Differentiations! Life and death, tree and machine, beginning and end! Every name like a coin has its obverse and reverse. When paying with a coin it is not possible to spend half of it, keeping either the heads or the tails for oneself. All that is large is small and vice versa. Ambiguity is a consequence of calling things by their names. Every name teeters on a knife edge, in desperation, and makes differentiations necessary. Every adjective that is juxtaposed with it will bring along a counteradjective, every conjecture a counterconjecture. good will create evil, warmth will create cold, end will create beginning. Whoever maintains that the world resembles a tree is the enemy and brother of him who insists that it resembles a machine. Both know what a tree is and what a machine is. In attempting to touch the essence of things they keep using the same names as if they were arguing about some precious plunder, torn apart by the desire to keep the whole lot but in agreement about the amount and the name of the currency; at the same time they will hear nothing about counterfeit banknotes. But whoever describes the city in a hundred thousand words will nourish a hundred thousand words of the countercity and each of them will return to the city like a bad penny.
No one asks where nouns come from or who they belong to. The inhabitants of the city carry them with complete confidence, just as in its beginning they carried bricks, convinced that they were laboring for themselves and their children and that whoever bears the burden is its owner. At one time they cheered as records were beaten on scaffolding and believed that the hand lifts the brick, not the opposite. They have always yielded easily to illusions. In their own opinion they are the masters of words, yet words do not obey them. They do not stick to objects; they suddenly change meaning or disappear, replaced by other words. They move, now here now there, dragging thoughts, questions and desires behind them.
Though people here burden themselves with anything the eye can see, they have no possessions. The objects they have bought or received as presents always eventually vanish or are destroyed. Their clothes, though they were new, end up being old, their children turn into adults. In recollections there remain only nouns, verbs and adjectives, like deposit slips, but the things listed on them have long since gone from any warehouse. The inhabitants of the city clutch their slips and believe themselves the owners of countless possessions; they have no intention of giving up a single thing, even the snows of yesteryear. Like travelers who, depositing their suitcases at the left-luggage office, walk about the city, they are certain that their belongings are at their disposal at every moment. Where is that vast left-luggage office containing plush teddy bears that belonged to soldiers, the happy moments of abandoned women, the fortunes of bankrupts, the kisses of those run over by trams, the reflections of sunsets in windowpanes, finished melodies and eaten tarts? Here it is: It is great and small; without any difficulty it contains all this, though it itself fits easily on a shelf, in a hard cover, with an alphabetical list of entries. In it tart is next to tartan, and like it has the black color of printer’s ink.
The naming of things never brought anyone happiness. Yet despite this, names circulate without ceasing, ever more densely and feverishly. For what has not been named drifts away on the waves of the river. Everything takes flight. Events do not attach to words and do not need them in order to flow. They roll through the city, stirring up shoals of glittering definitions, describing every moment in various ways. What is supposed to flow, flows, while definitions remain in place, rocking on the waves, tied down with ropes, round and brightly colored, like buoys on the river. The inhabitants of the city use them to mark the course of events in order to understand them better. This is a necessity: Events by their nature are incomprehensible, with a tendency to overflow in all directions and efface their borders. Love requires white veils, black tuxedos and beribboned limousines, but at times it must make do with a grille in the visiting room. Sleep requires a room and a bed but in extremity it can manage with a bench in a station waiting room or even a corner of the sidewalk, thus becoming something that can be confused with fainting, drunkenness or death. It is precisely because of this that navigational signs — the buoys of words — are so essential. It is they that make it possible to differentiate, to separate out that which would be jumbled up. One beside the other, they bob up and down on the waves of events, obscuring them entirely. It is not surprising that in the end their movement is taken for the waves themselves, and that descriptions conceal objects.
Even events themselves are not needed to set flowing that which is meant to flow. In fact only words are essential. Thus on a rainy day an incautious pedestrian dies at a busy intersection and a drunk driver causes a fatal accident, from one moment to another becoming a criminal. The family, plunged into sorrow, bids farewell forever to a father and grandfather, a teacher of many years, while children carry their ink-stained backpacks to school and rejoice at the fact that their test has been canceled. The police escort the culprit from the lockup to the courtroom; at the same time a taxicab is taking a woman in labor in the opposite direction to the maternity clinic. If someone should desire a telephone connection between the courthouse and the delivery room it is technically feasible, but the gaudy, hollow buoys of words that mark roles and the course of matters render such a telephone a needless waste of time, a caprice and even a suspicious subterfuge, a trick employed in bad faith. The words criminal and escort fix figures in their roles, in freeze frame. Names delimit the boundaries of what is possible. On a different day, another person dies at the same intersection; in the courtroom, another trial begins (the escort and the arrestee have the same journey to make, though the section numbers from the criminal code cited in the charge sheet are different). A woman in labor rides to the maternity clinic in a taxicab; perhaps rain is falling again; the same children carry their backpacks to school and, on the way, are gradually imbued with the mournfulness of grammar and of exercises involving trains. The victims of accidents, the police officers, criminals, schoolchildren, the women in labor and the cab drivers have no choice: They have to make their way in the direction laid out by the street, to enter and exit through doors, and to do so during the hours they are open. They never come into the world or die, except in connection with the circumstances that precede these events and then follow them; they are utterly bound by rules determined by the relations between words. Nothing will occur that cannot be named, and everything that can be named will sooner or later occur.
Events do not stop even for a minute in their course. They carve out bends and uncover islands. The flowing water sculpts the banks — the only memento it leaves behind. Where the greatest number of accidents occurred an underground passageway has been constructed. Where things were bought and sold marketplaces have sprung up; where thieves gathered a police station has been built. Even soccer matches and loud concerts leave behind colored marks on the walls. Everywhere there is a multitude of signs aiding memory, and telling gaps where the signs have been removed or destroyed.