Nekyia study
Two singers and a speaker (the writer) will
perform live within a soundscape of recorded voices and live electronics,
in a visual environment of sails, water, translucent cloth and video and
slide projections. The majority of the projections are of written texts
in different contexts and distortions - often variations on the texts that
are being spoken and sung.
This text is plundered from many texts (in
particular Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation and Elizabeth Bronfen’s
The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents) and sources such as
the radio and television. They were written to be passed through Joseph
Hyde’s digital processes or written for the gaps in his sonic material
- he has either edited the texts or provided the structures in which the
text must operate. The performances of the texts (whether by Alaric
or the singers) that Joseph records provide the sonic material of the “music”.
The performance will explore the fluidity of medium, identity and source.
Nekyia Study is a pilot for the full work,
read by Alaric with the soundscape on CD. It was performed at Baggot Inn,
New York, USA on January 2, 1999 and at the Sonic Arts Network Conference,
Huddersfield, UK on March 13, 1999. The first performance of the three-voice
work was held in September 1999 at Shawford Mill, an old watermill converted
to a performance space in Somerset UK. R&D funding is from the Arts
Council of England.
Alaric Sumner died unexpectedly in early 2000.
NARRATOR:
He emerges here in a direction that takes a certain
pace through resistant fluids. The concept of the night sea crossing
is a dynamic mystery and a certain gap remains in the function of thought
- impossible to understand in memory, impossible to process in conscious
reasoning. He sits opposite her, naked at a table and they flood.
Water and cold make them dance the divisions of sex, which might become
a despairing ritual in which all images have the same value. He will
emerge from illusion into illusion and will only repeat “I can’t go on”,
never breaking the surface into air, only finding strange horizons within
the depths. The new body of water, past each strange horizon, remains
as void, uncreated, unnameable, as the water from which it is divided;
in time, his body will merge with water or she will burst into open air,
gasping.
They are flooding. Impossible to remain
divided, they merge in water. In the dark of dreams, there is no
upward mobility. He is committed to an irrevocable journey through
the unconscious, chaos, prima materia. Infinity is never attained
except through despair, but is he compelled into the wilderness or does
he escape from her into it? The demons cannot reach him here, there
are no telegrams, no telephone calls, no letters, no visitors. So when
he finds her already there awaiting him, does she rise up in another cycle,
another archetype between individual and universal wonders and terrors
or must he call her to him with offerings?
His language unfolds, determining the limits of
what forgetting has effaced, as he makes the mistake of finding meaning
in random patterns. The violence of his thought is unhinged, unattached
to common recognitions. Chains of force meet and fuse with each confrontation,
a catastrophic discord of the faculties, such that language paradoxically
breaks its own order, confusing suspicion with reminiscence. Clarity
is obscured and waylaid amid traces of betrayal. Language is forgotten
a second time; memory searches for it (it is too far removed). His language
brings him face to face with the unrememberable and the immemorial.
He attempts to predict the water’s movements, as if freezing pattern in
knowledge would expose secret order.
Lightless dreaming cannot break the narrative
of naming. No Sybil can speak as the strange horizon seals.
Only the dead speak to one another in the deep water. Did he offer
his blood to call her from the deep sea, or did she rise up ravening and
tumultuous to rip flesh and let blood float and flood?
The Nekyia is no aimless and purely destructive
fall into the abyss, but a meaningful katabasis eis antron, a descent into
the cave of initiation and secret knowledge. Yet it is a test: a
goal is only important as a hope, an aim: the journey is the essential,
not the destination.
They battle or embrace in the depths. (Two
are always locked in struggle; but three have, at least, the possibility
of transformation.) Another comes into chaos. This one had
trusted that study would produce knowledge and certainty. This Bearer
of Light has fallen and become individuated from the light he carried.
Light had effaced his personality, but light and heat do not belong to
him any more. He has become dim, wet, cold. Deep in the sea, he descends
to the gloomy river of forgetfulness. In the place of writing, where
memory dies, there is no speech and feasting on the empty page. Written
out of mind, expelled from memory onto paper, the mind dims. The
dead crowd around him twittering like bats - they are without nostrils.
No learning that has not come from practice survives these deep swells.
