The idea for this book came to me at the end of August 2017, halfway through an artist’s residency at Shiro Oni Studio, Onishi, Gunma prefecture. The monsoon had come late, and the heat and humidity militated against vigorous activity of any sort. I spent much of my time lying on the cool tatami floor of my room, trying to recapture the sleep that had eluded me the night before. In the late afternoons I’d go around the corner to my studio, where I’d listen to a processed field recording I’d made in the local elementary school. I’d procedurally split the recording into overlapping 500ms segments that I then resequenced according to their spectral features and concatenated to make something new. The outcome was repetitive, shot through with the school attention chime that sounded halfway through the recording — the effect was like a cross between kulintang drumming and the stridulation of the kirigirisu or long-horned katydids that sang in the grass all night. I seemed to have stepped out of the timeline of my ordinary life and into an oppressively humid waking dream.
The foregoing (“The idea for this book ...”) is something I wrote as publicity copy for a different book, Waking Paralysis. But it could apply equally to this one. That makes three books to have come, in one fashion or another, from that six-week residency: The Human Scaffold (2021), Waking Paralysis, and this. If you pressed me for an account of what this one is “about” I might say: Sound, posture, time. Dissociation. Touch.
Those are things this book could be said to be about in the sense that they are things I have in mind as I work on it. But there’s a second kind of aboutness that attaches to made things, an aboutness of process. If you pressed me for an account of what this book is about in this second sense I might say:
Paring back connective tissue.
Stripping away explicit argument.
Letting the argument be an emergent property of the text (letting it supervene upon the text?).
Allowing yourself to not know what the argument is as you write, as you put the text together.
Allowing yourself to dispense with metadiscursive expressions of the form “what this book is about …”.
Allowing it not to be about anything. (At least— at first?)
Yielding to the urge to be nonintentional.
Stripping back one’s defenses.
Stripping back one’s defenses.
A more encouraging image: Scraping as an act of fashioning — as late Pleistocene Tasmanians scraped the inner face of wallaby pelts with faceted stone tools to make them fit to wear (see The Human Scaffold).
Or: Scraping as in gua sha, the evoking of petechia. Encouraging something to bloom in the skin.
If I could write this book as a series of notes to friends, it would feel effortless.
In other words: If I could write this book as a series of texts where a phatic aboutness, an aboutness of fashioning relationships, eclipsed thematic aboutness, so that the latter represented a precipitate, a residue, something that took form in the course of writing without my paying it much attention, save occasionally to flick it away, but that could be recovered later without too much effort on the reader’s part, it would feel effortless.
But it would have to really be a collection of notes to friends, later collated and edited, and not simply a series of notes written as if to friends.
Working in secret, behind my own back.
In fact, one thing I was doing in Onishi, in August and September 2017, was working on a book “about sound”. In terms of thematic aboutness, the present book bears but glancing relation to that one. In terms of process aboutness they represent the origin and endpoint, as I wrote above, of stripping back one’s defenses.
But of course that’s something that has no endpoint.
