With the support of the bücherraum f in Zürich, a small pilot trial took place in the middle of winter. In the small-circle outdoor trial, Incrementum loqui would be planted for the first time.
Baptised and amen: Reimgewinn
If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility, Robert Musil once said, and went on to explain that possibilities are the not-yet-awakened intentions of God. One can also interpret this glorious image, as Musil himself undoubtedly meant it, in a secular way: the not-yet-awakened intentions of nature, of human beings. Every fiction aims at this not yet awakened. Utopia is the most consistently conceived possibility. But utopia must draw its strength, and its power of persuasion, from the soil of everyday life.
In doing so, language art generally sets the stage for new images and words. There is a venerable tradition of books that seek to give new meaning and existence, or even new words into existence, to existing words in almost lexical form, from Gustave Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Commonplaces” (posthumous 1913) to “The Devil’s Dictionary” (1911) by Ambrose Bierce to “The Meaning of Liff” (1983) by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. René Gisler has pushed this linguistic creative desire into another dimension of grandeur. In the “Thesaurus Rex” (2019), for which he is responsible, there are a few tens of thousands of entries on possible words and their possible meanings.
With his so-called word plantings, he goes one step further, and at the same time one step back: fiction is tied back to the real. A word creation is given a shape in the form of an already existing plant and thus becomes existent in a new form. This can take place almost alchemically in the dark.
To bücherraum f, Gisler had offered a selection of possible word plantings, and after a complicated procedure, we in turn submitted two for him to choose from. Monika Z. had made the necessary arrangements, procured the plant, a Yucca filamentosa, the fine-leaved one, had anchored the pot – the soil of everyday life – and prepared a golden veil for the moment of unveiling. The Creator Himself did this, as He presented us with one, His last, selection.
So now the “Reimgewinn” (Incrementum loqui), in keeping with the bücherraum f’s undertaking to eavesdrop on books, stands in front of the bücherraum on Jungstrasse.
At the event on the same day, the psycho- and language analyst Peter Schneider pointed out that language does not simply signify, but creates its own reality, on the one hand as an act of language, as an action, and on the other hand by giving the objects to which it refers their social existence, as in a baptism. The image of baptism can easily be linked to the process of invocation described by Louis Althusser: by giving someone a name with which they are called, they are first constituted as a subject. By being given the name “rhyme gain”, the yucca ilamentosa has become a subject in its own right, the only plant of its kind in the whole world. – Stefan Howald – translated by Deeple.