Babel

 

Seminar on Street Art 6: Babel. Observe the city of 250 languages. Drop into the aural aroundedness. Distinguish its many Englishes, their accents and oops of grammar. Pronounce with aitch, haitch and huh. Notice the many variants of commuter Chinese. Unravel the beauties of iphone Spanish. Respect the originality of Greek. Encounter the aboriginality in Wurundjeri. Wonder, a lot. Abandon the belief you understand everything being said. Breathe the air on this first day. Breathe again, as everyone breathes. Listen to the world come to this city of towers, here to perpetuate its tried messages. Trial by embouchure, fearless with found phrases. Try to discern what is so trying from what makes every effort at trying. Live with the saying of it that doesn’t need to try. Interpret mood by the ups and downs of other intonations. Appreciate the incomprehensible that, for others, is the most comprehensible thing they have heard all day. Distinguish the English, single out the verbal wish. Gauge the basins or terraces or meanders where such tongues have their root in the geography of migration. Abide in the speedy profusion of multiple speech. Turn then. Turn past the airwaves. Gaze down past resolute institutions and punning shops to the walls of no-man words. Track with your pupils the contours of word hundreds, outlines and inners of unsaid words lining outer limits. Note how these names are not their real names. Consider this is because they desire to escape detection. See how these diversities seek to name the unnameable. Contemplate their tangles of consonants and vowels seven-feet high, concrete poetry that makes nothing happen. Query whether these experiments in unEnglish are not the mergings of 250 tongues bumping each other and curling into being. Question if this is not unquestionably the case. Measure the miles of street art speaking back to spraycan Babel its makers’ yearnings for agreement, their longing for speaking in tongues. Appreciate the language of walls, signs of the confusion of speech, giving birth to new words unfamiliar to an urban dictionary. Relax with a rapid city that talks over the top of itself, whispers and shouts in fast-drying paint. Listen the while to the out spokenness of neighbours, one of the most diverse in the world. Eyeball the walls, covered to the rooftops everywhere in lettering, lettering very deliberately absolutely no one can understand. Read with assurance the painted translations of the aural aroundedness, the object of a future signing itself with daring. Read their secrets, that are our secrets, coded but out in the open for all to share.