July 10: side by side

I remember reading The Lesbian Body years ago, and finding a certain encouragement: to step into a space with another set of coordinates, a sort of sensibility circulating around shadows and physicality, a dizzying space. It was not so entirely the text, that set this feeling going; not entirely in the words, but more the meeting of where I was and where it was; an integration of the meaning and how I then carried it forward, as part of the life of the imagination and all those hard knots of the day to day. I think of this now, as the summer rain drifts down into the trees dark against the evening sky, for some reason or another – maybe it is having just watched Ken Loach’s Rif Raff, or having now put on Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing, low in the background, or rather, murmuring away in the corner… I’m not really sure what brings me to this point, now: or rather, to this feeling of an expanded perspective – of appreciating the nomadic heart at the base of figuring something unclear but all the more focused; an architecture of the moment designed also as a new society, a new sexuality, if I can say: a secret on the inside finding points of contact. It is only a small feeling that feels rather grand, for all that it comes to suggest: that is, to involve oneself. Like the other week in Bordeaux, meeting Bruit du Frigo, walking through the park, speculating, about possible work, about possible sharing, to make something there, for a future moment, and recognizing that generosity is really in the making of possibility: to say, what can we do here. Such moments, like years ago reading that book, certainly give encouragement: to occupy an in-between space where what one is is shaped by whom one anticipates, welcomes, and considers. To walk, side by side.

January 10: Eating Boy George (text written for The Wire, epiphany column)

Trying to capture the epiphany inevitably brings forward a network of memories, cultural objects, moments in life, poetic and disturbing, revelatory and challenging, all of which makes me sense that the epiphany is a break in time and space that lets through a certain resonance, a certain shimmering, a certain gathering. With such thoughts trickling through my mind while sitting on a plane bound for Lisbon, I hear Culture Club playing over the speaker system. Looking out over the runway, a small rain falling down, soon on our way into the clouds, I started to remember a girl from junior high school that used to dress like Boy George. It was the time of Culture Club, of new romantics, of synth-pop and 80s fashion, and I was still listening to Black Sabbath, donning a mane of hair and reading Rimbaud. The girl at school, Angela, broke into my cultural life, dragging Boy George in and disturbing the lines of my outlook and understanding – at the time, I shunned such fashions, such pop-sentiments, imagining myself on the side of “real” angst, existential life and bold energies; Boy George seemed in contrast to such interior adventures, dark moods and throbbing journeys. Only now, sitting on the plane, hearing Boy George’s voice humming through the banality of the moment, do I start to recognize the joys of this other music, but more, the recognition that life and music are bound in a complex and poetic weave. My epiphany in this case is only a small moment, which brought together memories of early teenage life, Angela, and Boy George, along with an opening of the ear through which Black Sabbath might sit alongside Culture Club, and my own identification with such voices might fall in tune not with a single melody, but with the full breadth of sonic experience. “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me” starts to function as a personal anthem, to signal my own journey toward what I originally did not like, what I at first shunned and criticized: at 13 years old, Boy George stood for what I detested. Now, 27 years later, he sings to my heart. The light skip of the rhythm, the drifting synth melodies in the background, and Boy George singing his heart out, all start to resound in my own heart, and with my own voice wanting to belt out there in the plane I wished Angela could be there, as no doubt she’d laugh at me and also probably scold me for those days at school when I’d ridicule her parody of Boy. The epiphany in this instance is both a joy in Culture Club, and more, a pleasure in recognizing one’s own betrayal of past identifications: that the heart is an ever-expanding beat into whose unfolding, life forever provides input.

Might such a moment also suggest a model for listening in general? If listening can be thought of as the exposure of oneself to the other, then my epiphany on the plane is a bold articulation. I’m reminded of Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto from 1928. Written in São Paulo, the Manifesto opened a route for an entire cultural revolution, giving way to strategies of not only art making, music or writing, but a cultural and political position: that to escape the colonizing Empire, Brazilians needed to locate a position of not so much opposition, but of radical incorporation. To become Cannibal was to eat the enemy, to refigure the power dynamic through ingesting the very forces by which one is already occupied.

