Azimuth

THE ECOLOGY

 OF AN EAR

Edited by Patrick Farmer

After Mary Oliver
(1935-2019)
 Published by SARU 2019
Printed by Footprint Worker’s Co-Op

©2019 each author and artist

Please do not reproduce content

without prior consent from contributors

Cover by Susana Gómez Larrañga

ISBN: 978-1-9996176-3-9

www.sonicartresearch.co.uk
www.footprinters.co.uk


10 - 11 ... Invite

Susana Gómez Larrañga - Ruins in reverse

Azimuth. Separation
Drawings by Lotti V Closs, text by Patrick Farmer

16 - 18 ... Pinnae
19 - 21 ... Ear canal
22 - 24 ... Tympanic membrane
25 - 26 ... Eustachian tube
27 - 29 ... Ossicles, Malleus, Incus, Stapes
30 - 31 ... Oval window
32 - 33 ... Round window
34 - 36 ... Cochlea
37 - 39 ... Basilar and Reissner’s membranes, Perilymph & Endolymph
40 - 41 ... Stereocilia
42 - 43 ... Organ of Corti
44 - 45 ... Otolith organs, Saccule, Utricle
46 - 47 ... Otoconia
48 - 49 ... Semicircular canals
50 - 51 ... Cochleovestibular nerve

52 - 53 ... Glossary

57 - 138 ... Patrick Farmer - Wingless flying is cruel amusement. Liminal

139 - 143 ... References

 Palinode. Aggregation
147 - 149 ... Thomas Martin Nutt - Pinnae
151 - 155 ... Richard Skelton - Ear canal
157 - 163 ... Carrie Olivia Adams - Tympanic membrane
165 - 167 ... Helen Frosi - Stereocilia
169 - 170 ... April Van Winden - Eustachian tube
173 - 177 ... Florence Sunnen - Ossicles
179 - 183 ... Lance Austin Olsen - Ossicles
185 - 190 ... Tomoé Hill - Oval window
193 - 197 ... Chloë Proctor - Round window
199 - 204 ... Nisha Ramayya - Cochlea
207 - 210 ... J.R. Carpenter - Basilar membrane
213 - 215 ... Hannah Dargavel-Leafe - Perilymph & Endolymph
217 - 219 ... Mirella Salamé - Reissner’s membrane
221 - 223 ... Julia Bloch - Stereocilia
225 - 227 ... Michael Pisaro - Organ of Corti
229 - 231 ... Clara de Asís - Otolith organs
233 - 241 ... Patrick Farmer - Otoconia
243 - 245 ... Fay Zmija Nicolson - Stereocilia
247 - 250 ... Tess Denman-Cleaver - Semicircular canals
253 - 257 ... Joseph Clayton Mills - Cochleovestibular nerve

258 - 261 ... Thomas Martin Nutt - Topography of Sound

262 - 265 ... Amelia Ishmael - Bring your ear near this abyss
266 - 274 ... Emily Leon - Sonic Selves and the Rune-Filled Ear
276 - 283 ... Patrick Farmer - Up to our ears in the world

284 - 289 ... Biographies

10

Invite

Whereas a ‘sound’ was really within the midst of this intense engagement with
everything: with all the noise that you’ve ever heard. You struggle somehow
to make a difference, so to speak, within that noise. And that difference isn’t
necessarily about you as an individual, it’s much more simply about trying
to augment and to differentiate what’s around you. And that’s what sound is
for me.

Fred Moten
 11

I’ve been working on a sister-publication to Listening and its not these last few
months, titled Azimuth (an arc marking the distance of a star from the north
or south point of the meridian / the three-dimensional positionality of sound
localisation).

Azimuth is fifteen attempts to locate and rend the human/nonhuman ear into
fragments, isolating and being with its forms and natures outside of their
conventional relations–inhabiting a distinct violence of separation–in order
to see what, if any, degree of wholeness may arise in the distinct noise of the
particulars.

I have been writing these parts into a kind of maturation, just as the artist Lotti V
Closs has been drawing them, and now I’d like to send each part to people who
will in turn respond, to the text and/or drawings of the ear, in whatever medium/s
and modes––fabulations and speculations, with the ear and its relations, directly
or indirectly––they wish, providing they are able to be published.

Once all the responses have been received, the ear (no small matter, an efficacious
outcome of little perceptions) will be pieced back together in a different, if not
metaphysical, morphology. The ear as publication. The ear as place.

I will be writing something of an introduction over the coming months, a means

to respond to the ear’s subsequent arrangement, to consider the potentially new
forms and natures of the organ as multiplicitous; as if this new and partial ear
could be made of something other than atoms.

I’d be very happy if you’d consider responding to the ‘. . . ’ fragment, and in light
of this think about, in whatever fashion fits (though please don’t feel the need to
follow these curiosities). What is the ear. Where is the ear. Who is the ear. What
are we to our ears. Are we listeners or listening. Does the ear hear. The ear as
interlocutor. As equivalence. As a sum of parts independent from the whole. As
eros (hear us).

I don’t see this as a matter of archaeological passion, nor romantic sentiment,

but a desire to live within the body like an environment, to move in and out of
it–oneself or another–not to break into it.

I’d like to leave the experience and interpretation of responding as open as

possible. Though we can discuss any potential boundaries with regard to the
materiality of publication should you wish.
Azimuth
 You won’t recognise your house.

Big Thief
16

Pinnae
 17

A pinna is a net of ridges and furrows. It resides on the body and opens
to whorls of sound. Another way of thinking about it is as an old wing
overlooked by its shadow, a particular visibly indivisible. It is the beginning
of nothing, and if it could speak, it would say everything could be otherwise.

The outer ear is not random. The human pinna twists and folds in such a
way that it enhances sound within seams typical of the human voice, a range
many humans care about. The nets amplify vibrations up to 100 times their
former extent; they don’t snag, as much as filter.

Vibrations from front and sides are welcomed by the pinnae, those circling
from the back are reduced, creating small differences in volume. Pinna, along
with horn and shell, is the offspring of libra. Environments enter as different
fulcrums of space-time. Pinnae sift location from incipient place.

Remingtonocetids had short legs, long tails, and snouts, some were the size
of river otters. They retained their air-filled ear canal, for hearing on land,
whilst underwater vibrations strained fast through a fat pad in the lower jaw.
This fullsome thing, this jellied lobe, could regulate body temperature.

Pinna is a type of zoology. We are more than used to the term and can die
from such things. Auricle is another name and is redolent of a schism once
closed by the wing, a facet of human exceptionalism. Pinnae seep out from
worts, burrs, and nests, wet black seeds decked amidst flowing pampas hairs.

Basilosaurids were glorious and snake-like, possessed tiny hand-limbs, and

couldn’t leave the water. Growing up to eighteen feet in length, they possessed
air-filled sacs to insulate each meatus from the world, enabling directional
hearing underwater as sound scattered like pollen in the air.

Monotremes lack pinna. If we were to only see the gross morphology of their
inner ear, it would be difficult to recognise them as mammalian. We linger
amongst these spirals, idly passing successive bifurcations of form. Observing
the pinnae, we might learn to be at rest in a room.
18

Pinnae correspond. A spider’s web, partially to catch nutrition. The antennae

of insects, to receive signals. The shell of a paper nautilus, to provide safety
and buoyancy. The infinite silence of Giacomo Leopardi’s lonely hillside,
imperceptibly unfurling like the fiddle-head of a fern.

An articulate middle ear and a coiled cochlea are not consequences of being
a mammal. This is closer to the wholeness of being, a wholeness barely held
together by listening and translating, corresponding and reciprocating. There
is nothing inevitable about the evolution of mammalian hearing.
 19

Ear
canal
20

The resonating ear canal is when the acoustics of pressure and wave begin
their folding. Consisting primarily of bone, fibre, and cartilage, populated by
yellow life, we might say that it is one of the smallest canals in the world, it
could well be the most abundant.

When a ‘typical’ mammal is submerged, water fills the ear canal and the
entire skull vibrates, diminishing the ability to locate pelt and pole. Whale’s
ears were remade to regain the ability to hear clearly underwater, to pinpoint
the direction and location of light-sound that is all-life.

The structure of the ear canal is apparently the same in all mammals. It
appears, a slight curve in its tube, extending inward from the floor of the
pinna, and ends blindly at the tympanic membrane. This triangle is beautiful,
solid, and radiant; it is populated with night-time imaginings.

Crocodilians posses a complex network of airspaces that connect the ears on

either side of the head by means of a bony canal that runs over the brainpan.
A similar connection between the two ears occurs in birds. This allows for an
internal acoustic network and a love of the ears.

Round sound, ballooning out from its sources, further accommodates

a directional response from the tympanic membrane to enhance sound
localisation. A canal is a term of enticement, the meatus wants to be a wing
and so settles for a well, like two palms barely cupping.

The ear canal flies in splays of overlapping planes between the first and
second pharyngeal arches, corporeal ruins framed by bead-planes. The
tympanic membrane sprang up between these portals, drinking the air before
it as a first radiance.

At its apex–a ceiling of bone, the convexity of which is upwards and

backwards–the canal is inhabited by an isthmus filled with overlapping and
microscopic bed creatures. On occasion, life can be felt in the smell of sound
and the wilderness of chemicals. Our early morning marrow.
 21

Our amphibious natures dance about this confined sphere like hyaline
masses. Faceless waves and dark corpuscular lights pass in a zigzag quiver
under an auricular breach of stratified minerals reflected back as we burst
appositions of field, line and foot. The canal does not like insects.
22

Tympanic
membrane
 23

The tympanic membrane is neither parallel nor at right angles to a specified

or implied line; in other words, it slants. It is not a plane surface, but inward.
A pearly-grey membrane, slightly glistening in its obliquity, it constitutes one
of many porous and unstable borders.

A highly differentiated disc of thin, nonglandular skin, the tympanic middle

ear evolved independently at least five times in turtles, lepidosaurs, archosaurs,
and the synapsid ancestors of mammals. Losing the tympanic middle ear has
been referred to as earlessness.

In ‘Tympan’, Derrida argues that the membrane’s position at the border

between the ear canal and the middle ear is emblematic of philosophy’s
effort to think its other. The control organ of ‘différance’, so-called, is the
same thickness as this paper.

One of the effects of its obliqueness is an increase in the surface of impression

and the capacity of vibration. It has been thought that precision of hearing is
in direct proportion to the obliqueness of the tympanum. To be tympanic is
to be convex, to be membranous is to be fluid.

A bird that opens its beak wide enough when displaying can change the
tension of its ear drum, reducing the ability to hear its own call. In Tympan,
philosophy is configured as a form of the ear that has learned to tune out
everything but the sound of its own name.

As a bird calls, new energy is given to the notion of listening louder. We

might consider the tympanic membrane a mimic, an invisible lyrebird or an
echo, a valve of the hearing heart. We may even call a stretched tympanic
membrane a psychopompos, an ethos calling for its character.

The membrane has been called the organ of proximity, measuring a

difference of what is ‘proper’ to oneself, and to the realm of the other. It is
enmeshed in a peckered language of holes that encircle and drink from the
cracks in our vocabularies.
24

The oil from the crushed bulb of Narcissus was thought to cure affections of
the ear. This may hold for a punctured tympanum if, as Denise Riley said,
thought is truly a bone. The tympanum squints its aperture under canopies
of mackled light. It is a framed cloth that watches over its fields.

During the Triasic, mammals underwent a metamorphosis of the jaw, a

morphological spike that created depth at the back of the mouth. In this way,
only mammals established a middle ear with three ossicles, like Beatrice’s
train, conducive to the evolution of high-frequency hearing.
 25

Eustachian
tube
26

The Eustachian tube connects crack and crust of the middle ear and the
mouth cavity along increments of gaping and collapsing. It makes it possible
for air pressure to walk a straight line on both sides of the filmy tympanic
membrane, quivering whilst destabalising flow.

The air in the middle ear is not in direct contact with the atmosphere outside
the body, and so the Eustachian tube is a link to other mediums and matters.
Sky and water, flying and diving. It tells us the air the eyes see through is
constantly spiralling, that the mouth is the smallest of springs.

Polypterus have tiny holes in the tops of their heads called spiracles. Small
valves open a bony lid over these notches, allowing air to be pumped in and
sucked out each time a fish surfaces. These holes evolved to become the
Eustachian tube, a place where the ear is a ceremony of the throat.

Immersions of combed mucosa brace the bridges that hold the bounds that
sink. A pleurisy of vibrations through the brain became the plaything of the
spiracle canal. Its lines crosshatched and stratified. A marvel of the world.
Asclepian bindweed smothering and sinking the poles.

We don’t often hear our bodies feeding on elements and memories of

experience, a moment where membranes billow like smoke. Contemplating
the ear, quartering a shadow to release its scent, we consider why we listen,
what listening means, what we want, what we’re listening to.
 27

Ossicles

Malleus
Incus
Stapes
28

The ossicles evolved from the lower jawbone of amniotes. We imagine the
inner voices of such creatures produced and received in the same place.
When arranged together, the ossicles look like a rhizome of ginger. They
move like a moorhen washing in dark water.

The malleus, or hammer, lifts from the tympanic membrane within the
fragility of the middle ear suspended by ligaments in an air space. Its other is
attached to the incus within a confusion of names. The hammer has a neck
and evolved from vertebrates that laid their eggs on land.

The middle ear once had a function in support of the jaw. The malleus
sprouted from the jaw joint and remained attached for the first half of
mammalian evolution. It now has a long arm, a bony wing, a will that knows
how to bend and bear the world’s weight.

The incus, or anvil, receives lateral vibration from the malleus, which it then
transmits to the stapes, a seashell white of the lily-faced stirrup. It seems
foolish to consider this process to be linear in itself. Just as the hammer has a
neck, the anvil has limbs, and thinks.

The ossicles are a distortion of many bodies. The stirrup wants to break a
window that wants to be broken, yet it cannot, because it’s the smallest and
lightest bone in the body. The window is an illusion of language. The stapes
has a head, and is a voyeur. It stands.

Middle ear responses are influenced by the ability of the inner ear to process
the frequencies being transmitted. Where the ossicles are called a chain, it
seems fit to call them a line. A journey of particles between the eyes of night
as gravity’s tail plucks the salt in the stars.

The handle of the malleus is sometimes noted as a reddish-yellow streak.

If we traverse the bone, part of the ossicular line, we note that its extreme
end, in the sense of its infinitesimal nature, is a little white and rounded
prominence. A bound Hermes. A wingless Iris.

In most therian mammals the middle ear is encased in a bony structure

called the auditory bulla, a dark space, the floor of the middle ear cavity.
This protects middle ear tissue and developed early in therian evolution. It is
also a genus of hermaphrodite sea snails and is Spanish for noise.
 29

The composition of auditory bulla in mammals is variable within a circle

of elective affinities known as a tympanic ring. Certain mammals, such as
shrews and some talpid moles, live in the folds of auditory bulla, and have
only partially enclosed ears. This is another kind of beauty.
30

Oval
window
 31

The oval window is a masked aperture through which vibrations travel from
the ossicular pivot. The ear is numerous boundaries. A gene of a pulsar. A
spore of an electron. A ghost that speaks in the voice of another–facilitating
listening by listening less–as ghosts must do again, what gives them pain.

The oval window first appeared in cartilaginous fishes. Through this

windowless window vibration reaches and ratches in ogival pitches. After
being thrown at a pace by the ossicular root structure it fills up reniform holes
having grown younger.

The ancestral inner ear was a parameningeal vesical in which sound learnt
how to swim as vibration began to maturate. Ecotones grow the oval window
like light spins matter. Aggregates fall through an enfolding ellipsis of arrows
in invisible water.

The inner ear first appeared prior to the Ordovician period, during which
invertebrate sea-dwelling creatures were the predominant life form. It
developed as an infolding of the lateral line system of fishes. Everything is
emerging to the sound of its own vertiginous attraction.

To form the window, the world moves with the window. By merging at
the apex of the helicotrema (the hole of the coil we could call a place, a
geometrical perspective, a quavering third position), the view renders a scene
where vibration and sound uncoil in strange togetherness.
32

Round
window
 33

The round window is a membrane that fluctuates between transparent

and translucent states of compression and fluidity. It is in the vicinity of
the cochlear aqueduct, a communicating tubule in between the cochlea’s
perilymph and cerebrospinal fluid.

A duct funnels pressure changes from the oval to the round window and is
separated by an elevation called the promontory. These eccentric geometries
follow the trajectory of helix virgata, the shape of the world that maturates into
love darts of chemical frets and labyrinthine handfuls.

The promontory is a bright, eccentric time spot, a blank tablet, an erasure of

stillness discussed as mind moves, as time forests, as organs resist each other
like words placed together, words that listen to each other beyond sentences,
old dance floors beautiful in the dark.

The round window is not round. It acts round so that audition can right itself.
As the stapes shouts a solid pressure beyond the oval window, the round
window shells the involucrum of vibration, forcing the displacement of fluid
within the cochlea and the further stimulation of the hair cells.

The mechanics of the round window affect the spin of the basilar membrane.
This plays an important role in the life of sound as it circles the cochlea.
However, no precise measurement of such properties has been accepted
because of the round window’s compass and temperament.

The window looks out over subarachnoid space, a mesh of tender and tough
mothers. Anatomic vortices envelop the brain and spinal cord via the bore
diameter of a fluid duct, which extends beyond the edges of the ear and
collapses the body like the sun cracks a seed.

Roundness has limited space to spin. There is a fine view if one can see past
the ciliated cells, inconclusive gestures, illusory objects, and failed shapes. We
imagine sound as an endless pattern of concentric spirals, gyrating a life of
the ear as if it were a moss filled body of primordial waters.
34

Cochlea
 35

Life curves whilst the cochlea, a conical helix where hearing is said to reside,
makes no provision for sunlight, encased as it is within a bony matrix. From
here, sound begins to make its nest in every variety of festoon, scroll, garland,
and coil.

The human cochlea is a home of 2 1/2 curves, a wayward and itinerant coil,
an ecology of resemblance to much of the visual world. If we consider the
sound of the space-place and time-place, and not just the essential form, we
reach for the mysteries of its mass in a skein of incipient relations.

The screw-shaped cochlea is not archetypically mammalian. The concentric

sum of cochlear coiling exists in sutured space that is wound because as
bipeds we detached ourselves from the innate time of the earth just like the
moon detached itself from the ocean. Both went elsewhere.

All vertebrates possess a basic inner ear design that houses the auditory and
vestibular sensory epithelia in a capsule called the otic labyrinth. It is a place
of nothing but turnings and crooked by-ways, a bewilderment of a seemingly
infinite number of twistings, sinuousities, and turn-agains.

The amplitude range of the cochlea evolves in response to the loudest sounds
of an environment: hoards and lowbursts of thunderstorms, hand dryers,
inner voices, blue light falling from felled trees, volcanic eruptions, millions
of sparrows, meteors, and the genitals of water boatmen.

The modern cochlea can recognise the separate vibrations of a sound,

pulling apart and recomposing its own hydrogen atoms, holding lives of
oscillating corpuscles. Any sound that has travelled through the brain can be
remembered.

The lateral line receptor, one of the earliest sensory end organs, can be traced
back to the armoured fishes of the Silurian period, 400 million years ago.
The lateral line and inner labyrinth joined in spiral brain-stem projections
and carved the structural foundations of the cerebellum.
36

The modern cerebellum, a little brain that is also a little ear, is dependent
upon reciprocal interaction with the otoliths and canals. It helps to keep our
bodies upright as we imperceptibly sway to vertiginous echoes and walk like
puckered cymatic symmetries.

If hearing resides in the cochlea, we imagine that it moves as slowly as the

snail from which the structure takes its name. Leaving trails of películas,
webs of vibrating mucus, among the spirals. The cochlea is its own resonant
frequency. The gradual accumulation of everything that is heard in a life.
 37

Basilar
and
Reissner’s
membranes

Perilymph
&
Endolymph
38

A central lining of the cochlea, the basilar membrane is the indistinguishable

fibre of space-place opening time-place, a gelatinous vehicle of revelation.
Low frequencies (Emersonian rays of relation) conduct and roam its apex.
High frequencies (the beauty of influence), its base.

Perilymph and endolymph are the fluid health of possibility beyond singular
perception. In cycles and increments of sodium and potassium, patterns of
bubbling intervals stitch aspiration to capriciousness. These fluids are black
and white stones and absorb nothing.

Spinoza felt that there is much to be seen in animals that we struggle to

see. The human and dolphin cochlea are the same length, but the basilar
membrane in dolphins is half as wide as that in humans, creating a difference
in upper frequency response that far surpasses human sagacity.

The basilar membrane is not uniform. Its presence in the ear keeps hair
cells in accord with perilymph and endolymph. Its expanding structure
extends like Leonora Carrington’s hearing trumpet, replete with its spiralling
passages, or even Toyen’s collages for Annie Le Brun.

Reissner’s membrane is a tonotopic map within the cochlea that also

separates the ear’s canals of calcium and potassium, balance and hearing,
fresh water and salt. It slants at an angle of 45 degrees and its acoustic fibres
are stimulated by both air and bone through fields of ligamentous spirals.

The membrane is thin and porous, nutrients gather there like lateral mudslides
as ecotones sing microscopic confusion from its auditory teeth. Glossolalia of
light parts mammalian lips, vibrating slime in which vibrating begins. As it
survives, it destroys itself.

The inner ear is ink thin. Osseus and membranous felicity. One dreams the
other’s abyss, perilous to the end. Chemicals suck the spine’s nodules, leaving
fissures like the hammered diamonds of silver birch. A life sustained by the
entangled filigrees of subarachnoid space.

Atmospheric pressure shudders the vestibular end organs for depth and
acceleration like the pell-mell flight of a young mole in the ideality of
complete dark. If endolymph catches the judder, we face a distorted sense of
motion, a splitting orientation, in which sound imitates itself.
 39

Sound is a sort of spider watering its web, a bluish transparency of boiled

cartilage that is a torn immanence, an anamorphic distortion in line and
language. The cavity of the skull is the innards of gossamer, successive whorls
of helices from which we uncoil our tales.
40

Stereocilia
 41

Hair cells connote immense complexity. Arranged and projected like 15,000
relationships of motile flasks, tubes, and staircases creaking under the motion
of bodies in motion. Unravelling to the sound of proteins unravelling. Shifting
one flex with another, like lawless lateral mountains.

Hearing and balance rely on mechano-sensory hair cells. Tufts of stereocilia

shelter our ears from storm and spiss. Deflection of stereocilia is a common
mechanism by which all hair cells transduce mechanical forces, a viscosity of
clews, both mechanism and nature.

Relation upon relation of these hairs can be found in the organs of Corti,
otoliths, and semicircular canals. Models of tenuity and compactness, the
population of hair cells in an inner ear is less than photoreceptors in a retina,
chemoreceptors in a nose, eggs in a male seahorse.

Composed primarily of cytoplasm, their displacement through mechanical

to electrochemical conduction causes a runoff in the opening and closing of
ion channels. A meeting of atomic currents passes below a suspension of self,
an offering of carrion.

Mechanosensation accumulated before ears unfolded. The microsensory

bristles of fruitflies, and microtubulate mechanosensors of nematodes,
developed cells grouped into gelatinous cupular organs similar to those of
the gridded lateral lines and nacreous curvature of labyrinths.

Hair cells stem from otic placodes, from a thickening of things. With the
evolution of vertebrates came the folds of neural crest cells, giving rise to
sensory cells, spreading among bodies they partially invent. Motion and
mass, mysterious as the dreams of a nautilus shell.
42

Organ
of
Corti
 43

The organ of Corti–poised above the basilar membrane like a samara above
a squirrel–is an organ inside the cochlea duct. It is full of people, and draws
the shape of the ear in the ear. Thinking this way, we might say that Alfonso
Corti first noticed himself around 1851.

In this place, sensibility is constantly discovering its own denudation. The

hairs that project from the cells of the organ have been compared to fingers,
they are the offspring of tentacles and wings. Thousands of assiduous
appendages versed in the tuning of transduction.

Its infinitesimal events are molecular worlds extracting energy from sound
like light drinking shadow. Corti’s organ is buoyant in its potassium infused
endolymph, bordered by channels of perilymph. It is surrounded by the
resonance of tympani and the patience of vestibule.

The basilar papilla is the auditory sensory organ of amphibians and birds,
the organ of Corti is its echo. Prestin is the oxygen of cochlear amplification,
a motor protein that changes its shape based on the voltage inside of a hair
cell, running sideways along tapering rungs.

This organ, a creeping fig that hears, is yet another boundary. We may
consider the notion of such supposed terminals as almost meaningless,
perceiving them instead as arterial forms and midstream natures, imaginal
stages composed like funnel web spiders spinning in low orbit above faultlines.

Coiling minimises distances between afferent fibres meeting along different

positions in the organ of Corti, this stabalises travel times for signals. We
imagine such processes of audition as akin to the social calamity of Beckett’s
Mercier and Camier, as cobble and vigil, voltage and curdle.

Arr. Dep. Arr. Dep. Arr. Dep. Arr.

Prestin 9.05 9.10 9.25 9.30 9.40 9.45 9.50
Hair Cell 9.15 9.20 9.35 9.40 9.50
44

Otolith
organs

Saccule
Utricle
 45

As we walk under the moon, you crane your head to hear my feet. The
vestibule of your inner ear, home of the otolith organs, swings like ideas of
line that hum in blue light, slides over circles of bone. The saccule (skylight)
responds to vertical spur, the utricle (cellar door), to horizontal speed.

The mammalian cochlea was preceded by more ancient cochlear structures

and evolved in parallel to equivalent organs in amphibians, birds, and lizards.
The faint oscillation of an otolithic covering is a botanic affinity, a cycle of
scorpion grass and scattered butterflies. Zero one way. Zero the other.

These organs are an abyss of galaxies seemingly smaller than we can observe.
Otoconia are infinitesimal crystals that cling to the surface of space, a
conjunction that is a mutual deepening, loosely bound by the enormity of
matrix material. A hole pushing the brain up gravity’s imagination.

The behaviour of the crystals gives new life to the age old notion that the
world is sound. But what is sound? An intrinsic layering of immanence
through a life in between vertiginous potentials of walking in a straight line
whilst turning.

These organs are a vital part of the developing system of combination and
replacement between the biological particularities of life and death. They
present the possibility that conscious sensation and affect might arise not only
from motion but also from loss or gain in otoconial mass.
46

Otoconia
 47

Individual otoconia are often cylindrical in shape and have pointed ends
formed by the intersection of rhombohedral and cylindrical facets. They
herd in light-space aggregates of tiny bolides and time-spots toward a place
where duality begins to forget its terse dimensionality.

David Hubbard pointed at a paradox. Had nature intended true ear stones
of unchanging characteristics, a single large crystal with maximum mass
and smallest surface area might have been designed. Instead we exist within
millions of small crystals, the vital life of otoconial grief wings.

Rising and falling from the calcareous mulch hooks of the otolith organs, ot +
konis, they are the ooze of flying mineral reactions, arbiters in stratified veils.
A depthless psychology, their time casts a strangely tranquil light that is inside
a thing’s outside.

Hubbard saw the otolith crystals as physical particles which symbolically

represent the outer world. An organ through which gravity speaks. They exist
in a state of dynamic equilibrium with their fluid environment, incipiently
registering the effects of gravity upon the brain.

The otoconial shoal does not transform into a finished state that would
remain unaltered throughout a life, but churn their own flux within the wider
labyrinth, wherein every detail of their structure works to accommodate the
existence of the chemical cloud-mould of audition.

Otoconia mark a threshold of human identity, across which pass the processes
that enable us to have our being. They are the natural movements of the soul
that, according to Simone Weil, are controlled by laws analogous to those of
physical gravity. These drifting radiolaria are the time of the earth.
48

Semicircular
canals
 49

The semicircular canals are nouns of floating hours. Three vertical birds
of the ear above three horizontal rivers that span the length and breadth of
the body. They are the curved sounds of the world that belong to no one in
particular. An asceticism amidst the abundance.

The semicircular canals are inertial sensors of rotation. The crista of the
canals, a cone-shaped spinning top, has its favourite frequencies. Its dynamics
are such that it functions best at a range of 0.012hz-27hz. Much lower than
the range of sound frequencies that stimulate the human cochlea.

J.R. Ewald wrote a few ‘laws’ concerning his observations of the inner ear in
the mid 1800s, one of which goes: “A stimulation of the semicircular canal
causes a movement of the eyes in the plane of the stimulated canal.” Marie
Flourens came to the same conclusion. Both used barbaric methods.

Pietro Tullio was another sump of surgical synergy experimenting with sound
as stimuli in the labyrinths of pigeons. He carved a window with no view into
their semicircular canals, observing eye and head nystagmus–a kind of vitus
in the eye–within the plane, the fenestra, of the demolished canal.

The movement of liquids through the canals reflects the movement of the
whole body. Sunlight spins inside a star. They act as a compass for the ‘house
door’. Thus we might consider the body an incipient burrow, and the canal,
a partial negation of exceptionalism.

