?) but anyway it accomplishes its task. It's a matter of "resolution", to use an optical term. The smaller the element the reticule is made of, greater is the detail depicted and perceived. Then comes back the importance of relfecting, of the communicator's "artistic" ability: his tongue is the instrument to be sharpened, sped, empowered, to differentiate the smallest parts and to secure that the message will reach its destination satisfactorily. Also because those who really want to communicate consider everybody (or at least a major part of them) as their public, and it's clear, it's just natural and correct to care about the comprehension of the audience. Otherwise the speech becomes just an exercise in front of the mirror, for which we could even be almost unlimitedly satisfied, but that will remain an infertile exercise if it does not stick to the real nature of language: the exchange.

Now I stop here  because if you want me to talk about the exchange then I will have to stay up all night…!