The Voices of Silence and Underwater Experience

Abstract

After positing that water has a body, a soul, and a voice, Gaston Bachelard argues in Water and Dreams, „Possibly more than any other element, water is the complete poetic reality“through which we enjoy, among other things, an intimate taste of our destiny. The „poetic reality“ which water is capable of manifesting is a way of perceiving meaning in the world, a meaning which defies the linear and temporal assumptions that structure the operations of utilitarian language. In his essay on „Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,“Merleau-Ponty describes the dynamics of poetic language: „it is the lateral relation of one sign to another which makes each of them significant, so that meaning appears only at the intersection of and as it were an interval between words.“ In The Psychoanalysis of Fire Bachelard defines the manner in which poetic language negates its temporal texture (where meaning is seen as progressing from one word to another) by commenting, „metaphors summon one another and are more coordinated than sensations, so much so that a poetic mind is purely and simply a syntax of metaphors.“ It is in the name of „a truer relation between things,“ Merleau-Ponty observes while discussing the aesthetic philosophy of Malraux, „that their ordinary ties are broken.“ Prosaic syntax is transcended by perception, the prose of the senses which is poetry, he argues: „It must be poetry; that is, it must completely awaken and recall our sheer power of expressing beyond things already said or seen.“ Immersed and imprisoned in a world of time where he chants that he has known it all („For I have known them all already, known them all“ — „known them all“ — „known them all“), T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock laments his inability to make contact with and express that poetic reality: „It is impossible to say just what I mean!“ To do so would require the courage which he does not have: „To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.’ For, indeed, would it have been worth it, after all?“