The capsules branch and distend like a composition by Alexander Rodchenko,

or perhaps one of Konstantin Medunetsky’s constructions Along such planes
the senses spill and swim like a dehiscent welt of pink marrow, calcareous
deposits of future life and openness.

Jakob Von Uexküll felt that all animals in possession of three semicircular
canals have ‘available’ a three-dimensional effect space. Hearing such things
we consider ourselves ‘humanimals’, a means, according to Donna Haraway,
of paying attention to co-making.
50

Cochleovestibular
nerve
 51

The pillars and tunnels of the organ of Corti lead to a space in which perhaps
no one will ever really live. Blackness plunges out of it and goes elsewhere. It
never really arrives, but it continues. Listen: I let you be, therefore let me be.
Words herein begin our dissolve.

Arborising around cells like a thousand dendritic Demeters, these nerves are
the harvest of hearing and balance. The vestibular nerve’s primary role is to
transform vibration’s gate into an egocentric frame of reference based on the
position of the head in relation to the body.

The cochlear nerve carries auditory-sensory information from the cochlea

directly to the brain. The cracks along the core of the nerve look like a rope
of mud towers in ectoplasmic puddles that pull dark from light and suck vines
from bark.

When viewed together they appear as a vast mass of intraganglionic spiral

bundles churning around an ardent pillar. Mewling sensory neurons wander
from the nest of the inner ear to the nervous system. To listen is to transmit
to organisms helically closed in on themselves.

The cell bodies of the cochlear nerve form spirals and knots in a slight
haziness against a single point, close against its wall, lined with enamel and
gold. The horde of its vivacious motes exit the cochlea base in contractive
effort, a conjunction of interwoven occupation with vestibular nerves.

The mammalian auditory system is a quinquncial garden enfolding the

calcyces of Held, blind tails of flamboyant sepals releasing axons of sound-
pollen that span the globes of cochlear nucleus and trapezoid body. Laps and
lanterns reveal these tiers of interaural capability.

Sunlight lands upon lichen suckered through audible marrow. Here is where
there and when. The ear makes its abode with joy. Sound stems with sensory
and psychological life, rumbles along clusters of brains, sends spores of
patterns into different hemispheres like the bare feet of memories.
52

Glossary
Amniotes.
A clade of tetrapod vertebrates comprising the reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Amniotes lay their eggs on land or retain the fertilised egg within the mother
and are distinguished from the anamniotes (fishes and amphibians), which
typically lay their eggs in water.

Basilosaurids.
A group of extinct cetaceans that lived during the late middle Eocene.

Crista.
The sensory organ of rotation. Found in the ampullae of each of the
semicircular canals of the inner ear.

Chondrichthyes.
A class that contains the cartilaginous fishes: they are jawed vertebrates
with paired fins, paired nares, scales, a heart with its chambers in series, and
skeletons made of cartilage rather than bone.

Crocodilians.
An order of mostly large, predatory, semiaquatic archosaurian reptiles that
first appeared around 95 million years ago.

Cupular organ.
A structure in the vestibular system providing the sense of spatial orientation.

Diverticulum.
The medical or biological term for an outpouching of a hollow (or a fluid-
filled) structure in the body.

Epithelia.
One of the four basic types of animal tissue, along with connective tissue,
muscle tissue, and nervous tissue.

Meatus.
A natural body opening or canal. The external acoustic meatus is the opening
of the ear canal.
 53

Monotremes.
One of the three main groups of living mammals, along with placentals, and
marsupials.

Ordovician.
A geologic period and system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic
Era. The Ordovician spans 41.2 million years from the end of the Cambrian
Period 485.4 million years ago to the start of the Silurian Period 443.8 million
years ago.

Parameningeal.
Of, or related to, the structures proximal to meninges. The three thin layers
of tissue that cover and protect the brain and spinal cord, pia mater, dura mater,
and subarachnoid space.

Perilymphatic duct.
Where the perilymphatic space (vestibule of the ear) is connected to the
subarachnoid space. This works as a type of shunt to eliminate excess
perilymph fluid from the perilymphatic space around the cochlea of the ear.

Pharyngeal.
The auditory tube, which connects the middle ear to the pharynx, opens into
the nasopharynx. The opening and closing of the auditory tubes serves to
equalise the barometric pressure in the middle ear with that of the ambient
atmosphere.

Polypterus.
A genus of freshwater fish in the bichir family. A fish of many names.

Remingtonocetid.
A diverse group of aquatic mammals of the order Cetacea, literally, huge
fish. Often placed with crocodilians.

Therian.
Therian mammals give birth to live young without a shelled egg.
Patrick Farmer - Wingless flying is cruel amusement
15 holes in between the ear

o An equilibrium caprice o
o Vertigo of the unthought o
o The evening and morning stars are the same o
o A description of stillness o
o Don’t eat your heart o
o Don’t commit a nuisance towards the sun o
o Retention of the form o
o Sound from elsewhere o
o Time is the mind of the stars o
o The motion of light in water o
o This star teaches bending o
o Coma Berenices o
o Hermes dancing o
o The white belly of a spider o
o The more time goes by the more it’s recorded o

Epilogue
An intense engagement
Gertrude Stein and Thomas Bernhard
The whole notion that art, or a more fundamental form of
representation, language, vision, consciousness, obscures and distorts
an otherwise coherent, transcendental reality, is not, to my mind, a
particularly compelling or productive formulation.

Much more intriguing, I think, are the capacities of particular works

to expand, invent, explode, and adumbrate what we mean when we
say reality.

Maggie Nelson

I am no scientist, I explore the neighbourhood. I would like to know

grasses, and sedges, and calm.

Annie Dillard
 57

An equilibrium caprice

You hear the beauty you see the sound.

Gertrude Stein

‘Pavlik, don’t break the object.’ The painter Pavel Tchelitchew would
echo this, through the years, like a cuckoo. According to a lecture
he gave on Gertrude Stein at the Ringling Museum, Sarasota,
the aesthetics of object-breaking was a grave one to his friend and
patron. He maintained that Stein projected a tingling repulsion when
contemplating a broken object. She ‘praised me greatly,’ he said, ‘for
not doing as the Cubists had done.’ Tchelitchew then spun around the
object, instead of bursting through it, administering it as an elective
affinity, orating and painting the physical inviolability of the organic
world, particularly the human body.

That being said. My right ear is broken. My right ear is dead, suspended
in time. Ten years ago Sarah Hughes and I installed a work called
Mr Palomar at Bloc space in Sheffield. After the opening I passed out
and fell, hitting the concrete with my forehead, breaking ribs, popping
nerves in my knee. I had food poisoning, and in an attempt to spin
around it, it had burst through me. Something split wide open, dove
coloured, I lost consciousness and have been told that I was fitting and
convulsing, slapping and chopping like a suffocating fish over stones
losing their brightness.

As I emerged all I can remember is a concrete bell-sound that had

lodged itself in me, its spiralling wail folded, walling me up behind
bones off the latch. Then nothing but a talking-humming tinnitus
that has not abated since. The tinnitus is the only memory I have of
where I went, it is the residue of a sudden flight into nonexistence. I
lost the ability to hear in my right ear and cracked several bones the
58

size of hemispheres, a lyric glow of illness spread through me as an

autophony, a ripped surface of muffled rumblings and torn presences,
a perambulation of corporeal bounds, a cosmos closed laterally.

Three years ago I flew to Japan to perform at the Ftarri Festival. A week
or so after returning home I ran to catch a bus and everything came
to a halt. I burst. My dead ear was suddenly listening to its own decay.
I have since realised amidst the vertigo that it is a self-motile entity of
inconceivable complexity and diversity, a torn stem of inaudible light
that flickers and chews the mulch-membranes of my bodies.

I am alive as long as there is fire in my head. As the shock faded I felt

what I had lost, but I also realised what I had gained. I identify my fall
with Pavel Tchelitchew’s series of painted Celestial Physiognomies1,
psychic bodies from which all wounds have been erased, and with the
upside down faces painted by Rex Whistler, shown to me by a friend
after telling her how I often feel like my skull stays at the top of a flight
of stairs as I reach the bottom. At such times it’s as if my bones detach
themselves from my body, turning around and upside down, inspite of
the apparent fixity of my frame. This is a bare fact, a strong pressure
now exists in the middle of my head, a sound like a ram’s horn. In
between brain and skull there is a bubble continually expanding to
reduce my life down to its spasm. I am a repoussé head. One may look
inside and see my face from behind, a complex vivisection of anatomy
invested with going and coming, a transmutated network of tough and
tender webs.

As strange as it may sound, occasionally I remember to ask myself if

I’m ill; what this means and what it could mean in the future. About
my limitations, and how I might hear them in order that I may live
with them. “Like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when
you’re little and notice you’re living, the ring which resumes later in

1 This is a term the scholar Parker Tyler uses for many of Tchelitchew’s late works, his “New Zodiac”, a
circle that includes his ‘Spiral Heads’, ‘Torsos’, ‘Paroxysm’, ‘Apoteosi’, and ‘Castagna’, all painted in the
1950s.
 59

life when you’re sick”, as Annie Dillard writes. Foraging amongst the
numerous passages and spectra of the ear can lead to the possibility of
feeling ever more adrift and yet, at that instant, more alive than ever in
a bright unbearable reality.

The aforementioned rupture that now clings to the surface of my

consciousness, I have since discovered, was the manifestation of a latent
congenital misalignment called superior canal dehiscence syndrome;
a pathological condition in which pressure changes drastically affect,
among other, dare I say deeper things, balance and orientation. The
roof of my semicircular canal is missing, and so one of the major
protective mechanisms that prevent sound energy from stimulating
the canal is a ruin. Tullio demonstrated this in his horrendous
experiments with sound as a stimulus for the labyrinth in pigeons after
he fenestrated their semicircular canals. He observed that this caused
eye and head nystagmus, a kind of erratic jumping, in the plane of the
fenestrated canal.

In addition to the oval and round windows, Huizinga proposed that

such fenestra created a third mobile window in the labyrinth. This
window opens another route for sound to fill. It is a hole that tricks
the skull, a pit in which neurons are burnt alive. It is a scorched goat
path that traces a perimeter along which endolymph sinks under the
spagyric influence of fossils. When exposed to loud sound, the exposed
canal, in alchemical autopsy, transmutates one element into another.
The head, still, rotates. The canal, burning, evaporates. The vestibular
system generates a compensatory eye movement as if the head were
turning in place. Resulting, at least for me, in the macabre comedy of
Whistler’s inverted faces.

Dehiscence, coupled with autophony–a condition, like Ovid’s Echo,

that will flick any sound back inside me if it’s pitched louder than the
muttering of a dove–means that I can hear my voice rattling between
the splintered bones that are always trying to pull themselves apart,
that my pulse irradiates any quiescence, that I can hear my eyes move
60

in my ear. My body is a place of conductive hypercusis where sound

energy is admitted more acutely through bone than air. I find that
I often have to shut my eyes in order to protect my ear, the yellow
spot drifting from the middle of the retina, and that this is not just an
auditory condition, even though we may say the violence is ‘located’
there.

An accident–it’s nothing, it’s quite literally nothing.

“Diaphanous”, Michel Serres writes, “the world calms the turbulent

noise of my body”. His organs fall silent, and health supposedly returns.
“Illness comes upon me”, he says, “when my organs can hear each
other”. In his Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, Serres tells of the Asclepion,
the most celebrated healing centre of the classical world. Many people
would spend a night in the enkoimeteria, an enormous sleeping hall,
theatre in the capital of healing that is both a pavilion and an immense
ear.

When the body will not remain silent, what does it hear? Voice?
Language? A fluctuating sum of bodies within bodies? The plurivalent
inhabition of ourselves... The body splits and scars as billions of
biochemical spores and skins release and germinate their contents.
When the body will not remain silent, does it sense its own predation,
is it feeding on its own decay? Asclepius watches the instar, curling
around corporeal thresholds, some coenesthetic subimago. In an
instant, innumerable larval ears contract their muscles and disperse
throughout the body as if it were a drop of water.

Some years ago I went on a field recording trip to the Isle of Grain
on the Hoo Peninsula, just north of Rochester. I was hoping to filter
the hum of the ubiquitous power stations through the conductive
ecotone of the Medway. Bright night time solitudes of herons in the
trees, squealed like vervet monkeys. Straining after tiny sensations, the
pondweed and marsh frogs, as if they were phantoms in the ear.
 61

The silence within the theatre and in the surrounding scrub seeps into
Serres’s skin, bathes and penetrates it, drains vibration from the hollow
of the empty body that releases a low moan into the world as it receives
back an immensity of peace. This is the healing sought from Asclepius
on a winter morning, the silencing of one’s organs in harmony with the
supposed silence around them.

In Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘History of Angels’ we read that the primitive

angels were stars, expert guides through solitude. The grey herons
of Hoo were such guides. In their numbers they were a seraphic
psychopomp of terror that led me to listen louder. A universe in the
sky, a resonance of wings, mirages, and aureoles.

Treatment and amelioration at Epidaurus consisted in the prescription

of sleep and dreams. The patient was required to hear the sounds their
sick body was emitting. They left, healed, if they had silenced their
organs. The body’s magnificent capacity for subliminal sound-making
is a roar our proprioceptive ear sometimes strains to hear, billions
upon billions of cells, the microbiome, so dedicated to biochemical
reactions, the likes of which, Serres aptly states, “should have us all
fainting from their collective hum”.

As I was walking around Cliffe Pools on the western side of the peninsula,
the sun had seized hold of the air and would not let it go. Amidst this
thickness I heard a sound that was like a thousand tiny explosions in
the face. I was in a kind of accidental harmony with the environment
around me. Walking into the bushes with the microphone, I realised
that the myriad gorse pods were popping, displaying what’s known
botanically as dehiscence. They were casting seeds from their yellow
berths high into the air. A residua transported in the beaks of birds,
under the feet of walkers and in the clomp of livestock. How many
shoes do we wear out during the course of such assiduity? How many
explosions do we transport wandering these paths? Having seized hold
of sound, we have trouble letting it go.
62

Vertigo of the unthought

I’m not name dropping but locating the Company.

Robert Creeley

A couple of years ago I was gifted a Bakelite model of the inner ear,
the yolk of a plastic cephalopod, one side reaching for the other in
curling fronds that increase the distance between balance and sound
the more they attempt to close the gap. It showed me, with no degree
of uncertainty, what I was missing. How to forage. How my blood
used to whisper, and how it now shouts. This is, I hope, my way of
listening to that gift, acting as an aggregate of guides that come and
go from the ear. An aggregate that is itself a shade of the Company,
a stream of shared and prolonged experience felt keenly in Creeley’s
poem, ‘Consolatio’:

What’s gone is gone.

What’s lost is lost.

What’s felt is pulse –

what’s mind, what’s home.

Who’s here, where’s there –

what’s patience now.

What thought of all,

why echo it.

Now to begin –
Why fear the end.

Having separated the ear into fifteen guides, making fifteen holes, I set
about writing them isometrically as Lotti V Closs drew them, forming
 63

the nucleus of Azimuth. The guides were then sent out for others to
locate, to articulate and reform, to consider what degree of wholeness
could arise in the distinct and noiseless vapour of the particulars.
The ear has been slowly pieced back together in the formless form of
these returned gifts, ranging from scores for organ to poems for Alice
Coltrane. This new and partial ear feels like a fluctuating balance of
electron clouds and dust motes, a means of observing the obverse, as
the poet Oswald Egger says. Pulling on threads and fascia in order
to release and be there, with all unspooled life, within the isometric
paragraphs and drawings of Azimuth which itself draws from the
responses around increments of lateral temporality. Azimuth is not
concerned with discovering what the ear ‘is’ as much as combining
and recombining the responses as implicate echoes and reflections of
the fluctuating whole. It is in slow pursuit of the variance of perceptual
perspective. Once there, now here, and so on.

Every part of ‘Wingless flying...’ is a different observation of

constellations of writers, fields, and concepts stemming from location,
definition, and their seeming opposites in playful rows of reconciliation
and brief attempts at co-existence. This whole book, then, is concerned
with communication as both location and fluctuation, losing and
fixing, wandering and planting, now one way, now another, following
and adjusting for the movement of things. It’s a getting to know the
neighbourhood, the concrete and the cosmological. It seeks to be part
of an undoing of the normativity that makes many of these terms
legible only when they are set in opposition. We stay still long enough
to see what emerges from the holes.

Each hole in Azimuth is marked by the shadow of its own guide. The
pinnae, cochlea, semicircular canals, tympanic membrane, thousands
of otoconia, all interwoven like stars and their spectra, like Spinozan
bodies flowing at a rate inversely proportional to the distance between
a celestial body and an observer in a condensation of responses.
64

What is it to try and locate oneself in a tangled mass of relations?

A meshwork that exponentially abounds and resides in new and
modulating sounds and residues and memories, where ideas are
equalised in their relevance like nests of strings calling back and forth.
We attempt to listen louder, to listen in sympathy, as one guide helps to
locate the next until decay ensues and we begin again in the thick of the
intermediate, located and lost in the possibility of concentric patterns.
For some, an ear drum may be a loutish guide, but the guide of the ear
drum may well be polite and pensive. We consider that we are readers
disorganised by the one but kept in line by the other and that, in such a
world, the ear acts as a constantly churning environment surrounding
our disembodiment.

Azimuth is a strange and complex word–stranger than we can suppose–

that cannot be located at a point in space-time for long. Astrology is
a science that maintains that the destiny of humans is ruled by the
positions of the stars, studying life’s reactions to planetary vibrations.
An azimuth is the arc marking the distance of a star from the north or
south point of the meridian. It is a sympathetic tool with which to draw
the stars down to earth and into our intentions. It stems from a time
when the planetary bodies were dressed in a neighbourly and even cosy
availability, one just as psychological as physical. An anthropomorphic
universe where the stars were the guides of the astronomer and the
astrologer, the poet and the artist.

In this book I have tended to think of the term, azimuth, as akin to how
Mary Oliver described the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Oliver,
astute as ever, observed that “he never walked in a straight line to get to
the end of his subject, preferring to wander to all sides of an issue”. All
life is this force of endless digression, producing a potential for strange
attachments where the beauty of the moon is very warm and very
near, an omni-direction whereupon, looking up at a star, wandering
along the plane of a shrouded canal, one senses a picture–in the
most elementary sense of a cosmic effect–of which great elasticity of
dimension is the home. Signalling the contiguous partnership of body
 65

and universe, of mystery and ratiocination.

It is of course part of the will and ability of a listener to identify the

location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance, a sort
of happening, immanent in the stimulation of composite bodies both
solid and liquid, membrane and water, compressed and rarefied, sulci
and gyrus. Pinnae are akin to a layering doubleness, nets of inter-aural
time-position, house-doors and pulsing weaves, always hearing more
than appears.

When a sound is produced, when it makes itself known to us, its angle
in relation to the head is referred to as its azimuth, with 0º azimuth
being directly in front, 90º azimuth to the right, 180º directly behind.
What would it be then, to consider the body as pinna, as a wing without
a body? What would this make of the idea of a horizontal (azimuth)
and vertical (elevation) plane? Indicating a measurement of distance
for static sounds and velocity for moving sounds. The azimuth of a
sound is indicative of the difference in arrival times in the pinnae by
the relative amplitude of high-frequency sounds (the so-called shadow
effect) and the asymmetrical spectral reflection from various parts of
our bodies, torso and shoulders in particular. This means that the
auditory system can capitalise on moiré patterns generated by the
torso. Perhaps we are all, then, visible interference.

Where is location amidst such interference? Perhaps it’s the immobility

of everything around us, a state we impose upon things by our certainty
that they are themselves and not others? Marcel Proust said that “we
are not ourselves all the time, and not all our ourselves at any time”,
and so if we consider, as Alfred North Whitehead asks of us, that
everything is everywhere at all times, would every location then involve
an aspect of itself in every other location? Integrated in a company
of complementarity, are we both defined and located, disturbed and
uncertain, placed and displaced?
66

When arranged, the possibilities of this book form a Company

tuned to such oscillating spectra. When taken apart they maintain
an uneasy tension, somewhere in between, as Wallace Stevens says,
“the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order
our imaginations impose upon the world”. To gather together and
rearrange these possibilities is akin to a hope of integration beyond
description, of going inside the description and binding with the germ
of the essential, the living cosmos, the immediacy of relations. To find
the spiral that is everywhere, as it were. The guides, often pointing
directly to themselves, represent many different facets and modes,
reasons and intentions, of listening and being. A relentless plurality
spins its shadows.

Azimuth is the sister of Listening and its not, a book that grew out of
a text score I wrote in 2016, concerned with ways of writing about
listening without writing about listening. They intersect along the lines
of collaboration which have so often articulated the ground on which
I base much of my work. There are many words for collaboration of
course, co-production being one with which I feel a particular kinship,
but recently I’ve taken to thinking about what Audre Lorde calls the
‘Erotic’. This functions for Lorde in several ways, providing the power
which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.
The ‘Erotic’ can be a sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional,
psychic, or intellectual, that forms a bridge between the sharers. A
basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them,
lessening the threat of their difference.

Azimuth is not just an attempt at inner knowledge of the ear. It goes

and comes from the tone rows of variegated speculations concerned
with how light and sound may remake the time of the body outside
of experience. It is a call to rest (aside from motion and amongst the
familiar) where each part is given its repose, an attempt to communicate
with potentials in their own registers. It comes from a very basic need
to listen to others by dismantling the appendage on which I most rely
to communicate. A reminder, as Audre Lorde said, “of our capacity
 67

for feeling”. Writing it has been like pushing skin into bone, affect
into muscle, cartilage into fluid, writing possibilities and relations that
most of us have never seen and probably never will see. Writing about
things immeasurably close and closed off, emptying empty holes into
peripheral extravagances bereft of memory and association.

I read that receiving different vibrations/neurological signals (in

a physiological sense these differences are called tonotopic) in the
auditory cortex can reshape the brain; that the brain can pull apart a
hydrogen atom and remake it. Azimuth is an echo of this physiological
flux. The dust from the insides of stars that are ten times the mass of
the sun, their shells long since burnt out. Iron pulled apart by gravity.
We come from this galaxy. Surrounded by a world of parts and wholes,
these relations resound like amoeba snagged on ganglic webs too
numerous to hear.

This book is devoted to the domain of intimacy, the particular life

that one part grants a relation in actuality, that a relation gives a part
in potential. A feather is an intimacy, part of both net and wing, a
co-evolved force and form in relation to the ear that comes from
tone, cell, forest, continent, foam, pulsar, and so on. These terms are
interchangeable by degree, threads in a weave and skin around the
earth. But they are not the same, we abstract phenomena of nuance
if we treat them otherwise. They are an extravagance of minutiae
to which I affix my attention amidst various husk-covered forms of
illusory and experiential time. Intimacy guides us towards the edges
of things that exist against nothing, billions of stars pulsate its surface
like mechanoreceptors on skin. A matrix of unthinkable barbules eat
their own hearts.
68
 69

T he evening and mor ning star s

are the same

What is a sound.
A sound is two things heard at one and the same time but not together.

Gertrude Stein

If we try to frame sound, it refuses to fit neatly, it folds, bifurcates, and

bends, so what do we do? Do we echo, or mimic, its amorphousness?
Tantamount to not thinking, perhaps? When we read Gertrude Stein’s
definition of sound, we see things encircling each other with their own
melting, new experiences rising from the inner blindness of labyrinths.
Could Stein be suggesting that sound is liminal? It feels strange to
use such a word when she is in earshot. Can we define sound without
defining listening? We must be able to, but it makes me uneasy. We
might consider that sound creates its own lustering liminality1.

1 For me liminality is akin to filling one empty hole with another empty hole, or emptying one empty
hole into another, like the scattering of nothing into nothing, erring from and manipulating the
circumference. Every time something passes through such liminal space it both loses and gains a part
of itself. The moments in which we exist fluidly, in one place and another, enable us to hear the stars.
In the 1980s, Leonora Carrington used the term, liminal, to describe the sense of suspended time and
magical play present in many of her compositions. Effluvial passages, from umbral to transmundal,
wrapping around a consciousness preserved through interference patterns. I feel that Liminality’s
spectral presence also pervades her Diary entries of the 1940s, where Carrington writes that she is
afraid she will drift into fiction; that she can hear the differences between the vibrations of being and
their voices; that she is on another planet containing the past and the future and, simultaneously, the
present. The term is taken from both Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner’s ethnograpical theories
regarding the ritual significance of performance and play that they used to describe aspects of their
field research in Africa. “Since liminal time is not controlled by the clock, it is a time of enchantment
when anything might, even should, happen”, Turner writes. I recently read an interview, conducted
by David Wallace, with Fred Moten in The New Yorker, in which Moten states that mayonnaise has a
complex kind of relation to the sublime, as emulsion does generally; that it’s liminal, “a place between
being solid and liquid”. “It’s emulsive quality connects to the body in a certain way”, says Moten.
Interestingly, in Carrington’s Diary, itself a species of liminal cartography, she writes of an egg as being
“the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole.”
70

I’ve often felt of sound in this way (that it refuses to fit)–it’s the greatest
mystery of poetry, according to Susan Howe2–but after reading Bell
Hooks’s book All about Love, New Visions, I started to think of the
possibilities of a uniform definition of sound; evading, where possible,
a thought process where sound can mean almost nothing or absolutely
anything. “Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how
to love if we began with a shared definition”, says Hooks. Thinking
this way, a shared definition of sound could be a pretext for a shared
definition of listening that is itself a Möbius pretext for a shared
definition of sound.

“Love is most often defined as a noun, yet all the most astute theorists
of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a
verb”, Hooks says. We read that it took years for her to encounter a
definition that felt right, eventually finding one in a self-help book by
M. Scott Peck. “Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of
nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”3

It seems somewhat myopic to haughtily infer a shared identity between

the two definitions of sound and love in this apparent search for
exactitude4, and yet I can’t help but forage. How might we say, here
we–incontrovertibly–are? Is this what it is to define? Circling concentric
circles wherein the warmth of the moon wanders.

2 Howe made this comment about sound during an interview with Charles Bernstein in 1995. In her
most recent work, Debths, published in 2018, Howe writes that “A work of art is a world of signs, at
least to the poet’s nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear”. If we carry our reading behind
the ear, nestled amidst cartilage and childhood, sound becomes a pretext for poetry, or a cat’s footfall
in the snow, if we think of Wallace Stevens. “Only art works are capable of transmitting cthonic echo-
signals”, says Howe in her introduction to Debths.

3 With brief regards to the use of the word spiritual, it’s apt to say that I feel an individual does not need
to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle, a cymatic life force
with no need of language (some call it a soul), that when nurtured can possibly enhance our capacity to
engage with the world as it surrounds us.“So much more than air and world and time”, as Fred Moten
writes in Little Edges.

4 Akin to localising a sound, to marking the distance of a star, to intuiting what takes place between
organ and bone.
 71

“Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word love is
the source of our difficulty in loving”, Hooks says, and whilst I openly
admit that thinking about sound in this way is possibly a little too
earnest, I feel there is a unique resonance in between the two. There
are certain sounds that when I hear them produce in me a heightened
emotional state, quite involuntary but wholly welcome, the closest
analogue of which, I can only state, is love.

“When the very meaning of the word is cloaked in mystery, it should

not come as a surprise that most people find it hard to define what
they mean when they use the word love”, says Hooks. I realise that
this is going someway to mystify that which Hooks hopes to demystify,
but thinking of Stein’s definition of sound, “two things heard at one
and the same time but not together”, helps us to consider these two
things–heard–as sound receiving a body in the midst of its sounding;
and so this pattern replicates (like an electron that is always already
inseparable from the wild activities of a vacuum). Sound and a body
are two things heard at one and the same time but not together. We
are always arriving at a state of collapse, ringing a similar periodic
ambulation to Peck’s belief that love is both intention and action, a
kind of holding on together.

There are of course boundless alternatives when we think about sound.

It is an experience5; a mechanical vibration in a medium; particle
displacement; a medium we hear in; the compression and expansion
of matter. But sound is never singular, it is part of the stratified toil of
phenomenal life. Listening to such definitions is akin to both crossing
and drawing a line. It seems we are presented with as many possibilities
and potentials as the film-like creature in Paul Klee’s painting, ‘Animal
catching a scent’. Moving is both meeting and parting.

5 I feel a particular affinity with what Tim Ingold has to say on the subject: “Hearing focuses our
attention on the surface of things... Sound redirects our attention to the medium in which things take
shape and are dissolved.”
72

The creature’s ears hear, its brain listens, its body senses like a filigree
of vibration and rarefied texture, a world always in formation.
Listening, Pauline Oliveros says, “is a lifetime practise that depends
on accumulated experiences with sound”. One that can be focussed to
detail or open to the entire field. “It is a mysterious process that is not
the same for everyone”.

