Encompassing meaning goes beyond itself. No matter how closely considered, or even more if so, an overflowing of the senses and the understanding slipping away chase the mind out of its own zone not to return to itself but to signal constantly into a future of more maze and endless promise—literally, long sentences turned into missives sent to an unknown receiver even if it’s one’s own mind catching up to past missense.
In the letter rests the conceptual unit that ties writing and drawing as undecidable actions; sound and design as a phoneme, a fraction of noise, a leap from blank; in the letter too translation, the rendering of one combination of terms in one given language into another, finds its decision threshold—it either adapts to the needs of language and makes sense or stays with the letter and makes noise while saying foreignness.
Sound and image, not languages themselves, unlanguages articulating at every given moment that threshold of options—either one or the other, either present or absent, either full or devoid of meaning—won’t allow one to be rendered into the other but they can be intuited as both pointing in the same direction—the meaningless state of the meaningful gap between the two. In that bouncing from one to another, an endless and unachievable translation takes over. A translation that ties both image and sound up in the same intent of not being absorbed by signifying. One can’t translate sound into image or vice versa but the sounded and the drawn letters translate one another as long as they are a sign that never achieves what they could mean, keeping their materiality from crystalizing.
Translation is a device language develops in order to avoid meaning. The multiple languages seek each other in order to retain the materiality of their thick sound web while letting wither that un-transferable core of sense that over and over aims to anchor language—as thought, as speech, as writing—to fully express beyond words and become mimicking. If such a thing happened—if language were reduced to meaning—the flow of its process (a continuum perpetually being built) would cease and leave the human tongue stuck in just gestures. On the surface sequence of elements remains the realm of the constant process of becoming.