All Voice, Risk Words: Thirteen Experiments for the Tens and Beyond

He spoke about music in its pre-cultural state, when song had been a howl across several pitches, [when] musical performances must have had a quality something like free recitation; improvisation. But if one closely examined music, and in particular its most recently achieved stage of development, one noticed the secret desire to return to those conditions.

— Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (as taken from the website of Matchless Recordings)

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I’ve become increasingly interested in a constellation of terms (returning, style, threshold, silence, humilitas, entropy) which have ended up vaguely pointing towards the well-worn idea that energy in all its forms tends towards a state of highest entropy, that all energy—and, by extension, everything—“seeks” dispersion.

If we’re then taking this into those terms, into our thinking more generally as guided by those terms, the idea of “the individual” is an early casualty. But when exposed to any sort of pressure, we find that we are messing with a first principle, “the individual” being that which acts as a false ground to most Western thinking. If we’re being good poststructuralists (or maybe we don’t even need to go that far), we also know that we can’t demolish or alter this notion of the individual in any substantial way because it justifies itself and, like hyphae, it colours everything else. It’s not a case that you shouldn’t pull at it, but rather that you just can’t.

One idea that we might want to consider the impact of this way of thinking on is community. It is a vague abstraction, one which colloquially means “a collection of individuals with something in common”, so unable are we to think of community as anything other than a group of sacred, defined agents who elect to temporarily give themselves over to something else, a something else that they have already decided worth their time.

Key here are “elect” and “temporarily” (and, in a moment, “something else”). The very first breath taken at birth is anything but election. Where a common sense understanding of breathing might argue that we draw in air, we actually expand our chest cavity and, thus, create an area of low pressure for air to flow into: we make room, the world enters. This is an act of yielding, not election, and if we are to live, both in that first instance and beyond it, we must continue to yield. An acceptance of life is an acceptance that we must give way.

By this measure, this election is also not “temporary”. This need for acceptance, for yielding, as a basic principle of life as opposed to the individual is inescapably permanent. Implicit in all of this is that, even more than not being able to live without others, we are not able to live without anything other than exactly what is there, exactly all the energy that is dispersing in exactly all the ways that it is. This is not therefore about other bodies, other personalities (as pleasurable as these might be to us), but, rather, it is the very possibility of interaction itself, the idea that we can and should be surprised in ways that we can’t yet possibly figure. As Hélène Cixous wrote, it is a case of writing ‘in the direction of that which does not let itself be written…What I can write is already written, it is no longer of interest.’

I’m outlining a problem here, a problem that I’m about to suggest we tackle by not talking about it or by not seeing it as a problem. I’m trying to think about ways to embody interaction not as self-guided but as self-disrupting, as seeing dispersion as a beautiful confluence rather than as an end of “me”, or a “you”, or a “they” that we should mourn. It’s very easy, as the late Sean Bonney once said, to deny the “I” when yours is the dominant. This is true, and none of this writing here is an attempt to end that; to do this would merely be to play semantics. It is merely to ask whether an “I” or a “you” might only be able to fight for one’s rights or self-worth through this confluence, through this yielding to radically unwritable possibilities, through allowing ourselves to form communities which do not “allow” in the sense of permit but “allow” in the sense of permeability.

The works presented here are disruptions, antagonisations, interjections. In keeping with this, there is no ranking and no review, but rather a line or two which may disrupt, antagonise, interject or fall by the wayside (‘It’s no use, Mr James—It’s turtles all the way down’). These works are genuine experiments in that they have the potential to go wrong (whatever that might mean). They are the possibility of an interaction we can never describe or predict; as Denise Levertov would put it, they are like a thread:

Something is very gently,

invisibly, silently,

pulling at me – a thread

or net of threads

finer than cobweb and as

elastic…

…Not fear

but a stirring

of wonder makes me

catch my breath when I feel

the tug of it when I thought

it had loosened itself and gone.