“Listen to the sound through one another’s skin. Preserve the sound
through membrane and water, to find our form in corresponding”. As
comparatively complex as this passage from Fred Moten’s Little Edges
may seem in its unravelling, it is a beautiful way of understanding that
a definition is a product of, at least, two.

Sound–perhaps we’re better off saying, in this case, audible sound,

as speciously yet necessarily distinct from vibration–is the product of
collision, and rubbing. Spending time with Fred Moten, Bell Hooks,
and Gertrude Stein, we find ourselves in an ontology of knots. A
correspondence of commitment and attention, a life lived with others,
in which, to paraphrase Jack Spicer, we try to get these words out of
our mouths and into our hearts.

Following the spiralling lines of ‘Wingless flying...’ we try to move

between definition and clarity, confusion and mystery, inner-deafness
and self-awareness; to pluralise and refine, here thinking of Maggie
Nelson, who was in part thinking of Roland Barthes. As Lewis Hyde
says, “all purity comes from refinement, and refineries must leave
behind their piles of tailings, slag, dross, rubbish, accident”. It’s such
piles (of dross and tailings) that I feel we define as location, constant
and subliminal attempts at purity, vulnerable to the return of what is
sloughed off. The becoming of holes.

Purity is something invisible, a celestial influence perhaps, a synonym

of both place and sound as they exist in fluxes of time abstracted from
space. Gaston Bachelard writes of rings that were crowned by fern
crystals, granting invisibility to the wearer. If we refine too much we
 73

disappear.

If a person has tinnitus it could mean that the fusiform cells that reside
in the dorsal cochlear nucleus of the auditory system in the human
brain are misfiring, sending messages around the body that have
no ‘direct’ correlate with the environment. Many researchers claim
that such misalignment is indicative of sounds that ‘aren’t there’, but
fusiform cells are meant to quiet our biochemical responses, to soften
the din of corporeal auditory refugia. So where is there? It could be
that tinnitus is that which is sloughed off, leaving us vulnerable to our
disembodied corporeality.

“If we reduce a fern to ashes which we dissolve in pure water, then

allow the water to evaporate, we obtain lovely crystals that have the
form of a fern frond,” Bachelard writes. Many other examples could
be furnished of dreamers meditating in order to discover what he calls
“saturated growth salts of formal causality”.

We read in the 13th minor Upanishad, the ‘Nadabindu’, where Nada

refers to an unstruck sound, that we need to focus on the thin buzzing
sound of the right ear as a source of deep meditation in which all
disposition attached to the buzzing dissolves into the sound itself.

“Undoubtedly, many of us are more comfortable with the notion that

love can mean anything to anybody precisely because when we define
it with precision and clarity it brings us face to face with our lacks–
with terrible alienation”. If we could find ourselves face to face with
sound, if it could be contained by form, located, met with the clarity of
definition, we might then realise a life lived in service of the other, “the
first fact of existence”, according to Emmanuel Levinas. I can’t help
but go back, to listen to Fred Moten, to a life lived in correspondence.
If Levinas’s definition of sound, “a ringing and clanging scandal”, is
the constant movement of things into and out of their resounding,
how can we locate anything if it is always pitching about?
74

If we play Mint and Water with this triadic and knotless knot of Moten,
Hooks, and Stein, we realise we’re flecked with the fibrous residue of
Levinasian ethics wherein the obligation to others precedes and takes
precedence over the so-called individual self, summoning, we might
say, an obstinate and maternal rigor of responsibility, an ardor of
attention. This bundle unravels strange harmonies, the quintessence
of social life, a generation of disharmonius chords. When Moten
writes, “Listen to the sound through one another’s skin,” we read a
sort of equivalent in Levinas; that “the real presence of the other is
important”, a presence “fulfilled in the act of hearing”6; or as Moten
says, preserved, “through membrane and water”. We–writer / listener
/ reader–encounter forms corresponding. Listening consists of lines
crossed and drawn. Sound becomes sound as it passes through the
membrane of the oval window and into the waters of the body, in
which the cochlea swims like a caged cephalopod. The other is not
always conflated to that where it appears to be.

When I first started to try and write about listening, or attempted

writing listening, not wishing to define it, I constantly encountered a
boundary, mainly because of its heightened presence in the company
and earshot of qualities such as greed and avarice. However, since
reading Bell Hooks I’ve found it easier to both relate and imagine that
such a way of listening couldn’t be further from a definition to which
I feel a sense of orbital symbiosis. I realise this could be considered
idealistic, but the type of listening associated with such a quality as
greed is that of a mutual blockage, it is, I think, parasitic. Listening
is not always symbiotic–it is often complicated and unruly–it is not a
resolute and guaranteed ecology of harmony, of course, but I do feel
that it can be mutual, or commensal, more often than not. An incipient
exchange that is neither weighted by harmony or conquest, closer to
what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has called, a ‘disturbance ecology’.

6 I wonder if hearing here stands for a practise of assiduity? A means through which the self registers the
shades and natures specific to the other, through both listening in and out, to the point that the boundary
between self, awareness, and contingency blurs and a notion of care extends towards both the other and
the self, creating a bridge of continuity and ambivalence between actual and otherwise.
 75

We gift our listening, and in such an exchange greed cannot successfully

co-exist. Greed, I am thinking particularly of corporate greed, is like
a story without oat husks, a negation of responsibility, and of care.
The resolute denial to extend the self for the purpose of developing
another’s spiritual growth; only for the development of one’s legacy,
one’s mark. Denying the possibility of redistribution, change, and
sharing.

Does a definition of something seemingly so unruly in terms of the

relationship between language and experience enable us to listen to
other definitions as they interact, definitions (like the one proffered by
Roland Barthes in his autobiography) that state “the task of love (and
of language) is to give one and the same phrase inflections which will
be forever new”? Does a definition then, empty us, as it fills us? We
perceive words crawling back to words; words emerging from their
imprints; phenomenon generated by encounters in the mediums of
the world in which we are left open to possible new experiences and
interactions–where intra-actions entail transitions from one kind to
another in a radical undoing of kinds–constituting, as Karen Barad
says, “an encounter with the infinite alterity of the self.”
76
 77

A description of stillness

I always thought that the voice was meant to indicate a kind of genuine,
authentic, absolute individuation, which struck me as A) undesirable, and B)
impossible.

Whereas a sound was really in the midst of this intense engagement with
everything: with all the noise that you’ve ever heard, you struggle somehow to
make a difference, so to speak, within that noise.

And that difference isn’t necessarily about you as an individual, it’s much more
simply about trying to augment and differentiate what’s around you. And that’s
what a sound is for me.

Fred Moten

To live in augmentation and differentiation (a Barthesian life lived

according to nuance) is to mimic the pinnae as they mimic sound. A
bee orchid interpreting a bee. Leonora Carrington’s intestines as they
vibrate in accord with Madrid’s painful digestion. Two things heard at
one and the same time but not together.

Sound is not only something we hear, just as love is not only something
we feel. Listening, we find ourselves in between lines that are just more
lines. A seeming illusion of appearances akin to a philosophy of change.
In his Principles of Psychology, William James asks, “Does not the same
piano key, struck with the same force, make us hear in the same way?
Does not the same grass give us the same feeling of green? It seems
a piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet
a close attention to the matter shows that there is not proof that the
same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice, what is got twice is the
same object.”

In Daisy Hildyard’s book The Second Body, we encounter a reality that

is both cosmological and individual, “real life and global truth”, as
78

Hildyard writes, creating many literary and ecological bridges that

span the world. The Second Body includes a fascinating close reading
of Elena Ferrante’s My Beautiful Friend and the condition of ‘dissolving
boundaries’, where the body is a disembodied force attempting to
make itself transparent, uninscribed, unlined. Once we remove one
part of the body from another, does it then start to hear differently? It
must do. Everything we do in this regard is important. Is listening then
a synonym of both separation and aggregation?

The body is the organism whose state regulates our cognisance of

the world that regulates the body, but which body? We have several,
says Barthes. A digestive body, a nauseated body, a third body which
is migrainous, sensual, muscular, emotive, moved, stirred, depressed,
exalted, intimidated, a city body and a country body (something I
understand to be the difference in one’s heart beat). I think, however,
that the Barthesian several is much better understood if we return to
Daisy Hildyard, who says that “every living thing has two bodies these
days - you are flying into the atmosphere and back down to the ground
right now, but you can’t feel it.”

One of Pavel Tchelitchew’s formulas in his Celestial Physiognomies

was not born chronologically but in a plastic apprehension of the
line, curving spherically in conformance with the shape of our earthly
globe like the will to extend the self. If these lines, akin to waves and
tendrils, extend far enough, they might curve and meet like lively and
tentacular symbolic nuances, warm-wet with existence. Studying his
physiognomies, I hear time and time again that we have partaken of
every element, and thus possess an immutable affinity with them all.

“Sound and light are not mere vectors that carry information about
the world of which it is left to observers and listeners to extract”, Tim
Ingold writes, “they are qualities of experience in themselves, and as
qualities of experience sound and light cannot be reduced to their
physical, physiological, and neurological prerequisites”. We read in
Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body that “in normal life a human body
 79

is rarely understood to exist outside of its own skin.” In between the

individual and the cosmos, we might say, are the irreducible sounds of
the universe.

Two things are heard when we hear Gertrude Stein and Tim Ingold,
and because they are not heard together, we may assume that what
is heard is our own intermediary and interpretative presence. “Is it
clear”, Gertrude Stein asks, “is it eclair?” Stein’s definition of sound is
also an invitation, with two pieces of pastry and cream in the middle.

Pressing her back to a door and listening to the vibrations, Leonora

Carrington writes that, “it was no longer necessary to translate noises,
sensations, colours, forms, etc”. Every cell found a twin correspondence
in her, permeating her life with a “perfect answer”. Atmospheres are
moods which one feels in the air, and as Gernot Böhme proffers, they
exist in between subjects and objects. We can describe them as object-
like emotions, randomly cast into a space, but at the same time they are
evidently subjective, insofar as they require a discerning subject.

We read that atmospheres are experienced affectively and that one

can only describe their characteristics insofar as one exposes oneself to
their presence and experiences them as bodily sensations. Atmospheres
are, at least as far as Böhme understands them, examined by reference
to what produces them: objects, their qualities, arrangements, light,
sound, and so on. With regard to an ontology of objects, the concern
is not with the properties of the object, properties which encapsulate
and distinguish it from other objects, but rather with the qualities via
which the object projects itself into a space. These are what Böhme
calls “Ecstasies”, “perfect answers”, the ways in which a thing goes out
of itself and modifies the sphere of its surroundings.1

1 In Catherine Clement’s The Call of the Trance we read that “the trance of Dionysus begins with the foot’,
that the Greek name for the Dionysian trance, ekpedan, means ‘leap out’, ‘leap away’. I can’t help but notice
the parallels, where sound and the trance are akin to states of nothing but pure energy, bursting cells,
electromagnetic waves and psychomagnetic curves, beyond route.
80

We recall, as William James proffered, that there is no proof that the

same bodily sensation is ever received by us twice, and that what is
received twice is the same object; but as Ingold says (some 125 years
later), “sound and light blow us apart so that at one and the same time
we remain where we stand, emplaced where our bodies are, and roam
heaven and earth as our attention wanders the furthest reaches of the
visual field”. That we “burst forth in the atmospheric in between”.2

If we consider that there are corporeal and celestial poles of hearing

–the one sensing, the other sensible–which, when they collide, or
when they ‘rub’, if we listen with Fred Moten’s vocabulary, generate
the experience of sound. The very coagulation of sound, born of the
joining of the affective and the cosmic (where what is heard often turns
out to be our own hearing), also divides us in such a way that, much as
in a dream, we are simultaneously at home in our bodies and at large
in the cosmos.

As part of a philosophy of Radical Empiricism, William James

cultivated various definitions of experience, stating that the notion of
consciousness was best replaced by that of absolute experience. This
is not to say that he was denying that thought exists, rather that there
is a function in experience that thoughts perform. That we may start
with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material
in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed. If we call that
stuff, pure experience, then knowing, James said, can be explained as
a particular sort of relation towards one another, in which portions
of pure experience may enter. This is akin to Hildyard’s need to
incorporate the second body with the first, to find its real life amidst
real people and real creatures.

The quintessence of experience, if such a thing exists, could be

understood in experiencing how very difficult it is to experience. The

2 I feel there are many parallels to be drawn between this and Walter Benjamin’s understanding of a
blasting apart of the world, a defamiliarisation of the familiar and the habitual that extends into one’s own
body. This is part of what constitutes the disembodied body..
 81

experience of listening to Heraclitean joints, whole and not whole,

connected when separate, consonant when dissonant. Cooperation
looped around its own opposition, a harmony of separate forces.
Wholeness arises from distinct particulars, distant particulars occur in
wholeness, like the experience of sound as experience, or the experience
of experience as pure consciousness. In these immanent processes of
purification and plurality some things must change in order to stay the
same. Experience could be thought of as the memory of a medium
in which sound invariably pulsates and eludes, “the feeling of having
been another animal”, as we read once again in The Second Body.

When we go for a walk we should be prepared to return as a fossil. A

year ago I was out in the peak district and took a wrong turn through
a swamp; though this very notion is a strange one, considering I didn’t
realise I was walking anywhere in particular. I carried on someway
until I discovered my seeming error, though what made me do this
was something I wouldn’t have heard otherwise and that continues to
make itself known. This in itself is a telling consequence of thinking I
knew which way I was going, or which way, so to speak, was the right
way. I always listen out for birds, and on this occasion I heard the
penumbral call of a family of bullfinches. Truly beautiful and shy birds,
bright pink yet near invisible. So illusory, it seems, that in the tradition
of increasingly elaborate collective nouns, I’ve taken to calling them a
ghost of bullfinches. Their voices were like the inaudible sounds of eros
galls pushed by my boots deep into the murk of the swamp.

“Every eddy is a centre of auditory awareness”, Ingold writes. Pulsating

and vibratory eddies spin in both directions at once like a cochlea
amidst cochleas. There, toward, through, around. For me writing is
walking, a disaster of the self. I feel I’m going one way whilst I’m going
another. It’s somewhere in between these lines made, followed, and
lost, that bullfinches happen. Their rain cloud wings suspending self-
reflection above what I would call place, a cultivation of strangeness
and a freedom from thinking. A pulsing mist of incipient evasion
arising from a wider nexus of intimate relations. It is an immanent
82

process of desublimation, of perceived unity, and intense engagement.

As Robert Creeley says, “I’ve thought of place as how long it takes to
get there, and where there then is”.3

Our ears, like our bodies, do not only carry physical impulses from
the environment across the threshold of our skin. We might say they
are where mind and matter blur and split from inside to deeper inside,
wherefrom they reappear like a stretching simulacrum of sensory
stimuli. A processual continuum we often see as triangles and circles,
a mimesis, seeming to divide the individual against the cosmos. I feel
we hear both in and along the adumbrative lines of the poet Mei Mei
Berssenbrugge’s immanent audition, where hearing is “the fractality
of fragments occurring as they disintegrate”. This is an intimate
process when hearing is a form of response to the ‘real’; which,
according to Charles Bernstein, in an interview with Berssenbrugge,
is “transactional and temporal”, a flickering pulse that we hear only
when we stop listening.

I can’t help but think that Stein’s definition of sound is a poetry in

unto itself. What I’m responding to, what I hear as echo, goddess of
noise, is Moten’s definition and experience of sound. Such an ongoing
attempt to augment and differentiate could be a definition of listening
that is itself a body reaching over to the other side of the continent, a
manifestation of both the facts of language and statements about the
world. This is part of the struggle to define that which is intermediary,
to locate the Metaxy4, or that which is moving.

3 In an interview I listened to many years ago, that I’ve been unable to locate since, I seem remember
Creeley saying that he could recite a line of his poetry, walk around the block, return, and resume the
reading as if nothing had happened.

4 The Metaxy is intrinsic to my understanding of correspondence and the notion of a decentred reality.
I picture it as a mental surface upon which one may attempt to experience more than oneself, a surface
interwoven amongst the nebulous natures of listening. I encountered the term in Plato’s Symposium,
where it is understood to be the condition of the middle ground, neither one thing nor the other, a state
in between things.
 83

When asked to augment and differentiate what we’re hearing we

so commonly tell not of the sounds themselves but of the objects or
actions that they draw to our attentions: a person brushing up against
a friend, the resonance of an open mouth, the motor of a vibraphone
turning. These could be Moten’s voices. In each case, identification
rests on recognising relevant ecstasies in the sound as it bursts forth. In
listening to listening itself.

If sound is a fabric of atmosphere–one we hear in, an absence of the

totality of fragments–I can think of no better atmosphere than that of
the 27 rue de Fleurus, the home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
Alice, evidently an assiduous person, listened, typed, and responded
to Gertrude’s writing (wherein two things are heard at one and the
same time but not together), articulating the circular process of living,
writing, reading, and transcribing that Gertrude and Alice extended
together.

te ned as Gertr
ic e lis ud
e
Al wr
d
ot
ie
rif

eA
cl a

lice
ed as Gertrude

sle pt a
s Gertrud
ion

e
es t

sle
qu

tA p
ce

i l ic
Al e ype
et
r os d as Gertrude
84

Don’t eat your heart

Nobody, nothing
ever gave me
greater thing

than time
unless light
and silence

which if intense
makes sound

Lorine Niedecker

Dust and gas fall onto a young star, fluid as it gathers material to itself,
producing high-pitched extremities in the plasma. A heated-rose tone.
A transformation in between mass and energy pulses through my
window at the end of these lucent September days. An infinitesimal
shift in a molecule is enough to send a signal through the auditory
pathway of the brain. Plasma flows around stars in hydrodynamic
wavelength shifts reaching a trillion hertz. High-velocity electrons,
close to the speed of light, spiral through the magnetic fields of the
galaxy. From an explosion on a nearby star eight minutes ago, light-
sound of emission lines, concatenations of hydrogen, oxygen, and
magnesium, disperse through space as superluminal radio-sources.
Impossible resonance from those realms of the universe that for
centuries represented the epitome of silence and muteness, but are full
of sounds that constantly redefine definition in a heterodyne ticking of
pulsars. The edge of galaxy is a hissing cacophony. The spectra of the
nuclei from such places is embedded in a plenum of emission lines, hot
ionised gasses streaming out at velocities of thousands of kilometres
per second.
 85

Particle-wave and light-sound angle along the island and filter through
a skein of land dust / clay bits / sod bits / tiny wind-borne insects /
bacteria / enzymes / shreds of wing and leg / gravel dust / radiation /
grits of carbon / dried cells of grass / bark / leaves / copious chicken
bones. Reddened, the light-sound inclines along the plane from the
sea and into the green western hills, sifting between larch on the
western slopes and absorbed by particles of gossamer-lined gorse, oak
and sycamore, whose leaves are clenching, one by one. Lobbing an
intimate haze of cone shapes on the ground above the spring. Light-
sound hatches the field in a redistribution of energy and threads
through the nest of my open living room window in a long history of
wavelengths. A thousand tiny events changing the world for a moment.
An earful of stars imperceptibly falling into entropy. The hand is a
gravitational bower of singular vibrations and alterations. Wings are
psychomagnetic curves.

The colour patches of vision part, shift, and reform as we move through
space in time with a harmony of dissonances like the collapse of the
wave function over a rioting niche of atmospheres. The sun intones, as
Goethe predicted. The present is the object of vision that hears, and
what we hear before us at any given second is a constellation of colour
pitches resounding like stars growling. The configuration will never
be repeated. Living is moving elliptically. Matter compressing and
expanding. Pressure changes in a medium glint and pour through the
tympanic membrane to and from a concentric mystery that reaches.
The whole is taken up in a flawless double encirclement like the floor
of the mind that is constantly collapsing. A trick floor of elliptical orbits
and cosmic sounds that are written into our ears like the proportions of
a human body and the corresponding planetary orbits.
86

Shapes of air break the eyes in time. Spin, circle, slow, vanish. The
surface of mystery is not smooth. The snow line of otoconial crystals
collapse the medium into a milky cloud of barnacles courting boundary
stones in a sea of amino acids. Strange lives bear familiarity and are
reflected in the chiton shift of an abalone protein. In the 60,000 miles
of mycelial filaments that fall together. In a photograph of Robert
Walser’s body, lying cold amidst the wonder of Wilson Bentley’s snow
crystals.

Subatomic particles, quarks, techni-quarks, leptons, neutrinos,

constitute in effect the infrared and ultraviolet, the x-ray and the radio
wave that expound into a contingency of infinite wavelengths beyond
strings, beyond anything. The universe is too big and too small to
perceive, though that doesn’t stop me from trying to touch it. It is more
or less invisible to me, though present. It is peripheral to me in a real
sense because I do not understand even what I can actually touch. I
would like to be there, among it all, to understand it, but I must start
somewhere. At the edge of the possibility of experience, the flux and
press of intimacy assumes primary importance.
 87

Sound from elsewhere

Anything that is strange, accidental, individual, can become a portal to the

universe. A face, a star, a stretch of countryside, an old tree, etc, may make an
epoch in our inner lives.

Novalis

An ear is an archaeology approaching its own silence. It is governed

by great curves and whirling glass globes, freighted to either side of an
oval with a decaying shell between the poles. It has its Asia and its Alps,
just as motes of dust have their moons, seasons, and geology. Worlds
constantly distorted into states of similarity.

The ears are a continuous present, a fluid home, an ecology of

representation and its lack, ever forming a structural principle. I do
not mean to overmine audition. I feel as sure as I can that what I say
here is also reflected in the other senses, but it’d be disingenuous of me,
and beyond my ability, to compose a unified response. My interest is
vested. I think of the cochlea as home, like light passing over a wooden
floor throughout the day. The cochlea is part of such sheer activity, it is
always on the verge of decoherence. This makes us think, as Hannah
Arendt states, of ways and means to bring it out of its shell. To do this,
we look for a model.

Spreading my body like a snail, separation cuts me off. From the

unfolding spiral echoes a mantra that cannot be deciphered. If we are
lost, let us be lost always.

Writing about the ear can be like writing a dream as it melts around
me, a dream that consists of dreams eating dreams. Some days are
clearer than others. Some days my head feels like a spiral diagram of
itself, a Renaissance exercise in perspective wandering off the page.
88

Through all of this, unless I’m feeling it, it is remarkably difficult to

recollect with any degree of clarity, and of course, when I’m feeling it,
it’s hard to think of anything at all. I move my head one way, I move
my head another way, but it rarely feels like my head anymore.

Whilst I call these parts of the ear (holes) they may very well be ghosts.
I have felt and dreamt through untold billions of polarised particles
splayed like tonotopic matter, changing their lines of polarity in scores
of infinite constellations. The spectrum never falls into permanent
disorder. We cannot truly separate the ear anymore than it can be
permanently fixed together.

In Rene Daumal’s The Pataphysics of Ghosts, a clown asks his partner in a

ring at the Circus Medrano, “what is a hole?” A hole is not so much a
listening ear as a listening brain. My right ear is a ghost, dead and pink.
It is, as Daumal says, “absence surrounded by presence.” A ghost is
indeed a hole, but a hole to which are attributed intentions. The dead
ear is a series of symbols curling around a broader sense of history
that determines the shape of the hole. A still life of triangles in radiant
asymmetrical configurations.

To listen into the ear is to face the maker of vertigoes. It is not only a
question of what we do, it is a question of how acutely and fully we
can feel in the doing. The ears are not a horizon. I think of them as
twinned to something Daniela Cascella said the last time I saw her
talk in Oxford–to run away from sound, is to run towards it–a process
I have since come to understand as a helical chaos. “The difference
between one stillness and another stillness”, as Susan Howe says.

Where is auricular ecstasy as it flows? Does it keep close to what Audre

Lorde calls the ‘Erotic’? A form deep within herself. A kernel, once
released from its intense and constrained pellet, that flows through
and colours her life with an energy that heightens and strengthens all
experience. “The beginnings of our sense of self ”. A clearing where
no auricle yet resembles a heart. “The chaos of our strongest feelings”.
 89

I dreamt the maker of vertigoes, it has no foundation, and no head.

Over the short course of writing this text I realised that its form could
be found in Forbidden Fruit, a painting by Leonora Carrington. The
maker of vertigoes, the creature at the centre of Carrington’s celestial
labyrinth, is also at its entrance and its exit. It is adorned with a radiant,
waxen echo and placed on a yellow that is the surface of a star. It
is both a ministering, helpful spirit, and a teasing, elusive, deceptive
goblin. It is a reflection seen in a sphere of water with dragon’s wings,
a round fish in the middle of the sea with no bones and a wonderful
fatness.

Carrington’s creature bears striking resemblance to the alchemical

spiritus mercurialis and its transformations, often represented as a
monstrous dragon. The spiritus is a guide, a psychopompos, a tempter
of both good luck and ruin. It is a quaternity in which the fourth is at
the same time the unity of the three, the unity being symbolised by the
mystagogue Hermes. The three are Luna, Sol, and their conjunction.
When they fall together they form Mercurius, a self-transforming being
represented as a dragon that devours itself from the tail or else as two
dragons eating each other.

We approach time with a light heart and feelings of curious intimacy

in which words listen like deaf dragons. We attend with all our being
like frantic motes relinquishing their obscurity. Films bulge without
dimension, flicker like the impression of a midgelike vibration
somewhere about. Encysted and blown away, the ear is love, yet here
it has also been subjected to strife. We emerge from this forest because
we carry it with us in our hair, mouth, eyes, hands...
90

Don’t commit a nuisance towards

Narcissus peers into the water where time is the duration of a

thought, swallowed two-peak ammonoid morphospace, in all its
shell forms. An echo underwater is accidental.

A world where things do not stop easily at the borders of themselves,

but overflow, where language tends to break the environment into
separate pieces in some way.

They witness the behaviour of electrons outside atoms where

time is a figment of the imagination and the world a collection of
moments far from coherent.

They communicate with the positions of their bodies, engage

in a relentless silent reading of each other’s posture bent out of
language. A sense of one as an other.

They abandon each other, bereft of ontological bones. A lack of a

body. We are all multitudes, they mouth. A reflection can sustain a
multiplicity of gossamer distinctions.
 91

the sun

They are separated from all worlds by decoherence and grey wind.
They are the aether between particles. They live in a superposition
of all possible worlds.

All things that could happen are happening to them at the same
time. They wait for the collapse of everything so that they might
live only as each other.

It is not the now that they perceive. No thing in them is going fast
enough to get inside the separation that is happening deeper inside
of them.

They exist in as many times as there are histories, longing to make

it all real. They have no memory of the past other than their
memory of it. They need this.

They are not so much looking for the shape of reality as trying
to remain available to any shape that may be summoning itself
through them.
92

Time is the mind of the star s

earthearthearth
earthearthearth
earthearthearth
earthearthearth
earthearthearth
earthearthearth

Ronald Johnson

The anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf writes from a shock of

serial planes, where to look at a wall covered with fine traceries of
lacelike design can accumulate in evidence to serve as the ground
for a bolder pattern, yet still delicate, of tiny flowers. As we become
increasingly aware of this floral expanse through prolonged attention,
we realise that multitudes of gaps make another pattern, and groups
of infinitesimal patterns make letters–aligned in columns, listing and
classifying entities–and so on in continual cross-patterning until we
find this pattern to be the actions of everything around us.

By adding pt- to Eros, the gods created Pteros, which is, we read in
Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, a play upon the Greek word pteron,
meaning ‘wing’. Desire is known as ‘the winged one’ or, perhaps more
aptly in this case, they who have something to do with wings. Pinna,
which we remember represents a projection, a feather, a wing, a fin,
and has even been referred to as a weak vestigial muscle attached to
the shell of the ear, comes from the Latin pinnatus, to be winged. If we
imagine the outer ear as pinnated we see an arrangement of feather-
like or multi-divided features arising from both sides of the skull, pinnae
as depicted in constant movement and relation, the process of locating
that is an extension of the self, roaming the skull as swiftly as the ears
of a bat, changing shape quicker than humans can blink their eyes.
 93

Thinking of these links between pinna and pinnation we might say that
even rivers have wings, where pinnate marks are left on the transitory
subsistence of their beds, an active mystery, fresh every second.
Enmeshed in these webs, wings act as crystals, “atomic tessellations”,
as Christian Bök says, tools with which to adumbrate reality. A pinnate
morphology extends beyond its anatomical dimensions. The pinnae
are a means of netting that which comes close, from any direction. It’s
worth noting that another name for the outer ear, auricule, from the
Latin auricula, is a way of describing the ear shaped appendage of the
left and right atrium of the heart.

In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard writes that Dionysus the Areopagite
thought the Seraphs, the highest order of angels, were “all wings”,
with six wings apiece, two of which they fold over their eyes. If we, such
people who invented angels from the stars, consider this anatomically,
for a moment, the means through which we hear has the ability to
blind us. We see through holes in our wings. We see through our
labyrinths because our ears possess the ability to protect our eyes. We
might imagine that the skin of our eyelids came from the skin of our
wings; which is why we can’t fly, having lost our wings in order to see.

