What
is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words.
The words themselves always express the incidentals, which is not what
we really mean. What we are really concerned with can only, at best, be
written about, and that means, quite literally, we write around
it. We encompass it. We make statements which never contain the whole
true experience: that cannot be described. All the statements can do is
to encircle it, as tightly and closely as possible: the true, the
inexpressible experience emerges at best as the tension between the
statements.
What we are presumably striving to do is to state
everything that is capable of expression; language is like a chisel,
which pares away all that is not a mystery, and everything said implies a
taking away. We should not be deterred by the fact that everything,
once it is put into words, has an element of blankness in it. What one
says is not life itself; yet we say it in the
interests of life. Like the sculptor plying his chisel, language works
by bringing the area of blankness in the things that can be said as
close as possible to the central mystery, the living element. There is
always the danger that in doing so one might destroy the mystery, just as there is
the danger that one might leave off too soon, might leave it as an
unshaped block, might not locate the mystery, grasp it, and free it from
all the things that could still be said; in other words, that one might
not get through to its final surface.
This surface at which all
that it is possible to express becomes one with the mystery itself has
no substance, it exists only in the mind and not in Nature, where there
is also no dividing line between mountain and sky. Is it perhaps what
one means by form? A kind of sounding barrier -
Max Frisch, Sketchbook 1946 - 1949, p 25, (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
translated by Geoffrey Skelton
Original text in German
