painting, allegory, speech / Salvator Rosa, Dante Alighieri, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Not having much to write around music and sound these days, I turned to painting and poetry, philosophy and allegory. I knew I would found my way back into listening. Here are some initial notes, only a beginning:

 

                                                             Poetry, oil on canvas, c. 1641                                                                      

Philosophy, oil on canvas, 1640

Poetry holds a notebook and a quill. She is just about to write something, but glances backwards, toward me, with brooding eyes. Is that page the space of knowing that some truth somewhere exists? Have I just caught her writing? Is poetry that space caught between my guessing and her glance? Is poetry that woman’s face?

Philosophy is also troubled, his face so dark. He does not write though, his words have been written already – carved, it seems: ‘Aut tace Aut loquere meliora silentio’. ‘Keep silent unless what you are going to say is more important than silence’. Is philosophy this constant oscillation between an absolute silence, and the tension to say something so heavy that is heavier and more loaded than silence?

As it were, the real titles of these paintings are not Poetry and Philosophy, but Lucrezia as Poetry and Self-Portrait as Philosophy. The Italian 17th-century painter Salvator Rosa, author of both paintings, used a portrait of his lover alongside his self-portrait to give shape to his allegorical representations of Poetry and Philosophy. As if the two could not be without a relationship, a tension in between. It is not ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’ as absolute categories that he seems most concerned with, but poetry in the face of Lucrezia, philosophy in the shape of Salvator. Unique human beings, lovers; their glances and their gestures, engaging in a silent dialogue, outlining a changeable territory of seduction, and breakups, and attractions.

Looking for singular faces and catching the singular expressions of my Lucrezia Poetry and of my Salvator Philosophy, I imagine the possible words between them, or between me and each of them. I think of their singular expressions, one by one, I lose myself in a word, or in an inflection of the eye, rather than looking for any universal meaning or lines of demarcation beyond them. I am thrilled when I realise that a certain black in Salvator’s eyes is the same hue as Lucrezia’s. Or that they might share the sky above. Or that he is stuck in the immobility of his frontal posture, while she is all torsion and enclosed dynamism.

Both paintings are known to art historians as allegories. So: allegory. I could start with a Medieval saying:

Littera gesta docet,
Quod credas allegoria
.  .  .  .  .

The literal sense teaches what happened,
The allegorical what you believe
.  .  .  .  .

And with the excuse of being Italian, I would move to one of my favourite writers with no further justification: Dante Alighieri. In the Letter to Can Grande della Scala, he writes of the Divine Comedy: ‘The subject of the whole work, then, taken literally, is the state of souls after death, understood in a simple sense; for the movement of the whole work turns upon this and about this’.

For the movement of the whole work turns upon this and about this: the literal side, understood in a simple sense. What is remarkable is the emphasis on the literal truth as a foundation for any other levels of meaning. So perhaps I should look at these two paintings again in detail, and not think of Poetry and Philosophy at all, but of the faces and the bodies of Lucrezia and Salvator: literally. They seem to be inscribed in the same shade of grey, although more or less abstract in form. What happens when a poem is inscribed within a philosophical text? When thought flows into poetry?

I go back to another book by Dante. The Convivio is a treatise dedicated to Lady Philosophy; it is a book on knowledge, and it is full of poems. Furthermore, it is written in volgare, not in Latin: in 14^thcentury Italy, Latin was the language of philosophy and vulgar was the language of the people, of songs, of poems. Philosophy is impersonated as a woman Dante loves; the proximity between philosophy and poetry is resolved by intersecting the argument in the text with a number of poems, and through a metaphor in which knowledge is a banquet, and the food is poetry, and the bread that goes with it is philosophy.
One of the poems in the Convivio, entitled Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, Love that converses with me inside my mind, ends up like this:

My song, it seems you speak contrary to
Words spoken by a sister whom you have;
For this lady, whom you claim to be so humble,
She calls proud and disdainful.
You know the sky is always bright
and clear,
and of itself is never clouded.
And yet our eyes, for many reasons,
Sometimes say a star is dark.
Likewise when she calls her proud,
She views her not according to the truth
But only as what she seems to her.
For my soul was full of fear,
And still is, so much that everything I see
Seems proud, when she casts her gaze on me.
So excuse yourself, should the need arise;
And when you can, present yourself to her
And say: ‘My Lady, if it is your wish,
I will speak of you in every place’.