“Desire”, Carson says, “entails a wing growing necessity”. Pinnae

inhabit a liminal, emulsive space–in between echoes of perception
and knowledge–that is terrestrial, aquatic, aerial and cosmological.
Carson goes on to speak of the Platonic Cratylus via Socrates and his
belief that the gods call things by the names which are naturally right.
Pteros then, is truer than Eros. Grasping, we read, the pathos of the
experience, desire literally swoops through and wrenches our insides.

Writing in the twentieth century, Thomas Bernhard is, I think, a kind

of modern day Cratylus. Cratylus was a philosopher who lived in
Athens in the fifth century BCE. He was taught by Heraclitus and
supposedly taught Plato, though I suppose this matters little. He
pushed the Heraclitean doctrine of flux into an early pataphysical state
in which we could not even step into the same stream once. Eventually
94

he began to point at things, instead of naming them. Cratylus sought

a perfect language of words, univocal in meaning, something that is
analogous to the underlying cause of mania in Thomas Bernhard’s
The Lime Works.

The Lime Works is a book about a book about the sense of hearing,
a book that is never written, only heard through a hearing that can
only ever locate the hearer as he is surrounded by ever increasing
uncertainty. The thought of thought. It is full of ways in which the
protagonist, Konrad, attempts to funnel sound into and out of himself
in the hope of tipping his head onto the page in one fell swoop. The
impossible outpourings of a sadistic misomaniac. An individual full of
madness, seeking the end as a means of probing the immanent ear.

As long as vibration pulses Konrad paces, further and further away from
sound and into his echoless self. The ear lies open, directed by inner
space and inner time. The Lime Works is a drive toward the separation
of quietude from thought. Not once can he sense the absolute silence
towards which he points; conducting a relentless barrage of hearing
exercises–‘the urbanchich method’–on his long suffering wife, Zryd.

The structure of the novel, we might say, is borderline Cratylian. Very

little is fixed. Almost everything presented to the reader floats. The
only certainty is the invisible viscera of things, the mucus and the
plasma that renders and hinders motion. The lime works is an old stone
labyrinth, and Konrad’s attempts at soundproofing manifest in a series
of barren schemes to keep the world out. Architecture is torn down in
unstrung haste, replaced by bars of wrought iron. Konrad lives in an
ear that hears nothing, not because it is deaf, per se, but because of the
thickness of the wall surrounding the labyrinth. A thickening of the
bone around his inner ear.

The dream of a Cratylic language, according to Carla Billiteri,

is one of joining the exact nature of words with things to broker a
transformation of human community. A dream of a perfect language,
 95

univocal in meaning. A poetry of Leibnizian monads mirroring the

whole world.

What I would at least now call pataphysics, is echoed in many of

Bernhard’s works. In his novella ‘Walking’, we are told by the character
Oehler that “if we hear something on Wednesday we check what
we’ve heard and we check what we’ve heard until we have to say that
what we have heard is not true, what we have heard is a lie. If we see
something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what
we are looking at is horrible.” Faced with the idea of reality, in sensible
flux, where are we?

When we arrive at an edge we are located, and yet we are enmeshed

in what Tim Ingold has called, “a correspondence of lines”. I consider
correspondence to be a means of conceptualising movement and a
way of trying to imagine thought. It is intertwined with the concept
of the Metaxy, the flux of the former intimately wrapped around
the seeming stillness of the latter. Without one we cannot imagine
the other, we might say. A pataphysical definition of correspondence
itself lies ‘outside’ of the text; it is involved with creating and bridging
distances between things, such as the gaps between different qualities
of listening and the resultant violence of syncope when we abstract a
quality from a life, and relates to the movement of words. A prosodic
definition is related to the inter- and infra-textual nature of words,
analysing and searching for echoes of works in other works, particularly
as the metaphoric exfoliation of synesthetic potentiality in the poems
of Charles Baudelaire. Correspondence is an energy that underpins
phases and scales of transition.

Are sound and language twinned, are they imperfect, polyvocal?

“Nature does not need thought”, says Oehler, “only human pride
incessantly thinks into nature its thinking”. “We live exclusively in the
present because it is always eternally today and tomorrow will be a
today, eternity is the state of things at this very moment”, says Clarice
Lispector as she writes by ear. Listening, or “the interpretation of sound
96

waves”, as Pauline Oliveros says, is subject to time delays, sometimes

what is heard is interpreted anywhere from milliseconds to many years
later, or never.

The historical Cratylus in Plato’s dialogue believed in a fixity of

meaning, in a natural language, and yet held to the Heraclitean view
of nature as ever in flux. We read in Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of
Cruelty, that by observing seemingly conflicting impulses, which some
might call paradoxical, we begin to pay attention to the possibility of
a third term, in a situation that otherwise seemingly consists of two
opposing forces. As Nelson states, “the Neutral is that which throws a
wrench into any system that demands, often with menacing pressure,
that one enter conflicts, produce meaning, take sides, choose between
binary oppositions.”

How do we start at the beginning if things happen before they

happen? asks Lispector. Identifying the various positions in language
that the Cratylus considers, positions that are not only antagonistic but
also points on a continuum–where the perfect and the actual coexist
in meaningful relation–a place, to quote Charles Olson, “where
individual experience is not obliterated in abstraction”, it may help to
think of Azimuth not as an assemblage or even an arrangement, but as
innumerable spectra wrapped around and flowing from an increment.
It is always already bending to change. Part of a topology in which one
is found in another.

Being as everything is vibrating, chemically or otherwise, what might

serve as a process of selection from amongst the infinite pulsating
subtraction and extension of self ? As William James asks, “where does
experience come from?” Perhaps a place where the life of a molecule
is a Heraclitean life, spinning around both the antagonistic and the
continual, willing the ideal and the actual to co-exist in meaningful
relation, in disturbance.
 97

We pass through the world with every step, without ever really
passing through. The next step refers to the step before, suspended in
between remembering and forgetting, coming and going, being and
awaiting, on a threshold before that which will be and have already
been, gathered before us like an encounter recounted without taking
place, told without speaking. The seeming solidity of bodies we are
becoming, that which would always already have taken place, we are
always about to meet.
98

T he motion of light in water

The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in
their place.

Walt Whitman

Another model for Azimuth can be found in the work of psychologist

Silvan Tomkins. “Affects combine with other affects, intensify or
modulate them, or suppress or reduce them”, says Tomkins, who
nevertheless still choose to study each affect, such as enjoyment-joy,
and distress-anguish, in isolation. Tomkins believed that “the surface
of the skin is where it’s at”, that if we want to understand feeling
better we had better understand all the things that are conjoined and
have evolved to be conjoined. “You can tear them apart”, he says,
“but they remain a unitary phenomenon which exhibits many diverse
characteristics at once”. Azimuth contemplates the unification of such
a tear. An evocation and an expression of affects. A discovery of the
beauty of biological form through a kind of violence. A reflection of
one empty hole in another, “different structures of nothingness”, as we
read in Karen Barad. A binding actualised and dreamt.

If we try to imagine (perhaps we don’t even need to) that our bodies
are receiving and emitting an immanent flow of particles and waves
at speeds beyond our imagination, that the skin is itself between and
in between, and that listening (a corporeal act in so many ways) is as
much part of experience as it is expression, we might then say that the
ears cannot be located at a point in space, that they are organs of time-
space, that listening is as much a reception and gift of attention as it is
an emotion or a surface.

For a long time the space between the spheres was said to be filled
with a substance called aether. In his Physics, Aristotle proclaimed that
 99

nature must abhor a vacuum (a theory that was later to become known,
in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, as horror vacui, or a fear of empty
space), though as modern quantum field theory postulates, at least in
accord with principles of ontological indeterminacy, “the energy of a
vacuum isn’t determinately zero”. The void may not be nothing after
all. It may fluctuate. It may be the source of all that is.

In his Principles of Philosophy, published in 1644, Descartes proposed

that everything in the universe was made of tiny particles he called
corpuscles, and that they swirled in the space in between celestial
objects. It’s a wonderful thing to contemplate, akin to a vertigo-tree,
where the boundaries between rings are blurred as waves flicker
and morph across particle, field and void. Imagine looking up and
contemplating the mystery of what holds the celestial bodies together,
what governs their movement. Or realising that, like Giordano Bruno
in the sixteenth century, the stars were all suns, that the universe was
infinite, and that by extension there could be a plurality of worlds.
Descartes would later expound his particle theory by claiming that the
innumerable corpuscles that filled the vast spaces between the stars
must themselves be filled with vortices–an equivalent perhaps, of what
Karen Barad calls a speaking silence–eventually compiling four laws
of corpuscular motion.

1. There are many mechanoreceptors in the body that play a part in the
reception of particles and waves. The location of Pacinian corpuscles in our
diaphragm ostensibly means that we can hear with our stomachs. They are
so sensitive that the only form of mechanical energy they can perceive is a
sound wave. It’s also worth noting that said corpuscles can be found in the
human foot. 2. The human finger can perceive sound waves when water is
a coupling agent. 3. Meisner’s corpuscles respond to vibrations between 10
and 50 hertz. 4. Ruffini’s corpuscles, whilst little understood, are known to
respond to internally generated auditory stimuli.

Evidently we detect sound by the direction, volume, and speed with

which vibrations pass into and around the pinnae, but what about
vibrations that flow through, for example, the kidneys and the liver?
100

How are these processed? Do we affect greater decoherence as vibration

permeates our organs, incipiently amplifying and absorbing various
resonances as more energy fills and empties the circumambience of
bodies? “You don’t understand music, you hear it. So hear me with
your whole body”, Clarice Lispector says, fascinated by the noise of
life inside of her. Such experiences are deeply sonorous, but in between
them there’s a whispering. It’s the whispering that compels me to hold a
mirror up to the horror, to contemplate particles entangled with voids.

More recent findings have shown that when dust and gas collide with
stars they can produce an extremely high-pitched sound in the plasma.
When stars are accumulating new material from their surroundings
(much like a caddisfly larvae does at the bottom of a river), a strange
phenomena occurs in that stars could be making sound, but since
sound supposedly cannot propagate through the vacuum of space, we
cannot hear such growth through normal means. I often wonder how
this could be described, like an ancient pulse that drifts along a series
of internal mutations and molecular displacements. How might we
contemplate sound in a vacuum? What if a vacuum is not empty?

The plasma in between the regions of celestial bodies can produce

pulses that reach up to a trillion hertz, a frequency six million times
higher than anything that can be heard by a mammal. As we see, not
everything is made of atoms, and just as Lispector writes by ear, I think
it’s a fair to state she also writes by plasma. “I see that I’ve never told
you how I listen to music – I gently rest my hand on the record player
and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body: and
so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of
reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands”. Lispector’s
hand is a field suspended over its own collapse. As Karen Barad says,
at least according to classical physics, “when we think we’re touching a
cup of coffee, what we’re actually sensing is the electromagnetic force
between the electrons of the atoms that make up our fingers and those
that make up the cup”. Lispector stridulates her being like antennae
receiving layer upon layer of circular motion between the vast intervals
 101

of her spiritual nature and the solid forms of inorganic matter. As the
auditory system of the brain decomposes and recomposes sound into
its constituent partials, she senses that a moment is the exact state of
everything, invoking an immediate connection between the hand that
writes and the hand that listens, as both universal modes of confluence
and spatial separations of frequency, locating the insensible within the
sensible.

The seething silence of things that are not silent, whether pulsars or
bodies, is typified in David Dunn’s The Sound of Light in Trees–an extreme
compression of space, time, and loss of habitat–gathered from two
years of field recordings of engraver beetles inside piñon trees. Within
the narrow circle of a tree’s cellulose, an almost unknown acoustical
world and an extraordinary array of sound occurs. Dunn shows us
that a complex microecology exists between bark beetles, various
fungi, and their host trees, that sound has a much more profound
role in regulating the dynamics of these relationships than previously
expected.

We read that one of the most common techniques for evaluating

drought stress in trees is to measure their cavitation events through
ultrasound monitoring. As the tree’s vascular system becomes stressed
from insufficient fluid transport, discontinuities in the integrity of
its vascular conduits cause small partial vacuum bubbles to form.
These can implode with such tremendous instantaneous force that,
under laboratory conditions, they have been measured to produce
temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees centigrade, the equivalent
temperature of the surface of the sun. When these cavitation events
occur, they release both light and ultrasound signals, and under extreme
conditions some trees produce these events as an almost continuous
pulse.

Whilst making his recordings, Dunn became curious as to whether

this phenomenon was audible to the beetles and wondered whether it
played a role in the infestation. We know that many species of insect
102

possess ultrasound perception, probably in relation to their main

predators being bats, who of course hunt and orientate themselves
using echolocation, so it was logical for Dunn to consider that there
would be some overlap between the ultrasound of the bats and the
trees.

Many bark beetle species carry various forms of bluestain fungi, Dunn
says, and such fungi kills the trees much quicker than beetles alone,
weakening the tree’s vascular system even further. It’s been observed
that, at ambient temperatures, cavitation sonoluminescence releases
light in a lower frequency spectrum than ultraviolet; light that certain
species of fungi, such as bluestain, require to catalyse their reproductive
cycles. So the sounds of drought-stressed trees attract beetles that then
invade whilst introducing a fungi that feeds on the light inside the tree.
This is regulated, as Dunn says, “by the exchange of complex chemical
and acoustical signals between beetles, fungi, and trees, transforming
them into new forms of energy, nutrients, scent molecules, sound and
light”.

The acuity of the mammalian ear is accurate in terms of one one-

millionth of a second in the localisation of a sound source. e a r.
It’s hard to describe the feelings I have when I see these three letters
on the page, they murmur, so much so, or for so long a period, that
their foundations, my own, become unstable. There are innumerable
patterns to identify amidst such persistent uncertainty. The letters
are far away. The word has lost an l, the beginning of a line. Perhaps
the line is invisible, a screen with which we intervene, with which we
establish an environment, some kind of territory, somewhere we can
locate. I always seem to be beginning to work with these questions, just
beginning to locate them as the l distends and attracts the ear, a process
that permeates much more than I had previously realised. To locate
could be to evacuate one’s consciousness, for a moment. To be there,
partial and whole, matter and essence.
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T his star teaches bending

The mystery now a friend and helpful.

Suzanne Césaire

We sit in between guides and holes, offering the visible to the invisible.
“We are cut off from others” posits Virginia Woolf, “except for waves
of sound”. What else is there that we cannot see in these words that
are also echoes as they move in permanent transience? Reflecting
the consistency and the ineffability of a mysterious and pulsating
neurological life, each body hair is a tactile outpost that registers the
slightest bending, guiding us towards meaning, meaning that compels
us to bend. Should we, can we... close our apertures and become
impermeable environments, a taunting and yet addictive paradox of
all that we know, just out of reach, aside our own heads? Each body
hair is a star.

Narcissus was prophesised to live to a ripe old age, provided that he

never know himself. As he died his blood soaked the earth, and up
sprang the white narcissus flower with its red corollary, from which
an unguent balm was distilled. This was recommended for ‘affections
of the ears’, though it could create headaches. A simple enough
explanation arises when we consider Narcissus as a symbol for our
intimate inner-life. We imagine that, when our self-reflexivity becomes
vertiginous, we apply a few drops of this unguent, a sort of distillation
of brain waves, in the hope that we might orbit our inner-life at a safe
distance, at an intimate proximity.

An intimate inner-life is a certain fragment of matter endowed with

a quality like no other; the medium in which every quality and every
likeness appears. The threshole of consciousness. “A smooth dark
mirror of black marble”, as Proust said, where decomposition is a
pretext for wholeness. Where we can see a raven staring back at us.
104

In William James’s Principles of Psychology, we read that “the separation

of one mind from another is absolute”, that “neither contemporaneity,
not proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to
fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging
to different personal minds”. “The breaches between such thoughts
are the most absolute breaches in nature.” The ear is made not just to
exist, but to speak, to be part of a Company. Before my fall I was such
a stranger to myself that I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world
to see in it and hear in it, to taste in it its smells and to smell in it what I
can touch, to react to it, to realise I became with it. Narcissus saw truth
in fluidity, the thinnest film parted him from another. Echo’s boundary
was the entire world.

If we adumbrate Gertrude Stein’s definition of sound so it points

at both language and reality, happening at the same time but not
together–in mind of an estranged intimacy–we might consider whether
consciousness can be treated as an intermediate portion in between
minds that are both separate and not.

In James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism, published posthumously in 1912,

he continues to study this seeming divide. “Why, if two or more lines
can run through the same geometrical point, or if two or more distinct
processes of activity can run through the same physical things so that
it simultaneously plays a role in each and every process, might not two
or more personal streams of consciousness include one and the same
limit of experience so that it would simultaneously be a part of the
experience of the different minds. How can an experience enter into
two or more consciousnesses?”

“One can work on the abuse of the ear”, writes Lispector. “I encourage
you to listen to me with more than one ear”. Perhaps the ear drinks
the life of a secret happiness, attached to tendrils rooted in deep time,
where in order to have what we have, to keep a little bit of having, we
have to make having move (pulse) a little. We have to agitate it, disquiet
it. As soon as there is a conscience, something is interrupted. There
 105

is a subject, and it is too much, like a vacuum that experiments with

its own non-being, and maybe, as Barad postulates, with the ongoing
questioning of itself as the structure of nothingness.

Is a thing
Pythagoras believed that where two lines cross the junction is two lines thick.
explained a thing we have no further concerns with, does know thyself
mean have no further concern with thyself ? Euclid said that two lines can cross
infinitely without any thickness at all. Knowing oneself can be a catastrophic
undertaking, but only if the Socratic injunction is taken in its modern
vice, the calcified introspection of individual self-consciousness. Then
the risk of self-knowledge becomes that of complacency. At the junction of
R. Buckminster Fuller’s works lines crossed that were two lines thick. How many of us
know how to observe something? Of those who do, how many observe
themselves? Are we all farthest away from ourselves? Marlow Moss’s double
line was thick enough to produce aesthetic emotion through an ever-becoming state of action
and dynamism. The entrance of a person into a room may offer, for those
afflicted with an overly acute sense of hearing, a moment of joyous
self-obliviousness, a quickened pulse that feeds the constellations
in the veins, placates the neurons in the back of the head, prompts
involuntary gestures. In other circumstances we imagine such people
as being able to govern and subdue every impulse, every upwelling of
emotion, as long as they are conscious of who they are.

It seems germane to briefly return to Stein, in particular her beautiful

short portrait of 1910, ‘Ada’, written to honour the life of Alice B.
Toklas. Toward the end of the portrait Stein writes, “Some one who
was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was
almost always listening. That one who was loving was almost always
listening. That one who was loving was telling about being one then
listening.” Laid out on the page, in the 1999 Dover edition, the lines
begin to look like sound waves. Indeed, when we read this passage out
loud it seems best to stop thinking and just “be one then listening”, to
let sound waves map our bodies as we read.
106

It goes without saying that experiences come and go on an enormous

scale, and if we take them all together, they enfold like a chaos of
incommensurable relations that we cannot keep or let go. The bridge
that connects experiences, the surface upon which they correspond,
is mirrored in Audre Lorde’s ‘Erotic’, in the passions of love and its
deepest meanings.

James’s recognition of the difficulty of knowing where experiences

come from, of how they get themselves made, why their characters
and relations are just such, leads me to revisit liminality and Stein’s
definition of sound as that of relation, not the thing related, but as
the pure in between. This is the moment of love, “like a third term”,
as Luce Irigaray writes in her essay on Plato’s Symposium and the role
of Diotima, the absent guide of Socrates. “Something gets solidified
in space-time with the loss of a vital intermediary milieu”, Irigaray
comments, “a sort of teleological triangle replaces a perpetual
movement”. What Irigaray hears tell of Diotima, that “she speaks in
a style that is woven but never definitively knotted, of becoming in
time, of permanent generation and regeneration here and now,” could
easily be said of Stein, Toklas and their ‘Ada’. Here the intermediary
remains the intermediary, a liminal space where, as Tim Ingold writes,
the “in between is a movement of generation and dissolution in a
world of becoming”, a stage where things are not yet given but are on
their way to being given.

Evidently we could continue this any number of ways. We read in

Anne Carson’s Eros The Bittersweet that, “where eros is lack, its activation
calls for three structural components––lover, beloved, and that which
comes between them. These are three points of transformation on a
circuit of possible relationships, electrified by desire so that they touch
not touching.” Three points of transformation, heard at the same time
but not together. Perhaps these three points can be condensed into art,
as that which Jacques Ranciere considers a third thing between people,
though if, as Ranciere says, “its meaning is owned by no one”, what
does this then say about definition and location?
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Where are we when we think?

Variegation and solidarity coexist within these definitions, to extend

the self is likewise to live in service of the other, though with regard to
the former, it feels like the self and the other are of the same composite
nature. Eventually we require the voice of the inner voice in order to
speak and be heard outside of oneself.

When are we where we think?

Azimuth continues to speak, leading me to try and pay constant and

close attention to the intermediary as that which we are in, as not
already codified, as an incipient confusion of opposition where matter
is never a settled matter.

The body is metamorphoses. The will to hear and to see and to touch
infinitely. Hearing that one has a chance to see without knowing, to say
without seeing, to touch without hearing.

What is a new ear? A listening heart, a place from which to restructure

sensibility. To move, to drift, longing for light, going wherever our
guides take us, wherever their guides take them.

As Catherine Clement says, “When one returns from syncope it is the

real world that looks strange.”

Where was I?
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Retention of the for m

The infinite in an instant.

Simone Weil

Whilst discussing his film, Sirius1, Stan Brakhage said that the biggest
influence on the work was a realisation that there is no repetition,
that every time a word is repeated it is a new word by virtue of what
precedes it and what follows it. “Gertrude Stein gave me the courage”,
Brakhage says, “to let images recur in this fashion and in such a manner
that there was no sense of repetition.”

One of Stein’s ambitions was to defeat the sense of expectation, to

make each item she presents resound in its full immediacy. What does
it say of location if we consider we are in a prolonged present? A
“natural composition in the world”. Her prolonged present was made
into a continuous present, which, as Stein comments, “naturally, was
natural”. We also hear Stein’s present immediacy and her perpetually
regenerating forms, which she refers to as “beginning again and again”,
a “using everything”. Charles Sanders Peirce maintained that meaning
does not inhere in individual concepts but in the relations among the
concepts. This echoes Stein’s life-long interest in showing how the
meanings of terms undergo change as they take on new relations,
seeking to show that context establishes significance, and that it is felt
somatically, through the corporeal effects of rhythm.

1 In the recently published letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, Davenport writes that Brakhage’s
work put a tax on his eyeballs that was the most demanding he’d ever experienced, akin only to the thick
imagery of Pavel Tchelitchew. Davenport writes that his films were “a paced metric of briefly-held images,
always a superimposition of two, but so arranged that the eye (so slow to lose an image) is always looking
at four at once”. After asking Brakhage about some of the images in his films, he writes to Kenner that
they were of “the lung’s inner surface, tripe-white and tripe-textured, puckering with exhalation, bubbling
like boiling milk with inhalation, corpuscles photographed in perspective, enlarged 2000 times, the shiny
red surface of a beating heart.”
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Stein, like James, felt that nouns present the world as fixed, whereas
everything is in motion. Part of her response was to displace the
emphasis away from nouns and towards aggregates of words where
repeated sounds could become meanings. I wonder if autophony is the
repetition of one’s voice, or another voice entirely?

“I watched the red rooster, and the rooster, reptilian, kept one alert
and alien eye on me. He pulled his extravagant neck to its maximum
length, hauled himself high on his legs, stretched his beak as if he were
gagging, screamed, and blinked. It was a ruckus. The din came from
everywhere, and only the most rigorous application of reason could
persuade me that it proceeded in its entirety from this lone and maniac
bird.”

Reading the above from ‘A Field of Silence’, by Annie Dillard, we’re

reminded that many birds, when displaying and vocalising for a mate,
call so loud that they should, in fact, deafen themselves. However, when
birds open their beaks to such an extent, they pull on the tympanic
membrane, as a kind of reflex response, and are unable to hear the
sound of their own voice. To begin at the limit is–as a bird–to be
always reaching the limit of the tympanic organ.

For Echo, to forcibly repeat others’ words was her ear torment. Her
own catastrophe. Her daughter, Inyx, was a wryneck, torticollis, twisted
neck, barred and secretive as any cuckoo. The tympanic membrane is
a writher in the woods. It is what is returned to us. In Derrida’s essay,
‘Tympan’, he states that philosophy is configured as an apparatus of
the ear, one that has learned to tune out everything but the sound of its
own name. Inner thought pushes against the tympanum as it writhes
from the outside, from the forest we all carry with us. The membrane
appears like the translucent veins of an avocado stone, awaiting a
tender translation, from one vibratory dimension to the nest.

Some years ago, I played a few shows in Sweden. I stayed on a farm

outside Gothenberg. Every morning I was awoken by the sound of a
110

rooster competing with its own echo. “After a pause” Dillard continues,
“the roosters across the street started, answering the proclamation, or
cranking out another round, arrhythmically, interrupting. In the same
way there is no pattern nor sense to the massed stridulations of cicadas;
their skipped beats, enjambments, and failed alterations jangle your
spirits, as though each of those thousand insects, each with identical
feelings, were stubbornly deaf to the others, and loudly alone.”

Narcissus’s bloom drove Echo deeper into repetition as a quavering

reflection. A ringing rock. A tympanum. In ‘Tympan’ we read that
Derrida thought the middle ear was responsible for the equalisation
of internal and external pressure. We now know that this is the role
of the Eustachian tube. The membrane of the tympanum, a thin and
transparent partition separating the auditory canal from the middle
ear cavity, is stretched obliquely. Obliquely from above to below, from
outside to inside, and from the back to the front. Therefore it is not
perpendicular to the axis of the ear canal, and one of the effects of
this obliqueness is to increase the surface of impression and hence the
capacity of vibration. It has been observed, particularly in birds, that
precision of hearing is in direct proportion to the obliqueness of the
tympanum.

In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the notion of liberation through hearing
during the intermediate state is proffered as that of the Bardo Thodol.
The Thodol is a guide in a long history of guides. This is a synthesis of
listening louder, of hearing nothing but the sound of our own voices
and nothing of our own voices, being liberated, through hearing, to a
temporal place that is less than one but greater than two.

The epitome of a psychopomp, a mercurius bird calls and new energy

is given to the notion of listening louder, of drinking from the life of
secret happiness. If bone is thought, does autophony force me to hear
the marrow? If the tympanic membrane is echo, are fusiform neurons
ancient stars gathering stories?
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Coma Berenices

The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds

And of sounds so far forgotten, like her voice,
That they return unrecognised.

Wallace Stevens

In the Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson ingeniously translates the

Epicurean goal of ataraxia as a state of emotionlessness. Ataraxia has
often been interpreted, in relation to the Epicurean doctrine of how
best to live, as the absence of disturbance, perhaps even an absence
of echo. A life devoid of emotion manifests as a disembodied figure
whose outline is a reproduction of ecstasies, a unmoored thing, a
pollen grain. Several of the dehiscent grains that flew into the sky on a
hot day and became Azimuth came from my attempts to read the spirals
of a fossilised earbone, to look toward life through its silent archives
like some hermeneut of osseus textuality, a fortune teller in reverse, a
transmutation of seeds and fossils.

Three years ago, I was gifted the fossilised ear bone of a whale. A relic
of a lifeform now extinct. I remember an aroma of burnt herbs as I
opened the box. I didn’t need to touch the gift, I couldn’t, I could do
nothing but peer into its kindness, its loss, its distance. The whale’s
ear bone is a memory where memories reside, such a thing that can
hold equal force and tenderness, sadness and joy, moments of absolute
peace in which thought soundlessly sleeps and gently wakes. No limb
or muscle can twitch for a debilitating sorrow, a regret that cannot tell
you anything, a oneness in which all form is universal. Where there is
no high and no low, a solid held in movement. A thing, still, vibrating,
leaps and grieves, empty and full. It doesn’t bring memory back, just
the feeling of remembering, of being somewhere. Eunoia, this will and
112

wall to bliss. A temporal thought wherein the intellect is forgotten.

This thing keeps everything alive, always opening, always receiving in
its suspension. An event remembered has no bounds, and I remember
myself remembering in a heavy honeycomb of remembrance, in a time
that compels matter to silence, a fetter of eternity to push through the
past only to arrive back there.

Fossils cannot appear until the earth’s deep fires have burned off a
great deal of dross. Tailings that do not disappear, but accumulate
somewhere in the darkness. When humans are underwater, their
skulls vibrate, and being as our ears are attached to our skulls, they too
vibrate. This can be why we have trouble locating sound underwater.
A whale’s ear bone, however, floats. It is detached from the skull. It is
nature enmeshed in nature.

We know that vibration travels roughly four times faster in water than
it does in air. The ears of this fossil must tell us something of how
sound prevailed so long ago. The incessant cymatic burrs and eddies
are stains and grains amidst the impossible blackness of the bulla.
Temporal rings of the cetacean otoconia. Far from sedimentation, this
fossil is life. It is integral. Its past is mixed into its present through a
series of porous distinctions and itinerant locations.

