We often put pairs of words together, and repeat ourselves. Some of the pairs we would like to think of as opposites. Death is not life. Life is not death. And so on. Then we could say Life/Death is an antonym.
But a little on maybe we want to say, “Perhaps Life/Death is a false antonym”. Because we can’t have one without the other. So now we start to think that Life/Death are not opposites. Actually we might even start to think of the Life/Death pair of words as synonyms. Or, hedging our bets, false synonyms, if we think that we are going too far.
Then there is the ‘/’ oblique sign between life and death. Is it merely a signal of the pairing? Or does it also signify? Does it signify a gap for instance, like the caesura in a poem? A pause, which tells us we need to take a breath.
(“…in real life there is always resistance, even though we have to breathe constantly. Inspiration. Brief pause. Expiration. Brief pause. Resistance is probably related to authenticity“) What is our thinking here?
Halfway and we need to take a breather, and continue our search for meaning by other means. In 1982 the Georges Perec published an article piece of longer-form journalism (or feuilleton as we like to call this form of writing) called ‘THINK/CLASSIFY‘ in la Genre Humain (reprinted in Species of Spaces and other Pieces, tr John Sturrock 2008). Note the use of capitals, inverted commas and the oblique sign were all in the title.
Section K of the article is titled ‘Some Aphorisms’, and explores the idea of creating a certain number of formulae for pairs of words (eg using a formula such as: ‘A little ‘A’ carries us away from ‘B’, a lot brings us closer‘, and so on). Perec imagined a computer programme, which it would be easy to construct that “produces ad lib a near infinite number of aphorisms, each one of them bearing more meaning than the last”.
Perec provided a list of a short series of formulae (Page 203) using the words forgetting/remembering to create some aphorisms. Here is the same list now applied to Life/Death:
Life is a malady for which Death is the cure
Life wouldn’t be Life if it weren’t Death
What comes by Life goes by Death
Small Death makes big Life
Life adds to our pains, Death to our pleasures
(I thought about reversing the Life/Death pairing here to Death/Life, but properly resisted the temptation)
Life delivers us from Death, but who will deliver us from Life?
Happiness is in Death, not in Life
Happiness is in Life, not in Death
A little Death carries us away from Life, a lot brings us closer
Life unites men, Death divides them
Life deceives us more often than Death
etc.
Perec now asks in the article, “Where is the thinking here? In the formula? In the vocabulary? In the operation that marries them?”
‘LIFE/DEATH’: It may be noted that 1982 was also the year of Georges Perec’s death at the age of 46 from lung cancer. He tells us about his strange experience (P 189) while working on the THINK/CLASSIFY piece: “What came to the surface was of the nature of the fuzzy, the uncertain, the fugitive and the unfinished, and in the end I chose deliberately to preserve the hesitant and perplexed character of these shapeless scraps, and to abandon the pretence of organizing them into something that would by rights have had the appearance (and seductiveness) of an article, with a beginning, a middle, and an end”.