Canzone, e’ par che tu parli contraro
al dir d’una sorella che tu hai;
che questa donna, che tanto umil fai,
ella la chiama fera e disdegnosa.
Tu sai che ‘l ciel sempr’è lucente e chiaro,
e quanto in sé, non si turba già mai;
ma li nostri occhi, per cagioni assai,
chiaman la stella talor tenebrosa.
Così, quand’ella la chiama orgogliosa,
non considera lei secondo il vero,
ma pur secondo quel ch’a lei parea:
ché l’anima temea,
e teme ancora, sì che mi par fero
quantunqu’io veggio là ‘v’ella mi senta.
Così ti scusa, se ti fa mestero;
e quando poi a lei ti rappresenta,
dirai: ‘Madonna, s’ello v’è a grato,
io parlerò di voi in ciascun lato’.

‘I will speak of you in every place’: could I think of the space opening up between philosophy and poetry as the space of speech? An utterance that is not necessarily delivered to destination, but that resounds nonetheless, and forms a space, makes the form of its understanding?

Now I think of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near the tombs of Antonio Gramsci and Percy Bysshe Shelley, before he wrote his poem The Ashes of Gramsci. Published in 1952, the poem breathed an elegiac and sensuous feel into the tight structure of a Dantesque terza rima. In these verses, Pasolini appears constantly torn between the moving force of thinking as a changing form and the pressing call of his aesthetic inclinations as the making of a shape.

Like Pasolini sitting in the Protestant cemetery and speaking out the words of Gramsci and the words of Shelley through his own verses, wondering how the words of the two could breathe and exist in the same ancient rhythm, what is spoken out appears as a space of osmotic exchange that brings poetry and philosophy together and makes them alive: resounding.

… – thus lives the I: I
alive, eluding life, while the feeling grows
of a life becoming grieving
violent oblivion … Ah how well
I understand, silent in the wind’s wet
humming, here where Rome is silent,
among wearily agitated cypresses,
next to you, Spirit whose inscription resounds
Shelley …

… vive l’io: io,
vivo, eludendo la vita, con nel petto
il senso di una vita che sia oblio
accorante, violento… Ah come
capisco, muto nel fradicio brusio
del vento, qui dov’è muta Roma,
tra i cipressi stancamente sconvolti,
presso te, l’anima il cui graffito suona
Shelley …

no name / for strangers only, please do not remove the bars

In Whitby, March 2012

This sonorous writing of nowhere. (Or: To go back to words and sounds. To forget about Deleuze)

‘I think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it will be in hearing what they can witness to and not what they can theorize about’.

Reading these words by Flannery O’Connor on the train back to London from Whitstable after a day at the Off the Page festival, prompted me to gather some thoughts on Simon Reynolds’ ‘intellectual profile’ of David Toop presented as part of the event organised by Sound and Music and The Wire.

For if the slogan ‘We are all David Toop’, skilfully placed by Reynolds at the beginning of his talk, worked well to endear the audience and to warm them into condescending smiles as they tweeted it all over, one issue remains: throughout his presentation Reynolds seemed more inclined to theorising about Toop’s writing than witnessing to it, not quite looking at who we all supposedly are and Toop is – and leaving the writing, and what makes the writing, more or less absent from the scene.

I am always fascinated by how writers speak, by how they read their words aloud; by what types of space they create when they talk – wittingly, or in spite of themselves. The space of Reynold’s words was outlined by an angular delivery that frustrated what he introduced as a comment on ‘flow motion’. Despite its talks of shifting plateaux, the presentation was obstructed by its thwarted attempts to clamp down the ideas behind Toop’s writing, whilst overlooking its presence and spirit. As if you could detach the ‘ideas’ from the actual writing, from what shapes and informs it: other words, music, soundmaking, image-looking, listening. In Reynold’s talk Toop’s writing was replaced by a refrain of Deleuze-Guattari jargon. All the scrupulously arranged references to ‘deterritorialisation’ attempted to scrutinise the subject of the talk as if it was motionless. Suddenly ‘the rhizomitisation of writing’ appeared like a nightmare anticipating some obscure surgical procedure on a subject that eventually was not there – because you can’t dissect what is alive and flees.

