Language is a virus

It’s all very well to know the­or­et­ic­ally that lan­guage is arbit­rary and all mean­ing is deferred, to start to grasp Der­rid­a’s notions of sup­ple­ment­ar­ity. It’s another entirely to be sur­roun­ded by a tongue you barely com­pre­hend and slowly feel those arbit­rary con­nec­tions being made, the mean­ings attach­ing them­selves tem­por­ar­ily, hes­it­antly, to the con­cepts in my head but more likely to other sig­ni­fi­ers… layers and layers… so that “quiesero” starts out mean­ing “I want” in Eng­lish in my head when I use it but slowly trans­mog­ri­fies into some­thing ever so slightly dif­fer­ent, so that when “I” want in Span­ish it is a dif­fer­ent I and a dif­fer­ent want­ing and an entirely dif­fer­ent mode of wanting.

It was all very well prac­ti­cing before I left… but when I walk into shops, my mind freezes and all I can remem­ber is “à‚¿Habla inglàƒ¨s?”. After two days, I’m get­ting a little better.

Still, when I went up to the people at the squat I saw and faltered after a few sen­tences, it was awk­ward. I am a product of the imper­i­al­ist nations, for­cing Eng­lish into the space. The woman I meet, Lia, invites me to the screen­ing of Bowl­ing for Columbine at the anarch­ist cafàƒ© on Friday… but the film will be in Catalan. She chats with friends and after the first couple of words I lose the thread again and am sur­roun­ded by music­al­ity I know to be com­mu­nic­a­tion but to which at the same time I am exterior.

Good pop cul­ture kid that I am, it reminds me of The Thir­teenth War­rior. Thank­fully, I also speak French, which has come in handy more than once, but con­fuses the situ­ation even more. I am switch­ing between lan­guages, losing the assump­tions of access­ib­il­ity, reveal­ing the slid­ing inter­con­nec­tions and slip­ping between the cracks of mean­ing. Noth­ing is exact. Pre­ci­sion escapes me.