Ayyu — the word that carries the soul

Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

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Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

— Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

— What a language does not name, its speakers slowly lose the capacity to perceive. And the reverse too: to name rightly is to make visible. —

§0 · A fissure to begin with

It has happened to you to listen to someone speak and to feel, all at once, that something other than the words was present in their speech. Not a hidden meaning. Not a subtext. Something that stood on the threshold between silence and sentence, and that made the voice alive in a way you did not know how to name. You tried to say it afterward, to someone else: « he had a presence in his voice, » « it touched something, » « it was inhabited. » These phrases are approximate. They betray what they speak of. And it is because the dominant language does not name this phenomenon. Other languages do. The Guaraní word ayyu. The Spanish duende. The German Sage. This article is about these words. And about what they open when we let them, gently, be given hospitality in our language.

Ayyu — the Guaraní word-flower

Let us begin with the least known. The Guaraní — a people native to Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia — have a word that linguists do not know how to translate correctly. The word is ayyu (sometimes written ayvu depending on the transcription). It was documented by the Paraguayan ethnologist León Cadogan in his major work Ayvu rapyta: textos míticos de los Mbyá-Guaraní del Guairá (1959), then taken further by Pierre Clastres in Le Grand Parler (1974).

This word means, simultaneously and inseparably: speech, soul, flower, and breath. For the Guaraní, these are not four different things that a single word would link — they are one single reality that the European languages have, by historical accident, divided into four separate concepts. The human being does not possess a soul and does not separately have a speech: they are a being of word-soul, who blossoms like a flower when the right breath passes through them. When a Mbyá-Guaraní learns to speak, they do not learn to use a tool: they learn to let their word-flower open.

Robert Moss takes up the word ayyu in Dreamways of the Iroquois — at the meeting, in his text, of the Iroquois grammar of the dreaming-soul and the Guaraní grammar of the speaking-soul. He uses it to describe what a great storyteller does, or a curandero, or anyone who speaks in such a way that their speech becomes alive: the word-flower opens. It is the opposite of technical discourse, of chatter, of commentary — which are wilted words, or words that never flowered.

Duende — what rises up through the soles of the feet

In 1933, in Buenos Aires, Federico García Lorca — an Andalusian poet, thirty-five years old, already famous — gives a lecture that will become a quiet classic of twentieth-century thought on art: Teoría y juego del duende — Theory and Play of the Duende. The text is short (forty pages in the Spanish edition), but it left its mark on Cohen, Cave, Dylan, Federico Mompou, and all who have tried to think through what distinguishes inhabited art from correctly executed art.

The duende, Lorca says, is neither the angel (who descends and who guides), nor the muse (who inspires beauty). It is what rises — through the soles of the feet, up from the earth, through the body of the artist. It comes from the chthonic, the underground, the blood. It cannot be commanded. It comes when the artist has burned their technique and what remains is an offered body. Lorca quotes Manuel Torres, an old flamenco cantaor, who said after a Falla concert: « Everything that has dark sounds has duende. » And Lorca adds, lapidary: « And there is no greater truth. »

Duende meets ayyu at one precise point: it does not name a content (what is said), but a quality of the saying (how the saying is said). And it presupposes the same condition: the human being who is passed through. The cantaor who sings with duende does not invent their emotion — they consent to its rising. The Mbyá word-flower opens when the karaí consents to its opening. Two very distant traditions, one same deep structure: inhabited speech is not produced, it is passed through.

Sage — Heidegger, the saying that calls

The third summit is philosophical. Martin Heidegger — whatever judgement one holds on his unacceptable political biography — spent the last twenty years of his life thinking about language. In Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959; French translation Acheminement vers la parole, Gallimard, 1976), he distinguishes two registers of speaking. The Sprache — language as a tool of communication, which transmits information between speakers. And the Sage — the « saying, » in the sense of the invocation that calls being to manifest. The Sage does not describe — it summons. It opens a space where the named being can enter.