“I’ve not learnt much from this experience, it seems” says Goethe’s
Mephistopheles, “the south, the north––neither make sense; down
here, back there, the ghosts are mad.” The fossil continues to open
up rails of emotion posing as memories that call from holes that are
neither one place nor another, but rather, the very motility of strata,
both continuous and relational. Perhaps there’s something in the colour
(the strange dark purity), or the absence of colour, the pigment sapped
from fuming oceans of the Pliocene, of where our ears once were.

We have muscles around our eyes that hold them in place, everything
mixes into something, but since my dehiscence has gotten worse those
muscles have become erratic, altering the visual angles of my eyes
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to the world. My brain tells me I’m moving when I’m not. There is
an agony in being put together by others; the world, put together,
does not escape this agony. Folds replace holes full of quietly vibrating
yet teeming life, living folds from holes that are sites of more rarefied
matter, holes riddled with holes, memory, reason, emotion, intellect,
empathy, sensation. I wash my apertures in order to acquire habits
that are screens in between plural and chaotic multiplicities. Echo lost
her voice and could only mimic. Without a body, our ability to listen
expands and spreads through a world that it cannot hear.

The ear continues to grow after it dies. Its death represents the
expansion of audition. Even though the ear is lifeless it can nevertheless
hear. To echo is to locate, but it is also to lose. It is a delicate radar that
guides us through impressions of resonance. An echo cannot occupy
the position of location. It is only capable of sending back an effluvial
tendency of what it receives, portions of utterances for which it is not
ultimately responsible. It is an eidolon of knowledge and of death. To
clear a path through its humid haste is to tread along spectra indicating
distillation of process. It is to be incipiently rearranged by one’s own
surroundings, always encroaching and declining amidst turning points
of white vapours and rubedo firmaments. A labyrinth of suddenly
revealed ripeness. The point at the centre where one could hear the
limits of the cosmos as sound sounding.

According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, several Amazonian myths present

the sun and the moon as “masters of fishing”. The two celestial bodies
fill such a role concurrently with the constellations of Orion and the
Pleiades on the one side and Berenice’s Hair on the other. We read
that “Orion and the Pleiades are responsible for the appearance of
fish, Berenice’s hair for the disappearance of fish, while the sun and
the moon ensure their resurrection which, as it were, neutralises the
opposition between the first two terms.”
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Sun, Moon
resurrection

Orion, Pleiades Berenice’s Hair

appearance disappearance

As we attempt to imagine a balance between such things, we hear

that the anthropologist Mary Douglas considered dirt to be “matter
out of place”. “Dirt”, Douglas says, “is anomalous”. It is what we
exclude when we are creating order. “The poached egg on your plate
at breakfast is not dirt; the poached egg on the floor of the Reading
Room in the British Museum is”, says Anne Carson. In the fragments
of Heraclitus we read that “Sea water is both fresh and foul: excellent
for fish, poison to men”, that “Asses would rather have hay than gold”.

To receive the fossilised whale’s ear bone, I realise, was to be faced with
my own dirt. Stepping out onto the bridge that crosses a rotating abyss.

Berenice’s Hair looks like an arrowhead in the sky, a harmony of

transmutation. It is a constellation seeking a triangle, a line corresponding
between clean and dirty, appearance and disappearance–the raw egg
that trickles down the side of a bull–the dung in a sacred drink–the
clay under the bed.“Gateways to the body”, as Catherine Clement
says.

In between this celestial line is an eclipse that is the rupture of vertigo,

abolishing and heightening the world around a life.
 115

Walter Benjamin employed the distinction between umwelt1 and

milieu in order to address what he understood to be a profound and
dangerous historical alienation between body and environment. We
might call this an anti-constellation, akin to a description of liminal
stillness where the sacrifice of the ear corresponds to the sacrifice of
the environment, a disjunction like George Bataille’s ‘Sacrifice of the
Gibbon’. We throw ourselves into this giant universe with the intimate
feeling of having urinated the stars.

Vertigo is suspended between the echo of the ear and the ear’s
echo. It is part of the family of bodily emotions that increase the
distance between the self and the surrounding world to the point of
alienation. Gaston Bachelard’s concept of topoanalysis, the systematic
psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives, is like an unfurled
tone map of puckered and stratified notches, or the value of a spiral. An
ever encroaching nostalgia of what has been and will never be again.
We encounter convulsive nuances along the coils of tonotopic analysis,
and in this speculative mode of pitched reflection and recollection the
gradual swelling of the whole is etched in partial determinations of the
surrounding environment that vertigo tries to straighten.

During the winter of 1987, the poet Archie Ammons was driving
north on the I-95 in Florida when an enormous hill of rubble came
into view. The sight sparked an idea. “I thought maybe that was the
sacred image of our time,” Ammons said. When he returned to Ithaca,
Ammons tried to write a long poem entitled Garbage. Nothing came of
the first attempt. Two years later, the image returned. He wrote the
poem quickly then put it aside.

1 Jakob Von Uexküll contends that each species or individual is surrounded by an objective world
dependent on the respective organism’s capacities for action and perception, the umwelt envelops like an
outer shell. Azimuth is a marvelling risk of wonder at this sheer multiplicity and differentiation of holes,
of selfworlds. Surfaces abstracted from lateral motion. Entangling our attentions, breaking down barriers
between bodies.
116

Walking can be akin to ataraxia. As we walk the self dies and makes
way for a particular kind of freedom from thinking. When I was 13,
and when everyone was asleep, my body would take my mind for a
walk up a hill behind our house, and I would lie down on a large
mound of rubble. It was supposed to be used to smooth out the roads
in the area, but it stayed there for years, unmoving, a point of intense
churning. This is “a memory”, as Chris Marker states, “whose only
function is to leave behind memories”. It seems to me that such things
revolve around us like planets that orbit stars. The thread that runs
through these relations is a creature, a bundle, an entanglement, a
ganglic heap. Lying on the hill of rubble, looking up, attempting to
blankly co-exist in ideation and a-figuration, detaching colour from
form as one thing passed into another in the freedom of the senses,
was the stillness of sauntering and the transient emptying of capacity
and recognition. A forgetful acquaintance with the stars. Listening
for that which is intrinsic to sound itself. I now realise that I stopped
visiting the rubble when my body fell silent.

We consider the benefits of granting the holes of the ear a period of

repose in order to reflect in solitude on the sonorous roaming of matter,
on nature. To provide for each a sky, a page where we can also consider
what this could mean to us. To wander far from the susceptible, to
figuration. Tonotopic analysis releases a melancholy whose tone Chris
Marker renders in a few lines from Samura Koichi:

“Who said that time heals all wounds? Better to say that time heals
everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its
real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if
the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what
remains is a disembodied wound.”

The senses are modified ears, each in possession of a hole that cannot
be closed, that is always tuning and trying to release the subjective
altogether. A hole that is a depth of holes, inscribing the world into the
perceiver and the perceiver into the world.
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Her mes dancing

I like a / loved one to / be apt in / the wing.

Lorine Niedecker

Sound is fugitive. Concentric waves of liminal flight do not connect so

much as correspond, coming to life where one thing turns to another.
To follow sound is to be followed by sound, akin to making a place
for the other as a practise of otherness, side-by-side life, a mode that
allows otherness to be heard. According to Guy Davenport, Gerard
Manley Hopkins believed that he could make a sacred geography
imaginable by comparing the Sea of Galilee with the left ear; locating
Nazareth by saying that it would be the corresponding nose, that
Jordan would run down through the hair of the head, and so on.
This is a careful emptiness echoed by Annie Dillard who, upon losing
interest in a given bird, would try to take it apart and put it back
together again with her mind, one cell at a time. “I would imagine
neutrinos passing through its feathers and into its heart and lungs, or
I reverse its evolution and imagine it as a lizard”.

I’m writing about parts and relations of the ear that, bar the pinnae,
I’ve not seen, and not heard. At least I can’t be sure I have. Am
I writing about an absence, an absence I’m filling with emptiness?
I’ve read that the cochlea echoes–our ear sending back to itself its
own truth (yet apparently a damaged cochlea makes or receives no
echoes)–that the whole body makes its own sound. I am inhabited by
autophony, the audible immanence of simply being alive from one
moment to the next, and yet I can’t say for certain that I’ve heard any
of this, felt... perhaps?

The difficulty of vocabulary is evident here. With its need to find

new references for forms unseen except as representations of a
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single person, studying the contours as if they were only absences.

An absence of air pressure in the conical hollows and fluctuating
membranes, inverse and gelatinous pyramids, would suggest a new
way of talking about differences that exhaust us when confronted
with the darkness of the ear. “If you run in a triangle you have one
inner experience of the blood”, says Rudolf Steiner. Every movement
contains its corresponding blood experience. There are three bones in
each semicircular canal. We run in triangles where waves are spirals.

“When we close our eyes and move our limbs, these movements are
known exactly by us in their direction and their extension. Using
our hand, we find our way in a space that one can designate the free
space of our movements, or, in other words, our effect space.” Here,
the biologist Jakob Von Uexküll begins a foray into directional signs
as pairs of opposites, left to right, upward to downward, forward to
backward, stating that “effect space is not just a space of movement
constructed of a thousand crisscrossing directional steps. Rather, it
possesses a system by which it is controlled, the well-known coordinate
system, consisting of levels that are vertically arranged, one on top of
the other.” This serves, Uexküll contends, as the basis of all spatial
determinations, where we are when we are moving.

Uexküll mentions that Elias Von Cyon was one of the first people to
attribute the three-dimensionality of our space to the semicircular
canals, the location of which, he says, corresponds to the three planes
of the effect space. “All animals that have these three semicircular
canals also have available a three-dimensional effect space,” and the
semicircular canals seem to “be called to play the role of a compass
as well–not a compass that only ever points north, but a compass
for the ‘house door’.” All movements of the body leave traces in the
semicircular canals.

The actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them
connect momentarily in a triangle. According to Anne Carson, the
difference (which we might say is also a potential connection) is
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eros. We learn from Bell Hooks that when we feel deeply drawn to
someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion
in them. As Hooks says, “that process of investment where a loved
one becomes important to us is called ‘cathexis’. M. Scott Peck rightly
emphasises that most of us “confuse cathecting with loving”. We all
know how often individuals feeling connected to someone through
the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even
if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of
cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.”

As Carson says, “simultaneous pleasure and pain are the symptoms

of eros”. Properly a noun, eros acts as a verb, as part of flow,
engendered by lack, careful emptiness, over holes, a delicate and
slow reach. Wings fan the movement of the soul, like the “man who
listens closely” in Sappho’s ‘Fragment 31’, and the movement of the
will to extend the self is part of the incorporation of identity with
possibility. To nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth is a
leap in the soul, and as Carson reminds us, “where eros is lack, its
activation calls for three structural components–lover, beloved, and
that which comes between them”.

Inside the pages of Stendhal’s essay on love, first published in 1822,

there seems a sound that wants to get to know the reader’s bones. I’ve
tried to write about this sound several times but have never managed
to hear it clearly, craning my ears to Stendhal’s limerent narrative, as
he and his companion, Madame Gheradi, become so taken with the
vast and undulating geography of the Salzburg Alps and the Hallein
Salt Mines. Before visitors descend into the subterranean caves of the
mines (an atmosphere from which the essay grows, and into which it
disappears); sliding on planks of wood three-quarters of a nautical
league down into the mineral earth, the miners would offer them
diamond-studded boughs of hornbeam. These twigs and sticks had
been left in the mines for months in order to become saturated by the
salt water atmosphere of the caves and, upon drying, were encrusted
with a shining deposit of crystals.
120

During their journey, Stendhal and Gheradi find themselves in the

company of a third, an officer of the Bavarian light horse, who is
besotted by the presence of Madame Gheradi. Whilst observing the
officer’s mannerisms, so engrossed in Gheradi’s features, Stendhal
comments that what strikes him most are the mad undertones
emerging moment by moment in the streaming discourse of the
officer. Every minute, the officer sees, in Gheradi, exponential
perfections seemingly invisible to others. This finds a metaphorical
counterpart as Stendhal passes scrutiny over both an ‘ordinary’ stick
of hornbeam and its salt-sheen equivalent, glittering like the finest
diamonds of a brightly lit ball room, a kind of longing for a location.
“Each moment what he said bore less resemblance to the woman
he was beginning to love”, Stendhal writes, eventually comparing
Gheradi herself to the hornbeam, as the officer continues to discover
crystals around her that Stendhal has never seen.

The will to extend the self, as if it were aeolian, to crack Stendhal’s

crystal casing and marvel at the light patterns as the salt falls to the
ground, releasing a scent that awakens even deeper feelings. Grafting
oneself onto the bark of the hornbeam, is, in part, a task of the
imagination–of reaching out–extending.

When I think of Stendhal’s essay, the space between the salt crystals
and the hornbeam is one of silence. Out of place. The invisible line
in the triangle consists of different layers of time and memory that
relive desire, reaching out again and again for a handful of saline
minerals that begin to dissolve as you hold them close. Reaching
out, extending the self from what is known and actual to something
different. When we try to think about our thinking, as when we try to
feel our own desire, we find ourselves located at a blindspot. In such
instances, we are nowhere in particular.

Three terms can be grouped together in all kinds of different triangles.

One can be a reflection of another, an inverse complementarity of
originating and resulting combinations. Two inverted triangles can
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often be regarded as sharing the same salt bridge. The combination

of two can create a quaternary, a soundless sound that is all
conceivable opposites. The innovation of the crystalline metaphor
occurs in the shift of distance from far to near and is effected in the
sound of its flickering preserved by quaternary bonding. An intense
act of imagination brings two things together in critical proximity,
contemplates their incongruence, then intuits a new congruence,
meanwhile continuing to recognise the previous through the new. An
ability to hold and let go at once, amidst pleasure and paradox, actual
and possible, where one self–returning and remaking–disappears
behind another. A “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration”, as
Elizabeth Bishop says. A cave (a cavity of the heart) enclosed within
a mountain. A centre, withdrawing from summit to interior.

An edge is here an agent of dissolution rather than enclosing line.

We find ourselves preoccupied with dissolving as migrating, collecting
rarefied encounters with locations that ‘must’ be there, and yet always
seem to vanish in endless beating fumes.
122

T he white belly of a spider

When it is a beautiful starry night Mr Palomar says: ‘I must go and look at the
stars.’ That is exactly what he says: ‘I must,’ because he hates waste and believes
it is wrong to waste that great quantity of stars that is put at his disposal.

Italo Calvino

Notes from several realisations of

Mieko Shiomi’s < star piece >
Do this piece on the roof of a building or in the park. 1963.

The biggest star –

Look at it while you like.

Polaris, Ursae Minoris, Pole Star. The shoulders of stars.

We become impersonal to the extent that we can liberate a thought, create

a work, understanding an experiment and its implications; to the extent that
other impersonal things, impulses, or forces can live within and through us;
that is, to the extent that we can walk a precarious line, a line of death that
always inhabits life.

The second biggest star –

Obscure it with the smoke of a cigarette.

Rigel, Orionis, Foot. The last bright one.

The silent constellations and the space which is time has nothing to do with
us.
 123

The third biggest star –

Shoot it with a gun.

Deneb kaitos, Ceti, Tail of the whale. In the mouth.

Agrippa von Nettesheim, a sixteenth-century Dutch physician, wrote that

“a person who is ill no longer is in harmony with the universe, they can find
harmony, however, and ‘get well’ again, if they orientate their movements
to the motions of the stars”. When a star falls together it can create a
black hole, and being as I am vertiginous, looking up has become decidedly
difficult.

The fourth biggest star –

Hold a cat in your arms.

Algol, Persei, The monster. The human part of the figure.

The thickness between us and the stars is the same in-between sugars and
rotifers. Is this the blood of sacred geography (chimeric particles), the world
encircled by the mandala?

The fifth biggest star –

Look at it through a telescope.
Spica, Virginis, An ear of wheat. The horses’s part.

A passage through zero. The decoherence of rearrangement. The line is

something very mysterious.

The sixth biggest star –

When you find it, look at your watch.

Vega, Lyrae, Falling (eagle). Ruddy.

Listening and its not is held up and pushed down by Paul Klee’s Greeting (a
painting from 1922 which I’ve also seen called Separation in the evening), by
the importance of friendship throughout such an endeavour, a voluntary
rubbing of opposites.
124

Other layers continue to grow over and around the painting’s contemplative
lines, a movement from the top upwards and from the bottom downwards,
making room for the encounter (sending and receiving the score) that
prompts the greeting (sending and receiving the responses). We could
equally think of this relationship as having neither an above or a below, but
additions, creating other correspondences, feeding them.

An abundance of threads are unearthed, fall together. A moment in the

curve that this movement, in the dirt, describes. What Helen Cixous refers
to as a “passage to the stars”. A gathering together of the threads of life–
both solid and fluid–a grace we can put our hands through, as if it were a
window. The broken glass lands in the shape of an ear, and listens.

The seventh biggest star –

Reflect it in the water of a glass and drink it.

Capella, Aurigae, A little she-goat. The hilt of a nebula.

Looping, netting, knitting, crocheting, knotting, coiling, twinning, braiding.

The eighth biggest star –

Obscure it with the flame of a candle.

Fomalhaut, Piscis Australis, Mouth of the fish. In the knot.

Place is in time when two ends of the round earth meet.

The ninth biggest star –

Draw a deep breath.

Achernar, Eridani, The end of the river. Consonant thighs.

Foraging among churning layers of growth and decay, I have found in all
directions that the memory disappears and comes back, upside down, as its
opposite.
 125

The tenth biggest star –

Lie down and look at it through a loop of your fingers.

Arcturus, Bootis, Guardian of the bear. Stars in the horns.

Parker Tyler introduced Stan Brakhage to Joseph Cornell. They met in a

library, and Cornell hid behind a pillar. Liminality ties the holes together.

The eleventh biggest star –

Read a letter sent to you recently.

Thuban, Draconis, A dragon. Those in the sting.

Form, as Paul Klee puts it, is death; form giving is life. This is the line
that sometimes precedes but always follows ‘a life’, balanced between
subjectivisation and death, which ends whatever particular line a life might
follow, but perhaps liberates other lines. To be taken up by others who come
after.

...

In The Divine Comedy, a biography of Pavel Tchelitchew, Parker Tyler writes

in his own inimitable language of the artist’s first practical initiation
into the heavens, of Tchelitchew “studying the bluebacked begemmed
arches above”. Pavel and his sisters, wary of frostbite as they roam
their Doubrovka estate, would plunge into the cold night with their
telescope and map of the constellations. Pavel would so often return
frozen, his outer ear huge and red, requiring instant attention. This,
Tyler reasons, is a precursor to the great and foreshortened pinnae
of his paintings, most keenly rendered, perhaps, in his ‘Study for The
Tennis Players’ and Sleeping Pinheads. Visibly vibrating yet fastened
down, a redness indicative of a severe migraine.
126

Whilst writing the text for Azimuth, I came to think of pinnae as nets,
and elsewhere in Tchelitchew’s biography I was not at all surprised
to find that for him the “nett” (as he spelt it) symbolised a trap, “the
very skein of his own fate”.

The net (and I think by extension the pinnae) is conspicuous in

Tchelitchew’s art in myriad ways, from the net that catches the falling
acrobat to the form of the spider’s web as the architecture of home,
which also acts as a prison. Perhaps the culmination of the net as
pinna takes place throughout his immanent Celestial Physiognomies
and Interior Landscapes, where the sublime good will of the night sky
roams the harmonics of the face. Where in between the light of the
moon and the passions, strange harmonies of sound are caught like
butterflies. A fulminating panic heard in the wing, caused by the net.

There are some individuals we encounter when researching and

writing whose personal mythology echoes our own. Tchelitchew is
seemingly one of those individuals. Working in sound, I have become
obsessed with cymatic patterns, and Tchelitchew, along with Gertrude
Stein, seems to feature in myriad threads of the networked weave of
a poetics of listening. Tchelitchew followed the astronomical belief
that our bodies, being made of elements compounded from earth
and space, are ruled by the myriad conjunctions and mystic humours
attributed to the celestial bodies as they transmit their sublimated
signals through earthly beings. Such things bend to the guide all their
care, wheeling through spirals to present themselves with greater and
greater clarity and confusion. The soundless beginning of a thought
that listens like an earthquake.

Throughout his Celestial Physiognomies, Tchelitchew tried to

systematically translate the face into its scaleless as well as its timeless
aspects. His canvases of the time are replete with steady ovals and
spirals, the outer ears depicted as concentric circles, as if they were
both sound and the nets with which to sift sound. A location, a kernel,
suspended over an abyss.
 127

Inachevé1, an incarnation of the head of La Dame Blanche (the Jungian

anima which, according to Tyler, as a boy, and long before he knew
what an anima2 was, Tchelitchew had seen in Doubravka3), is the
final, and unfinished, work in Tchelitchew’s triad, the posthumously
named Divine Comedy. It seems to me like all the pulsing and
shimmering forms of his Celestial Physiognomies were both working
towards and starting from Inachevé. Wound around the spiral network
in which Tchelitchew pictured his own demise.

Tchelitchew first saw the apparition of La Dame Blanche along an

avenue of trees in Doubrovka. As he walked towards her the spectral
aether would disappear, often vanishing altogether. As he turned
around, she would reappear at the opposite end, as before. Thinking
of this memory, as if it were a place, Inachevé could quite possibly be a
mandala, which, according to Tyler, would reveal a correspondence
with the pagan zodiac and its arrangement of ruling planets and
mythic constellations, enwebbed in the geometry of the celestial
globes. Inachevé is also quite possibly a yantra, an architectural
connotation of the labyrinth; an attempt at reaching into the fluid
features of infinity and uncovering a new ontology capable of fitting
into a more refined astrology, susceptible to both poetic and scientific

1 The painting Tchelitchew was working on when he died. A skeleton of a leaf so thin and etiolated as
to be translucent, but at the same time lambent, minutely, with a pale and sufficient light. A world of
new small hands revealing the exoskeleton, exposing bones to its light. Charles Henri Ford stated that
Inacheve’s working title was The Sun.

2 Jung states that “aspects of the anima appear as Hermes, and that in dreams he is a helpful guide”.
Hermes, a capricious tone of mediation in between the unconscious and conscious mind, appears
in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, and is given the task, in which he gleefully participates, of frisking
each shade of its attributes. If the anima is forced into one’s inner world, it can function as a medium
in between the ego and the unconscious, in much the same way as does the persona for ego and
environment. Over-awareness of the anima could provide a premature conclusion or blockage to the
individuation process. Instead of being “content with an intermediate position”, it calcifies the version
of the self with which the person’s anima identifies. “A will to be some entity could become an act of
petrification”, as Denise Riley puts it.

3 The ‘bird-urn woman’, La Dame Blanche, was a guide who announced Tchelitchew’s death. She
appeared, like ‘a nucleus of meaning’, in a set of variations on the last sketchbook page on which
Tchelitchew worked.
128

methods. “Inachevé”, Parker writes, “is a radical attempt to dispense

with the idea of pictorial space (a limited ground on which an image
exists), by simultaneously abstracting and geometrising the face of
the amorphous guide that haunted Tchelitchew’s life”.

I’ve come to think of the Celestial Physiognomies, and indeed Inachevé,

as indicative of how time creates spatial illusions, where what we see
is partly there and partly gone. The apparition, the guide that is both
Trickster and Psychopomp, is seen through the skrim of time-space
proportions so great that, in this case, the anima’s initial identity is
constantly submerged; transformed in a performance of ecological
knowledge. La Dame Blanche’s body breaks its limits and transcends
its ecstasy, shakes off its apertures and edges in a plexus of critical
proximity, pushing and pulling the centre out into its own deafness.

The body is a universe dancing. Imbuing life with significance

through endless contemplation and immersion, as psychomagnetic
fields reveal themselves through the casting and shattering of matter.

This is what it can be to distinguish the self in order for each hole to
become conscious of the other. A nerve language touching its own
viscera.
 129

T he more time goes by the more

it’s recorded
Ah, and I don’t want anything explained to me that in order to be explained would
have to be removed from itself.

Clarice Lispector

“For Patanjali”1 Luce Irigaray states, “the way to develop perception

toward a culminating energy–so as to reach samadhi–requires the
mental internalisation of what is perceived until the abolition of the
subject-object duality.” For Irigaray, the state of Samadhi can be
attained by preserving the duality between another living being, an oak
or a lily, for example, and herself, but changing her way of perceiving.
“I no longer gaze at the tree or the flower as a solely visible object, I
gaze at their invisibility. The sap which animates them and starting
from which, they can appear to me without any possible appropriation
on my part, be it physical or mental.” It is the irreducible duality
between the tree or the flower that Irigaray believes can lead her to
a state of samadhi, arising from the love of life itself. To listen can
be to recognise another life, irreducible in its flow amidst a labyrinth
of labyrinths. The ear is love, a spectral spreading that encompasses
the past and the future, and in some way, as Jorge Luis Borges says,
“involves the stars.”

The lives of things in the world could be imagined, as Bruno Latour

has suggested, as star-like shapes with centres surrounded by many
radiating lines with all sorts of tiny conduits leading to and fro. Here I
find myself picturing Ernst Haeckl’s drawings of radiolaria, the ooze
of a life process wherein boundaries are sustained only thanks to the
flow of materials across them. I think again of the caddisfly larvae, “a

1 One of the authors of the Yoga Sutras.

130

memento mori for those who read too much”, as Annie Dillard says.

Picturing the rays and spectra of Latour’s star model, we find ourselves
focussing on the formative boundaries of mind and matter in Paul
Klee’s diagram, ‘I–You–Earth–World’, wherein artists themselves are
in nature and part of nature in natural space. It exemplifies the tensions
where a life exists in myriad relationships, each seeking and constantly
adjusting to its own balance in accordance to those of others. We might
think of Klee, facing nature, subject to object, I and You, set so harshly
and purposefully that the invisible becomes necessary to transform
one state into another. Establishing optical-physical relations across
an invisible barrier. Rendering the waves on the paper as they flow
from the object’s surface and are absorbed by the medium; suggesting
that the You is more than its outward appearance, enabling intuitive
inferences about the inner object from its optical exterior. Anatomy
becoming physiology.

Thinking of morphological spectra, of Latour’s star-like shapes,

Clement and Bohme’s ecstasies and trances, even of Klee’s Bauhaus
diagrams from the early 1930s (where we find a star-like correspondence
of progression and regression forming between his theoretical and
creative work). I picture a sensory perception diagram, one that
focusses on the stratified interaction of the eyes and ears, the nerves
and the brain; indicating temporal sequences of plurivalent motion.
A diagram drawn by the physicist Ernst Mach, before the publication
of his Analysis of Sensations in 1886. The soft and looped pencil lines
are faded, as if subsisting under a sheet of ice, and as Veit Erlmann
tells us, highlight Mach’s “monist belief that physics, physiology, and
psychology are part of a single field of knowledge in which ‘reality’ is
but a conglomeration of ‘sensational elements’ where the ‘mysterious
entity’ called ego, consequently, is unsavable.”

Mach’s diagram, which is quite similar to the energy in between the

scalloped radii and Archimedian spirals of Klee’s ‘I–You–Earth–
World’ (a “creature on a star among stars” as Klee writes in his
 131

notebooks), sought to help show that consciousness is not a substantive

nature, but a mere formal property resulting from disturbance. To
show that consciousness arises from vacillating delays in between the
stable foundation of the self and an infatuation with ego-dissolving
immediacy. The diagram, according to Veit Erlmann, represents “the
acoustic unconscious”, and thus reflects a fascination with the ecstasy
and rapture of pure sensation, posing syncope as the basis for a vitality
beyond the dualism of body and mind.

Whilst it’s possible to read an attempt at this sort of dynamic

equilibrium in the lines of Azimuth, akin to the painter Marlow
Moss waiting for sustenance through balance, I feel it is closer to a
reconciliation through pervading and enveloping tension and motion.
The interconnectedness of the sense organs require only the slightest
shock to become destabalised. I’ve not heard my voice since I hit my
head. What else haven’t I heard? We seek to unpick these nets until
our mind forgets. The lines fall in a straight line that curves, covering
our tracks, echoing our echoes. We seek, braid, and weave each other
through the epochs whose clock is a pyramid slowly worn down by a
bird’s wing that brushes against it every thousand and one years in
Borgesian circular time.

In his ‘Ways of Nature’ study, Klee writes about nonoptical ways of

establishing and maintaining intimate physical contact with the world
from above and below. The lower way leads through the realm of the
static and produces static forms, while the upper way leads through the
realm of the dynamic. Along the lower way, gravitating towards the
centre of the earth, lie problems of static equilibrium characterised by
words, to stand despite all possibility of falling. We are led to the upper
way by yearning to free ourselves from earthly bonds, by swimming
and flying. We free ourselves from constraint in pure mobility.

