F.M.R.L.: Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound - Daniela Cascella. Winchester: Zero Books, 2015
By Marcel Cobussen
So here I am musing over the assonance of sequel and cyclical, can I begin by imagining a cyclical sequel, can I write and rewrite this sigh and this song and this listen as a cyclical sequel? In all this I become sequel and cyclical: quizzical […] Every beginning a sequel each beginning a sequel equel quel uel el l (p. 22).
How do I react to Daniela’s call in F.M.R.L.?[1] How do I “answer” in what is supposed to be a review – a review with academic standards, a review which should inform and perhaps attract potential readers to this book? How can I write a review that somehow will do justice to Daniela’s contemplations on the relations between listening, reading, and writing? How can I respond properly to her poetic language, her “sonic fiction,” informed by many references, partly formed by extensive quotations, yet so far removed from conventional scholarly texts? Since she remarks more than once throughout F.M.R.L. that its fifteen chapters should be regarded as “beginnings,” as starting points, as incentives, I thought that a proper reaction should consist of beginnings, of unfinished onsets, of fragments, too …
… At 7 am I settle myself on the terrace of our holiday apartment on the Mediterranean coast. Before starting to read, I leaf through the book a bit, immediately realizing that I will need two bookmarkers, one to remember where I leave the main text, the other one to find the references at the end of the book. Soon, and one should regard this a compliment, the reading drifts me away from the text, the pages, the words, their meanings and connotations. It drifts me toward listening: to the sounds of the moving bookmarkers, the leafing through the pages, the pencil with which I write my notes in the margins of Daniela’s contemplations. And then, when the sun finally rises after a night punctuated with thunder and lightning: the cicada orchestra whose rhythmic sounds remind me of Steve Reich’s phase shifting technique, the cooing of a pair of pigeons, the appearance of humanly produced sounds of another (hot) day at the sea …
… F.M.R.L.: 15 chapters, rather different in tone. Different voices, different styles, different genres. The book consists of scraps, leftovers, a series of beginnings, research and diary notes, many of them not directly related to sound but (also) to literature, drama, film, sculpture. I expected something else. But what? And why? I also ask myself if it is suitable for JSS. Why not? The attention paid to sound art, Daniela’s (implicit) invitations to read some pages aloud, the various rhythms of her thinking, the subtitle telling me that the book is about writing sound – sound is present (and absent) in and through the book in all its variety …
… “I have a habit with listening and sometimes it is obsession” (p. 9). Am I obsessed by sounds? Obsessed like Daniela? Have I always listened? Attentively, interested, concentrated? In a way I feel somewhat intimidated by her confessions; inevitably they make me rethink my own relations to sound, sound art, and music. I have to admit that I rather recognize myself in her descriptions of a more distracted form of listening such as this one: “Often the act of listening is mistaken with paying attention exclusively, whereas it so often also involves inclusion, mishaps, chance, distraction, not always alert states of mind” (p. 107). Yeah, my own listening is often distracted, not only because most of the time I listen to music outside a concert venue, but also because listening almost always evokes memories, thoughts, feelings …
… Despite its wide variety of topics and styles, I consider it fairly easy to trace a central theme in F.M.R.L.: the difficulty or even impossibility of writing about sounds, “to catch and hold” sounds in words and nevertheless feeling the desire, the urge to Write Sound,[2] sometimes even before having listened to it! “Either sound is too far and leaves words in a void intimacy, very private but inexplicable and frozen, or it breaks in and leaves no chance” (p. 27).[3] It is a litany one often finds in writing about the ontology and phenomenology of sound studies - I can even catch myself flirting with this idea. But of course not being able to capture an object, an event, or a sound is not a problem only sound writers have to deal with. Already in 1967 Jacques Derrida argued in De la grammatologie against what he called “a metaphysics of presence,” the idea that something can be present in and as itself. Of course, writing about sounds can never replace those sounds, the sounds of those sounds; however, what is lurking is a kind of (perceptual) essentialism – the famous longing for the sounds-in-themselves and an absolute proximity – for which Seth Kim-Cohen, for example, warns in his book from 2009 In the Blink of an Ear; every experience of a sound is always already mediated, always already affected by social, political, gender, class, and/or racial issues. “The suggestion of an unadulterated, untainted purity of experience prior to linguistic capture seeks a return to a never-present, Romanticized, pre-Enlightenment darkness” (Kim-Cohen 2009: 112). Instead, Kim-Cohen opts for a discursiveness of sonic practices. In other words, writing sound/Writing Sound is not a mere supplement, but, as a parergonal activity, constitutive for sounds to appear as sounds. Luckily, Daniela has been able to avoid this trap of essentialism, as she acknowledges that writing somehow affects the sounds and listening experiences. However, according to her, her writing does not seek to control, to name, or to frame sounds; she regards her texts rather as “an archive of approximations to nothing,” as fabulations, that is, as creative acts, creating other spaces for inhabiting sounds (p. 39–45) …
This is how I am drawn to sounds. I know nothing of them, they whisper from the edge of my understanding spend time with me now. And then I recall, then I write and the words that follow will not have a punctum, they will trace instead an extended arc of kinships, in various degrees of closeness and distance, opacity and clarity, and the evidence will never be there, and it will always be on an edge, tripped over toward the multiplicity of singular and contingent ways of listening (p. 80).
… The book leaves me puzzled; it has not given me concrete new knowledge about sound art and/or music like Douglas Kahn’s publications, no real listening tips like in the books of David Toop, no philosophical grounding as in Salomé Voegelin’s work. Nevertheless, it has given me food for thought: about me as a listener, my past as a reader and how that affects my listening (and vice versa), my own sonic memories from my childhood, my profession as a writer around, under, or aside sounds, sound art, and music …
… I close the book, I close my thoughts, and tune in on the sounds of my kids returning from the beach …
