A Quiz:

a poem with notes

If listening is a question, is sound the answer? (1)This piece is a poetic response to the poetic response to listening that is the book by that name by Jean Luc Nancy (2007).

      an eager hand shoots upward

Listening seeks sounds and asks of them questions.

      another hand timidly raises
      curved at the junction where fingers meet palm (2)I am thinking of hands holding the invisible shapes of thoughts, shapes of sounds. In Laurie Anderson’s recent book All the Things I Lost in the Flood (2018) she talks of mudras, ancient hand symbols used ritually within Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism to focus reflection. As a poor sculpture student and follower of Buddhism (even her deceased dog had a spiritual advisor) she used the pulp of the day’s newspapers to create papier-mâché mudras, which she saw as “the negative space of each hand gesture” (Anderson, 2018, p. 271). This gets me thinking about shaping the shape of the absence of thought. What is the negative space of sound? I also think of Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966), hand choreography created when she was physically unable to move her body, her digits expressing the desire of the whole (Rainer, 1966). See below for active link..

Listening wraps around sound,
envelops it in a responsive embrace.
Listening attempts to hold sounds
—not to keep them as treasures in themselves—
just long enough to ask them more questions.

      an agitated hand, grasping at the air

Listening is always hungry, ravenous,
has never had enough,
is never satisfied with the ineffable answers
that are all too easily overwritten.

      two hands come together with a force
      a clap, a call to attention
      that reverberates off the nearest surfaces

Sound will never answer the same way twice,
never stay still long enough for a second gleaning,
always in transit,
heading for extinction.
Attack, decay, sustain, release.
Attack, decay, sustain, release.
This is the sound of a sound living to its fullest.
A motto to live by?

One question answered by many answers?

One answer answering many questions? (3)Dabbling in theory makes me anxious. The Socratic method of supposed cooperative argument relies too heavily on territorial defence for me. So this piece is also a response to Christoph Cox's “Sonic Realism and Auditory Culture: A Reply to Marie Thompson and Annie Goh”, which is his response to Annie Goh's “Sounding Situated Knowledges: Echo in Archaeoacoustics”, which is her response, using feminist epistemologies, to what she proposes are problematic subject-object, language-matter genderings of nature in Cox's “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism” (2011). It’s very complicated.

      a sleight of hand
      a coin or a scarf appears from thin air

Sounds deflect and refract
questions, making more questions.

      an infinite regress of diminishing question marks
      in the shape of cupped hands
      and curled ears (4) I am thinking of Daniela Cascella's proposal that writing within writing can be compared to the technique of mise en abîme (Cascella, 2012), in which an image of a painting is contained within the painting. This can also be seen in the infinite regress that occurs when two mirrors are positioned opposite each other, or in video feedback.

Notes, Asides and Unfinished Thoughts

Notes Within Notes