Spring, 2020. A worldwide forced flight, depleting public spheres. Buildings abandoned and squares escaped. Out of fear. Out of order. Hurriedly walking the dog, chop-chop, sniffing the eeriness, all ears to the absence, the familiar faded fast. Illness drove us back into our homes, mansions for many, bunkers for most. We deflated our worlds until they fitted the walls. The threshold crossed and hermetically sealed, covers anger and boredom, doubt and disease. Rooms rumble a lethargic litany and when a cough escapes the oral cavity, it is muffled by curtains and dulled by disgrace. Keep it in. Keep it in. Keep it in.

          This forced retraction from the public arena, back into our houses, seems to mark and amplify the opposition between outside and inside. We stare at the doorstep and now more than ever, see a margin, an edge, an end. This inward motion, messes with our sense of self.

          As a migraineur, I am drawn towards this opposition between outside and inside because my perception of these concepts is heavily influenced by the chronic condition from which I suffer. I have gotten familiar with this motion into isolation. Often multiple times a week, I flee from the public spheres to retire in the blackened cave of my bedroom. All sounds, noises, smells and lights become intolerable due to a hypersensitivity of the senses. With all doors and curtains carefully closed, I shut out the world and hide from everything that evidences the presence of society and I shield myself from the signs of existence. A violent one-sided headache accompanies a constant flux of vomit and reduces me to an immovable lump of misery, an asexual blob of being. I am not really ‘there’, or it at least became difficult to define what being-there actually means under these extreme circumstances. A clear dimensional division has been made; “outside” is a place for the living, “inside” houses the non-being. This spatial opposition and my sense of self, became intimately connected.

          Sequestered, I bend to keep an ear to the ground of this floor and listen to the discord of the situation. Phonophobia drove me into isolation. This hypersensitivity of the sonic senses causes for everyday noises to be perceived as immensely loud and painful (Sacks, 1985: 27). An aversion to sound is the first sign of my troubles. Migraine is announcing itself by overexcitedly ringing my doorbell and belligerently banging at my door. Even the softest of sounds seem exuberantly amplified. So, cautiously, I lock the doors, shut the windows and close the curtains, shutting out the slightest peek of outside life, eliminating the smallest possibility to present its blaring cacophony at the side of my bed. Still, when the tram passes my window, screeching and squeaking, it splits my feeble skull. Inside, the domestic noises too became intolerable; their familiarity faded and fused into the abstract. So when the house sings its private anthem, I hear nothing but senseless noises from the abysses of hell. Phonophobia marks the migraine experience and the impact of the aural on the sufferer’s sense of self is significant for it pushes her over the edge that separates out from in. At the same time, migraine manages to phenomenologically ravage this clear distinction. When the attack worsens, the migraineur enters a synesthetic in-between. Her senses merge. Lights, smells, noises and feelings all become equally deafening. This distorted perception of the senses establishes an all-encompassing haze of hypersensitivity, swallowing both external stimuli and internal impulses.

           In “The Poetics of Space” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard dedicates a chapter to the dialectics of outside and inside. He argues that the interplay of these concepts is much more complex than the standard geographical distinction implies. When we untie them from all literal implications and introduce them into phenomenological spheres, we learn that outside and inside go beyond the simple opposition and actually find themselves in a constant exchange, he states. And indeed, I nod my troubled head, softly in assent with these assumptions, because when migraine continues its ever-repetitive cycle, it imposes feelings of derealization and temporal distortions and my perception of “outside” and “inside” slowly starts to shift. For the umpteenth time, tied to the bedridden bunker, the clear distinction between body and room, space and self, collapses with a thundering noise.

          So indeed, we should not limit ourselves more than necessary by exclusively clinging to the “lazy certainties of geometric intuitions” (Bachelard, 1964: 235). In his writings, Bachelard aspires a “study of being” (p.229) through a phenomenological understanding of outside and inside. In order to do so, he searches for poetic images that relate to this spatial division and are “new to the nuance of being” (p.232). Using these texts, he proposes several new dialectic models that overthrow the obvious opposition. Bachelard turns to poetry because “language”, he states, “bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed. Through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression, it opens up” (p.237).    