My epiphany begins to locate listening as an act of cannibalistic incorporation – that to listen is to readily take in the differences that sound often provides, to bring the commanding noise or the alienating silence into the body and make it part of the self. As John M. Hull observes in his thoughtful account of blindness, the world of acoustic events is one that actively forces onto oneself its energetic verve. Each sound is a dynamic instant breaking into the environment and claiming space, to touch the ear with a complicated generosity. “It is thus a world which comes to me, which springs into life for me, which has no existence apart from its life towards me.” The acoustic world is something for me and yet I am also completely absorbed within it – I cannot really turn away.

Sound, as an exposure to the other, has become the base for my own artistic and sonic work: to stage sound as a scene of crime in which the villain may still lurk, and to generate the question: did you hear that? The acoustic world demands attention, from the voices outside the window to the washing machine in the next room puttering away, each sonic event interferes, and at the same time I participate, however unwillingly, by listening and by wondering. Such an understanding starts to define a space for creatively relating to the sounds around us, as acoustic territories full of agitation that may also produce sudden intimacy. The act of listening may operate as a form of negotiation, and the willful incorporation of sound’s feverish material into the self a potential act of subversive ingestion.

In eating Boy George, I both defuse the challenge he posed to my adolescent heart as well as open the way for a sort of commingling, a sudden horizon of pleasure in finding new meaning in what I thought was rubbish. Sitting on the plane, I find new freedom in adopting Boy as my own. This moment might be thought of as a first kiss: between Boy and I, the beginning of a romance, which at best is always the shattering of the self, the tearing apart of interior life, the making of a porous body, the beginning of care. I take Boy along with me, up into the clouds, past the mist and the terrestrial, to hover in the sudden blue, together. I carry that voice, now in the silence around me.

February 09: At the doctor's

Waking up with a terrible ache in my ear, a fever, and a bad cold, days before having to fly to London, I made my way to the doctor's office, knowing I'd have to wait through the long line, with countless others who no doubt were being hit with the late winter flu. After signing in at the front desk I went to find my place in the waiting room, packed with sniffling kids and moaning adults, each waiting it out by scanning magazines and playing games on mobile phones. My thoughts were adrift on all the soft banalities of the office environment, glancing occasionally out the window at the passing day. Yet my attention was quickly turned by a woman also waiting to see the doctor, and who had already made an impression while waiting in line by asking various questions of the nurses and the other patients, in an air of friendliness. Yet, there was a distinct sense that her fairly constant vocalizations, queries, and often vague monologues were to be ignored as everyone generally turned the other way, or only offered the slightest of responses. This sense was of course conditioned by the fact that I could not understand the language, being at a doctor's office in Berlin and without any real sense for the German language - all I could do was follow the contours of conversation and the social narratives that pass within such contexts. My ear understood perfectly well that the woman often intruded upon the otherwise quiet environment, and that such intrusions were seen as rather out of line; essentially, she seemed a "special" type, but this special quality, as the hours wore on, and the crowd came and went, leaving her and I as the remaining patients who were unfortunate not to have an appointment, I came to respect and admire. Her ability to feel at ease enough with herself to ask questions aloud, to greet new patients and say farewell to departing ones, plus her confronting the doctor on occasion when it would be her turn, and what I slowly grew to feel was her rather polite and amicable way of sharing her thoughts and feelings to perfect strangers - all of this made their way under my skin, and into my listening as a profoundly beautiful sound. I slowly began to hear that what the woman offered was something generally missing from social environments, that is, the recognition that we are all not so different. Her sudden expressions and utterances tossed around the room rather randomly, but not without consideration, seemed to fill the space in such a way as to open it up, to make it a shared space where all the quiet thoughts and sensations tossing around within each body present could in fact be spoken, uttered into the air, and made a part of the already common experience. I started to admire this person, as a rather free individual, at ease and already living beyond the usual repressions and sublimations that, for sure allow certain social exchanges to flow, but mostly block others. As her turn finally arrived after 3 hours of waiting, she turned to leave the room and kindly waved to me, said a few words in German, which everyone seemed surprised by - they wondered, do they know each other? who is this crazy woman? - I could not help but appreciate this sound, this voice, as a much needed interference.

