The Mother Tongue Amongst Trust, Semidelirium and the Love of What is Alive

In this article two aspects of the maternal tongue are described. The first is that through which language is learned in a connection between words and things, so much so that words have an intimate link, that is not arbitrary, with things. The second aspect is that through which one begins to go towards the symbolic when one begins to play with words, with the signifiers. Both aspects have a great creative capacity both in childhood and adulthood. But these two aspects can be turned around into a negative. The first can close itself into a closed and selfreferring language, whilst the second can lead to a nihilistic uprooting and sceptical relativism. I give as an example of a language that stays fixed to concrete words, trying to return to childhood, the reflection of Anna Maria Ortese on her adolescent writing in El puerto de Toledo. To this Ortese contrasts the friendship towards what is alive that gave her the possibility of recovering a writing that was not self-referencing, not fixed nostalgically on childhood, but rather open to the world and trusting in language. From this itinerary of Anna Maria Ortese we can learn a way of dealing with the fragmentation that we live in this contemporary age, which invades the soul with pieces of reality that are detached from each other and that we no longer know how to fit in. The practice that is suggested is that of friendship towards what is alive, the love of the world that leads us to take on in our own being the fragments of reality that we experience. The soul, expanding itself, experiences them as its own, it weighs them up and thus one can come to express them in words without staying flattened by the fragmentation. The love of what is alive leads us to take on the fragments of reality, whilst the trust in language sustains the desire to give them symbolic expression. Without trust, we would remain mute.