thrown words
by Matteo Scopel
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Raising my voice
24/06/2024
With this blog, I am raising my voice. I’ve gotten used to not really doing this. In fact, I’ve gotten used to not really wanting my voice to be heard. And if heard it must be, then I’d rather have it happen out of strict necessity. And I will speak quietly. Not this time. I am raising my voice. As I’ve just said, it is not something I’ve been doing often. Since the pandemic, I’ve been more isolated. Since I’ve joined the world of adults, I’ve been living through perennial economic chaos. Through all this, I’ve always been towered by noise. The internet is a stream of opinions without owners that have found their way into my brain.1 But it is not just the internet. It’s everywhere. Everyone will happily throw their opinions to your face, particularly if they aren’t worth being listened to.2
The world is filled with noise and I don’t want to add any more to it. Thank me later. But would I be adding noise if I spoke? I’m very quick to cast aside every opinion I have. Perhaps a gigantic impostor syndrome has brought me to be very skeptical towards most opinions I form. I have argued too many times about ideas not to know that ideas most often stand on our own subjectivity, our stories, and the power that animates these things. What I say would not be an exception. It would not be true by itself. Then, I will not say it.
I realize I am setting a very high standard here. But that is not the problem. If everyone followed such standard, I’d be having a more pleasant existence. What bothers me is that such standard is humanly unattainable. In fact, most things I love don’t achieve it.
This is not it, then. I am unconvinced by my own motivations. What if I did not want to speak because I am afraid no one cares about what I say? The pain I feel when writing this tells me I’m right. In the serendipity of my isolation, I care a lot about others. You, specifically, reader. I don’t want my thoughts to end up unheard. I don’t want my thoughts to pile up with the rest of the noise. I don’t want them to pollute your mind, add one more echo to the many you’re hearing every day. I don’t want to be a voice you don’t care about.
Words make sense only if they’re said where someone can hear them. If I say them when I am alone, I might as well stay quiet. I had chosen to be alone in my inner forest. There, words, opinions, and those who pronounce them and those who listen to them don’t exist. There is just me.
And let’s imagine that I speak or I write and I tell you things. You will get all those things and you’ll think that they’re just words and no more. At best, they’re “content”. At worst, ramblings. In any case, they won’t matter one bit. Words don’t do things. Actions do. I’d rather do something than say it. I don’t want to entertain you.
I have an idea. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt speaks about action as the eminently human element: the deed whose outcome is unknown to the actor. Speech plays a fundamental role too.
Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?”3
And the answer to the question is unknown to the actor themselves:
This unpredictability of outcome is closely related to the revelatory character of action and speech, in which one discloses one’s self without ever either knowing himself or being able to calculate beforehand whom he reveals.4
When I speak, the unfoundedness of my speech is established by my humanity. So is everyone else’s. When I speak, I throw myself, whatever you take that to be, to the world and I watch myself roll and change shape. My words stop being mine and start acting on their own. I relinquish my control. It is likely they’ll sink in a quiet glade amid the forest in which I’ve put myself. I’ll still raise my voice. Wherever they’ll go, I will put care in them. Writing to you will be a way of telling you that I care. I haven’t given up, and that must matter something to this world.