Horizon on horizon layers the deeps - no leave-taking of the upper world
is ever completed. Perception of the self disintegrates as images
of opposites come together in disturbance, cancerous growths that crack
and dissolve the homogeneity of dreams. The dreamworld cannot be
grounded, fixed in the psyche of the individual; the dreamworld is the
product of the triangulation of three dreamers - the desiring, the desired
and the bearer of light.
It is not enough to see things; it is necessary
to divide things just beyond the strange horizon of surface. A violent
baptism promises the rebirth of cure.
(Internal dryness and heat.)
A text is not a text when it is jarred and jagged
at first hearing. it remains forever harboured - inaccessible and imperceptible.
A secret can never be a book, but it could be a gift if rigorously trawled
and beyond comparison. Cold water attacks both stagnant blood, and
frenzied heat and dryness.
(Violent, internal dryness and heat... mania.)
The creation of the deep sea has not yet taken
place. It is unformed, it is a between. It is between the corruption
of hell and the memory of time - dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious,
fertile - the dark of dreams. Engines crank out the nets - the catch
is never the same text... but is never truly a different world.
(... but blocks in arteries; repels... thick; malice,
ice crystals.)
You slice through systems of memory. You
travel from element to element; air is easy. You travel; you are
travelling at night in humid air.
In practice, nothing surprising happens - (... waters,
fluidly. So might water flex and flow or shock. Water... air...) - but small
craft warn of laughter flickering out over the marshes.
(The vessels repel; blood active.)
In the Americas, grains of grass are stripped
wildly by poor naked Bedlam boys (flexing round rocks from element to element).
You might talk as blood rushes over heated blood - as if the Church were
picking at the dark harvest of storms. Shocks backward unexpectedly.
Your body is jerked violently backwards into iced
water to cure your madness.
(Jerks back, jerks back; blocks.)
Blood shocks to the brain, blocks, shocks back
to the heart, boils... And the mind plunges into the immediate. Frenzy is
calmed.
The metaphoric operation is a futile attempt to
make empty marks into bladder wrack on the shore: a trace that transforms
the objects that are juxtaposed. You have no respect for discrete
things. You find no attraction in unmoving forms. Abstraction now operates
in an intellectual landscape of littoral spaces, zones of change where
the fact of small distances between tide strewn objects proves a great
chasm that separates knowledge from understanding. Floating deep
in the sea, the unimaginable seems quite palpable, but on the shore the
barriers of complexity divide you from unstable systems. The shore
appears to offer unlimited statistical reliability.
In order to decode this message, you must extract
the distinctive features of language from the perceptual arena. The
distinctive features dissolve themselves on the acoustic field - labials,
velars, dentals, palatals, divide the mouth as sea water floods the cavity.
The articulatory faculties fail as the resonating hollow fills and plosives,
labiodentals, alveolars, and uvular affricatives become constricted.
Your body trembles, moved by the spirit of language, gasps, and the strange
horizon seals above you as you relinquish air. Again you gasp. Yet
this is a reality which is completely familiar - (dryness... speed through
resistant air) - every time the dice are thrown they give the same number.
Solid objects are defined by their liquid containers - you always drown
in the same river, but it is never truly different water. Resistance
hardens... sea... seeing... flight... parched... scudding away on systems of memory.
There is a problem of voice reclaiming the integrity
of the organism. The process of disintegration resists speech though
it provokes analysis. The processes of division and generalisation
absorb the requirements of logic such that the first problem of logic is
insoluble. Logic overwhelms itself with its own impossibility.
Mind is compelled to one mode of attention and is no longer able to withdraw
its attention from marks of individuation, but it can see that everything
is water - an overwhelmingly universal abstraction. That abstraction
can be deferred, but it cannot be solved; you are beginning to slide into
a world which lacks that depth from out of which an essential could rise.
All things sink to the same level, a new horizon of surface in the depths
of the ocean which resembles a mirror but casts nothing back on to any
shore. This is the onslaught of destructive evil, a dark world with
the
discipline of the infinite.
Copyright remains with contributors.
All rights are reserved.
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(... talk might... as blood rushes over softness.
Stagnant humours shift and soften. Softness splits your body’s pressure.)