Informing Aural Memories. A Diptych

I was invited by or-bits to contribute a text to their current Informal programme. Part 1 is now online, Part 2 will follow later this month.

1. Woman with Chainsaw and Time
Over, she thinks. The sky, slate gray and uniform. Outside, at 7.30am, the man with the chainsaw cutting a tree bears an annoying promise: noise through the day will creep inside the room. The sound of the chainsaw cutting a tree annoys, yet the space cut away from that stubborn, uneven knot of sound is absorbing … [read more]

2. The Next Day
An aural experience past, tangled with the forming and the informing of a memory: what is retained of it in writing? What does writing do to the aural memory?
Today I read a sentence by Paul Klee from 1928: ‘There are some problems to be posed, such as: the construction of the secret’ … [to be continued]

writing, drifting, silencing, choking

Early morning today spent reading The Relationship with Text by Arnold Schönberg, an essay published in Der Blaue Reiter almanac in 1912, advocating the primacy of intuition in musical perception beyond instructions and interpretation. The flow of thoughts and words by Schönberg in these pages is at its most Swedenborgian mixture of rigour and vision. In any point you pin music, he says, it will bleed. However you might want to analyse or dissect it, you will see the same blood. At the time Schönberg was writing against programme music, intended as a faithful, point-by-point correspondence between a prescriptive text and subsequent sounds. In his text he put forward an idea of music as a living entity supported by a singular driving force – hence the blood metaphor. I like to turn the issue upside down and think of the relationship between sound before, and the words that may or may not come after.

So what happens when I write after listening, when I write in a foreign language that I find demanding to articulate clearly, and that often leaves me speechless, helpless? Can I shift the trite question I am often asked, ‘Do you dream in English or in Italian?’ into something a bit more twisted: ‘Do you listen in English or in Italian?’ And then, write.

The fact that I am more willing to write of my listening experiences in English – a language that bears a lot more opacity to my eyes and ears, not being my mother tongue – tempts me to make the opacity between sounds and words even more obvious, without attempting any gentle fade-ins between the two, just considering them as different entities trying to look at each other through a thick fog, half-guessing each other but never clearly. They call for each other but the closest they can get is an unsteady unison, soon to be disrupted. In other words, I’m trying to leave aside the old point, ‘it’s impossible to write about sound’, and to think instead of ‘writing away from sound’. To stop considering writing as derivative of sound, hence constantly frustrated by not being sound, or watered down because it cannot be of the same essence: to consider the writing not as a document, but as a self-standing entity carrying as much presence and possessed by a singular driving force as much as sound does. Like music for Schönberg, if you pin the words they will bleed too.

Words exist in the porous, half-empty space of my listening in a foreign language, and struggle to be anchored to anything definitive or clear: because maybe the only steady anchors belong to another language, to another listening, another thinking – which are gradually drifting away, becoming more and more ambiguous. Can this writing be seen as a silencing – to which extent can these words be soundproofed, half-recalling the inner soundings of references, tradition, history?

After reading Schönberg today I listened to a London morning:

This coming to a foreign place: to be able to say its name correctly, to be at home. Around are plants whose name I do not know, and this broken weather, that I might be listening to with ardent quiet, and void between my listening and my words. See, nothing here is literal. Maybe a snap of thought uncovered something elsewhere: a note. This opacity of words of sounds begins to look like an uneasy special place. Deprived of proper words and of horizon I have no voice here, nor song, but a tongue tied to a thick rope of hemp right in my throat. It chokes me inside the barrel of my every London morning, in sawdust days of tea and tar.
‘Keep the words worn out, listless by this choking, keep the ruptured breathing’.

where? / the foreigners’ dark garden

Walter Crane, The Grave of Keats, 1873

Where?

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.