June 08: Loudspeaking

Walking through Mexico City what becomes immediately apparent, at least to the ear, is the abundant presence of music sounding out from numerous loudspeakers. Strewn throughout the streets, the speakers bulge out from shop windows and open doors, suspended from string and wire to dangle under awnings, and stuck into corners of kiosks and other make-shift shelters that dot the sidewalks. Meandering around the city, the plethora of sonic information conditions the sonic life and spills into a vital cacophony that accompanies all sorts of activity, adding a continual sonorous noise to everyday life. This is not a form of muzak delicately chiming away within air-conditioned shopping centers, nor other selected broadcasts designed for commercial projects, but an improvised and random noise that seems to find its place within the energies of the city. No one seems to mind or appear to be disturbed, as the blasts of audio rise from speakers that often look as though they’ve been through years of use – inherited by the son of the aunt who owns the shop, or pulled from a dumpster behind the taco stand, the speakers are figures in the city. My ear is not so much tuned to the actual sound coming forth but wonders as to the life and circulation of these public loudspeakers: how they fit within the architecture, get lodged within the racks of t-shirts for sale, or piles of adhesive tape stacked on three shelves of a corner kiosk, or hover above a juice cart on a haphazard wooden boomstand. The speakers are partners in the expressions of so many exchanges, labours, economies and relations, forming a distributed chorus or network within the city. The speakers may function as an informal infrastructure aiding the movements and flows that come to define the urban formation.

March 08: Blinded

I was treated to a surprising event by the students at the Michaelis art school in Cape Town, who blindfolded me and proceeded to give me a tour of the city. As I had never met them before, my initial introduction was through their voices, as I was passed along throughout the tour, being led by small groups through different passages and spaces. At first it took some time to settle into the sudden blindness, shifting my pace to that of my guides, allowing them to direct my steps and direction, yet it did not take long before I felt the sudden wave of euphoria at surrendering myself to the change in pattern and sensory perspective. A general feeling of liberation swept over me as I let the situation envelope all the coordinates and exchanges of the moment. The intensification of the aural canvas took on a new depth and degrees of significance while my sense of smell and touch expanded – the demarcations of the city were no longer visual (except for the shifts in light that seeped through the blindfold), but were marked by the shift in smells, from the flower seller who offered me a mysterious floral fragrance to the wet noxious odour of a hidden alleyway, my sensory imbalance sought out new means for orientation. And the tactile and physical presence of the world around me, especially toward my guides, whose hands held me in varying ways to lead me through the city, passed strangers and through traffic, took on levels of surprising intimacy. The feel of a hand, the texture of the voice, the weight and shape of the body, which I could sense alongside me, the occasional brushing of clothing, invited a mysterious form of communication through which I in turn navigated, sought out points of comfort or excitement, as a new field of sensory connection and discovery. The tour was an invitation to disorient my sense of self while locating new forms of contact, experiencing city life as a multi-sensed event.

August 07: Sirens

The street, the tram line, the train overhead, on its solid tracks, and the guy next to me that speaks inside smoke rings, gruffly accenting every word with a puff, and the guitar in the distance, strummed and resounding from under the overpass, against the tall building on one side and out toward the train lines the other way, like a makeshift amphitheatre, defined in this sudden moment, haphazardly and without reflection. The notes sound out, in loose succession, to puncture in sharp attacks the ascent and descent of traffic, cross walks, interweaving with the signals timed to orchestrate in some form of precision the excesses of urban life. And there are the birds, bopping and tossing against the agitations of human bodies and their detritus, sifting in the left overs and the scraps, the discarded cartons and thrown papers and chunks of this and that, their presence… soft emblems of other rhythms and systems. The music returns (is it music? The notes sing without refrain, or grounded melody…a series of points thrown up to suggest lines of melody, possible phrases that might sink in, according to some form of inertia, and piece together a progression, a song even) to tickle the fine hairs of this listening, enraptured without locatable cause or effect, a haphazard listening, that occupies a small slot of this picture: which at times, and as a sudden extremity, contains or is broken by the shot-through agitation and volume of a police siren carried from some distance to another by the roar of a vehicle, intercutting the flows and the exchanges with an unignorable prism of noise. Noise which may be said to be so by the steady unfolding of people plugging their ears with fingers and palms, squinting, and rolling their faces in united response. The siren has a function and a meaning, which depends on making itself public, extremely public; it tears into the social announcing its presence through an urgent formation, ringing in a clamorous metallic pattern, pure boisterousness with death contained therein. As a sound object, the siren and its sonorous patterning, its amplification across and through cities, is pure information; in this regard, one may not necessarily catalogue it as noise, if noise is given the status of resisting, over-riding, or skirting meaning and the informational patterning of language or messages. Yet, it may slip into noise by always also missing its target, through its excessive distribution, for those sitting in the café, or hearing a guitar pass its time, need not necessarily have to receive or hear the siren’s message – the message is directed mainly at traffic, at the realm of the street and its vehicles, and yet the siren ricochets, through a radical propagation. And maybe, on another semantic layer, the siren is a social reminder to the community of city dwellers that others are suffering. That the city, while being a space of vitality, haphazard and makeshift, syncopated and synchronous, overlapped and commingling, is also a dangerous place, dangerous according to the very same rhythms and pulses, the very same magic that makes this guitar, this overpass, this mysterious orchestration, possible and potent.