          Interestingly, Bachelard almost exclusively chooses poems that mention sounds (senseless noise, sonorous echoes, rumblings and buzzes) and silences (quietude, stillness) to describe a being’s constantly shifting perception of outside and inside. In the whole discourse of his essay, the aural takes up a central role. Bachelard explains this preoccupation with sound as follows: “sight says too many things at one time. Being does not see itself. Perhaps it listens to itself. It does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness” (p.230). In other words, he searches to “determine being” (p.215) by listening to the inner-spatial shifts.

          Being an artist, working with sound, I am drawn to Bachelard’s aural approach and for this reason, I will turn to his writings as a theoretical and compositional framework to create a Sonic Study of Being through Illness and Isolation. As a singer and sound-artist, I will aim to capture the friction between the self and the space and portray their constantly shifting displacements. This piece will take aural notice of how my perception of being changes in sync with my relation to the room. I will use the poems proposed by the philosopher as a textual outline and turn to my voice as a vessel through which the self reverberates. Sounds from in and around the house will provide the sonic segments to use in my attempt to unite the materiality of the room with the materiality of the voice. This audio piece will be partly made while migraining in order to establish a dialogue between the sick-self, the recovered-self and the space in which they suffer.

Constantly on the move between outside and inside, the migraineur is destined to a nomadic life. Migraines are manifested in an endless cyclic motion; health induces sickness and only sickness will lead her back to health. Every attack unfolds in the same manner and does so with ritualistic precision. As in a ceremonial procession that marches to the beat of high ringing bells and dispirited drums, the migraineur maneuvers through FOUR FUNDAMENTAL STAGES: retreat, revulsion, repose and recovery. As the attack evolves, her sense of self conforms to the severity of her sufferings and simultaneously, so does her sense of space. As a result, we distinguish a progression through several states of migrainous being over the course of one attack. I will illustrate these states of being, by applying Bachelard’s dialectic models on the phenomenological experience of a migraine attack.

First, the migraineur enters the stage of RETREAT. We find her in flight, the earliest state of migrainous being. We already addressed this forced retraction from outside to inside in the paragraphs above. Still it remains crucial to underscore the impact of this inward motion. When the attack arises, all senses shudder and the rattling rhythm of life becomes an unsupportable commotion. Hands to the ears, the migraineur flees and as she crosses the threshold of her houses front door, she abandons her daily routine and leaves behind the living in pursuit of isolation. Here, our understanding of outside and inside, is indeed based on a clear geographical distinction, and forces upon us metaphorical thinking that relates to oppositions such as “yes” and “no”, “positive” and “negative”,  “being” and “non-being.” In the opening quote of this essay (Bachelard, 1958: 227), Bachelard, encourages us to go beyond these obvious symbolisms and to leave behind the flagrancy of the opposition. His permissive suggestion proves to become a true necessity when we continue our study of the migrainous cycle.

Silently, the migraineur closes, locks, turns down, shuts off, seals off and undresses as she enters the state of being bunkered. For a brief moment she is consoled by secludedness. Trading vastness for intimacy and the full mouthed for the muffled, she feels better, or at least for a breath or two. But soon her eyes and ears adjust. The silence is not that soundless and the black is not that black. Her senses still suffer. Downstairs, the usually soothing domestic noises now seem to thunder. When volume is heightened to the absurd, it messes with meaning. Phonophobia phantomizes the familiar, turns the homely into the haunted and the intimate into the far-out. A sense of uncanniness seeps in. At this point, hypersensitivity merges all senses into one painful blend, turning any ordinary sensory impression into an encounter with the bizarre. So when the sun enters the bedroom and hits the wall, it hurts the ears as much as it does the eyes. Synesthesia, a classic migraine symptom that problematizes boundaries and distinctions, is beautifully portrayed as a poetic metaphor by Tristan Tzara:

“The market of the sun has come into my room.