Toop’s writing always meant for me the freedom – as a writer – to actually leave aside Deleuze, or any theorist du jour as canonised frameworks of legitimisation, and to explore instead unexpected, incorrect and incidental references. In Toop’s words, to write of music arises out of a search into ‘uncollected archives, those that gather like loose sand in the unofficial corners of culture’ and ‘teeter dangerously on the brink of vanishing’. Not certainly the safety of the Deleuzeian idiom.

So, I would like to witness now to this writing, to the space of Toop’s writing.

***

Every time I enter it, it’s as if I found myself in the Pitt Rivers Museum after a major earthquake – first overwhelmed, then gradually attracted by an array of curious and mysterious objects and signs, whose function is not always clear but that I can spend time with re-arranging. And then: a breadth of vision, multiple pasts crashing into now, lost histories, debris, dust and charms. They all prompt the forming and re-forming of a disjointed self in the manner of ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’, which is inextricably tied – James Clifford showed it – to the process of writing.

This writing: the recurring clusters of splintered loops; the self-corroding prose toward the end of Sinister Resonance, consuming the space of anticipation and hesitation reflected in listening. The animated rhythms against a canvas of stillness. Memories arranged in a rhapsodic manner. This writing moves and can seem to lead nowhere, and what really matters is that we are there – inside – and it still speaks. Read the loosening up and syntactical surrender in Burning Fuse, last year’s landmark article on mellow soul in The Wire: read the locked groove toward the end of the article, reciting ‘I am thinking’ six times, six long and ticking times, until the thinking is un-thought and its timing gives way to a feel, makes a point for an exclusion.

This writing is an instrument of nowhere. An attempt – always forestalled, always reinstated – at reflecting what Jankélévitch called the charm of music. It resists paraphrasing. It points at freedom on the edge of a line. It cannot be canonised because it exists in metamorphosis. Toop’s ‘impure’ mode of writing mixes personal reverie, biography, accounts, descriptions, fragments and quotes, meanderings. It is born out of the erratic density of notebooks constructed around the sensing of a living person. It speaks a hybrid language, attuned to heteroglossia. It does not explain, judge, claim to give value, impose interpretation. A lot is hidden: losses, voids against which the words are even more present as they hover on the disintegrating boundary of a self, that’s constructed and destructed polyphonically. The gathering of these elements is fleeting and non-scientific and unpredictable. This writing exudes no uplifting or secure strategy: it wants to be contaminated, it listens closely, in all the details, to the off-track moments of singular stories. This writing is not arranged according to the linear structures of a theorist, but according to the singular cadenzas of a musician. Like Toop says, this writing is gathered from vanishing sources, ‘the small print of record sleeves; oral history picked up (like a sexually transmitted disease) in a motel or bar; the obsessive-compulsive lists of fanatics; the outgrowth of analysis, discourse, accumulating factoids, gossip and rumour that clusters around their core activity, the workings of sound and listening that we call music’. It is precarious, frayed because alive. It leaves me longing to be mesmerised to listen, it makes me want to write.

This writing shows that to write is arbitrary, but demands to construct the arbitrariness with rigour: a rigour true to one’s own life. If it has to do with understanding, it does so literally by standing under the layered substance of experience – which is not authority, but attention. It carries the responsibility of making a shape.

This writing hallucinates sounds into words.

‘We listen to feelings; we listen to music. Both torture us with their resistance to language’. This writing is tainted and fickle, just like any listening moment. It is not a crystal-clear system of analysis. It does not call for deciphering, it has no key or code. It wants to be read; it exists on its own and needs no other justification than its very existence. It wants you to say, ‘I want to be here’, an act of volition that constructs its own world and place: a leap of faith.

So in this writing I like to read the night and shades before this leap of faith, generating precarious and alluring constructions. As a reader, I like to believe that in those words lies the nocturnal agony of doubt and of beginning, from which the words – and I with them – can’t be healed. Although drenched in music, art, poetry, this writing has visited many places and known people who stray from what’s commonly regarded as ‘art’.

This writing unveils and covers sounds at once. In the spaces in-between I have encountered from time to time: distant percussions, ruffles, soft voices, a sigh; the afterimage of a painting recalled; ecstatic rhythms; stories told, reinvented and interconnected; dust and ashes of songs; the unbearable lashing of a silence in a room, in a place that – I knew this from the start – is many-whered.

