2.9.10

When the attention of the mind draws close to the idea of the sound in language

Work in progress....

'When the attention of the mind draws close to the idea of the sound in language, and after polishing it in the mouth, between the tongue and the top of the palette, attempt'n to talk of it... the mouth immediately is stuck with the choices it has open to it i.e. to speak. The choices are varied and so much many that it is drawn to pause and this pause can be often misread or misheard as silence. But with silence being just one of the sounds of language we find in it... we have already begun at the place where all sounds are folded into and mirror each other so-exactly that they fall still-frozen in the face of themselves.

And this will not do. 

The position of the tongue in relation to the throat is at once a position of the self and the object – in this case the object has no ‘real’ name and no real sound. The shape of sounded language cannot be decided, the territory of it’s…the register, the history philosophy, is again oblique, a whisper. The only way to describe it is through that that refuses it. It is in effect a gap.
We are stood up by the very object we wish to dance to, sing along with.
So I begin with the tenuous threads or echoes that I hear of it in what I do have...'

A digital essay... for more go to http://biography-sound.blogspot.com/

3 comments:

peer said...

I like what you are saying here - it reminds of this quote:

“Trying to Define Yourself is Like Trying to Bite Your Own Teeth”
-Alan Watts (1965)

peer said...

Here is link to an interview on Bomb with David Toop on Listening.

http://bombsite.com/articles/3622

I think this touches on some of those subject/object questionings you articulate.

majena mafe said...

Thanks for your comment and link 'peer' Toops article is interesting I've browsed his new book. And yes your spot on, I'm really interested in that place where language collapses in on itself...never mind the self but its the self of language that I'm worrying like an old bone.