where? / the foreigners’ dark garden

Walter Crane, The Grave of Keats, 1873

Where?

En abîme, notes / Writing, Baroque and Artifice

Writing En abîme in English also brought about a number of considerations on the construction of the entire project. I thought of my writing method through a few notions related to the Baroque as a technique devoted to making a space. I’m particularly interested in the notion of Baroque artificiality, stemming from the Latin word artificium as skill, technique – hence my references to Italian writer Giorgio Manganelli’s idea of artificium in relation to writing. The very foundation of this book, the English language, appears to be a form of artifice in itself: a construction, an enhanced exercise in a craft, an over-exaggerated mode of expression.

Reinassance and Baroque by Heinrich Wölfflin was instrumental to analyse the relationship between Kunstwollen (a notion defined by Alois Riegl, where art is the expression of a historically determined, constructed reality) and an idea of meaning which is not a value related to truth, but a skill: a creative production, building a history of vision and of visual strata. Very detailed and convoluted descriptions do not function as superfluous ornaments, but as consistent and necessary in the foundation of an autonomous linguistic and creative territory. I think for example of the elaborate, extravagant visions painted on the domes of the Chiesa del Gesù by Baciccio and of the Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio by Andrea Pozzo, both in Rome – both overwhelming with details and decorations, yet functional to the fictional expansion of the churches’ architectural frames. And indeed the scope of Baroque vision was a spatial one, like the Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan showed on many occasions, in particular with relation to Baroque and rhetoric.

In a note to Acquainted with Grief, Carlo Emilio Gadda addressed directly the notion of Baroque in relation to his writing, and spoke of the Baroque as an attempt to construct. He wrote at length on the subject as a technique of building the grounds for the self-contained truth within language.

Argan, Giulio Carlo. (1986). Immagine e persuasione. Saggi sul Barocco. Milan: Feltrinelli, pp. 19-24.

Argan, Giulio Carlo. (1957). L’architettura barocca in Italia. Milan: Garzanti.

Argan, Giulio Carlo. (1955). La Retorica e l’arte barocca. In: AA.VV. Retorica e Barocco, Atti del III Convegno Internazionale di Studi Umanistici Venezia 1954. Rome:, pp.167-76.

Argan, Giulio Carlo. (1988). Storia dell’arte italiana, vol. III. Florence: Sansoni. First published in 1968.

Gadda, Carlo Emilio. (1987). Quer pasticciaccio brutto di via Merulana. Milan: Garzanti. First published in 1957.

Gadda, Carlo Emilio. (1997). La cognizione del dolore. Milan: Garzanti, pp. 197-199.

Manganelli, Giorgio. (1994). Il rumore sottile della prosa. Milan: Adelphi. A collection of articles published between 1966 and 1990.

Manganelli, Giorgio. (1985). La letteratura come menzogna. Milan: Adelphi. First published in 1967.

Manganelli, Giorgio. (1997). Le interviste impossibili. Milan: Adelphi. First published as A e B in 1975.

Riegl, Alois. (2010). The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome. Translated from German by Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. First published in 1908.

Wölfflin, Heinrich. (1967). Renaissance and Baroque. Translated from German by Kathrin Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. First published in 1888.

En abîme, notes / writing in English as a foreign language

Writing in English as a foreign language is a necessary tool allowing me to enact distance in language and to work with form in an exaggerated manner. Often words in the text appear as signposts pointing elsewhere, rather than as signs capable of resolving the narrative tension per se. This is another reason why I often choose to use repetition: I choose to make the most of the vagueness and of the sense of direction – in some cases, of exhaustion – inherent in my signpost-words as they appear on the pages; to leave them hover mid-air as signifiers but to let them move the narration as vectors; to uncover such tension by means of recurring patterns of clichés, while their meaning is disclosed by movement, by accumulation, by a time-based process, rather than by a fixed form or textual sign. If I think of my work in En abîme as a trace of the experience that made it, then the idea of word patterns constantly crashing into the now is one of its tropes, and the choice of repeating those patterns to the point of exhaustion further supports the experiential mode disclosed by the project.
A certain idea of abandon to English as a foreign language was also consolidated by a number of reflections on Walter Benjamin’s The Translator’s Task (1923)  – although I was not thinking of translating a language, but of translating the foreign background that informs my writing in English – in particular with regards to notions of translation as afterimage, as a mode of intention aiming for an ever-changing harmony, and as a receptacle of other languages and cultures.