And the room into my buzzing head,”

(Tzara, 1968: 24)

In this image the senses collide, and Bachelard detects a sense of surrealism that reminds us of the migrainous oddity: “[We] experience the strange whir of the sun as it comes into a room in which one is alone, for it is a fact that first ray strikes the wall. [ ] Then everything starts buzzing and one’s head is a hive, the hive of the sounds of the sun” (Bachelard, 1958: 242). In this synesthetic instant, the boundaries between self and space start to shift. When the sun scratches the wall, it scratches the migraineur’s senses, all of them at once. It becomes difficult to differentiate external stimuli from internal impulses. Slowly sufferer and space start to coincide.

Then, the migraineur enters the stage of REVULSION as torment keeps building up. First, we meet her in a state of blurred boundaries. The headache heightens. Nears the unbearable. The migraineur becomes drowsed by her increasing aggravation and learns that pain consumes space as much as it does thought and time. The chamber grows on her, a bodily extension, stretching her sufferings. The boundaries between her and the space dissolve and the bedroom turns into an expansion of her suffering body.

Nausea now reaches an untenable, almost existential, height and bursts into a constant flow of emesis. “Swallowing and chocking, ” Brandon LaBelle explains, “lead us into these deep performances and issues revealing the degrees to which the oral assists in regulating our sense of self. With vomiting, this reaches an extremely dramatic peak. [ ] Lurching forward to get rid of what has found its way in. Vomiting is the ultimate attempt to expel what is unwanted” (Labelle, 2014: 39). At this point, the migraineur enters a state of flux. Aware of nothing but her physical life, she withdraws into herself and takes along with her the walls that hold her, back. She turns into herself and when she does, swallows the space. The room taken in, puked out, putting the intolerance back where it belongs. All in repeat. In this convulsive interchange of outside and inside, we find the self and the space in continuous dislocation. Bachelard explains this unstable state of being as follows: “outside and inside are both intimate - they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a borderline surface between such an inside and an outside, this surface is painful on both sides. When we experience this, [ ] we absorb a mixture of being and nothingness. The center of ‘being-there’ wavers and trembles” (Bachelard, 1958: 233). And with this thought he points us towards “Shade-Haunted Space”, a poem by Henri Michaux that meticulously matches the midst of migrainous misery:

“Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is. Certain (shades) especially, girding their loins one last time, make a desperate effort to “exist as a single unity.” But they rue the day. I met one of them. Destroyed by punishment, it was reduced to a noise, a thunderous noise. An immense world still heard it, but no longer existed, having become simply and solely a noise, which was to rumble on for centuries longer, but was fated to die out completely, as though it had never existed.”

(Michaux, 1952)

In this state of (non-)being, the migraineur’s thoughts are compromised completely and as a result, so is her sense of self. The extremities of the circumstances have pushed back the immensity of her inner-awareness until nothing is left but the outer edges, the boundaries, the limits. Her inner- self is reduced to nothing but a sense of narrowness that sticks on her insides, leaving no space for her to actually exist. Bachelard calls this state, a phobia of inner-space (p235), a mode of being which he also recognizes in Michaux’s poem. He describes the self as:

a spirit that has lost its ‘being-there’ (être-là), one that has so declined as to fall from the being of its shade and mingle with the rumors of being, in the form of meaningless noise, of a confused hum that cannot be located. It once was. But wasn’t it merely the noise that it has become? Isn’t its punishment the fact of heaving become the mere echo of the meaningless, useless noise it once was? Wasn’t it formerly what it is now: a sonorous echo from the voids of hell? [ ] In this horrible ‘inside-outside’ of unuttered words and unfulfilled intensions, within itself, being is slowly digesting its nothingness” (Bachelard, 1958: 233).

When finally the torment has come to a head and reaches its climax, we enter the third phase of migraine: the stage of REPOSE. This catharsis announces the shift from increase to decrease. When pain and nausea commence their unhurried departure, the body enters a state of rest. The torment is not instantly gone and the migraineur is still swallowed by the space, but she somehow experiences the room more like a mollusk does its shell. The chamber now holds her in protection. She is enveloped by a sense of safety. This image is beautifully portrayed by Tristan Tzara:

“A slow humility penetrates the room.

That dwells in the palm of repose.”

