Walker on Body and Voice--Four Cries: Cry Three


"Shouts in the distance: the VICE-CONSUL. Cries of despair. Heart-rending, obscene. Voice 1 (distant): What's he shouting? Voice 2: The name she used to have in Venice, in the desert of Calcutta. Silence. The cries fade in the distance. Disappear. Voice 2, all in one breath, in fear, tells the story of the crime, the crime committed in Lahore: Voice 2 (low): 'He fired a gun. One night, from his balcony in Lahore, he fired on the lepers in the Shalimar Gardens.' Silence"(M. Duras, India Song, tr. Barbara Bray, N.Y.: Grove Press, 1976, 42).

So. So, where am I, as the little (w)hole leaks its liquid, drop (word) by drop (word), [i] by [i], moment by moment.

[i] am up to repetition, repetition as difference, as that being repeated is always changed somehow, as if coming from a different person for different ends: "That is it is never the same moment it is never the same emphasis at any successive moment of existing then really what is repetition"(G. Stein, Look at Me Now and Here I am, London: Penguin, 1990, 117). I have then at my disposal, to begin again, something which I know already, is mine, possessed. Or so I think: the repetition is the cry. If I possess five repetitions, like "This begins on a dark night", or "the night birds are back", I have five ways (and more, all their combinations) to articulate the cry. To write down its look. To console myself with the shape of its sound. To begin where I am familiar, the cry perhaps being joy, mostly not.

I begin: This begins on a dark night, awake to the clear air, no hint of smoke, not even the leaves move, not a quiver, raining a little, and south of the action, out of sight and sound.

I begin again: This begins on a dark night. Loss is not the whole of it. A dimension is given up for the glimpse of a shape behind the scene. The quiet time passed with the moon.

If syntax equals the body structure then [i] flows in two directions. Body structure to syntax, and syntax to body structure. I can affect and be affected (infected). And this is a disturbance of power within the acts of reading and writing, and within the texts of the body, and which happens anyway, without determination: boredom, for example, or confusion, or dismay, or elation, or speculation on the text: what is going on here, what is this (cried out, loudly: for heaven's sake & who is this person: "When we read a text, we are either read by the text or we are in the text. Either we tame a text, we ride on it, we roll over it, or we are swallowed up by it, as by a whale" (H. Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector, ed. & tr. Verena Andermatt Conley, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1990, 3). Laughter too. Cut little pieces away, see what happens. What is it, someone murmurs. And a voice from the page says: "I return to the fragment: while it never is unique, still it has no external limit - the outside toward which it falls is not its edge - and at the same time no internal limitation (it is no hedgehog, rolled up and closed upon itself). And yet it is something strict, not because of its brevity (it can be prolonged like agony), but through the tautness, the tightness that chokes to the breaking point: there are always some links that have sprung (they are not missing). No fullness, no void."(M. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, tr. Ann Smock, Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1988, 46)

I am such a --

Forensics, said Gertrude Stein, "is a taught paragraph -- what is forensics forensics is an argument to be fought -- Forensics is so true -- Forensics establishes which is that they will rather than linger and so they establish -- For instance forensics does not use nor deny nor imply it refuses to curve -- Forensics may be a thirst for gold"(G. Stein How to Write, N.Y.: Dover, 1975, 385-395). How to write, that is almost all of it, as [i] sees it, in the dark, at night, saying 'begins' while already being in the midst, way past any Beginning. The word forensics comes from the Latin forum, a market-place, the centre of public business, and has an adjective forensis, meaning of the forum, the original centre of law business. Hence, forensic: legal, especially in relation to speech.

Forensics is very appealing, persuasive (which is its job) - like the good, neat, or round, sentence - it is inscription, it is machining. It is not abject, mustn't leak. It pleads. There can be no tender beginnings, no repetitions. Movement is forward, sharp, conclusive. Forensics is the business of formal debating, of taking a side, in the domain of the law, where ever it might be. "Forensics is richly in a hurry"( How to Write, 394).

I am such a you can hear it coming on the wind yet today was hot the evening cool and calm so extreme that it be calm here and yet now the night is quiet quite the same routine I am such a the wind is a day away yet probably the taste no the call no the and and leaning back listening blood beating through the ears a song of insects in the veins a song anyway a page turning close by a morning a morning a morning the clock chiming as every year loud as loud as sand against the eyes the loud red and then the dogs bark and a shout and the dogs stop and still I am such a resting in the dark keeping the dread which scrapes me out a little to the side on my guard a hand out at just the right moment it is there so well known coming close enough to suck this time this but its at my back fully formed starred such a bell an unholy row ready to bite my teeth out I am such a bell crossing the calm evening crossing the hammer never mind I am such a never in the wind in the wind.

The question and/or answer then is, for [i], to write whenever possible a non-forensic subject/text: [i] being a hole, a wound, a cry, an excess rather than evidence. And repetition then being not repetition, but insistence, insistence of the fragment, a way, a method, with which to make/cry something: "expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis"(Look at Me Now, 100). Gertrude Stein tells how she became aware that repetition was insistence. She was seventeen and went to live with "a lot of my relations and principally with a whole group of very lively little aunts who had to know anything"(101). There were eleven of them, and they had to tell each other everything they had seen or heard and "they did have to say and hear said whatever was said and any one not hearing what it was they said had to come in to hear what had been said. That inevitably made everything said often -- No matter how often what happened had happened any time any one told anything there was no repetition"(101).

This begins on a dark night (this begins on a dark night), is a quiet cry - the cry of [i] named as abject, and so spasmic, insistent, refuse - a de-composing, a clearing away, for what will follow, ordinarily, as a journey then, as a type of listening, to my[i]self probably. Giving my[i]self a place, redundant even, for a moment, familiar of course, already known, dreamed, a forming and deforming, simultaneous, a return over and over, by the imagination, an invitation to eat and sleep (without the yellow drug) & participate in the "continuous passage from the real to the imaginary"(G. Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, tr. Colette Gaudin, Dallas: Spring, 1987, 22), yet: "I know what I'm doing here -- I'm improvising"(C. Lispector, The Stream of Life, tr. Elizabeth Lowe & Earl Fitz, Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1989, 21). I know what I'm doing here, question mark, then colon, then quotation (for love's sake): "The so-called personal pronouns: everything happens here, I am forever enclosed within the pronominal lists: 'I' mobilize the image-repertoire, 'you' and 'he' mobilize paranoia. But also, fugitively, according to the reader, everything, like the reflections of a watered silk, can be reversed: in 'myself, I,' the 'I' might not be 'me,' the 'me' he so ostentatiously puts down; I can say to myself 'you' as Sade did, in order to detach within myself the worker, the fabricator, the producer of writing from the subject of the work (the Author); on the other hand, not to speak of oneself can mean: I am He who does not speak about himself; and to speak about oneself by saying 'he' can mean: I am speaking about myself as though I were more or less dead, caught up in a faint mist of paranoiac rhetoric, or again: I am speaking about myself in the manner of the Brechtian actor who must distance his character -- "(Barthes by Barthes, 168) Insistence is a cry, in its morning guise plain as day, abject in it necessity to be movement. Going in or coming out, repeating insists, as breathing or retching, word after word. And this is how [i] is sometimes --