I.‘Listen’: to give one’s attention to a sound; ‘Listening’ cf. Lispector [1973] -‘the happiness of vibration’
II.‘Transcript’: a written or printed version of material originally presented in another medium
Read me aloud.
I am conscious that I am reading you: your last words, your thoughts, captivations, your memories, your profound urges. I feel desirous of the words that are constructing images in my mind as my eye moves across the page. A sensation of awe ripples throughout my body, staying in my chest.
The fluidity of your word, I want to bathe in it and here we are. Sitting and thinking are only part of the equation, I must go out and live it, breathe it, listen for it. Clarice, the way you called it ‘it’ – the unnamed naming – and I know I must delve and sink into my own ‘it’. The way you it-ed all over the Stream of Life, threading it all together in a curvy litany of moods and I luxuriate in its harmony and at the same time, long for more.
The rawness of feeling alive right now.
My skin is a vessel for something infinite.
And I remember what you wrote about listening: the ‘happiness of vibration’ you called it and I feel through the current states of joy and non-joy I find myself in constantly right now. Like a dance where I do not know the steps, but I try to lead and sometimes I want to be led. The dance is never-ending, and the music never stops.
It drives me mad with fever, entranced by its rhythm.
The madness of being alive right now. The tranquility of madness too.
Read me aloud.
My fears finding space in my unconscious to knock around, to try new things.
I feel out of control and yet I want to be there. In my dreams, they appear–those fears:
Separation, Abandonment
Where does that come from?
When did it take root and gnarl around me, puppeteering from the shadows?
My great-grandfather fought in a war that was ideologically, emotionally and physically separating him from his family for thirty years. Thirty years in a prisoner-of-war camp only to re-meet his love in the twilight of their lives. His will, totally bent, transformed; her being, unknown. The mysterious rhythms of connection and disconnection in such a life, if only we were meant to know.
Is Death such a portal? Is Birth?
At times a heavy heart, oily tears, stuck throat, borne from the rubble of my ancestors.
But they never leave us.
We carry them with us, they hold me.
There are some things that I will never really grasp and hold onto. Like sand slipping through my fingers at the beach, drawing shapes in the air as each granule slips slips slips farther away from the palm of my hand.
I want to write something important, but my inner critic punishes me. I want to create a container for people to feel as I feel and I want to feel as you feel.
But in the end, I want to write what is not important. I’ll just write and write and write and write until my fingers are sore from typing and bleed metaphorically all over this synthetic keyboard, except only I can see the blood and when I try to drink it back into my body, it’s gone.
Read me aloud.
I read her words and I want to write.
But language can be stifling: once, I was deep in an acid trip and I awoke but was never asleep. She remembered that language also performs.
That words cannot suffice sometimes for the things I would like to describe or recount or share. And yet that struggle must continue.
I know that I must write and write and write and think and think and think then my body says wait what about me? What about what you feel right now?
Is your arm tingling?
Is your sex pulsing?
Are your legs sore?
Is your blood gushing and swishing and surging and purging…
I read her words and I remember I woke up from that tradition feeling underwhelmed by language, an inability to express aptly and fully what it was that was inside me, gestating me.
What to do? I must keep writing. I write and I write and I write and I write and I write and I write. And most of it is just junk anyway. But this is not.
No, this is not. This is real.
I read your words and I seek to fill in myself the depths of my sensations and traverse these gestures and signals like driving down one of those famous long highways in America – noting the signage along the way. Sometimes I feel that these signs, ciphers, shadows cloud the sensationalism of what it means to be alive right now, in this exact moment. Breathing and breathing.
Breathing out and into myself, breathing into us.
So you want to be free? she asked.
Yes, I said. I want to be free. Please, free me.
Only you can free yourself.
And with blinking eyes, the one who needs others to last grieved and sighed and gave up, she died so that I could live. Furiously she wrote and scribbled and sang and her voice suddenly cracked open.
Silence.
We are unshackled – and the one who cannot fathom the lasting lost some of her power over me. At least she no longer had the edge of puppeteering without intention.
The lasting is the longing and the longing lasts though it changes objects and forms constantly.
I had feared longing for some time and now I believe that longing is what keeps me alive.
I long to long for you
and for me
I long to feel birth and death together
and never
I long to feel safe
not with you
but with me and with you
Read me aloud.
I am alive. I am breathing. The body knows, it hungers for that in breath and out. Inside and outside. That is where the particles live in between where they do not distinguish between the outside and the inside.
They are the digestion of a cosmic-corporeal Venn diagram and they love it, oh they relish in that sticky juicy overflowing-ness of it all happening at the same time, no time, everywhere, stop.
All my selves, we wrote. We are alive. We are breathing.
I feel and I feel and you feel and I feel and we feel and I and I feel some more.
Our body is a vessel. Remember?
When we remember that place, we meet our true face.
Inspiration. Perspiration. Divination. I call to you, Clarice, I feel you, your aliveness, you are haunting me and I love it: I am breathing in this instant passing through the stream of life.
Your breath makes shapes in the form of English letters, only because I cannot read you the way you wrote me, but somehow even in the first instance, it was an act of translation. How do you translate all that is inside you to another, to a page?
I read you like I read a river.
Read me like you read solar flares, like the dusty unsettled vortex of your soul dancing through a night sea journey. I read your words and they nourish me, like the silky smooth nectar of a fresh fruit warmed in the summer heat.
And when that nectar drips down, our throat loosens:
The air rises from deep within us, rippling across the tender cosmos, passing through the stream of life.
Take a deep breath in and a deep breath out, so you might read me aloud.
This reading was originally performed on 4 Sept 2024 at Little Portland Street as part of NOCTURN [02] LIVE Studio Takeover by Zoë Marden: Submerged Desires, A Night of Readings and Performances from the Deep
Readers: Emmanuel Balogun/Anú Ólú, Matilde Cerruti Quara, Bianca Chu, Evan Ifekoya, Billy Klotsa, Rene Matić
Can I be your snake goddess a performance by Zoë Marden
Followed by DJ Set by Thempress
Nocturn is a series of commissioned interventions in the built environment, social and material landscape of Little Portland Street, London, in collaboration with artists, presented and curated by Bianca Chu.