 

 

pierre, or the ambiguities / a book, then another book

writing sound, part 6 (the end)

[...]

Listening and writing are bound to remain strangers to each other, and writing sound inhabits the space of this otherness. There is no prescriptive way of being in such a space because it is ultimately the space of memory, personal and constructed in the present.

I think of writing sound as the space of an absence, strictly tied to the act of remembering: and how does memory take shape? To remember means to construct an impression of a lost presence; moreover, often memory has to do with the desire of a memory, thus questioning any claim for an origin that prescribes a one-sided faithfulness to it. Think for example of that part in Proust’s Recherche when the narrator recalls his first meeting with Gilberte, and says: ‘If her eyes hadn’t been so dark, I would have not loved in her, as I did, especially her blue eyes 12’. Here the presumed authenticity of Gilberte’s black eyes fades in the authenticity of the narrator’s vision of blue eyes, and both merge in a memory that is written and constructed through the experience of a place: the hiss of the wind, the hues and smells of the pink hawthorns, all contributing to the construction of the recollection.

Each memory, hence each memory of a sound, is mediated, filtered, deferred – and yet, present every time it is written. Sounds cannot be separated from a sense of place, and writing sound in turn is not concerned with abstractions only manifested to the ears, detached and purely aural: writing embraces sound as it calls for the participation of deepest perceptions, desires and further recollections, and possesses us to the point when we no longer know what we heard and what we think we’d heard. Ultimately, what we know is what we write.

Sounds as sounds will stay as such. To write sound has to do with our not being in sounds; our memories of them speak of the places where we experience them in time. What we exchange as humans are our reports mixed with our longing, our words and the words of others: stories of stories, constructions of constructions.

The landscape of writing sound appears like a mise en abîme with blurred margins, where the frame of each new scene fades into the next and is not clearly defined: where memories and words from the past are renewed into the now. As I write sound, what I outline cannot be but a layered construction of all the thoughts and words and images that have been with me through the years within the landscapes of my listening, and that load my every return. There is no claim for authenticity, it doesn’t matter what is real and what is fake in the texture woven in such a hybrid operation. Rather than interrogating the provenance and aim of the resulting text I’d lose myself in its patterns of recalled, reinvented and revisited scenarios, in words. What matters is what is here / what I hear today, when I construct my writing sound as a mise en abîme of eroding and revived experiences, anticipations, recollections.

To conclude, I go back to Calvino’s lonely king. Despite of the illusion of dialogic space encountered in his duet, at the end he wakes up in a cave underground. Once more alone, once more with his buzz in his head, once more uncertain of his status and place. The circularity of reaching out, through words, and yet being entrenched in the uniqueness of each listening moment, is the space of writing sound. It is prompted by a question: ‘Where am I?’. It enquires about a place, and it constructs over and over the landscape in which I locate myself, or lose myself – personally, culturally – every time I set out to write after listening. It opens incremental horizons through the singularities of each telling. It doesn’t have to do with prescriptive ways, all-encompassing categories or defining reasons, but with the presence of an experience and of a place, in the intermittences, the raptures and the falls of every other today.

 

---

12 Proust, Marcel. (1985). Dalla parte di Swann. Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, p.231. Translation from Italian is mine.

writing sound, part 5

[...]

So the question here seems to be: how do I occupy the space between listening and writing? I think of reference in Writing Sound as I read Chapter Two in Pandora’s Hope by Bruno Latour, entitled Circulating Reference 7: the French sociologist describes the procedures carried out by soil science experts and geographers to translate soil samples from a forest into a map of a forest, and compares such procedures to the use of reference: to ‘pack the world into words’ 8, he says. In the same chapter Latour shows how ‘in losing the forest we win knowledge of it’ 9. I would like to draw a parallel between the transition from forest to map, and the transition from listening to writing, with particular regards to the function of reference: that is, packing into words the world of listening, while being removed from it. 

In losing a sound we gain knowledge of it: in words.

