Visual AIDS Featured Gallery, August 2016 FIELD RECORDINGS: Notes from the West Margaret Tedesco “Hearing is Dangerous” A Question About The Body After The Fact (Trafficker Press, 2009) Bhanu Kapil: I had some questions about surfaces. I wanted to know, for example, what the opposite of an archive was. How a person might extend a teleological reach then collapse it, re-folding the narrative to create recessed spaces which were, of course, acoustic. All that aluminum foil. All those tendons, re-quilted with industrial materials, to form: a telephone booth. Chapbook as booth. I took Susan’s book to India, and placed it on the steps, partially in its envelope, on the banks of the river Ganges. Not so much a bank as a step. What happens when the electricity a book contains gets wet? I took Susan’s book to London and held it up to the sky. By the time I read it, it was a little curved, turned in, like bark: pale brown, with darker blackish grooves. I put a needle in a groove and started to listen. When I asked Susan a question about the body, the body’s technology in repetition, in love, she wrote this: Susan Gevirtz: I was thinking that it all starts with a (phone) call. I was thinking about "We cannot ascertain whether or to what extent different cultures listen differently, or whether the traveller listens differently than the inhabitant, although R. Murray Schafer claims confidently that some cultures 'are trained to listen to sounds peripherally — that is equally from all directions — while others are trained to place sounds in series which are proportionate to one another, the strong to the weak, the desired to the undesired'." Bialas, The Body Wall Testimony: Once I was the passenger of his voice. It dove swung swerved climbed and I adhered shamelessly, as if a hostage, strung up on his live-wire. I was thinking of how true it is that I had done that. How, even if treated badly, I could only continue to adhere to his voice. I heard the body in, I entered the body of, this poem, peripherally. It arrives as the sounds of alphabets and the sonic light and shape they emit as they are said out loud and written down "out loud" as much as that can be. That saying to one

or transmitting to many illuminates the world and the silence the word carves (craves?) in its acts of uttering sound. So you might get a body always being called into being from many different sources — and always arriving — loose limbed — and maybe never solidifying before it is called into another shape issued from another sound source. And this calling from many sources might generate a body of a person or of a conversation or of a melody or of a rhythm of thinking by invoking the negative space of sound that surrounds where a body might be — kind of like in British sculptor Rachel Whiteread's casts of what she calls the emptiness ... the space conventionally defined by the positive objects we move around. And sometimes that body emits its own calls. Or is being recorded by ear, stenographer, machine. Or is just passing through like breeze in a curtain. The poem might overhear a little of it. An attempt maybe at acute excavation — but yes, also an inventory of the many hearings that are revealed in that act of attention. The radio body maybe — coalescing from one station and then as we hear the stations spin, another and another. Some of the stations from different times and broadcasting by different kinds of "radio" maybe not then called "radio." So the poem attempts not so much to be primarily an inventory of these kinds of hearings and soundings but to investigate the nature of their many different kinds of manifestation — and how they might affect one another, transmit to one another across times and space. So some may no longer exist but still can be heard as echo or rumor. So much of this action happens in voice, but sometimes these voices don't issue from, or directly from bodies — they might be mediated by restraints like Odysseus tied to the mast calling out to be released into the sounds of the sirens, the sirens being heard "safely" only through restraint of ropes, or ear plugs for his crew, and they don't even work for the whole crew. — Sometimes it is impossible to not hear something; or hearing is dangerous; or the sounds might pass through computers or phones or caves or from behind screens as did the words of Pythagoras to his disciples. Again not exactly an inventory. but an inquiry into some of the many modes of transmission and their impact on what is transmitted throughout histories I can remember. First I woke up repeatedly with the word "Gloîre" in my head and it wouldn't go away. I wondered where it came from. French isn't batting around in the back of my mind all the time. When I uttered it upon waking, it seemed to refer to some kind of heightened state that happens every day. Glory. A kind of ecstasy of the ordinary that is in the light on the tree outside my window and the impossible attempt to speak of the light. So this word with its infinite possibilities also held in the pit of its stomach the disappointment and tease of ever being reachable — and yet it repeatedly lit up my waking and telegraphed from dream and I don't

know from where or to who else ... and Gloîre contains in it a sense of triumph, of winning something – the gore, the gory as in glory of battle — and that is a hubris and a futile effort that one could get hooked on in staying with that word and its bright promises — it is a golden fleece word — it has a lot of journey for desired object and desired theft in it. So I was interested in seeing what might happen if I stayed with it, watched while it flung out one body of sound after another, and also embraced and dodged its seduction — having nothing against stealing though. Then finally would the word be able to touch or conjure some one, some melody, some sound in a final or containable way? I doubted it but wanted to go on its ride. I searched around for other instances of the word. It turns out that in Mallarmé's essay "La Gloîre" (which I'd never known existed before. truly) it is, among many other things "the solar drama"—"that which connects the beauty of a sunset to the gold of a woman's hair to the exaltation of the poet... and it is vainglory, or hubris... it separates us from the experience of glory itself..." What might appear to be "the soft sacrificial future" of the "body alphabet" in the poem is also a kind of separation from that which we /I long to hear — a keening for some lost or no longer hearable sounds from the past: we used to be able to hear the sounds of organs and bones as they contacted the gods on sacrificial altars, or healers could hear as they put their ear to the patient's body — human face or limb sometimes is far from sound now but what is heightened and able to be ultra-heard? I wish I could pick up a conch or shofar and blow into it or be called by it. Not nostalgia exactly but wonder: wondering whether if we turn our ears differently we might hear some of that which is either no longer heard, inaccessible to us due to our current cultural tuning and screening — so, possibly present but requiring a different kind of hearing between the lines, or maybe an interlinear or interstitial listening or making of sound, or poetry? And as a result, how and what kinds of bodies act now, can act, and have acted in attempts to make collective and singular contact? One body in love so often veering from the other too, maybe now and forever trying to hear across.