In ‘The Emotion of Motion’, written by David Hubbard and Charles

Wright–an essay influenced by Paul Schilder’s view of the human
psyche as a physical phenomenon suspended in space and actively
132

moving through it–we read that the otolith crystals of the inner ear
are “physical particles which represent the outer world” and that they
comprise the “organ through which gravity speaks”. Neil Reeve and
Richard Kerridge comment upon this in their essay concerning J.H.
Prynne’s poem The Oval Window, by speculating that by “registering
the laws of gravity upon the human brain, the crystals act as agents
of a primal encounter with external reality, a negative point or limit
for the ego’s aspirations”, which in this case is to fly or float, in other
words, to avoid falling. To create an order from feeling and motion.
This potential for collapse is particularly apt if we turn our attentions
briefly toward the existence of what are known as vestibular dark cells,
epithelial cells that line the endolymphatic space of the inner ear’s
balance organs. In the 1970s, Yasuo Harada observed changes in the
otoconial mass precede those in the sensory cilia, and that the otoconia
that are dislodged from the otolithic membrane fall into the dark cell
area where they are decalcified and eventually absorbed.

Ernst Mach was host, we read in Guy Davenport’s Geography of the

Imagination, “to the phenomenological doubt that we witness anything
except in agnosis”. Considering that what we understand of an event
is very little compared to our ignorance of its meaning, a vertiginous
equilibrium in between static and dynamic, itinerant and established, a
Borgesian interval of shadow divides two twilights to induce stutters of
recognition. In much the same way, otoconia mark a threshold at the
rim of human identity, across which pass the fundamental processes
that enable us to have our being. “The self is a vacuum, it is nothing
until it is filled”, says Davenport.

Gertrude Stein began a series of experiments in automatic writing in

the late 1890s whilst still a psychology student at Harvard University.
In a brief essay about this period of Stein’s thought, Barbara Will states
that “Unlike the Surrealists, Stein saw automaticity not as a ‘vehicle
[...] of revelation’, but as the ground-zero murmur of the psyche, the
sound-hum of the human motor”. Stein explored this murmur along
with her colleague, Leon Solomons, in the exploratory hope that it
 133

could be divorced from “reflection, judgement, and will”. By testing

people’s ability to “become automatic” via acts of distraction, Stein
and Solomons developed a mode of writing divorced from “conscious
intention”, going so far as to refer to automatism as “a general
background of sound, not belonging to anything in particular”.

Could this background be part of Stein’s definition of sound? One of

two things heard at the same time but not together, that which both
separates and links. Could the background indeed be the reason why
these two things can’t be heard together? The portrait of Henry James,
from which the definition was lifted, was written some 30 years later,
but nevertheless it does strike me as similar to Stein’s comprehension
of what she termed the ‘bottom nature’ of people, a term assiduously
invested in audition, arising from her “strong auditory consciousness”.
“I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said
the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over
and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you
could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not
so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but
the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and
endlessly different”, writes Stein in The Making of Americans.

In Klee’s ‘Notebooks’, we read that “it is not the purpose of art to

replicate finished forms that are already settled, whether as images in
the mind or objects in the world. The aim is rather to join with those very
forces that bring form into being.” To embrace our agnosis. Thinking
of the human motor that theoretically hums in the background of our
reflex actions, I wonder what role audition plays in joining with the
environment, or indeed controlling the environment, succumbing to it.
I can’t help but think of Jung’s theory of the ‘shadow self ’, about the
degree to which we condemn others and find evil in others, and how
such judgement can speak of the degree to which we are unconscious
of the potential of the same thing in ourselves.
134

What is it to listen to the sound-hum of the human motor, to feel

that we have located the seemingly boundless murmur of the psyche?
Human ears cannot be closed, and as Denise Riley says, “knowing
oneself can be a catastrophic undertaking”, at least in the Socratic
regard of an introspective self-consciousness, where the “risk of self-
knowledge becomes that of complacency”. More applicable, as Riley
points out, is the Kierkegaardian gloss of “self-knowledge as an act of
helpful differentiation and separation from yourself ”, a route where
two things are heard at the same time but not together, where we listen
to others as we listen to ourselves, suspending self-reflection. Each of
our senses is in possession of its own ears, eyes, nose, mouth...

Such routes spiral from a point in motion, a point that is the way in
which materials of all sorts mix and meld with one another in the
generation and aggregation of things. Continuity of perception, Mach
thought, is all we can call mind, “but the separation helps”, or so says
Gregory Bateson. It’s too much to think it all at once. Matter unfolds
and sutures in rearrangements of relations, like moving house plants
in and out of sunlight.
 135

Epilogue
An intense engagement
Gertrude Stein and Thomas Bernhard

Is this repetition or is this insistence.

I hallucinate what is empirically impossible, that our two profferings
be made at the same time, that one does not follow the other, as if it
depended on it. Proffering cannot be double, only the single flash will do,
in which two forces join.

I am on the one side and you are on the other, and in between is a joint
of reasonable affection. Anyone can see how such a decomposition would
disfigure what is flung out in a single impulse.

I used to make charts and charts of everybody who looked like anybody
until it got so that I hardly knew which one I knew on the street and which
one looked like them.

With that in mind, now I will recite to you a sentence with the short i
sound, to begin again our hearing exercises.

I will recite––in the inn district it is still dim––a hundred times slowly then
a hundred times rapidly, and finally two hundred times as fast as possible
in a choppy manner.

When I am done I will demand an immediate description of the effect

these spoken sentences have had on your ear and your brain.

I am inclined to think there is no such thing as repetition.

To endure such a comedy we would have to empty our brains from time
to time, a micturition of the brain. The brain is a spiritual lung.

What we repeat is the scene in which we are acting, the days in which
we are living, the coming and going which we are doing, anything we
are remembering is a repetition, though it is not repetition if it is that
136

which we are actually doing because naturally each time the emphasis is
different.

It is a complete mystery to me how hearing can be so unpredictable.

Insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the

same way because emphasis can never be the same not even when it is
most the same that is when it has been taught.

Now I’ll stand at the corner near the window and call out the word
labyrinth, quickly at first, ten times in succession, forcing instant comments
from you.

Labyrinth
I became conscious of these things when I first realised that the stars are
worlds and that everything is moving.
Labyrinth
Nothing makes any difference as long as someone is listening while they
are talking.
Labyrinth
Talking and listening, not as if they were one thing, not as if they were
two things.
Labyrinth
How do you like what you have.
Labyrinth
Anyone can hear everything, the fantasy is not to hear everything, but to
hear something else.
Labyrinth
When we speak at the same time the key is for me to listen to the sound of
your voice but not my own.
Labyrinth
It can be our inability to take our minds out of the experiment which
interferes with the experiment, there is a general background of sound
that doesn’t belong to anything in particular.
Labyrinth
Constantly repeating a word is of great value for overcoming the habit of
attention.
 137

Labyrinth
What of an alternation without memory, to have no idea what we have
been listening to, but to feel quite sure we have been listening.
Labyrinth
One sound goes out of consciousness before another has come in to be
associated with it, like an exploration of the process of listening as it is
taking place.

We begin by hearing, which enables us to see which in turn enables us to

think.

When we listen the difference between repetition and insistence is a very

important thing to know. We listen as we know.

When I open this window I can often hear the pine branches and the water
even when there isn’t a breeze stirring, even though my eyes perceive no
movement at all in the branches, on the water. I can hear the incessant
motion of the air. I can hear the surface of the water moving even when
no such motion is perceptible to my eyes. I can even hear the movement
in the deeps, the sounds of movements in the depths. I myself naturally
hear not just one sound, I hear thousands of different sounds and can
distinguish these thousands of sounds from each other.

I have a habit of conceiving myself as completely talking and listening.

Listening is talking and talking is listening and in so doing I conceive what
I once called the rhythm of anybody’s personality.

If listening is talking and talking is listening then at the same time any
little movement, any little expression, is a resemblance, and a resemblance
is something that presupposes remembering.

Memory is something we simply can’t depend on, memory sets traps for
us to walk into and find ourselves hopelessly lost in, it lures us into a trap
and then deserts us, over and over again our memories lure us into traps,
thousands of traps, and then deserts us, leaves us alone, drained of all
thought.
138

Listening and talking do not presuppose resemblance, and as they do not

presuppose resemblance, they do not necessitate remembering.

We are seeking consciousness without memory, to separate remembering

from talking and listening.

To talk and to listen is a matter of stumbling upon the most favourable

constellation of circumstances that would suddenly enable us to
concentrate on the medium once we start, occurring some time at the
right moment. It’s a question of recognising the right moment when it
comes along.

A great many intelligent people mix up remembering with talking and

listening, and as a result they have theories about anything.

We talk as if we know something, but we often confuse matters, we are

keeping two times going at once.

The most interesting kind of listening to me is one that opens out in every
direction.

Listening and talking at the same time does not have in it any element of
remembering.

For a whole year I studied only the effects on the hearing of scratching
sounds, slaps, drilling, drops, sounds of a rushing, whirring, humming
sort. Blowing sounds.

Is there any way of making what we know come out as we know it, come
out, not as remembering.

Now to try out hundreds of thousands of scraping noises.

 139

References, for Azimuth and Wingless flying...

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Apuleius. The Golden Ass.
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Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space.
Barad, K. A Feminist Approach to Teaching Quantum Physics.
–––––––– Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter.
–––––––– Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of
Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.
Barthes, R. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.
Barton, T. Ancient Astrology.
Bataille, G. Visions of Excess.
Bateson, G. Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
Benjamin, W. Reflections.
Bernhard, T. The Limeworks.
–––––––– Three Novellas.
Berssenbrugge, M-M. Nest.
Billitteri, C. Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman,
Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson.
Böhme, G. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres.
Bök, C. Crystallography.
Borges, J.L. Selected Poems, 1923-1967.
Bragdon, C. A Primer of Higher Space (the fourth dimension).
Brain, R. Speech Disorders.
Brakhage, S. Metaphors on Vision.
Calasso, R. Ardor.
Calvino, I. Mr Palomar.
Carrington, L. Down Below.
–––––––– The Debutante and other stories.
140

Carson, A. Eros the Bittersweet.

–––––––– Glass, Irony and God.
–––––––– Men in the Off Hours.
–––––––– The Autobiography of Red.
Césaire, S. The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945).
Chole, R.A. Colour Atlas of Ear Diseases.
Cirlot, J.E. A Dictionary of Symbols.
Cixous, H. Reading with Clarice Lispector.
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Palinode
 ABOVE, SOUNDLESS, the
travellers: vulture and star.

Paul Celan

It fills us. We rearrange it. It breaks down.

We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke

 147

Thomas Martin
Nutt

^
^

Pinnae
148
149
150
 151

Richard Skelton

^
^

Ear canal
152
153
154
155
156
 157

Carrie Olivia
Adams

^
^

Tympanic
membrane
158

Borderland

In proportion to the obliqueness
I am a body stretched thin.
I bang back.

This placement of the tongue
on this one roof to cover many
sounds. Cup me
<<these sounds>> with my hand.
Do I have an ear for it
an ear for the other me?

Like practicing stillness

can I practice <<silence>>
not of my mouth, but of my ear?

Can I stop hearing

the neighborhood move
the motoring on and off
the doors and the tossed off curses
the scrap metal heavy
the garbage cascading into a hole?

You are forced to listen

when someone or somewhere
has you by the ear.
 159

The whole sound

echoing of me
<<echoing from me>>
I enter and echo without.

Within I send the frequency

an information tunnel
a translation of electrical impulses.
I interpret the sensation
of my own <<name.>>

There are many ways to <<carry>>

to tune out everything, yet,
when I ask, I hold.
I plead, and I am bled bored
by the dark. I don’t hear the night
anymore, just the carriage
of the clouds gone dim.

Is my enthusiasm on schedule?
Have I banked with the other
in the recess? Have we mined
stone to make a hammer?

Get right up close and tell me.

A mimic, a valve, the heart
and the ear make a pact to beat.

 
160

To be membranous is to be fluid.
This porous thing, this permeable
thing, this penetrable bombastic
thing. The hard loud of a thing.
The <<beat>> of a thing.

How different they are,

the open and the transfer
and how frequently they are paired
together in this language of holes.

It is open like a <<wound>> to the world.

Pour in.
 161

Do I have an ear for it?

In the mind chatter of the deaf
the ear and the inner voice are tied.

If I had never heard my voice

I would not speak <<to me.>>

My thoughts would be signs,
would be words, would not
be the vibrations of a frequency
of me.

I might have to choose, to tune in,

to hear this sound that is <<mine.>>
162

To hear voices is to not recognize

the sound of your thoughts
to mistake yourself for an outsider.

To be tympanic is to be convex
an oversized <<mallet>> for my bone.
Get near and you can hear the sound.
The body stretches and the mind stretches
both like waking up.

Amid the buzzing

flower focus of our envy
are we overhearing one side
of a conversation on the bus?
Our mind rushes in
to make the words beyond our catch.

We are on both sides

of the verge of speech.

Come to the edge of this reef

to this living, breathing, dying pit of thump.
It’s all just flies here
announcing themselves again and again.
 163

In the effort to think my other

this is the borderland
between my voice and my
ability to recognize it.

The pornography of it
when forced to whisper
like a girl gone <<mad>> without
her anchor, her drum.

I leave my body when

I speak to you.
164
 165

Helen Frosi

^
^

Stereocilia
 what is the ear?
166
we just don’t know.

stardust, animated and static. 1

and all motion

is a crab
2

I
.
.
.
.
one
what dreams– off . molecule
.
.
.
.
.
such specialised organs.. of touch
specialised .
a part .
.
.
selectively attending .
from silence to pleasure
.
.
to pain .
.
an earthquake by mountain .
.
a stand of contorted pine trees .
flex flap flaçon . says
.
.
fluffy corridor full .
/// if gossiping .
.
hark! .
.
hammer a stink .
yes
.
in hot metal . to
and– .
another
.
.
.
(( silver fish murmuration )) .
.
.
crustaceans waiver antennae .
.
.
tasting brackish .
.
mitten, or super-haired .
and that face. .
.
.
of one riddled– .
.
like a shell: .
.
.
intricately engineered and .
.
.
cupping, the .
.
ocean. .
molecule
.
.
.
.
II .

lost before , a
time to bloom . inky
fields satiated . cracking for the occupational hazard bombarded
trignometry and sonic fallout of coloured
nightgowns . perpetual tone ; i hear your
constant ringing. timorous
our skin, sensitive to echo and quakes.

III

1.) a musical instrument

2.) [listening] is risky. and very, very personal. 3

3.) as seaweed, moving with the swell.

4.) in the cosmology of matter, it would seem the [ear] is everywhere.

5.) set in vibration. we are sound.

///
 167

__________________________________________________

Notes:

Photograph: reflections on the River Wandle, London (2018)

1.) Social media conversations (04 September 2018)

2.) Charles Olson, The Moon Is the Number 18
3.) Mandy-Suzanne Wong, http://mandysuzannewong.com/nonhumansound

The skeleton of this piece formed during conversations had with the following individuals:

Matt Cargill . Danny McCarthy . John O’Connor . Noé Cuéllar . Josephine Dickinson . Mikael Fernstrom . Sylvia Hallett . Nathan Harmer
. Robbie Judkins . Olga Koroleva . Alison Lloyd . Chase Lynn . Luc Messinezis . Constantine Michaelides . Ingrid Plum . Monica Tobel .
David Toop . Portia Winters .

And takes inspiration from my grandmother, Marjorie Kovács (née Rawson), who was endlessly creative through her hearing challenges.
168
 169

April Van
Winden

^
^

Eustachian
tube
170
171
172
 173

Florence Sunnen

^
^

Ossicles
174

The sway of their miniature bodies spans across the room. Grown
from a drum, clamped onto a snail. When asked to provide
an account of what it sees, the cartoon mind cannot describe
what’s there, because it sees two sharks dancing, kissing blind,
pale as bone, and this account remains unsaid. The room is a
cave, cradling the sharks’ bone mouths as they dissolve into each
other. The bone sharks have no skin, the sandpaper has melted
from their surface. They have no teeth, no features other than the
melted twist of a fin. They are only as shark as they need to be,
oscillating in the antechamber, pushing in and out of one other,
not ceasing as long as there is sound in the air.

Behind the drum is a space as speechless as the night before

intelligence, at midpoint between outside world and mind, where
there is only movement, no meaning allotted as yet, no resolution
to the code. It is the driest place on earth, where the air moves
like water and all water is confined to memory. Here, the sharks
don’t swim but levitate, it is nearly a falling as their bodies merge,
bound across the distance of the aching cave.

Underneath his waves, the living shark is hungry. The small hole
next to its eye hears as if it sees the thrashing of the vulnerable,
of those who are cut and bleeding out, who cannot go on. This
ear, which hears the fear of dying, is ruthlessly internal, an
aerophone sack buried deep inside the shark, under a thick layer
of sandpaper skin, scales covering its surface like brittle stars, like
arrowheads in a set formation. Unlike hairs these arrowheads are
blind. They translate nothing for any kind of brain.
 175

The bone sharks have no skin, they are not abrasive or predacious,
they are in their purest state. No eyes, no ears, no brain, all they
are is yearning. They are not for themselves, bound as they are
to other things. The first shark bound to the virginal drum, from
which it grows like a mushroom stem, sucking up what comes
through from the outside world. The second shark is tethered
to the cartilage snail, internalising everything. Bound to a snail,
bound to a drum, bound to each other by their leaning heads
in the eyeless calm that comes from mutual desire. Sound is
funnelled through, pulling them apart and back together as if
between them winds a string, a trust that what will move the one
will also move the other. They align unquestioningly, wanting only
to be felt, which is closest to being seen. They lean but couldn’t
say what it is they are perceiving, because language does not flow
through the particles popping in the middle ear.

But a bone shark is no living creature, it has no boundaries, no

needs. The real shark lives amidst suffering, in avoidance of, in
contribution to. When the underwater shark is hungry it has to
listen with an ear buried deep inside its head, nearly featureless,
with just enough countenance to express an unwavering will.
Inside its hole the shark ear bides the time until its path is crossed
by a frequency it can grab and drag into the dark with it, drown
inside the well of hearing space.

The shark ear shivers for the frequency of suffering, of giving

up. It hears acceleration in this world’s infinite tank, it hears the
widening of gaps inside the agonising flesh. Shooting through
water, the frequency comes tugging at the ring roads of the
woodwind ear, which provide the shark with balance so it doesn’t,
in its fury, lose sight of the flat horizon of its needs and collide
with the intimate flesh of another shark, one or both bodies sent
spinning uncontrollably.
176

The bone sharks have no horizon but each other. Do they seek
violence to still their appetite? Have they moved on to kinder
things? Their bone bodies bear no hunger, there are no ring roads
in their ears, no reeds feeding sound back into a sack, they do not
hear the rumble of suffering, there is no need. Their channels are
blocked by interference, an interference caused by having what
they crave, and being made entirely of air and bone. Inside the
chamber, black and flashing red, the darkness is a closed space,
and the sharks sway inside its intimacy, shudder with each sound
that reaches in. Their bodies push and pull, closer in and further
away, the sway is an endless one. They don’t breathe but their
bodies move as if they do, as if they are each other’s air, all around
them moves like air, or the water in which living sharks can swim,
listening for a far away man to drown at sea, a fish to be gutted
by another, an albatross to fall heavy with wet wings into the open
arms of a wave. The sharks living in their briny water listen for
what moves, for what stirs a helpless froth, their teeth are endless
when the frequency is right.

Inside the cave, waterless, the air is waves and the blind sharks
hold their heads together, throbbing quietly inside meaning’s
antechamber, before the sound goes through them both and into
the clamp tied against the meaning-making cartilage, where the
trembling weaves into a neural code, a message dished up to the
brain as food might be.

But what happens when the body dies? When the body becomes
still, it isn’t any less an object in the world, and though emitting
stillness death does not make it impervious to the moment taking
place around it. The body cannot stop responding to the fluttering
of wind, to the fall of shrapnel, to being nuzzled by a hungry dog.
The mechanics of hearing are involuntary even if the message
cannot be delivered because the brain has died.
 177

The sharks throb quietly, not concerned with meaning, imparting

only the pressure they receive. As long as there is sound, they are
caught in the waves. There is no stillness in their embrace, as
long as the world makes sound and the ear receives it, the sharks
are given to and taken from each other. Their shape is minute,
doll-like, dancing in a wind-up music box. Their bodies are bone
and will take a while to give in to decay. Decay will happen in
time, long after the heart has stopped pumping its rush. But that
is later. Right now, the ear is here, the sound is here, and the flesh
of the brain, now unblinking, is still here, why not pretend that
hearing still occurs? Nobody here to attest to the contrary. The
dancing shark bones don’t know, it is not up to them to know:
all they hear is one another. Speak into the dead ear all you like,
speak as if it were a face, what’s one more hail of sounds in this
ceaseless sway, as the bone sharks wallow in their bodies touching
in the cave, in the care of a self extinguished.

Only later, beyond the shark bones in their lair, does sound turn
into message. For now, the bones inside the dead man’s ear live
in blissful holding, because we are in the midnight phase of
things, and none of this can matter yet, not the midnight phone
call telling us the man has died, nor the fact that in a matter of
minutes a shark has ripped a drowning dog limb from limb, nor
the violence that starts anew at each dawn. The cave is as peaceful
as the night before the war breaks out, before the phone rings and
the unwanted meaning catches up with us. When the body dies,
the hearing organs start to wait in the dark for the last of the cilia,
in their arrowhead arrangements, to disintegrate. And then, the
waves of sound will run out of things to tickle and go rubbing
unobstructed along smooth, abstinent, immovable bone.
178
 179

Lance Austin
Olsen

^
^

Ossicles
180
181
182
183
184
 185

Tomoé Hill

^
^

Oval
window
186

I will let you in, if you will let me out. A confession: I do

not know how to swim. It is not from lack of trying, or other
people’s trying—I remember the sting of chlorine, the humid
scent of bodies, rubber, the feel of cool slippery tile. I remember
my face beneath the surface, the fear of opening my eyes to the
rush of water, my head under, the dull slow disruption of sound
on heavy waves. To place the head parallel with the water—the
ear just submerged—is to exist between planes, the hearing
and the unhearing, a window closed, the other not yet open.
I remember fear, its chemical smell, most of all, its silence. To
reach sound from under the water you must break through a
surface, otherwise it remains dreamlike, half-realised. I would
place my hands on the water’s underside, feeling all at once its
lightness and unbreakable heaviness. I wondered what it would
be like to be weightless but silent forever.

Sound swims, vibrates, shimmers: through canals and

bone labyrinths, waiting to pass through—beyond—air into
fluid, fluid into recognition and memory. Sound evolves: the
silences, the waves that only become when borne by a network,
tripping off the rattle of bones knocking at windows. Let me
in, mouths sound, unformed. Let me become. Bones—ossicles—
ossification. The swiftness of going from hearing to its negative,
the forming of bone. A transformation to the untouchable that
shuts out sound; the window forever sealed shut. The swimmer
under the surface, silent in the unhearing catacombs, like a root
waiting to grow and emerge.

Since childhood, there has been an image in my head

from a book about the mind: a photo of a young girl, blue-
beribboned hair, staring in concentration at a box lit with bars
of electric colours. She speaks into a microphone shaped like
a flying saucer or ringed planet, her mouth open, attempting
 187

to form ‘shoe’. She is deaf, and the colours she is so intently

focused on signal to her if she is pronouncing the word like
a hearing-abled person. I have never known why she cannot
hear: perhaps those windows are closed off—ossified—and
remaining below the surface of hearing, she must piece together
sound by colour, little rainbows reflecting and refracting what
emerges from her lips. The machine is called the Chromalizer.
Pure colours, pure sounds; hearing through sight. Does colour
permeate that window of bone, a bright vibration felt in the
depths of the sealed labyrinth—one sense enabling another
in order to create memory? The question that emerged then
from my thoughts, still unanswered: did she then hear in
colour, seeing patterns translated as a secret language? What is
the sound and message of a slate blue and violet-pink storm,
sombre greys of a patched-over parking lot, or the motley of a
summer forest?

In Modern Nature, part of Derek Jarman’s diaries, flora

becomes another language—a way of talking to the world that
he has deliberately removed himself from, even though much of
his new one is mute: … the Listening Wall … like the poor landscape,
cannot speak, only listen. His garden as a planting of a tongue,
tongues, so that there might be a conversation instead of the
emptiness of pre-sounds rattling against bones connected to
nothing, the inner ear as sealed catacomb. I re-read the pages
according to colour: sight as sound, as if he were speaking
to his garden the way the child spoke into the Chromalizer,
listening to the colour of the plants and flowers. The removal
of everything but blooming pigment—vital and changing, even
in death—became a secret language revealed, eyes as ears, stalk
and stem as those tiny bones rattling in a coastal breeze: sound
not yet formed travelling on wind, only to bloom and burst into
memories. Black; silver; green; ochre; sage-green; blue; red; yellow; iron
188

grey, violet, faded blue, pink, faded ochre, rust red, sapphire, clear. Clear.
I stopped short at that before realising clear is vital to colour
because it too, is a window, one where we see colour enter or
leave, a threshold of possibility. A chromatic litany to bring
one closer to the sound and centre of self, a life remembered
anew as colours are tilled and tended in the mind—black mud
licked from a lover’s feet; the silver garden of sodom; reddish-
brown acanthus, tall and proud as a cock anticipating pleasure.
Vibrations in the ear, on the lips, through the body.

Below the water again: eyes open, the dulled waves of

sound clashing with the pool’s waves, as if trying to reach me,
missing. I can see lips move above and I think whatever escapes
them moves in the water like butterflies in a field, free, the net
that is my window slow and clumsy in its attempts to catch
them. I would rise up from beneath in fear; not from drowning,
but the idea that my ears would be stopped and my hearing
forever lost. Listening underwater is like attempting to recall
a disappearing present: grasping at fragments, puzzle pieces
where the edges keep changing. Clear, searching for tangible
colours and sounds—tangible because it is only when you are
beneath the surface that you realise how hard it is to feel the
reality of these things that create the self, harder still to imagine
yourself in parts invisible, the assumption of function removed
like ground beneath your feet. I was too scared to swim; maybe
it was because I was too frightened not to hear.

The window is a net, an opening—it captures, but also

guides. Nabokov was a lepidopterist, although I like to think
each fragile specimen was simply a souvenir of some memory.
When we capture sounds, are they spread and pinned in a case
somewhere in our minds, their colours triggering a vibration
that travels back to those little bones, a ghostly wind through
 189

memory’s chimes? I will let you out, if you will let me in. If I open
that case in my mind, will memory-sounds flutter around
thoughts like the fields I found and gathered them in? I do not
want to simply capture and devour—I wish for these sounds to
fly free within me. Flight is akin to swimming, and if sound is a
butterfly it is also a swimmer, needing to move to exist. To exist
is to remember. Even when the window is grown over with bone
like a shroud of silence, the mind looks to let the sound in. A
crack in the bone is enough for the butterflies to fly through, for
the swimmer to break through to the surface.

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light (and sound) gets in1

I cannot swim, nor obviously can I fly. But I hear and in

a strange way it is the lightest of the senses, a direct line to the
divine unconscious, a Wunderkammer seemingly full of nothing,
but overflowing upon opening, the cabinet of curiosities talking
all at once like a hothouse full of tropical birds, Jarman waking
to find what was grey nothing the day before turned into
luminous yellow and sky-purple. Leaning over a lover’s body in
the night while they sleep, whispering a few words unheard but
to be remembered later—a dream but no dream—the flutter
of wings, the drift of pollen, the smooth flick of a silvered tail
through the window en route to remembrance like Bosch’s
flying fish. The window is a net, a surface, a door: sound exists

1 From ‘Anthem’ by Leonard Cohen, with apologies—if light comes in, why not sound, or the idea of
it? Sound may have a technical structure and process, but it doesn’t need to be solely defined by it. The
Chromalizer girl must have had something in her memory that stood in for what we know as sound,
once she understood the connection of articulation to colour. Who are we to tell her that her butterflies
are not as beautiful as ours?
190

in Ma, negative space, space between, a place that is no place,

the garden yet to break through the surface. Sound here is a
transition from air to memory, through windows and bones,
shapeshifting just as the hearer does the same: a sound passing
through the window allows the butterflies of memory in and
out—somewhere in the opening they meet, knowing they have
met before; another life, another space, another language,
another body.
191
192
 193

Chloë
Proctor

^
^

Round
window
194

Round Window
In act of shelling
held to ear the sound of cerebral
spinal fluid makes of audition
a lens

- I have been – so -
bored – more -
- I am – always -
here – too far –

acts round as action is the

mercy

- too far – at – times -

though I – quiver -

less round as a gape

less view as a duty

- I quiver – and -
know you – are somewhere –

How many movements a sound

does a gesture make
splitting timeways which is
the pulse

- at times – somewhere -
it is only – subtle –

and what of fluid

as audition
 195

- subtle – never – still –

I am - never –

or to shell as an act
of heroism in a greater
helix of heroic acts

- Nor I – never -
still – give me -
something – to
act for -

here eccentric geometries form

a way to listen beyond
sentences

- give me – crashes -
give – me great -
conical – waves –

For windows that are

round see occulus

- crash – waves –
you will – destroy -
yourself –

For windows with a view

see subarachnoid space

- destroy yourself -
be – still at – last –

Shapes that have failed

but act so as to move in
sound gestures
196

- Not – still never -

just – exhausted –

Split as pulse units minutiae

of body rhythms of everything
miraculously ticking

- I need – action – I
give – you all -
I need – do not -
reduce –

What of fluid as audition

do the banks wear thin
what of shelling

- do – not
reduce – yourself -
to – such vulgarity –

Does the window shatter round

does the membrane
how many movements

- vulgar I – give you I -

vibrate – with – you
always –

Sound at the mercy

of movement

– always – it is -
never – enough -
never and – too
much –
 197

Held to ear the sound

of a submarine window

- too much – you -

need it – isn’t -
sustainable –

They are in costume

as drones and not
in the act of listening

- make loud -
gestures – only -
- -
-
198
 199

Nisha
Ramayya

^
^

Cochlea
200

Three for Alice

John Coltrane, ‘Peace on Earth’, Concert in Japan (1966)

She plays the whole world of the piano, as if her chromatic fleets could meet
the historical condition of fleets. There is no… – There is no… – There
is no… – conditionality of any kind, in the feel of her time. The sound of
playing together, really playing playing together together, a band all clothed
with ears, fingertips foot-taps puff-cheeks puckered with ears. Collective
improvisation demands the nth root of ears, when n is assumed to be the
number of silent silences they’ve share shared. They play into the weight of
history, billowing sheets of sound, twisting history as their main cause, playing
out unsound pieces of possibly everlasting sound.