(Tzara, 1968: 24)

Bachelard takes us deeper into the stage of repose by describing it as follows: “Withdraw into oneself, and condense oneself in the being of repose [ ]. Then a great stream of simple humility that is in the silent room flows into ourselves. The intimacy of the room becomes our intimacy. And correlatively, intimate space has become so quiet, so simple, that all the quietude of the room is localized and centralized in it. The room is very deeply our room, it is in us. We no longer see it. It no longer limits us, because we are in the very depth of its repose, in the repose that it has conferred upon us. And all our former rooms come and fit into this one. How simple everything is” (Bachelard, 1958: 241).

With the phonophobic phantom departed, the migraineur is left in stillness. And with this calm, eventually comes RECOVERY, the fourth and final state of this migrainous cycle. When the pain subsides and the nausea slowly ebbs, a return of the self is established. Little by little the “unreal sounds are restored to their concrete, familiar meaning” (p. 245), Bachelard points out and suggest a paragraph by Rainer Maria Rilke to amplify this:

“Oh night without objects. Oh window muffled on the outside, oh, doors carefully closed; customs that have come down from times long past, transmitted, verified, never entirely understood. Oh silence in the stair-well, silence in the adjoining rooms, silence up there, on the ceiling. [ ] Outside everything is immeasurable. And when the level rises outside, it also rises in you, not in the vessels that are partially controlled by you, or in the phlegm of your most unimpressionable organs: but it grows in the capillary veins, drawn upward into the furthermost branches of your infinitely ramified existence. This is where it rises, where it overflows from you, higher than your respiration, and, as a final resort, as though on the tip of your breath. Ah!”

(Rilke, 2004: 106)

Recovered, the migraineur is ready to re-enter the world and so she does. She again crosses the threshold of her doorstep. The night has fallen and this moment is very highly charged. Re-entering society, going back to the living, means a “relapse into literal meaning” (p. 243). But not entirely. At this point, the migraineur is clear-headed and more lucid than ever. She is invulnerable to the hustle and bustle and tempted to stare the passing headlights straight into the eyes. She feels boundless and alive, lustrous and limitless. But this moment of resistance is brief. The cycle is endless and she knows all too well that soon the migrainous mill will yet again start grinding her sense of self, and space until nothing is left but a grating sound that is stentoriously senseless. Some boundaries are blurred up to a point of irreversibility. She therefore agrees with Bachelard when he suggests that: “inside and outside are not abandoned to their geometrical opposition” (p. 245) and that the opposition even “ceases to have as coefficient its geometric evidence” (p. 245). At least she was left with the benefit of an expanded experience; and the awareness that the force of this ever-recurrence is too strong to hold and will always break through the barriers of the bearable; an insight that answers to the following fragment by Maurice Blanchot, which was again suggested by Bachelard:

“About this room,

which was plunged in utter darkness,

I knew everything, I had entered into it,

I bore it within me,

I made it live, with a life that is no life,

but which is stronger than life,

and which no force in the world can vanquish”

(Blanchot, 1998: 124)

The migrainous cycle presents a hurtful experience. However, in his writings on the dialectics of outside and inside, Bachelard aims to transcend physicality by freeing himself from all “organic causalities” (p. 240) such as pain and suffering in order to reach a “situation beyond all situations” (p. 228). To do so, he taps into the reveries of man because daydreams allow him to draw on a “pure imagination” (p. 219). This, he claims is necessary in order to pursue a phenomenological understanding. My Sonic Study of Being through Illness and Isolation, on the contrary, will be rooted in a concrete and hyper-tangible bodily experience. It will also refer to a state in which imagination is not at all pure but utterly demolished. Physical pain devours all thought and seems to obliterate everything but itself, certainly leaving no space for reverie or creativity (Levy, 2010: 211.) Hence, the migrainous state of mind, in the depths of its misery, contradicts Bachelard’s in the absolute. Here again, we detect the opposition of open and closed; the mind that is free to wander, put alongside the mind that is utterly constricted; a door that allows or denies possibilities. Yet, my Sonic Study of Being will only take notice of the shrieking of this door’s hinges.

