i recently contributed a short bit of writing to the blog
word servents created by the talented
sarah butler.
John Cage opened his talk “Lecture on Nothing” by saying, “I am here and there is nothing to say. What we require is silence. But what silence requires is that I go on talking.”
A series of stops and starts. A slippery language of faintly recognizable utterances.
A soft eh, rounded a, a long ah. A t that follows a short i that sounds more like an ih. ee-a, ah, ee, a, ee, and three m’s, nicely spaced. Roland Barthes has called this underlying part of speech the “grain” of the voice. Where meaning is found in the smallest of details. Somewhere between sound and silence, hearing and listening.
In his work “Empty Words,” Cage subjected the journal of Henry David Thoreau to a set of chance operations to create a fragmented series of phrases and letters. He began by omitting entire sentences, then words, leaving a combination of phonemes and sounds. A return to communication without hierarchy. Cage continued, “We need a society in which communication is not practiced, in which words become nonsense as they do between lovers, in which words become what they originally were: trees and stars and the rest of the primeval environment.”
What is an empty word? An absent placeholder? Thoughts left unsaid? Déjà entendu? A deleted message, a dropped call, an overheard conversation? A game of telephone, a code, a broken line, a suitcase? Is a word you don’t understand empty, like a foreign language?
Why do we need language to carry our voices? A syllable sounds, traversing the expanse from contact to transmission to contact again. Voice turns from wave to ear. This too is a process. From one to another. Loud and clear, soft and sweet. Sedimentary layers, speaking to each other. The things affected are indefinable and impermanent. We may assume otherwise. Air and water might not be related. Earth has sound perception.
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HERE
