Matter

At what point did matter, when we reached out, not reach back through the void of function to that more powerful, inevitable, identity: form equal to form, material self a signature. Soap, urine, snowflake.

On words, we speak of their materiality. As if the ephemeral and purely conceptual construct language could be made concrete with a noun. But a material language might as easily be equated with function (Wittgenstein) as with a tautological self-identity: I am, therefore I am.

When we speak a thing into existence, as with magic or divine decree (let there be light), we align ourselves with an inherent possibility within language to be the thing it expresses, a thing, moreover, whose form it only borrows. When we regard language, on the other hand, in terms of its “atomic” materiality, i.e., as a set of phonemes, we restrict ourselves to an analysis of identity and difference that quickly tires.

Manuel DeLanda speaks of matter in terms of its energy potential for expressivity, places art at the crossroads between material self-identity and style. But words, lacking the physical materiality we may wish to assign to them, would seem also to lack the concomitant potential for expressivity.

Herein lies the hopelessness and pull of poetry – to “make the stony, stony,” to harness the expressivity of matter, in service of the tragically immaterial, language.