In this volatile space it is a solace to think, like Seneca once said, that ‘to be everywhere is to be nowhere’. That’s all there is, and where all we are: in this sonorous writing of nowhere, and it’s plenty.

Reading

David Toop, Sinister Resonance, New York and London: Continuum, 2010

David Toop, ‘Burning Fuse’, The Wire. Adventures in Modern Music, n. 327, May 2011, pp. 30-35

Flannery O’Connor, ‘Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’, in Mystery and Manners, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, p. 36

James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning’, in The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 92-113

Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1961]

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 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 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

wax cylinder recording / Rome, Her Litany

On 5 April 2011 I recorded an excerpt from my book for the Phonographies archive of wax cylinder recordings, curated by Aleks Kolkowski. The chapter takes place along via Appia and the Catacombs in Rome. Most of the book is structured on layers and returns, and the idea of superimposing two voices on the same wax cylinder seemed appropriate to reflect the phasing and unsteady unisons that occur throughout the book.

 

Here is a longer excerpt from the book chapter:

Ghosts on via Appia this morning. Twenty degrees, rain and damp. Catacombs of Saint Callixtus, the archives of the primitive Church. Ninety acres of land, four levels of subterranean galleries twelve miles long. Half a million tombs. Cemetery of Saint Callixtus, Crypt of Lucina, Cemetery of Saint Soter, Cemetery of Saint Mark, Marcellianus and Damasus, Cemetery of Balbina. Tomb of Cecilia Metella. And when the sun falls down the pine trees I still walk on these stones and there is a humming coming from below the catacombs and these slabs of history. It whispers death along this evening, it breathes in, it breathes out, in, and out, following me chasing me out of this still city of tombs. I keep listening. This still dead city of tombs is chasing me, I walk. Up to this very moment walking, listening, recalling.

I return to via Appia and to those Roman aqueduct arches, and to the mellow suburban countryside on a hot, rainy morning, November 2010. Once it was August, the year 1995, the heat unbearable, the black silhouette of the Cecilia Metella Mausoleum and the maritime pines drawing a silent backdrop to the early evening walk, that you and I had decided to take. We’d spent the whole midsummer day driving around the ring road of Rome, in one direction and backwards, filming – an exorcism against the boredom of that Roman summer and against that whole year, as a double noose holding and hanging that whole year. We’d spent the whole mid-summer day driving around the ring road of Rome, in one direction and backwards, listening – in the extreme sunshine and in the lethargic pace of Roman summers, car windows open wide and music full blast, until the texture of those sounds reached and merged with the melting lights.

I return to via Appia and think of August. Signposts to depots circle like coils on this evening. Your Fiat Punto exhales hundreds of miles. We are going to circle, and circle. You scream, these coils are closing in. You’ve gone crazy in your rotten daydreaming. You’ve gone crazy for your rotten dreaming, that is to say: it hurts. We circle, enwrapped in this spiral of heat. It arrives as a piercing signal, a ruthless clasp of frequencies pointing right at the essence of rhythm. It arrives as the sound of a new disquieting language; as a rhythmic pattern and oscillation devoid of any reference, other that the push-pull of sound you feel in your body, and the grip of our sonorous now. A bony creature is dancing along the broken structures of audio tracks, built upon the sonic detritus of what once was called techno. Stark on a sensorial plateaux, a thousand needles pierce this sonorous now. Subtle, severe, insidious: here is a plus, here is a minus. A plus, a minus, a minus. Then come the bass sounds, to the earth and up from the earth. Don’t tell me these sounds are cold. If something resounds here, it is a shivering body: the body of rhythm exposed in its nerves, in the contractions that keep it alive. It might be mutilated by the cuts of this sonic blade but it is always there, in its presence and denial: a plus, a minus.

I return to via Appia, with you and it is evening. In you Fiat Punto we are listening to Metri by Ø, aka Mika Vainio, I think I wrote about this record sometime. Then we park and we walk along the stone-paved street from twilight into night, listening to noises sifted from the sheltered villas. A knot of voices, smells, slivers of light. All the buildings, pines and stones narrated by the daylight have crumbled down into a storyless black. Across the metal bars of gates and the tall brick walls the night is here again. A low hum propagates, made of the same substance of the heat. Our blinded eyes and our deafened ears hope to see a new vision and chase a new melody. I follow the train of my thoughts once more, and the visions of those trains along the tracks down South, to a small town where one of us was born, it has one of the few preserved mythraeums in Italy.