May 06: Transmission from the front-lines of language #2

The man sits and stares into the blankness of a blank day – an interval bracketing minutes of too many movements
The woman grabs her coffee, sips the hot drink and places the cup back on the wooden table, back onto the damp ring where it had rested before
The door remains open, a whiff of spring blossoms riding on the fumes breezing in from the street and its mechanics of flesh and metal
Bored out of my mind, on this drifting day in Berlin, nothing to do and waiting for something, the imminence of sudden rapture, the question of possible constructions, meetings with different names and the rush of bearing witness to the making of certain happenings – figures that reflect the passion for other songs.
Someone walks in carrying a balloon, looking all funny and giddy – he smiles at me and I look down
Another coffee, another woman, ripping sugar packets and sipping past stirring sticks that always get in the way of a searching tongue
The window contains no new view, double reflections of possible daydreams and the lurking distance
Arriving in Halle (Salle) Germany yesterday, on a dull afternoon, the radio in the taxi eases into

Don't know much about history,
Don't know much biology.
Don't know much about a science book,
Don't know much about the french I took.
But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be.

What keeps me company during this ordinary hour, what hand do my thoughts (which are not really thoughts) grab onto, upon which medium does one gain orientation, locating the invisible compass that keeps us on track, within bounds, at least for a moment, before slipping again, before getting tripped up along the lines of too many wonders… Sam Cooke’s lyrics, of his Wonderful World, comes splashing in, with a sudden clarity, making my taxi drive a magic carpet ride and Halle a sudden bliss of certain beauty – I believe every word…
No more coffee today, the empty cup catching reflections from that street, that other view, casting a tiny world onto the chipped enamel table
Between words and feeling, between Sam’s science book and the hopeful passion of song, the body smiles, turning the I into what Hélène Cixous names “seeinghearing” – a writing blindly which for her is a step into battle with language and the Phallic Performing Theater that keeps Sam outside –

I don't claim to be an 'A' student
But I'm tryin' to be.
For maybe by being an 'A'-student, baby,
I can win your love for me.

Hélène is on the border, like Sam, occupying the white gaps lurking under every sentence, that open white nothing where every letter could creep, if directed by the spirit of other visions, if directed by Sam’s A-student philosophy, of baby-cakes and love’s own geometry: Sam writes blindly,

Don't know much about geography,
Don't know much trigonometry.
Don't know much about algebra,
Don't know what s slide rule is for.
But I know that one and one is two,
And if this one could be with you,
What a wonderful world this would be.

Hélène and Sam take a ride out of town, past Millie’s diner, and out into the countryside, through the farms of Mississippi where Sam used to sing gospel – where he learned the power of language, stealing words from the great Book to fashion forms of salvation from America’s hell (at least that is what he tells Hélène on this bright afternoon as the farms trail out into sprinkles of overgrown plots of land, forests creeping back in, edging against the edge of town like a swarm of slow wasps) – Hélène and Sam hold hands, sipping their coffee (I thought I saw them walk in, just a minute ago, all smiles and laughter…); Sam reaches down to turn on the radio, and Hélène laughs when the song comes on, as she remembers how she loved this one as a kid, dancing in the back garden in Algiers where she grew up, stealing French from the great book of the state to fashion her own, a tapestry of jewish mysticism-arab activism-french philosophy… her writing the body.
The taxi arrives before the song ends, and I hate to get out, to leave this drive on this nothing day, to close the book before I’ve had the chance to read the ending