Sound is: the possibility of sound and may not be sound itself. I… I… I…
Gross sounds arise and become subtle. Not-I… Not-I… Not-I… Subtle
sounds are reabsorbed by the nascent state. What’s insistence on open
dialogue elsewhere on earth? But why… But why… But why… What’s co-
signing messages meant straight for the top, what’s meant? what’s straight?
what’s top? What’s listening out for the sound of the spheres of the unborn
crying, while the born are crying here? Cosmos manifests at a concert in Japan:
why? here! why? here! why? here!

Supramaterial vomit –
of the cosmos –
premoralised destiny –
of the unborn.

The audience claps in the room elsewhere here on earth. Sound is: wherever
there is desire or vibration or clapping of any kind. Strike that: oh-om-OM!

An everlasting peace not caused by a shock, as like produces like, as like

destroys like, as poison as the antidote for peace. Oh-om-OM! A self-
generating peace that disregards the signature of time signature, to overblow
the precedent set by the treaty. Oh-om-OM! An unsound peace for freedom
elsewhere here, for most freest elsewhere here on earth. Oh-om-OM! An atonally
temporal disregard – ohhh – for the transhistorically: straight-lined centred
falsified – ommm – for the everlasting disregard of everlasting peace –
OMMM!
 201

Alice Coltrane, ‘Going Home’, Lord of Lords (1971)

Aah… I… Ah-aah…

I found…

I found I…

I found I, just didn’t need…

I just didn’t need, drone need, just didn’t, drone…

Sense organs cut through the tune that this tune could be, just didn’t need,
this tune takes place inside. I what? Inside ear worm, in in indignity.

Strings lay down staircase, impossible staircase, finding itself to be, going
home, just didn’t, getting. Anyone the sound of living alone. I found a way
to be. I what? Be home. Drone unaccompanied. Anyone the sound of going
home, supermundane and supreme.

You, the harp sunsets.

Blaze!

Harp sink us into ourselves, darkwash away the lie of heart’s lowlights.
Consciousness snail us within, silence, blaze! This tune upscales us
monochromatically – ah-aah, I-aye, um-what? – moon drives us on to electro-
organic heights.

Impossible staircase, get us nowhere, get us raised up, ultralight beam lights.

To going home, to stolen home, to reclamation’s getting nowhere, to down

home, drill down, drop off whitebread heights. Brave background! Unscrew
tune, invert ear drip, buttery be.
202

Electro-organic slide we sound. Sunset all the friends we knew. Sound play
with luminosity, invite light to the party, sunrise too soon. Most freest silence!
Anyone else, the sound of self inverting self, impossible staircase a means of
getting away. Anyone else laid down by lights, shot through with countersunk
holes. Anyone else body boltholes, tube lit, home having home as its main
cause.

Anyone else body home having home as its main cause. Snail shell battle cry,
resonance following most subtlest sound.

Pour sand in ears to catch lightning strike. Trail sand through body home.
Grit glissando, irritate ear, glass worm, too late.

My harp sings despite itself, squirms heartily, my sun sets, you-ooh, ow-aum,
lightning struck my ears emit, I-aye, supreme-aye, ow-aum, emanate earwax
homing device, I-um, this out be, this out be.

Out be.
 203

Alice Coltrane, ‘Govinda Jai Jai’, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana (1976)

I the sound of living together

I-aye, ow-aum

tickle the spark in disharmonic intervals:

you-ooh-oh
cup, chin, aah!

in a field someone is falling

buttercup tickles my living alone
someone is falling
in buttercups alonefully! when –

she! little mothers of the phonemes!

all clothed with sound earlined lips germinating

words keeping word-bound speech-clad
lovers apart, together, apart, together
phonetic mitosis on the tip of the tongue

she! generates a party made out of mantras!

someone is face down at the party

too full too soon, i.e. ready to evolve
syllabic bloat… causal stress…
I! bursts open at the party

the aloneful party falls apart in a field

together, apart, together

in a field of one, a battlefield

the supreme I ayes

she generates a party, skull cracks into chorus,

causal stress bursts into chorus, one must be identified

with the sound of the spheres: oh-ow-aum!
204

one must sound out cracks in the foundations

of the field, buttercups in the cracks
not a gladness too soon

gladness only exists only too soon

existence is the effect caused by vibrations

of the existential-potential:

one is identified with the whole world

and thus indifferent to it
one must identify the void in the whole world’s heart
with the void in one’s own heart

the party changes its tune

anyone else clapping, everyone comes in

on the clap only too soon gladness comes
in between claps there are fields and fields
of buttercups between claps battlefields
the chorus is cowherded in between claps

in a field someone is tidying the cowherd

gladly tidying chart success of any kind
implies inequality of tensions, everyone
isn’t wearing kaftans underneath it all
everyone isn’t keyboard players victorious
over life, i.e. resigning it willfully

the chorus slows down for emphasis

one must lean back, lean backbreakingly
far back, failing one’s rights of primogeniture
discount bin appropriation, lie face down
in the interval before the last vibration:

the last clap back

dissolution is the pinpricking of tensions

to a divine ear homogeneity to a divine ear
The Divine Ear must be dissolved
205
206
 207

J.R.
Carpenter

^
^

Basilar
membrane
208

In the beginning was the word, and the word was spoken by a body and the
word was breath.

The spoken word escapes the body as breath and immediately it is captured.
Thing-like it hangs frozen in the air on a cold morning, carves a path on
a wax cylinder, wakes waves on water, displays green peaks and valleys on
digital monitors, tickles the stereocilia of another body. Spiralling toward an
inner ear, the spoken word becomes part body again — mingling air, hair,
fluid, and flesh.

I am suddenly far from my brain and naked without it.

Outside the body, out in the world, the spoken word is a physical thing
— a sound wave bumping into other things for which the word may have
ramifications, but no specific meaning. Inside the body of the speaker and
of the listener, the spoken word is part of language. When we speak words
which have written equivalents, as we do in English, we perform possible
future written texts.

I am looking for something new.

The word is spoken by a body and there may be consequences; writing may
be among them. Writing may record a word already spoken, or a word
not yet spoken. This writing may never be read. Spoken words may pour
through a headset to be absorbed through the ear by a listening body — a
poor medium — and emerge as writing, clattering onto keyboards, scattering
toward far corners of the globe without once gracing a page.

I am looking for something familiar to hold against so much newness.

 209

On 10 March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the function of

what would become the telephone with the transmission of an imperative:
“Mr Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” The response to this call
would be an embodied one; Mr Watson would momentarily become
physically manifest in Bell’s presence. Bell modelled what he called ‘the
membrane speaking telephone’ after the human ear drum. He departed from
the function of biological apparatus by twinning transmitter and receiver in
a device which utterly confused boundaries between the mechanical and the
physiological, prompting German media Theorist Fredrick Kittler to quip:
“Wherever phones are ringing, a ghost resides in the receiver.”

Dizzy from spinning round

the hollow tubes of my ears,
I wait for sound.

I brace myself for the

ramifications of the movement
of tiny parts inside of me
which will translate
this motion into
information
and edge
it toward
speech.

On 12 December 1901, three short sharp clicks escaped the body by way
of the finger tips. Tap, tap, tap. Three ‘dots’ representing the Morse letter
‘S’ travelled from Poldu, Cornwall – not troubled at all by the curvature
of the Earth or the salt wet wind of the Atlantic – to arrive at Saint-John’s,
Newfoundland, where they were received by a telephonic headset held to the
highly sensitive receiver of Guglielmo Marconi’s waiting ear. Or so we hear.
210

Beyond the gravelled slope of my tongue I wait for language.

Marconi’s ear was particularly keenly attuned to language. His father was
Italian, his mother Irish; he grew up between nations, between languages.
In spoken communication mother and son continuously alternated between
English and Italian, repeating words from one language in the other, testing
transmission and reception, training the ear to meaning.

Although Marconi claimed to have heard the Morse ‘S’ distinctly, his colleague
in Saint-John’s confessed he couldn’t be so sure. In Marconi’s diary, now held
in the Marconi Archive at the Bodleian Library, in the space designated for
12 December 1901, the word ‘received’ was written. But the faint pencil
markings have since been overwritten and are now almost illegible.

If I scratched a note to myself deep in the substance of one of my bones, would I know
those words forever? Or would the relentless biology of body refuse to accommodate the
character of written language? Would the scratches fill in?

Was the Morse letter ‘S’ really appended to Saint-John’s that day? Hoax
rumours abound. Some suggest that what Marconi heard was actually
a harmonic resonance – a connection, yes, a sound born of reflection,
reverberation, coupling, or echoing, but not a transmission from one side of
the Atlantic to the other. The Morse letter ‘S’ was no doubt chosen for this
first attempt at transatlantic wireless transmission for its ease of intelligibility.
But three dots are, after all, an ellipsis, a grammatical indication of an
intentional omission…

Distance distorts… Distance distends…

The human heart, head, ear hears what it wishes, wants, needs to.
211
212
 213

Hannah
Dargavel-Leafe

^
^

Perilymph &
Endolymph
214
215
216
 217

Mirella Salamé

^
^

Reissner’s
Membrane
218
219
220
 221

Julia
Bloch

^
^

Stereocilia
222

“the interior is always unfamiliar”

—Bhanu Kapil, Incubation

row of dead cells

memory in ‘wet pastel’
feeling toward rosy circles
a thickening portal

pace ‘intramural’: hurtling against
the walls of the cell but not
the cell itself
a not hardly work

a work nervier than the ‘grief wings’

of ocotonia, rootier than the
‘floating hours’ of
the semicircular canals

sense precedes cell, a kind

of supplemental desire, as when
you tilted your brow in the art
building toward the murmuring student

who posed the question

what is a monster? what
is the beautiful part made of the
parts stitched together?
 223

‘my work is nearly

complete’ said
the monster
in the stitched text

as we fastened ourselves
down and against
the grammatical
rains
224
 225

Michael
Pisaro

^
^

Organ of
Corti
226
227
228
 229

Clara
de Asís

^
^

Otolith
organs
230

—
 231

salt

voice

a height

nothing

a distance

water

stone

a loss
232
 233

Patrick Farmer

^
^

Otoconia
234

30 30 20 10 0 10 20 30

30
.
. . .
20

20
10

10
.
. .

0
0
10

10

.
20

. . .
20

.
. . .
30

30

30 20 10 0 10 20 30
 235

NAME/CLUSTER. MAGNITUDE. ASCENSION.

well-rooted corms – 1.4 0h. 10m.

water turtles smooth as beans – 0.8 0 37

zenonian dreams – 0.4 0 43

warbling sinew – 0.1 0 29

The vestibular apparatus (semicircular canals / otolith organs) is

the principal receptor for the physical forces of linear and angular
acceleration. It helps us cope with the reality of gravity in a Heraclitean
world of stones. Otoconia collectively constitute the otolith organs,
which, among other things, are mediators of acoustic sensitivity. A
pair of blindfolded owls. One flies, the other walks. Sensing this, Paul
Schilder conducted a number of experiments and developed a number
of theories about gravity in relation to human personality development.
Observing his own reactions and writing the agglutinated ego–the strip
of being, the little flock of birds–shifting within and without his body
as the various lifts he called home rose and fell. Evidently, we read,
his observations of the human ego seem to have prevented him from
moving (I like to imagine he jumped up and down as often as he could,
no matter where he was) in an absent-minded way like so many of us.

Schilder considered the human psyche to be a physical phenomenon

that was suspended and actively moving through space. He also felt
that our vestibular receptors are tonically active, meaning that they
project a steady stream of neural impulses to the brain, which itself
emits a shaded ring of electromagnetic pulses to the world. Even when
the head is at rest we wax and wane in these waves. A correspondence
of stones, birds, and stars.
236

30 30 20 10 0 10 20 30

30
20

20
.
. .
10

10
...

.
.

0
0

. .

. .
10

10

.
20

20

. .
.
30

. .
30

.
. .
30 20 10 0 10 20 30
 237

NAME/CLUSTER. MAGNITUDE. ASCENSION.

arc of cedar apples – 0.3 0h. 33m

barnacles and time spots – 0.5 0 35

smooth condensations of the air – 0.2 0 40

fine film of forest dust – 0.2 0 18

Stars vary in colour from red to blue. They are not eyes, or ears, but
passions that negate spatialisation. The colour estimates by different
observers are often conflicting, they depend not only on the true
colour of the star, but also on the condition of the atmosphere and the
sensitivity of the observer. A star’s motion is perpetually within itself.
It is a seeded mud. A free flight of relations in between the immediate
and varied consciousness of a life and the supposedly unconscious
marrow through which it stampedes.

If dislodged from their bed, otoconia crystals may give rise to a floor
of vertigo. It’s during such times that we can no longer look up at the
stars without succumbing to a heliacal fall in terrestrial space; hearing
nothing but Edo Sparrows–chattering guides to whom we ask, as if
augurs–what do you want from us? what do we want from you? We
are storied matter. What happens outside registers inside prompting
action and on and so on. Such mattering is a site of narrativity, to use
a phrase by Serpil Oppermann, ever pouring into itself with ongoing
configurations of signs and meanings, epicycles and eccentrics, that we
interpret as stories, increasing the lobes of liver and pinnae alike. We
are concentric circles of fixed stones moving. The stars are sympathies
of heat and exhalation, refinenment and purification. We pick up what
they drop. One shape into another.
238

30 30 20 10 0 10 20 30

30
.
20

20
. . .

. . . .
10

10

0
0

. .
10

.. 10

. .
20

.
. .
20

.
30

30

30 20 10 0 10 20 30
 239

NAME/CLUSTER. MAGNITUDE. ASCENSION.

worm – 3.7 2h. 50m.

woodpile and cordwood – 3.8 3 05

ragged flock of protean birds – 1.1 0 58

hidden wilderness behind the bones – 1.6 1 34

These lines, wings, and hollows constitute triangular and dynamic

masses gathering and ejecting material. They are birds that embody
our lives. They are stars that pour into our ears. They are stones
that migrate between sky and earth. One moves and mingles with
numerous others. Just like the calcium that is continuously turned over
between otoconia and body calcium stores. Just like a star that grows as
its surface emits an extreme pulse (its plasmic bodies piling up between
regions of high and low density; akin to a sonification of light curves,
a fever that eats its own sting). Just like Melville’s seabirds (the croaked
requiem of their cries occurring not because they have significance
but having significance because they are occurring). Disintegration is a
pervasive patterning of phenomena.

Such spaces are inhabited, (like the bulla of the middle ear, some
nebula embossed onto a galaxy), by accidents and dirt. Significances
of pores, gaps, and fleeting openings. Each otoconia crystal possesses
its own resounding net of reciprocity, countered by fusiform neurons
in the back of the head; wheeling between the stars, hatching a humble
mythology of spectra, schist, and shell. We change in their company,
curl into vibration at noon as wingless shapes call from the clear sounds
of stars. A strange exertion of self-transformation. A quickening of the
heart.
240

30 30 20 10 0 10 20 30

30
. .

.
20

20
.
10

10
.

. .

0
0

.
10

. .
10

.
.
20

.
20
30

30

30 20 10 0 10 20 30
 241

NAME/CLUSTER. MAGNITUDE. ASCENSION.

bunchgrass – 2.7 4h. 30m.

groundfire in the ear – 0.1 0 17

whistling yellow silk – 1.9 2 30

deaf as a dragon – 2.2 3 49

Stars populate our ears and stones the sky. The wind that blows between
them is both liminal and transmundal. Such things are so many birds
on the perimeter of a circle we spread ourselves around. We stay
long enough to hear the sounds drift in, the last crow of autumn as it
ends, the terrestrial nature of magnetism that walks under the livers
of leaves. Methods of abrupt, separated, broken openings. Gradual
access. Stellar influence. Each is seemingly self-sufficient yet never
more than the interstice of its neighbors. Electrical disturbances in the
atmosphere.

Resemblances fly back and forth like Antigone’s birds resounding,

everything and nothing. A perfect sphericity. A gravitational will
coincident with a celestial axes revolving incessantly through circles
that blend one side with the other.

Accidents and messages of organs (stones) (birds) (stars) bind and bend
such transmigrational matters. Forgetting their centralness to sculpt
the marvelous (some becoming of golden shells). Melting wave and
particle. Rising from a moment in between, time may appear in the
midden of a fall. Filling bodies as she approaches, emptying them as
she moves away.
242
 243

Fay Zmija
Nicolson

^
^

Stereocilia
244
245
246
 247

Tess
Denman-Cleaver

^
^

Semicircular
canals
248

After sixty-three days they show us a photograph of a future, from one

through to three. An imaging of an us, deep grey-glowing, fixed and wanting,
smudge-faced and quickening. A small curl of a self chasing its tail.

We sit soft on chairs and are held in turn, our excitement steadied, expectation
hunched and dizzying, floating lost hours in the voices of others.

After one hundred and twenty-six days the room begins spinning, our elbows
begin buckling, and the floor rises up to meet our face.

I hear you in the garden as I begin to lean.

You are telling her about layers of cotton and viscosity, and she is voicing to
catch us.

I feel myself a me apart from you,

a shape,
a gravity in greyscale,
sound heard before a fall,
I pitch and roll
I was beginning to recall -

You are bent double and screaming through the next-door neighbour’s wall.

She is holding out her hands big and cupped

and saying that she doesn’t mind the mess,
she will catch me in the bowl of her hands.
 249

I count backwards from ten

trying to counter the yaw
trying to push into to the toss.

The backs of your hands ache as my bones drop.

Greyscale smudge and slow-draining cupula.

She dreams that she is helping a ewe give birth.

She pulls on the legs and feels the texture of the afterbirth in her sleep.
You are watching and encouraging; you are pleased and I am fading.

All that is left through the graveyard spiral is expressions of longing,

fingerprints, photographs of futures, from one through to three, and a curved
sheet of ceramic the size of her cupped palm:
A prominent lip and a corner of water stain showing where a plant sat.
A brown ribbed glaze that follows the finger-made surface.
And a gulley of almost lapis lazuli gathered in the underside of the rim.

Life vibrated out, quivers still in our eyeballs while we sleep

eat
walk
smile
and talk otherwise.

We push on, up and off the path.

Our expected route fades to waist height bog grass
And we shuffle our feet to feel the ground
250

Moulded with dried out gullies, impassable after rain but

do-able in a heat wave.
The hillside is littered with occasional sheep carcasses.
Open ribs and a radius of silence.

We are light and you are clear and bright, but despite this I feel responsible
for the quiet third party you carry with us.

All I have to give is this round of the broken pot, held in my cupped hands.
Deposits of future lives, from one through to three. The memory of movement
together.
251
252
 253

Joseph Clayton
Mills

^
^

Cochleovestibular
nerve
254

Vertigo and Silence: An Homage to the Cochleovestibular Nerve

Our elderly guide told us that, as local legend and rumor would have
it, in a small monastery perched on a picturesque but precarious
precipice in a secluded but not far distant region of the Carpathian
Mountains, a mysterious order of monks had once made their home.
They were neither Dominican nor Franciscan, neither Benedictine
nor Trappist, but practiced strict devotion to a rule adhered to
nowhere else in Christendom. Among the few who were privy
to its existence, this sacred fraternity was perhaps best known for
requiring of its initiates, in addition to the usual vows of poverty and
chastity and the less common but not unheard of vow of silence, an
obligation that to the best of our guide’s knowledge was required of
no other brotherhood—a vow of vertigo.

An imperfect parallel, our guide explained, might perhaps be drawn

to the ecstatic practices of the dervish, who seeks by means of his
whirling dance to grow closer to the divine, and it may well be true,
as some have speculated, that the idiosyncratic monastery’s founding
can be traced to the conversion to Christianity of a wandering Sufi
mystic—but with the crucial difference, our guide stressed, that
 255

the vertigo practiced by the monks was obtained entirely without

recourse to music, or rather with only the music of the silence of the
Carpathian vales to prompt their vertiginous devotional spinning
(a practice that they referred to among themselves as the axon agon,
or “struggle of the wheel”), because it was a remarkable fact that,
although the monastery possessed a number of bells of surpassing
beauty, inlaid with elaborate reliefs depicting in enamel and gold
the life of Ulrich, the patron saint of vertigo and weavers, they were
never rung, and although the monastery chapel was home to a vast
pipe organ, installed by the legendary Italian craftsman Alfonso
Giacomo Gaspare Corti in the late sixteenth century, it had long
since fallen into neglect and for many decades had loomed in silence,
mute and untouched.

In any case, our guide continued, spin the monks did, and often
with tragic results. It was not uncommon for one of their number to
pirouette into a yawning crevice while gathering sticks of firewood,
herding the few mangy and ill-nourished goats upon whose milk the
brothers relied for much of their sustenance, or sheering the sheep
that, with their wool, provided the rough-spun cloth that, through
much labor and with little skill, they fashioned into the ill-fitting
cassocks that served as their only garments. At irregular intervals an
unfortunate monk would wobble and fall, plunging into emptiness
without a cry (for each brother remained, even in this extremity,
attentive to his vows), spinning silently as he fell like a flower twirled
in the hand of a beautiful maiden, or rather, and more precisely, like
the chalice of a white tulip slowly turning between the forefinger and
thumb of an old woman as she recalled, with joy but not without
regret, the bittersweet courtships of her youth. Alas, the proximity of
the monastery to the precarious precipice ensured that their numbers,
never great, were insufficient to sustain the order into the latter half
of the twentieth century.
256

Indeed, during the conflagration of the Second World War, the

monastery—its population by that time reduced to the merest
handful—was deemed an ideal location for the emplacement of
certain long-range artillery, its elevation and inaccessibility providing
the Axis powers with a wide field of fire and leaving it virtually
impervious to attack along the narrow, twisted thread of a footpath
that served as the monastery’s only means of access or egress
(although supplies and the occasional visitor, too aged or infirm to
attempt the treacherous ascent on foot, might be hauled up the sheer,
lichen-covered cliff face in a wicker basket fastened with intricately
knotted ropes of a type made nowhere else, woven from the fibrous
bark of curious, unusually variegated trees grown only in the
monastery’s high-walled arbor). The site was not immune, however,
to concentrated attack from the air, and thus it came to pass that it
was thoroughly pulverized on a spring morning in 1945 by members
of the 340th Bombardment Group of the US Army Air Corps.

The ensuing firestorm destroyed not only the long-range artillery,

the artillerists, the abbot and the last of his handful of dizzy monks,
the sheep, the goats, the firewood, and the monastery proper, all of
which were summarily reduced to embers surmounted by pillars
of black, acrid smoke, but also the monastery gardens, which, our
guide informed us, were carefully modeled on the Garden of Cyrus,
described in such detail in Sir Thomas Browne’s The Quincuncial
Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, Naturally, Artificially,
Mystically Considered and which, Browne maintained, in the perfect
regularity of the quincunx provided one with a revelation of the
“mystical mathematics of the city of Heaven.” These gardens were
only slightly less renowned for the beauty and symmetry of their
blossoms than were the monks themselves for their vow of vertigo,
and they were surely at their most resplendent—at least according
to the eyewitness testimony of one of the young pilots, a former
farm boy from Sparta, Wisconsin, who had flown one of the “Flying
Fortresses” that had dropped the ordinance—on the bright April
morning on which they were swept into oblivion.
 257

Many years later, that pilot—by then an old man and recently
retired from a successful career in the National Air and Space
Administration, which had culminated in several lengthy so-called
space walks—had travelled to the region and sought out the village
in whose rather dilapidated and filthy inn my companions and I now
sat listening to the tale. There, the pilot had inquired after a guide to
escort him to the site of the monastery and its gardens, the beauty
of which had struck him forcefully when he had flown over them,
and which he had never forgotten. Indeed, the pilot had remarked
that it was the image of those gardens that had returned unbidden
to mind as he had floated weightlessly, tethered to his fragile craft by
a thin umbilicus, rotating in zero gravity with the silent Earth now
overhead, now underfoot, and on every side the star-flecked void
spiraling without end. In space, the pilot observed, one is immune to
the effects of vertigo. However, one is far from immune to the effects
of what, paraphrasing Pascal, the pilot described as “a terror induced
by the eternal silence of infinite space.” It was this sensation, coupled
closely although inexplicably with the memory of the monastery
gardens, that had prompted the pilot to make the long and difficult
journey.

Our elderly guide then revealed to us, although we had already

surmised as much, that it was he himself—then still a young man,
although now an old one—who had been obliged to inform the pilot
that the narrow mountain path, that gossamer of pale-white dust,
had long since been rendered impassable, the monastery abandoned,
and its shell-strewn gardens given over to time and the merciless
elements.
258

Thomas Martin Nutt

 259

Topography of Sound
260
261
262

Amelia Ishmael

I. The tongue in the ear

The tongue in the ear is also the kiss that most easily persuades the person who
appears reluctant to be kissed, sometimes it isn’t the eyes or the fingers or the lips that
overcome resistance, but simply the tongue that probes and disarms, whispers and
kisses, that almost obliges. Listening is the most dangerous thing of all….

II. Silence and Disability

There is a myth of a musician, in search of silence, who goes into a
small room that was designed to be completely soundproof. His goal
was to fully experience silence, to hear nothing. He was skeptical.
When he was lying in this room, completely and suspended in the
dark, after some time he began to hear two persistent noises: rapid,
high-pitched bursts and a slow, low-pitched throbbing. Concerned
that there might have been a leak, when he exits the chamber he asks
the room’s engineer why it was so loud. The engineer informed him
that what he heard did not come from outside of the chamber at all,
but rather from within: The high-pitched sounds were of the impulse
transmissions of his nerves communicating electronically, and the low
sound was of the circulating blood pumping through his body. The
musician’s theory that silence does not actually exist was reaffirmed.
Though it might be possible to shut out our senses to the outside world,
the effect is the increasing awareness of the cacophony within. The ear
folds and inverses, back into itself—like a speaker metamorphosized
into a microphone.

III. “Bring your ear near this abyss”

Square in your ship’s path are Seirênês, crying beauty to bewitch men coasting by;
woe to the innocent who hears that sound! …
Steer wide; keep well to seaward; plug your oarsmen’s ears
With beeswax kneaded soft; none of the rest
Should hear the song. …
But if you wish to listen,
Let the men tie you in the lugger, hand and foot, back to the mast,
 263

Bring your ear near this abyss

Lashed to the mast…

Shout as you will, begging to be untied,
Your crew must only twist more line around you
And keep their stroke up, till the singers fade.

IV. August 21, 2017: Arrow Rock, Missouri. Path of totality.

“I see nothing.”
“Open your eyes.”
“I see nothing.”
“Open your eyes.”
I pressed the protective lenses against my eyes, until everything was
black.
This means they are working?
I saw… not one star but many!
“My eyes are closed.”
“Open them.”
It’s dark. I searched for a golden sphere that was waxing,
but all of the stars that I saw were full red orbs.
“I see nothing.”
This isn’t working. I take them off and look up. The sun is still there,
brightly, behind a thin sheet of clouds.
“Do you see it now? It’s starting.”