In Latin the verb ‘referre’ means ‘to bring back’, and this bringing back occurs across layers of transformations. Latour further clarifies such process of transformation in a recent article 10, looking at how the correspondence between territory and map does not occur as an abstraction, but in practice and through reference. He writes of the navigator, who works out a route not based on some abstract correspondence between map and territory, but on the detection of cues on site and in real time between one steppingstone and the next. Each detection is not a ‘deadly jump’ but a ‘deambulation’: a walk through and about a number of steppingstones 11. The gap between two steps is packed with reference to layers of experience and observations; with laboured operations, detours or even falls and dead ends. Likewise when I write sound I navigate, I walk around the changing landscape of a listening experience as it is recalled in words, through reference to layers of knowledge, moments of being, of forgetting and of undoing. Writing Sound advocates variety and it opens up to multiplicity of outcomes. It presents and propagates one’s history. It is shaped across one’s personal experiences, collections and recollections of words and sounds and places.

To stop walking around them means they will no longer be audible.

[...]

---

7 Latour, Bruno. (1999). Circulating Reference. In: Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, pp. 24-79.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Latour, Bruno, November, Valerie and Camacho-Hübner, Eduardo. (2010). Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, pp. 581-599.

11 Latour calls the outcome of this process ‘the miracle of reference’.

writing sound, part 4

[...]

I think of Writing Sound as I read A King Listens 4 by Italo Calvino, a short story published posthumously in 1986 as part of an unfinished collection dedicated to the five senses. It is the story of a king who lives alone in a constant state of surveillance, capturing every acoustic signal in his palace as a sign of a plot against himself and his status. By writing of listening as an isolated act, Calvino points right at the heart of the paradox of writing sound. I would like to look more closely at the very distinctive voice in this story.

Throughout his text Calvino uses the second person, a powerful singular ‘you’, and by doing so the reader is placed constantly on the edge: that ‘you’ is highly ambiguous and one is never sure if it’s the writer addressing the king who listens, the king’s mind addressing the listening king, the writer addressing the reader-as-king as he or she listens, Calvino using his text as a mirror to reflect his words unto us, the readers.

Alone, the king listening to the silence around him and in turn, the reader reading and the writer writing the story and its threatening silence, become the figure of a solipsistic exercise verging into the buzz of paranoia. The king’s palace is but an ear. He sits lonely on top of his throne. Around, silence swarms with voices as he listens to ‘time as it goes by’ and its ‘sonorous numbers’ 5. Inside, silence is not the absence of signal, but the absence of a space articulated outside of the experience of listening as such. In one of his moments of doubt the king/narrator wonders, ‘Is there a story that links one noise to another?’ 6. Listening then needs to be articulated, attached to something outside of itself, otherwise it falls into a status of isolation and self-referentiality. The ‘you singular’ in Calvino’s story signifies the hesitancy of the narrator between the elusiveness of the aural dimension as such, and the necessity to extend it across words.

At last the king goes out of his palace and his ear is caught by a melody. He hears a woman singing and he no longer pays attention to the plotting of his lonely mind. He reaches out and sings a duet with her: his experience of listening now takes place in an articulated, rounded dimension. The sense of precariousness, the hovering site of the listener represented by the lonely king and by that ambiguous ‘you’, slippery and placeless, is resolved by Calvino by shaping the listening experience of a ‘singular you’ in a story that reaches out to many ‘I’s, ‘she’s and ‘he’s.

But this is not to say that they reply.

[...]

---

4 Calvino, Italo. (1986). Un re in ascolto. In: Calvino, Italo. Sotto il sole giaguaro. Milan: Garzanti, pp.51-77. Translation from Italian is mine.
The Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero wrote a detailed analysis of this story with regards to the relational nature of what she calls ‘the vocalic’; that is, the sounding quality of a voice before its semantic connotations. Cavarero, Adriana. (2005). For More Than One Voice. Toward A Philosophy Of Vocal Expression. Translated from Italian by Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

5 Calvino, Italo. (1986). Op. Cit.

6 Ibid.

writing sound, part 3

[...]