The example Heidegger develops is drawn from a poem by Georg Trakl: « A Winter Evening. » When the poet says « it snows on the window, » he is not describing meteorology. He calls. He brings into being, in the reader's consciousness, a certain opening of the evening, of the cold, of the outside, of the inside, of the glass, of the snowflake — a whole sensible cosmology that no descriptive sentence could transmit. The Sage is exactly what the Guaraní call ayyu. The word that does not only say what it says — that opens, through the saying itself, the being it names.

Gougaud — the storyteller who knows when to fall silent

The fourth witness is the most discreet. Henri Gougaud, a French storyteller who died in 2024, spent sixty years carrying the world's tales in a living French. His nine books of tales — from L'Arbre aux trésors (1987) to Les Sept plumes de l'aigle (1995) — are among the rare contemporary French texts where one feels the word-flower open.

Gougaud never theorized his art. But in several interviews — notably the one he gave to France Culture in 2010 — he stated the rule that guided his practice: « To tell is to know when to fall silent. » For him, the mistake of the beginning storyteller, or the storyteller in too much of a hurry, is to fill the silence. The great storyteller, by contrast, trusts the silence to carry what speech cannot transmit. It is exactly what the INFUSE voice calls, after the Japanese, ma (間) — the interval, the active silence that structures the tale as much as the words themselves.

If one gathers the four — ayyu, duende, Sage, the telling of Gougaud — one has a complete grammar of what a living speech is. It opens like a flower. It rises through the soles of the feet. It calls the being it names. It knows when to fall silent. Four different languages, four different lineages, one single thing traced. This is no accident. It signals, like the Bohm-Seth-Bachelard convergence we examined elsewhere, that one same phenomenon is sighted, in several independent traditions, with a precision sufficient for it to begin letting itself be named.

To give hospitality without appropriating

A clear ethical question arises at this point. Do we have the right, as French speakers of the twenty-first century, to use these words? Ayyu is not a French word. Duende is not a French word. Sage is technically untranslatable. To use them in our texts — is it an appropriation of the languages that carry them?

The INFUSE voice distinguishes two postures. The first is appropriation — when one borrows a word without honouring its source, peels it from its context, uses it as a product of spiritual signalling. It is what the wellness market does with « chakras, » « namaste, » « om, » « blessed. » The word becomes a costume. That is unacceptable. The second is hospitality — when one invites the word into one's language by naming its provenance, honouring what it carries, using it soberly, because its host language has no equivalent and the need is real.

INFUSE practises the second. We use ayyu rarely, always in italics, always naming the Mbyá-Guaraní and Cadogan-Clastres. We use duende rarely, always in italics, always naming Lorca. We use ma 間 rarely, always in italics. The rule (suggested by the linguist Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass) is clear: a foreign word enters a language only on condition that it traces a perceptual boundary no existing word traces. If the equivalent exists, the borrowing is snobbery. If the equivalent does not exist, the borrowing is just hospitality — it opens a perception.

Three uses for your ordinary life

Not to speak like a book. To perceive what your current language hides from you.

Use one — spot the ayyu in others. When you listen to someone speak, observe without judging: is their speech flowered? Does it open at the moment it is said, or does it merely transmit prepared information? You will quickly notice that some always speak with ayyu (often: children up to seven, certain storytellers, certain new lovers, certain people at the end of life). Others never (often: professional communicators, executives well-drilled in public speaking, trained politicians). This observation, made with tenderness, changes your social perception within a few weeks.

Use two — spot the duende in art. When you listen to a song, when you read a poem, when you watch a film, ask yourself: does it rise through the soles of the feet? Or does it stay in the head? This distinction is not a judgement of technical quality — much technically perfect art has no duende, and much imperfect art carries it. It is another parameter. Lorca gives it to you. You will learn to feel it.

Use three — make room for silence. When you tell someone a story, or when you speak of an experience that matters, experiment: slow down. Insert silence. Not the silence of embarrassment — intentional silence. You will notice that the speech changes. It opens. The Japanese ma 間, and Gougaud's rule, take effect. This is not learned in a day. It is practised. And after a certain time of practice, some of those you speak to will tell you, without knowing why: « what you said did something to me. » You will not have said more. You will have let the word-flower open.