III. Inquisition: The Leviathan and the Sphinx

The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head is hoisted
against the ship’s side…
And there with the strained craft leaning over it, by reason of the enormous drag
from the lower mast-head…that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist…
Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck… A short space
elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab…
he took Stubb’s long spade…and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended
mass…stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head…
“Speak thou vast and venerable head…and tell us the secret thing that is in thee.
264

Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest…has moved amid this world’s foundations…
Thou hast been where…
Thou saw’st…
Thou saw’st…
O head! Thou hast seen…and not one syllable is thine!”

IV. Otitis media

My voice is no more than arrhythmic vibrations; Nothing is enunciated.
I open my lips and move my tongue, contract in my throat and breathe.
With intention.
Is it working? Am I speaking? Can you hear me?
Nothing.
My heartbeat is everywhere, more encompassing than anything
happening “out-there.”
There’s something vestal about the sudden close-listening directed
towards ones’ inner self.
I listen through the fluid and then listen to it.
But what is this sound?
A whistler soaring through the sferics. Is it coming from inside or
outside?
Can I trust you... to tell me... honestly?
You open your lips, move your tongue, contract your throat and
breathe.
I cannot hear you.
“I cannot hear you. I am listening to myself. You cannot enter here:”
Aural chastity.
It swells; it pains; and then numbs. At first I don’t mind—It’s only one;
I have two.
But it’s not empty, it’s full of fluid: In the garden of passion’s fire… I have
found the entire pool of nectar…
My ear bloats with the “nectar,” it relishes in it, it stews.
I recollect that, in his Argentaurana, Stephen Emmens reported how to
grow a golden slug...the putrefactio that anticipated the materia prima.
“Tell me, inner fluids...
Thou hast been where…
 265

Thou saw’st…
What do you know!”
As time goes on I grow more anxious. It’s hoarding, coagulating, its
refusing to circulate: Its obdurate stagnancy will induce it to tear, will
induce it burst. And then, and then, all of those perfumed secrets
that are gestating in that fluid will leak out onto my pillow as I sleep,
and I will be none the wiser. I dream of biting the pillow tightly with
my teeth and sucking the fluid out of its stuffing. I dream of how it
tastes (perhaps like “soured water left standing in a rainbarrel”), but
my consciousness disrupts me. I rub, I pull. It continues to contract,
turning in further, becoming denser, thicker. I recollect Weil’s insistence
“to desire in the void.”

V. Antibiotics.
“Unless there is also an element of discommunication in the equation,
there is only communication. The issue of perceiving information that
is unseeable or unhearable is important, and without this element, it
seems to me that the balance is destroyed.”
— Kosugi

Works Cited:
Alvin Lucier, Sferics
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Homer, The Odyssey
James Elkins, What Painting Is
Javier Marías, A Heart So White
Takehisa Kosugi, World of Sound, New Summer
266

Emily Leon
 267

Sonic Selves and the Rune-Filled Ear

268

Can you hear the impact of a head-on traffic collision? What do

you hear first? Is it the violence of the windshield shattering into
1000s of luminous particles, an elaborate arrangement of prisms
hurtling through space toward an unrecognizable entity? Is it
the sound of the heat generated in the airbag, the sharp spirant
vibrations of sodium azide decomposing into sodium metal and
nitrogen gas? Is it the harsh primal squawk of the tires on asphalt?
What about the vertebrate skeleton, flesh consummating with
bone? What does the thud of a limp body sound like? Certainly,
you can hear the circular blare of sirens. Tears? Heavy breathing?
Muffled voices coming in and out of audible range? Does the
cacophony of flesh, material, and authority prompt a bit of
Ballardian symphorophilia? Maybe you can’t hear anything at
all or perhaps you can hear with your eyes even if the memory
signifies that you suffered from prosopagnosia.

Every erotogenic zone of the body is both an entrance and an

exit. An entrance allows passage through or into a place whilst an
exit acts as both an outlet for a departure and a space in which
something can come forth, an emergence. An emergence is often
understood as a rising from water, a substance that over half our
bodies are dependent on. In optics and astronomy, an emergence
is a ray of light passing through a prism or an active manifestation
of a heavenly body. In botany, an outgrowth which arises from
the sub-epidermic tissue, that which exists just beneath the skin.
Surely, there is an emergent presence in all forms of life, physical
and cosmic. Exposure to sound has a physiological impact on
plants, animals, and humans. It affects the harmonious system
of the universe. Might there be a common thread between all of
these seemingly disparate parts? Could that common thread be
the reciprocating motion of a sonorous body entering and exiting
the physical body?
 269

The physical body is a truly bizarre geography that scientific

study loves to prod and probe, defining its constraints, its limits,
its boundaries, and so forth. The real boundary is the categorical,
the act of defining which in and of itself renders the body obsolete,
determining its end and its spatial extent before its begun to move
or learn how to listen.

The body is an organism that has the capacity to invite and

expel a multiplicity of forms and phenomena. One such form
is the violence and intimacy of memory. Memories consume
and provoke. They change shape, causing the body to react in
colorful, audible, abusive, and tender ways. In these expressive
moments, the body functions precisely as an exit and an entrance.
An exit for excrement, odor, breathe, tears, sweat, vomit, and
language. Through this entrance we invite the sex of another,
new memories, saliva, and various other liquids and substances
needed to survive. We are time walkers, and despite the influx of
mindfulness movements that pontificate the importance of the
present, it is precisely the phenomenal capacity of the human
mind to simultaneously exist in the past, present, and imaginary
futures that bind us to this moment right now. The memory has
the capacity to change with time whilst changing the body in the
process. We are constantly transforming our dwelling and it is
constantly changing us.

Susan Stewart discusses the body as a microcosm, a miniature

within the very complex structure defined as the universe, in her
book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic,
the Souvenir, the Collection. This forces me to question our
understanding of the interiority and exteriority of the body, as
she analyzes the concept of the miniature and the gigantic in
myriad forms. Her analysis inevitably leads her to the mystic-
theosophic thought of Jakob Böhme. Böhme’s theory postulates
270

that “the whole body signifies heaven and earth; the body cavity
(or the bladder) signifies the air; the heart signifies fire; and the
blood (or liver) signifies water. The arteries signify the course of
the stars, and the intestines, their operation and wasting away.
The sky is the heart of nature, like the brain in man’s head.”1 This
interest in body to scale signifies the importance of understanding
anatomy in relation to the cosmos, a philosophy that values the
“contemplative and aesthetic” rather than the “scientific and
historical.”2

Might it be possible to grapple with a potential abstraction here,

such as the possibility that the body is capable of possessing the
power or faculty to hear beyond the ears? Consider auditory
illusions or perceptual phenomenon – the moment scientists
discovered the importance of the eyes to our sense of hearing
suggesting that our organs did not develop in isolation but in
tandem. Do we really understand how to perceive sound with
the body? The fleshy framework that covers our bones consists of
various textures and colors and is covered in mechanoreceptors.
Our bodies are listening all the time beyond the ears, and as
Stewart reveals in her text, “the paradoxical status of the body”
is “both mode and object of knowing.”3 It is the vehicle in which
something both occurs and is experienced. It might help here
to think of the body as a model. Good models are epistemic
operators that work towards a fuller understanding of the world,
and typically have an effectiveness beyond the human. The body
as media of habitation has a history. That history is encoded and
stored throughout the body itself.

1 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(Durham: Duke University Press,1992), 130.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 131.
 271

Earlier this year, I voluntarily went back to psychotherapy.

Specifically, the psychoanalytical method of Eye Movement
Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a treatment originally
designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic
memories. This is a treatment that has both been praised and
derided. I first underwent treatment in 2016. My therapist and
I eventually came to an agreement that I no longer needed the
sessions, as I had rewired my thinking and thus had no need to
continue at that time. Note that my treatment began 1700 miles
away from where my head-on collision had occurred many years
prior. This is an important fact that draws particular attention to
place and how memories are stored in our body and reactivated
by a mass of sensations, events, and locations.

When I moved back to the East Coast for graduate school a

year and a half after my treatment, all of my past trauma was
triggered solely based on the physical environment – my body
went into revolt and has been in revolt for nearly two years. I
am sure you’re wondering what this has to do with sound. Three
hearing tests later, I am still working through this phenomenal
experience myself.

For many years after the accident, I began to hone in on the

particular properties of sound. I left a space open for curiosity.
How might I engage with what Rudolf Otto would consider a
rejection of the illusion of selfhood, an attempt to become the
void. During this process, especially in hindsight, I have never
been more occupied with my own musical praxis and desire to
fully immerse in the infinite possibilities of what sonic vibration
can do to the body and mind. Yet, I was deaf to everything
around me. My flesh consumed the total atmosphere of sound; a
felt listening if have you. My experience was predicated on place
and space, not the organ we assign the rite of listening.
272

For weeks during EMDR, I returned to my 24-year old self to

see, hear, feel, and smell the event. You see, I have very little
visual memory of the accident. I certainly have no auditory
memory, which can more than likely be attributed to how quickly
and effortlessly my brain processes sound. However, in July of
this year, I felt the impact of the crash for the first time. To
perceive an extreme bodily sensation whilst sitting on a couch as
someone waves a telescoping wand in front of your eyes is a truly
remarkable experience. The sensation to feel or be felt is most
often dependent on external stimuli. The body became both the
signifier and signified.

Following the session of impact, I nearly went deaf in my left

ear. At first, it felt as if someone had pressed a plate of glass
just slightly behind the temporal muscle. I was having difficulty
understanding certain words. The ear was plugged. I called
the ENT and scheduled an appointment when the hearing loss
persisted. What had my body heard? Where did the sound come
from? Was it sound at all?

The audiologist and the ENT doctor were perplexed when my

hearing test revealed I had lost one frequency on the speech level
altogether. Have you been around any loud noises? Have you
been sick lately? No. Administer the steroids. After an eleven-day
run of Prednisone, the hearing test results were the same. Next
decision: MRI? I skipped it. Of course, I could have a problem
with my brain. Nevertheless, the intuitive and subjective side of
me is more akin to accept a phenomenological prognosis. The
real question is whether my ear was listening to my body. Did
the felt impact of a nearly ten-year old memory have a dialogue
with my ear? And what does this have to do with the present?
Why now and not when I lived 1700 miles away from the place
the incident occurred. I was processing the same memories back
 273

then in EMDR sessions.

What if the act of reviving past memories causes very present

and physical impressions such as a sudden loss of hearing in the
left ear - the ear that would have been closest to the driver side
window that shattered next to the head nearly ten years in the
past. Is the ear listening to my body and thus responding to the
memory of an accident? Sound doesn’t exist in my memories. To
quote Jonathan Smith, “So it is with memory: it is a complex and
deceptive experience. It appears to be pre-eminently a matter of
the past, yet it is as much an affair of the present. It appears to
be pre-eminently a matter of time, yet it is as much an affair of
space.”4

EMDR sessions are immersive, a combination of re-experiencing

emotionally disturbing material whilst simultaneously focusing
on an external stimulus. EMDR seeks to heal individuals from
psychological trauma, which means there must be a will to
remember that inevitably leads to present physiological and
psychological metamorphosis. On the one hand, the process
attempts to integrate past memories in order to develop the skills
needed for adaptive functioning. On the other hand, the treatment
triggers and targets the body’s memory of its encoded historical
text causing the body to act in threatening and physically abusive
ways.

How does one account for a loss of hearing based on a memory

that can’t perceive sound whilst sitting in a quiet room? For weeks
following my sudden loss of hearing I heard a constant spiral, a
swoosh, an ocean in my ear until one day it just stopped.

4 Jonathan Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
25.
274

Sometimes it still feels as though there’s something lodged in my

ear, a hollow and gray cylinder expanding around the ear canal.
And, of course, there’s often the thin and sharp needle prick
followed by an incredible high-pitched frequency that sometimes
makes me want to wildly fall to my knees and scream. I can feel
the energy entering and exiting my body. I perceive sound at
its most inaudible. It’s gigantic, all-consuming, and emotionally
charged. It has transformed and reconstituted my ear back to its
normal physiological state. Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner
believed that in order to reach another world such as the astral,
you have to be somewhat of an apostle for great-stillness. This
great-stillness becomes diffuse with sound and the individual can
weave through the portals of their own mind. Thus, the desire for
sound begins from within and beyond the ear.
275
276

Patrick Farmer

it takes two for an encounter and i am nothing

o never finished o we become a place o a hole
o a pulse of light is also a pulse of time o a
green bird that being inhabits o the energy of
radiant stars drip to become matter o a sense
of things o sweat licked from the upper lip o
axial lace o odours of hay o moss o clouds o
ginger o a universe of triangles scattering wings
into spectra o blue is the colour that beats o the
moon’s sky is black o mars’s is red o what is
the speed of all this o place is matter o place is
finished time o time is the mind of the stars o
stars are light o light becomes matter o matter
has sound o sound is place o time is an organ o
a wall between continuing voices o silk darts in
the labyrinth o definitions are holes we speak
 277

Up to our ears in the world

into o climb down o saw into o qualities are also

boundaries o textures sting their own thinness o
the nature of a biped o divorced from the ground
o half held up with time o a cavern high in the
mountains of the skull o clough o a cut that
longs for the continuum o a body that keeps the
brain from licking the external world o we are
confronting almost pure mystery o differences
between accident and portent o of degree o not
everything that exists in our minds belongs to the
fold of consciousness o thinking o walking o has
no place o why valorise the heart that does not
attempt to secure itself on this groundlessness o
we imagine a matted scurf of space o leviathan
saw the birds flying o a dream of being held
by the artifice of any sort of cot or ligament o
278

each hole grows a throat o we are this residua

o lungs expanding and singing with syncope o
shaken by spasms o naked above the skin o no
place could ever be strange to us again o what
are these fields o where birds awaken o when the
sap congeals o pressure of fecundity o out of the
paths and onto the impasse o the elusiveness of
the free o flawed nature of perfection o flung
down collosi and aeons of emptiness o we write
books about sprouts o about ears o about fossils
o alignments of pores o vertigo is light o a bird
that creeps in the weeds o we cannot cause it o
the most we can do is graft ourselves to it o wing
o epidote green o bright with rain o vertigo is
a bird in our eyes o a feathered dot o a passage
through weft of wet limbs o this bird this
 279

syllable o a weave of fanatic vitality o sifting us

o splitting the gaps between our cells o touching
nothing o quickening our tissue o fleet o feeding
o flying o a bird is a shadow o a yellow patch of
light unfolds its protoplasm o we are wrong o
the nothing we will not allow to be is time itself
o time is the entropy tree sap inhabits o a world
that has lost its contours o a crow’s circadian ear
o it may well have been the ghost of something
in the beginning o before light became matter
o mushroom flesh o wood ears o the organ
with holes in it o colour patches of sound o
part o shift o reform o we move through space
like time o the present is the object of ghosts
o a resounding mosaic of bodies o a worm o
a citrine borer o a hexagon o living is moving
280

o weathering o the lavender light fading o full

moisture in our lungs o heat from the pavement
on our lips and palms o dry orange dust from
the linden o a time that turns back without
warning o vertigo suspended between the stars
o a hole is a circle o a circle is a ghost o the salt
sea o this solid air o blood pumps up our thighs
again o the air reverberates with wolves o our
fingers enwind o this is it o here it comes o an
ecology mined by the maker of vertigoes o the
shaking diaphragm laughing at intimacy o we
carry spasms in our hair o our mouths o our
marrow o our blood, o tensions of space and
conditions of time o a cosmic motherhood o the
ear is a texture of condition o one part seeks the
other o circles of brains ring restfully o numb
 281

to a fine thrumb and sonant cast of wing cycles

o time can accelerate but sound cannot o early
slime on clay o a grinning viscera o a chemistry
sensitive to light o an unknown background
between fable and fibula o our here to our there
o motility of cilia o protozoa o the becoming
and refinement of animal bodies in motion o the
frothing of virtuality o a steady flow of animals
move onto the land and we remember o binding

time with mud and experience o our whole little

universe in thrumbs o shapes shot through with
shapelessness o we are up to our ears in the
world o feeling the golden threads uncoil along
our wilderness o we eat o and we are dead o
a fine film of waxen yellow o thousands upon
thousands of holes o husks of transparent cells
282

collapsing from their mediums o like noses o like

mouths o like ears o like beams o like cups and
bowls o like empty ditches o abrupt o broken o
openings o the holes are empty again o slipping
from amoeba to flagellate o whip like o an
erupting quiescence o everything tries violently
to assume another form that up until now would
have been unthinkable o everything is fine so
long as it’s still o we are losing our heads o dead

dog mercury o a slow ascent through chromatic

waves o entering into an ecstasy that our ears
are not prepared for o each becoming itself
according to itself alone o thousands of joints
o thousands of holes o thousands of organs o
what are we closest to o we point at the heart
o overripe melon o only the ground changes
 283

o liminal to liminoid o our veins are buried in

lime o a summer we felt o extracting wasps from
the soil o between our shoulders o scratching
millet from enamel o we have foxes for eyes o fins
grow from our paws o we are solar bodies o our
marrow swallowed by silica o the outer border
of membranes tremor and toss like horses o our
nerves are sleeping o gravity grows from our jaws
o we are up to our ears in memories o everything

must be rearranged o from the lithosphere to

the imago o the children of ear-splitting stars o
we taste each other’s void o the ossicles to the
cloaca o obsidian is our body angle o we lose
our speech o localised by our terms o thick with
sulphur o tiny rootlets o we persist in speaking
o we don’t know what’s going on here o
284

Biographies
Clara de Asís
Clara de Asís is a Spanish composer and guitarist born in 1988. Her works highlight
simplicity, non-intervention and active listening as means of music making. They
display an extreme precision and intuitive openness involving a dedicated attention
to sound, its details, and its most pure forms. Besides releasing collaborative albums in
recent years, notably ‘Without’ (elsewhere, 2018) with Greg Stuart and Erik Carlson,
her 2018 solo album ‘Do Nothing” (Another Timbre), on which she played guitar and
percussion on a set of her six compositions, was extremely well received.

Carrie Olivia Adams
Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she works in publishing and serves as
the poetry editor for Black Ocean. She is the author of three full-length collections
of poems Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence in
addition to the chapbooks “Proficiency Badges” (forthcoming from Meekling Press in
2019),“Grapple,” “Overture in the Key of F,” and “A Useless Window.” When she’s
not making poems, she’s making biscuits.

Julia Bloch
Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia. She is a Pew
Fellow in the Arts and the author of three books of poetry: Letters to Kelly Clarkson,
a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Valley Fever; and The Sacramento of
Desire, all from Sidebrow Books. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs the
Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania and coedits the online
journal of poetry and poetics Jacket2.

J.R. Carpenter
J. R. Carpenter is an award-winning artist, writer, performer, postdoctoral researcher,
and maker of maps, zines, books, poetry, short fiction, long fiction, non-fiction, and
non-linear, intertextual, hypermedia, and computer-generated narratives.
http://luckysoap.com

Tess Denman-Cleaver
Tess Denman-Cleaver is a North East based artist. Her work spans live performance,
performance writing and publication, performative workshops and installation. Her
work has been shown at Tate Britain, Hatton Gallery, Turner Contemporary, Tate
St Ives, M_HKA Gallery Antwerp, Paul Melon Centre, Audiograft Festival and
Wilkinson Gallery. In 2018 she was Artist in Residence at Middlesbrough Town Hall
creating new work for Middlesbrough Art Weekender. She worked with artist Tim
Shaw on a commission for English Heritage, exhibited at Globe Gallery (Newcastle)
in 2018. Tess is 2018-19 Artist in Residence at the Sonic Arts Research Unit (Oxford).
She was the Artistic Director of Tender Buttons theatre and performance company
 285

between 2010-18 and a programmer at The Northern Charter between 2015-2018.

Tess has a PhD on landscape and performance philosophy and also works as Producer
of Artists’ Moving Image at Tyneside Cinema.

Lotti V Closs
Lotti V Closs, B. Whitstable 1987.Graduated from MFA Sculpture at West Dean
College in 2014, lives and works in Nottingham. She has exhibited her sculptures
internationally, most recently with the solo show, In Plain Sight, shown between
Castor Projects, London and The Number Shop, Edinburgh, in 2017.

Patrick Farmer
Patrick grew up in Wales and would happily walk for a living. Along with Sarah
Hughes, he runs Compost and Height and Wolf Notes. He teaches in Oxford and has
a PhD on Auditory Knowledge. He has an album with David Lacey forthcoming on
the Suppedaneum imprint, and is currently working on a project concerned with dis/
embodied listening. www.patrickfarmer.org

Helen Frosi
Helen Frosi is an inter-disciplinary artist, curator and producer whose current
practice researches the social, cultural and political aspects of sound and listening.
Helen is fascinated by the resonance and poetics of place, and in particular by peri-
urban landscapes that perpetually shift–geologically, economically, sensuously and
metaphorically–acting both as memory palace and palimpsest. As a curator, Helen is
interested in social sculpture, collaborative practices and collective actions, with her
most recent work being Curator with James Bulley on the inaugural Longplayer Day,
an annual peripatetic cross-disciplinary festival focusing on time and space, duration
and long-term thinking. Helen is Director of SoundFjord a nomadic curatorial
platform, Founder of the Visible Near Midnight Recordings label and is a visiting
research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her latest research project,
EnCOUnTErs, sits at the nexus between art and ecology, with a specific focus on
interspecies communication, and the sonic imagination.

Tomoé Hill
Tomoé Hill is a contributing editor at Minor Literature[s] and currently lives
in London. She is also one of the editors of Love Bites: Fiction inspired by Pete
Shelley & Buzzcocks (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and will have an piece included in the
forthcoming anthology We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books).
@CuriosoTheGreat
286

Amelia Ishmael
With the otitis media effusion... I took antibiotics after taking a flight and erupting
in tears because the pain was so intense when we landed (at the higher altitude the
symptoms went away, and upon decent they all came rapidly swarming back, it was
too much)... and I was afraid of the membrane bursting (which had happened once
before, thus the knowledge of waking up to find the ear nectar all over the pillow),
the antibiotics killed all the good bacterias that were keeping the rest of myself in
order, the ear infection went away, but a few weeks later I got an eye infection that
I had to go back to the doctor for and more and bigger antibiotics, went away but a
few weeks later got a vaginal infection that an inamorato and I home remedied... by
then I was also onto the antibiotic/infection cycle and pist the fuck off at being “sick”
and playing musical chairs with my biological equilib. For about 4 months thanks to
medical practice of poisoning/burning/cutting the whole body rather than practicing
a healthier science of influence&balance. Still dealing with that, haven’t figured out
how to write about it...

Susana Gómez Larrañga

Susana Gómez Larrañaga A.K.A Susi Disorder (Santander, Spain) is an artist and a
PhD student at the University of Greenwich, London. In 2015, Susana was awarded
with the Firstsite Collectors’ Bursary Award for her site-specific hologram:Flying
Land; the project featured at the 2ndDeath Online Conference (Kingston University)
and at the RE:PRINT/RE:Present symposium/book and exhibition (Cambridge
School of Art). She was one of the artists at the Digital Factory Residency in
conjunction with Andy Warhol’s exhibition at Firstsite, Colchester. In 2018, her
experimental work was on display at Tate Britain, as part of Late Tate: Echoes. She
was commissioned by the Mayor of London and Tate Collective to create a site-
specific public artwork as part of the LDN WMN project. Fascinated by derelict sites
and their entropic assemblages, her art-led research investigates the materiality of
data through processes of sedimentation and decay in context of the Anthropocene.
Her practice involves generative processes, print media and site-specificity.
www.susidisorder.com

Hannah Dargavel-Leafe
Hannah Dargavel-Leafe is an artist working between sound, sculpture and drawing
exhibiting both in the UK and Internationally. She has performed at Whitechapel
Gallery and Iklectik, London, had a solo show at CAVE Gallery in Leeds and released
sounds on a limited edition vinyl through Calling Cards Publishing and a tape through
Sacred Tapes. in 2018 she was a research associate in sound at The Slade School of
Fine Art.

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Emily Leon
Emily Leon is an Independent Scholar, Art Historian, Drummer, Performer, &
Sound Enthusiast based in Durham, North Carolina. She holds an MA in Digital Art
History from Duke University and a BA in Art History summa cum laude from the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Joseph Clayton Mills

Joseph Clayton Mills is an artist, musician, and writer working at the intersection of
language, composition, and archival practice. His text-based paintings, assemblages,
and sound installations have been exhibited in the United States and Europe, including
at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, the Lincoln Park Conservatory, and the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and his work has appeared in numerous
publications, including The New Yorker. He is the author of the short story collection
Zyxt, published by Entr’acte in 2010. A former Chicagoan, he remains an active
participant in the improvised and experimental music community there, where
his collaborators have included Adam Sonderberg and Steven Hess (as Haptic),
Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé Cuéllar (as Partial), Marvin Tate, Michael Pisaro,
and Olivia Block, among many others. His recordings have appeared on numerous
labels, including Another Timbre, FSS, and Entr’acte, and in 2013 in he launched
Suppedaneum, a label focused on releasing scores and their realizations.

Fay Zmija Nicolson

Fay Nicolson (b. Derby 1984) is an artist based in London. She studied at CSM,
London 2006 and RCA, London 2011. Fay works across image, movement and
music. The idea of trans-aesthetic experience is important to the way she produces,
exploring connections between movement, gesture, mark and sound. Recent solo
projects include a performance of the song cycle Spa Songs at the Brunel Museum,
London 2017; the exhibition Sound before Symbol at DKUK, London 2017;
performance and film OVER AND OVER PURE FORM, Kunstraum, London,
2016-17; exhibition OVER AND OVER PURE FORM, Grand Union, Birmingham,
2015. Fay has exhibited, performed and taught internationally.

Thomas Martin Nutt

Martin is a British artist with an interest in sound and language. His practice centres
around experimental composition and improvisation but is demarcated by a more
nebulous border. He is currently researching new ways of employing the primary
devices with which we write music. He lives and works in Japan.
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Lance Austin Olsen

Lance Olsen started painting at the age of 15, when he entered London’s Camberwell
Art School, studying under well-known contemporary artists Frank Auerbach, Euan
Uglow and R.B. Kitaj. In 1968, he emigrated from the UK to Canada, making his
home in Victoria, BC, where he still resides. His body of work in both sound and
visual artworks not only function as an ongoing diary, but also a constant folding and
reevaluation of events from his life and immediate social landscape.

Michael Pisaro
Michael Pisaro is a guitarist, composer and a member of the Wandelweiser collective.
His music is performed frequently in concerts and festivals around the world.
Recordings of his work (solo and collaborative) have been released by (among others),
Edition Wandelweiser, erstwhile, New World Records, Hubro, another timbre,
Potlatch, winds measure, HEM Berlin and on Pisaro’s own imprint, Gravity Wave.
Before joining the composition faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, he taught
composition and theory at Northwestern University.

Chloë Proctor
Chloë Proctor’s work has recently appeared in Alterity and the Contemporary Poetry
Series: Nature & Language (both edited and published by Corbel Stone Press) as
well as Bedford Square 10, an anthology of new writing from the Royal Holloway
Creative Writing programme, where she studied for an MA in Poetic Practice. In her
poetry she experiments with interjections and clashing discourses and is particularly
interested in ecology, mental illness, sexuality and public space. She is particularly
uninterested in grammar. As of 2019, she is working on a body of work concerned
with public offence and abrasive language.

Nisha Ramayya
Nisha Ramayya’s poetry pamphlets Notes on Sanskrit (2015) and Correspondences
(2016) are published by Oystercatcher Press. With Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil,
she co-authored Threads (2018), a creative-critical pamphlet published by clinic. Her
work can be found in Cambridge Literary Review, Poetry London, and The White
Review. She is a member of the Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK research group
and the interdisciplinary practice-based-research group Generative Constraints.

Mirella Salamé
Mirella Salamé is a Lebanese multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the
borders between the private/marginal/hidden and the public/above surface/socially
constructed. Her works take form through performance art, installation art, words,
painting and wildcraft. Mirella is also known as ella for her ecofeminist work.
@ellazplanet / www.mirellasalame.com
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Richard Skelton
Richard Skelton is an artist from Lancashire in northern England. Between 2005 and
2011 he published 20 editions of music via his own acclaimed Sustain-Release Private
Press. He is known for using numerous pseudonyms, including A Broken Consort,
Clouwbeck, Heidika, and The Inward Circles. He currently runs the multi-media
publishing house Corbel Stone Press with his wife and creative partner Autumn
Richardson, and is the author of eleven books and numerous booklets, including
Landings (2009), Limnology (2012), The Pale Ladder (2016) and The Look Away
(2018). He is also the creator of the Centre for Alterity Studies, a resource for the work
of an international network of artists and researchers with interests in non-human
otherness, encompassing animal, plant and mineral alterity.

Florence Sunnen
Florence Sunnen was born in Luxembourg City. She writes short stories and makes
collages. A pamphlet of her story The Hook was published by Nightjar Press. She
lives in Coventry.

April Van Winden

#environmentaldesigner
#communicationdesigner
#designlecturer
#sociogeographicdesignresearcher
aprilvanwinden.tumblr.com
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