You consist of words

By : Finn Barlby

- What is language?
I’m not sure it’s something everyone goes around thinking about all the time. But perhaps they do, as it’s a problem for everyone. Because one way or another one must understand the language one uses and also what one wants to say in order to attain something, in order to gain clarity about some things or to resolve certain inner tensions. In that sense it’s something by means of which everyone has a relation to what is. And it is – as we were saying earlier – something that is never completed, but is incomplete. And if one asks what that is, it invariably requires a fresh answer. One can’t give a definitive answer.
   But for those of us who write it’s true that – compared to other people, who do something else – we have plenty of time to work with it in all sorts of ways, in order to find out what it can be used for.

- You once defined language as ‘originally irrefutable precise tools’?
Yes, that’s what it is. In the same way the body is, for what it has to do. Again, it has something to with language belonging to the body like an organ, almost. Which can be sharpened or blunted, according to where one finds oneself, also in a social sense…

- What is the situation of language now?
The times we live in, or more precisely the people who control our existence, are isolating language and taking all the content out of it and turning it into technology that will be used to serve them. That means: turning it into something they can supervise. They can only supervise two words: yes and no. And again that’s because the machines that have been made are so perfect that they can only use language in the same way one uses numbers. To find the way to something authority will not doubt the existence of.

- You mean, drain language of life?
Yes, because language is also life in relation to what is dead. At the same time as it’s meaningful, the meaning of life. You can say what you think about a given thing at a given moment, in that change that always takes place. You can use language to explain to yourself and others what it is, and in that way experience the unarticulated. You can use language to experience things themselves, and with the help of language you can develop things together. But for technology the precondition of language: ordinary people, companionship and shared activity, isn’t modern enough, it’s outdated in the modern age. Because everything must be isolated in order to be supervisable and controllable. In the old days the rulers – also with help from the church and so on – could use language to rule people with, to blur people’s consciousness with. But the language of authority is really now their technique for obliterating language. According to authority, that science has become cleverer or craftier than language… But in the last analysis it’s not so.

- No, because in one poem you say, don’t you, that the word never gives up. It may well be that the individual person – under pressure – gives up, but language doesn’t. It fights on?
Yes, as long as language exists it also survives and fights on. That is the principle of language, and it’s also history, so far. History has, after all, been transmitted through language. First orally, then in writing.
I think that language is a kind of opposite to giving up. The individual can give up, but not language. The individual’s inner language – what the individual’s inner self actually is – does not give up. For in reality it doesn’t want to give up…


This Interview first appeared in Finn Barlby: "Og verden kan ikke erobres bagfra", Dan-bog 1982

Translated by David McDuff