But how to attend artistically to the shifting of a self when it is subjected to illness and isolation? How to actually introduce these dynamic transformations into my sonic study and give voice to the existential and spatial changes that take place over the course of the migraine attack? How could the singer go beyond the rudimentary howls and groans and not merely amplify the crescendo and diminuendo of despair? “Before being, one must speak, if not to others, than at least to oneself” (p. 237) Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space. But pain ravages language and battles our rhetorical abilities, Elaine Scarry points out (Scarry 1985, 4). To my beliefs, it is exactly through these textual ruins, that a distorted sense of self becomes apparent. Both the textual content, as the way it is presented by the singer will contribute to this potential.

I chose to turn to the poems, presented by the Bachelard as a textual framework because poetry, indeed challenges the limits of language and therefore holds the potential of going beyond the exclusivity of the opposition. Poetry exemplifies what Julia Kristeva calls “semiotic speech.” The French philosopher argues that the semiotic opposes the symbolic by being an “extra-verbal way in which bodily energy and affects make their way into language. The semiotic includes both the subject’s drives and articulations. While the semiotic may be expressed verbally, it is not subject to regular rules of syntax” (McAffee, 2004: 17). Hence, poetry holds the potential of verbalizing the migraineur’s physical troubles.

When the singer turns to poetry and chord and discord come into play, another valuable potential becomes apparent. The resonation of the singing voice provides the opportunity to go even further beyond the signification of the text and the emotionality it represents. By singing, the vocalist truly holds the opportunity to make the audience listen to her body. This notion is what Roland Barthes calls the grain of the voice and explains the concept as follows: “the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice at it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs. [It is] something which is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages and from deep down in [ ] language as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings” (Barthes 1977, 188). When listening to grain, we hear the body reverberate on the intersection between music and language, he explains. The grain does not convey emotions and it does certainly not serve the meaning of the text. It does not care for communication, but instead explores the diction and the “sound-signifiers”, he points out.

Mumbling and muttering, I overthrow the tyranny of articulation and merely rub my singing body against the edges of the words. Moaning I go beyond meaning and in this field of tension, where breath uncontrolledly scrapes the surface of a suffering body, illness resonates vehemently. When in pain, all vocal technicalities are made undone and respiration is no longer subjected to a controlled movement of the diaphragm, instead it conforms to nothing but bodily needs.The sick body is sounding and through the grain we now truly encounter the materiality of the voice.

To amplify the synchronicity between a shifting sense of self and a shifting sense of space when subjected to illness and isolation, I make this materiality of the voice meet the materiality of the room. Bachelard argues that matter shapes our imagination. Creativity is not so much derived from deep within ourselves but indeed it stems from the materials we hold and inhabit. It is the ink that dictates the writing and the breath that prescribes our poetry (Bachelard, 1988). In our case, it might as well be that it is the house which holds our hollerings. The house speaks as it rustles and rattles and in this thumping we hear the tic toc of our territory. Wholeheartedly it hums our hidden hymns, and when the pipes purr their poetry, I chime in. Composed out of almost nothing but vocal sounds and domestic noises, recorded in and around the house, this piece merges the materiality of the room and voice in a conversation that balances on the edges of meaning. Juxtaposing one unto the other, both self and space get lost in displacement, matter melts and disappears into one roaring drone.

 Let us now return to the events of spring 2020, a time of collective crisis, for this piece was made while the pandemic peaked. I couldn’t help but notice that this temporary withdrawal into isolation, forced upon us by disease, somehow mimiced the migraineurs maneuvers, albeit on a different scale, when large parts of the world went into lockdown. The disappearance from the public spheres was stretched over months instead of hours and to many entailed fatal consequences. Still, aware of the finiteness of the situation, most people had no choice but to await their return into society submissively. But when quarantined, the days tended to be long and ruthlessly repetitive. Confinement severely messes up our sense of self. Disentangled, we may have felt disconnected and our notion of being became particularly troubled by forbidden physicality. Our sense of space too was heavily distorted and we outwaited the days in dissymmetry and disproportion. When homebound for months, the distinction between self and space obscures and the house becomes an extension of our physical self. To the rhythm of the house that creaks and clatters we performed our temporary routines. When the windows whistled, we whimpered along and with this hush-hush hymn, we hoped to invoke “the power to make space withdraw, to put space, all space outside, in order that meditating being might [again] be free to think” (Bachelard, 1958: 246).

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