Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/145

137 "LIKE BLOK", writes Mandel'stam,


 * Khlebnikov thought of language as a state, but not at all one in space—not geographical—but in time.

Khlebnikov's idea of the "state of time", for all its apparent extraordinariness, does have a certain logic in terms of the struggle for the spoken word. It is a fairly elementary observation to note that spoken language is composed of element related in a temporal sequence. Its dimension is time, while (since the words, ideally, exist "everywhere at once") it has no real spatial position or dimensions at all. The ideal dimensions of written language are just the opposite. The whole point of written language is that it is permanent: its elements exist in a durable form, related to each other not in time but in space.

The association of writing with the territorial state is also not without foundation. In a small tribal village, there is no real "space": space is being penetrated instantaneously and continuously by voices, and people respond to each other simultaneously and reciprocally almost all the time. Obviously, this is never entirely the case: voices do not carry very far, and there is always plenty of travelling and moving about. But to the extent that "space" as civilized man experiences it does not exist, it would perhaps not be too far-fetched to call such a village a little "state of time". This is not the place