I think of Writing Sound as I read Philosophy of Landscape 3, a text published by Georg Simmel in 1913. He shows how landscape perceived as a unity is in fact the result of an activity of the human gaze – of the artistic gaze in particular – that fills in a number of discreet signals and constructs a landscape, every time anew. Simmel uses the German word ‘Stimmung’ meaning ‘atmosphere’, ‘mood’, and ‘tuning’. For him, mood, atmosphere and tuning do not portray a landscape as a whole still entity but make it over and over, across fluctuations and nuances that register how we situate ourselves in it: a construction that does not have to do with permanence, but exists and changes culturally and historically.
I would like to expand this notion of ‘Stimmung’ from looking to writing, as an activity shaped by the impermanence of sounds and by how we tune in them. I would then think of writing sound as a landscape insisted upon and modified by personal instances of listening, and of remembering listening; a collection and a recollection of places, mixed with invention but true to the score drawn by each singular experience.

I think of writing sound as the trace of the experience that makes it.

It conveys the sense of shaping, step by step along the journey of the listening and the writing ‘I’, words into places at once familiar and strange.

[...]

---

3 Simmel, Georg. (2007). The Philosophy of Landscape. Translated from German by Josef Bleicher. Theory, Culture & Society. [online]. First published in 1913. http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/24/7-8/20.citation  (accessed 24 May 2011).

writing sound, part 2

[…]

As I listen to sounds and then set out to write, I become more and more aware of my distance from them. My words cannot capture them: they let them go astray, dissolve. Instead, my words inscribe sounds with their own presence, they answer the enigma of sounds with yet another enigma.

I read David Toop’s words in Sinister Resonance: ‘If we expect sound merely to give, or to invade, just like the earth digger on the building site or the bass drum, then we miss the other side. Better we should think of sound as an ear, a mirror, a resonant echo, a carrier, a shell 2’.

What is the question that I whisper in that ear? What do I see appearing in the mirror of listening? What do I ask of sound? What echoes out of sound as I listen?

I think of writing as ‘the other side’ of sound. Instead of looking for answers it echoes questions with questions, it adds complexity to complexity. Writing sound traces the shifting in the tuning of my words, of my questions, of sounds drifting.

[…]

---

2 Toop, David. (2010). Writhing Sigla. In: Sinister Resonance. The Mediumship of the Listener. New York and London: Continuum, p.53

writing sound, part 1

In the next few days I will be posting sections from my presentation ‘Something Missing’: notes on Writing Sound as Landscape and mise-en-abime at the Sound Art Theories symposium, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 5/6 November 2011.

The text is an edit from my book En abime. Listening, Reading, Writing.

An audio recording of the reading will be uploaded next month.

‘Something Missing’: notes on Writing Sound as Landscape and mise-en-abime

I think of the space of Writing Sound as I read a short text by Robert Walser, published in 1902 and entitled Music. At some point he says, ‘There’s something missing when I don’t hear music, and when I do, then there’s really something missing. That’s the best I can say about music’1. I wish to explore this space, delineated by ‘really something missing’ as the best that can be said about music. I wish my thoughts to exist right at the heart of Walser’s hopelessness for an encounter between music and words. And I wish to look at how writing sound fills a space apparently void, yet loaded; empty, but only just so. Music and sounds still resonate there, they can be sensed seeping through the words that speak the absence – or shall I say, that inscribe the absence?

Sound exists in Walser’s words in absentia, but it also exists in the actuality of its being written. The sense of missing calls for words: they crowd up against an outline of emptiness, swarm inside it, redefine and inhabit the space left by sound.

I think of this space as a landscape in perpetual transformation – occupied by sounds, left by them, filled in by words across recollections or anticipations, and over again. I look at the many ways of returning to and inhabiting this ever-changing, ever-familiar landscape as it is written. It is impossible to predict what might happen on any return: an accident, a happy discovery, a moment of contemplation, a fall.

Or even nothing special.

What is special about this nothing is its very precarious yet loaded quality, that I sense in my experience of being there, in listening, and not being there any longer, in writing – every time charged by the past, every time detached from it and informed by the new: a progression of moments of awareness, amassed into the now with all its load of then’s. Such a condition of estrangement from sounds does not call for unattainable wholeness, for absolute frameworks and legitimate ways of understanding, but rather for a syncretic, personal rearrangement of one’s array of the memories that shape each listening moment today. Such condition of estrangement from sound does not call for a complete, discursive space but for the making and the unmaking of memories in a contingent present singular.

[...]

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1 Walser, Robert. (1993). Music. In: Masquerade and Other Stories. Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky. London: Quartet Books, pp.9-10. First published in 1902.