"Pressures of The Unspeakable" and other screams

A brief anecdotal prologue: 

About six months ago at an improv workshop, we were given the task of getting up, one by one, to entertain the class for one minute. If the audience decided they did not like what they were seeing, they were allowed to get up and walk out of the room. The goal was to keep the entire class seated. Towards the end of the exercise after everyone had had their turn, we had some extra time and were asked if anyone wanted to try again. I decided that it would be hilarious to see how quickly I could drive everyone from the room, and so I got up in front of the class and screamed at the top of my lungs. Within ten seconds, unsurprisingly, every single person had left the room. 

I like rock concerts because they are one of the few places where you can scream without raising alarm.

A revision of the above sentence: I like rock concerts because they are one of the few places where you scream without raising alarm.

(Are either of these sentences pleasant, well structured example of English? Probably not. I don't care.)

I think my initial use of the word "can" creates an inaccurate image of the act of screaming, because it carries the implication that one consciously and thoughtfully considers whether one "can" or "cannot" scream in the given circumstances before actually screaming. Aside from the performed scream, that isn't what screaming is like. Screaming is a reflex. It rises in your lungs like a surge of electricity, as if your nervous system has short circuited, energy ricocheting and spasming through every muscle in your body. Noise barrelling past your lips like a bullet train. Screams are both robotic and primal. You do not decide whether or not to scream. You scream. The spider runs across your lap and you scream. You hear incredibly good news and you scream. You enter a command into the computer and it follows it. The dog sees the cat across the road and she barks at him. You see your favourite musician and you find yourself screaming before you think about screaming.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHGHGHGHGHHhHHhhhh


Last week I went to see Grimes (aka Claire Boucher) and found myself screaming without thinking about it.

"I don't speak Mandarin," Grimes laughs, addressing the writhing mosh pit, "so, I'm going to sing the Russian Version!" The amoeba of the crowd roars in response, and I am a part of it-- an ecstatic, primal holler tunneling up my throat from somewhere deep within me. The effect is almost choral. A moment of utter bacchanalia. This is the ritual of the concert-- the performer says something, and the moment her sentence finishes, we scream in response. I'm reminded of studying Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power and the Nuremberg Rallies last year in performance studies. Canetti writes in Crowds and Power about the liminal state of being in a dense crowd, suggesting that in entering a crowd one temporarily loses the self and the fear of unknown things outside of the self.

"as soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he loses his fear of being touched" 

One loses individual ration and joins the nervous system of the crowd, cells pressed against cells, embodied and inter-corporeal. Canetti writes:

"The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body."

Canetti then goes on to suggest that the frenzy of crowd mentality makes the collective actions and hysteria of the Nuremberg crowds understandable. The liminal experience of being a member of a crowd transgresses normative notions of appropriate behaviour and bodily contact. Because of this, we scream in the crowd, as part of the crowd, without even consciously intending to. 

My lecturer continued on to argue that crowd has not lost all ration or sanity-- they are simply caught up in the experience.  Anyway, the point is this: the scream I make is not my scream. It is the crowd's scream. My voice is one head of the hydra.

The music starts again and we scream along as the song plays.

The other day I listened to this episode of This American Life from 1996 and one particular story just before the fourth act piqued my curiosity (rewind to about 41:00.) About the Institute of Scream Studies. From the transcript of the episode:

Ira Glass: Well, this leads us to our next two stories here on our show. This is the work of two people who've immersed themselves in their own particular obsessions. And people at home can judge for themselves with what results.  

This first piece of work is one of the stranger things, I have to say, we've ever put on the show. A guy named Greg Whitehead has been collecting the sound of people screaming-- and their thoughts about the meaning of different kinds of screams-- for years all over the world. He sets up these special phone lines that people call into. He's set up a thing called The Institute of Scream Studies. 

Greg Whitehead: A scream is often treated as some kind of insurmountable, impenetrable obstacle, pure, white noise force, that is beyond analysis and unworthy of any kind of interpretation. But here at the institute, we hear the scream from entirely the other perspective-- the scream as an opening, as an entry point, as an access point. An entry into a vast interior landscape that has as its surface this highly nuanced, very individual, psycho-acoustic force to it. 

[SCREAMING]  

Greg Whitehead: There's also a scream line, the actual journey that the screamer takes into the interior landscape. And when we established the telephone answering machine here at the institute, we called it the "scream line," because that machine was going to circulate individual scream lines into--

Whitehead's work is only mentioned briefly in this initial episode, but is then spoken about several times in subsequent episodes, as This American Life sets up their own scream line and encourages listeners to ring in and scream, culminating in a full segment in the 1996 Halloween Episode.

According to his website, Whitehead established his first screamline in Australia, 1991, which culminated in a 1992 radio feature called "Pressures of the Unspeakable." Whitehead has both the radio show and the transcript on his website:

An excerpt from Pressures of the Unspeakable by Gregory Whitehead

Most of the screams on the tape blow the speakers, twisting the sound into a mangled, warbling static. It is alienating and strange to listen to, as Whitehead says on his website, "pure, unmanageable noise."

"The scream as animal energy ruptures signal clarity, exceeding the thresholds of communications technologies not designed to accommodate such vocal intensity."

The Whitehead's screambank has been has been recreated around the world a dozen times, including this Swiss Screambank.

The scream brings the body back to a primal place. The scream permeates the entire body, pushes the entire body into the most liminal, feral place possible. Screaming is considered improper and is reviled because it is inherently disturbing and inherently evocative. It is the ultimate disturbance of mind and body.

I'm thinking about Antonin Artaud's last work, the radio play To Have Done With the Judgement of God, (English transcript here) famously commissioned for French Radio, before being censored for being too profane and horrifying to listen to. It was never aired, and Artaud died little over a month later. The piece is performed by Artaud himself, a glossolalia of incoherent screaming and drums, a manifesto interspersed with shrieks and cries. He denounces America, recites a series of death rituals, denounces God and then gruesomely exalts shit as the only real evidence of life and death. The play ends with a description of God on an autopsy table as a dissected organ taken from the corpse of mankind.

an excerpt from "To Have Done With the Judgement of God"

There's even a staged version!

Screaming is a reflexive political act. You do not decide whether or not to scream, You scream. There's some other pressure, an unbearable, feral pressure, that decides for you.

aaAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

A brief anecdotal epilogue: My sister has just knocked on my door and told me to put on some fucking headphones. Apparently it sounds like someone is being murdered. This is entirely reasonable request and I definitely should have thought to do that before playing a tape of someone screaming.

So that is my epistle on screaming, from me to you. Does any of this make sense?? Is this rambling mixtape on the epistemology of screaming coherent?? I don't know. It is 11:40pm as I finish typing this and I feel like going out onto our veranda and howling at the moon.

A quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein which I have shamelessly stolen from Whitehead's website.

p.s. A poem of mine was published over on a wonderful Online Magazine called Scum Mag the other day! I'm absolutely elated and would be delighted if you would be so kind as to go and check it out here.