I returned to via Appia this morning, and I was lonely. Arthur Conan Doyle set one of his Tales of Terror just around here, The New Catacomb. The great Aqueduct of old Rome lay like a monstrous caterpillar across the moonlit landscape, he wrote. This evening the great aqueduct of old Rome in the moonlight doesn’t look much like a monster, but as a tamed force. I think again of your tamed silences, the long glances, and your restless longing for a space you will never allow anyone to circumscribe. I’m not sure if it is afternoon or early evening, but I know it was night when you first told me of this sense of waiting and longing. You are the imminence of a storm of ice, you smell of hunt and blood. You dark eyes, every day you lose some glow and gain some shade. Out of pure will you commanded your heart to be irregular as nothing ever in your life is regular: not the friends, not the hours, not your lovers or the lives you go through. Everything in your space deformed. Now a summer breeze moves through those pine trees, smells of sea salt and resin and cooking and smoke. Tomorrow it’s another go, another lap. You crawl.

I walk back, alone and toward home. I enter the Basilica dei Santi Quattro Coronati and listen to the enclosed nuns as they sing the Vespers. Even the stones are drenched in the void of this confinement. Spargens sonum, what is this voice whispering muddled tunes into my ears?

This morning I returned to via Appia, and to those Roman aqueduct arches and the mellow suburban countryside, following the steps of Rainer Maria Rilke, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville. I was on their traces along the old Roman road, and as I walked I engaged with all of them in a series of fictitious interviews.

I would ask Rilke of the void he saw in this sky while he walked along these same stones, while these same stones breathed into his verse another type of void, another type of voice. I would ask him of how lieber rhymes with Fieber. I would try to anticipate the answer.

I would ask Melville of the solitude and silence he felt around these Roman walls, in March 1857. Then he felt lost; this morning he was a reminder. To engage in an imaginary interview with Melville was like picturing Time in front of me: the Time of words when they take time to resound or seep through the mind, the Time of thoughts as they take shape into words, the Time of actions kept forever inside words. Everything seemed gathered, concluded; it now opens up again and draws a new horizon. It all has to be part of some other yet uncovered landscape.

I would ask Hawthorne of an entry in his diary, 23 October 1858. What now impresses me is the languor of Rome – its nastiness – its weary pavements – its little life pressed down by a weight of death.

Did you know this weight is even heavier today?

Between these unspoken interviews, loaded with memories and echoes, and filigrees of sounds recalled from reading, I did not feel any loss in the absence of my interlocutors. Maybe I just wanted to be in that silence, in the time of a recordare. To record, to recollect.

removed from sound, writing / the violent bear it away

The three main characters in Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel The Violent Bear It Away are all deaf, in some way or other. Bishop, the ‘dim-witted child’: deaf by birth. Rayber, his father: deaf by accident. He uses a hearing aid and his entire character is a study into degrees of self-imposed silence and distance in perception. Tarwater, the antihero: not literally deaf, but deaf to anything that happens around him except for his intent. A lot of this novel is shaped on mishearing, on assuming to hear or pretending not to, on hearing voices from hidden recesses of one’s own mind, on placing and displacing voices, on the calling of the voice of what is assumed and forced to be religion. Entire scenes are described by means of aural perception and of aural distance; each sounding shade overwhelms the vision and the space it inhabits, it is absorbed in the wholeness of the narration.

O’Connor wasn’t specifically concerned with describing sound or moments of listening as self-contained experiences. The aural dimension, as it is written, exists within the complexity of her stories, where sound is neither an absolute nor a central category. It is encompassed in her ways of shaping her words, to carry ‘all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth’, as she once wrote. And she continued, ‘the beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the writer begins where human perception begins. […] Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction’.

Writing sound too takes shape as an experience, not an abstraction: it is the trace of the experience that makes it, every other today.

 

O’Connor, Flannery. (2007). The Violent Bear It Away. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. First published in 1960.

O’Connor, Flannery. (1969). Mystery and Manners. Occasional Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.