Aphasic Materials
By Ilona Sagar
Th e intake and exhalation of air,
th e pool and swallow of saliva,
disadhesions of moist fl esh
(within the mouth.)
All the small instrumental taps and clicks
from the articulatory.
structures of the glottis, tongue, teeth, and lips
The architecture speech.
(pulmonary, tracheal, laryngeal, pharyngeal,
nasal, buccal).
The mouth implies the room,
and the room mimics the mouth.
Faced with its own refl ection,
“language itself will begin to vibrate and stutter.”
We are formless forms stuttering with placelessness.
when speech continues without communicating anything,
when speech intransitively reaches the limit,
when it becomes silent,
we can hear the body speak.
Objects, like bodies always mean what they carelessly say,
unhinged from a narrative construction.
l’espace indicible
Here is the space of anxiety between the mirror and the image
An indefinable enclosure – rendered a shimmering rupture.
Little slippery meanings dart here and around,
Defending themselves from the void by ever more sapid shapes.
These taciturn ghosts are transmuted.
disconnected by their spluttering repetitions,
bastardised renditions.
This, the evasive speechless object,
the wordless footnotes of Unobtainable utopias.
Unidiomatic stammering translations,
in which the details of one language are preserved
within the structure of another.
all speech is
dysfl uent, repeated, prolonged, distorted, suspended
— or or or or or
Cultural kleptomania hording all form without content.