"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.

A perfume I saw in Lush the other day. The description reads: "Death & Decay. Let it transport you to a serene space where the fullness of beauty and its inevitable decay can be contemplated without fear."

The sun is hidden behind the clouds, and yet she still divulges her presence in subtle things-- the freckles on my sister's face, the flowers who strain their thin green necks towards the sky. I am sick of the sun and the summer, so I play Nina Simone and pretend it is autumn, swathing myself in sweaters and coats.

...

an excerpt:

"Today we are going to the funeral home. I am to read a poem at the service (thankfully, not one of my own) and so I powder my face, put on a pretty dress and try my best to conceal the blood-shot ellipse on my throat. The white powder makes the hickey feel more obvious than ever, like a ghost wearing a white sheet. I have never been good at make up. Online, it says to use a green concealer, and so I paint my throat with emerald eyeshadow, which is useless. It feels fucking absurd that I'm spending the hours before this funeral trying to cover up a hickey.

My throat paunches and contracts. The bloated, croaking vocal sac of a frog. Tiddalik."

...

another excerpt:

"I wore sneakers to my grandmother's funeral and I feel guilty about it."

...

Grief reconfigures the brain, re-informs memories, resets thought patterns and neural pathways. Grief is the chasm between is/was. Grief is painful unlearning/relearning. A brand new type of punctuation for everything you've ever written.

...

Poetry as a cemetery. A cemetery of faces, hands, gestures. A cemetery of clouds, colors of the sky, a graveyard of winds, branches, jasmine (the jasmine from Swidnik), the statue of a saint from Marseilles, a single poplar over the Black Sea, a graveyard of moments and hours, burnt offerings of words. Eternal rest be yours in words, eternal rest, eternal light of recollection.

—	Anna Kamienska (trans. Clare Cavanagh) in Industrious Amazement

Two Poems

crescents

someone has scalped the moon— disfigured! her face

has landed in my garden.

it is sprawled across my freshly cut lawn, translucent

and sticky as milk. my poor daisies lie crushed

underneath the weight of that freshly planted

easter island head. she’s an enigmatic monolith,

with her acne pocked cheeks and those eyes

still open; like two astronomic sunken whirlpools.

last night i lay down on her asteroid

dappled brow, just to see

what she was staring at. i saw the ragged skein

of her grinning jaw, still hinged on the stars.

These days

I wake up with my mouth open

like a baby bird. I take

my pills after breakfast

and always remember

to pluck

the hairs

between my eyebrows

like daisies.

Arrange them in a vase,

leave them on the windowsill.

(These were originally published in the University of Sydney arts literary journal, ARNA.)

My sisters and I are pulling faces at one another as we sit strapped into the backseat of the car together. Rain strikes the roof violently, smashes up against the doors in waves as we skid through the great rivers that now stripe the highway.

Maybe we are playing this game because we are nervous.

Maybe we are nervous because we are locked in a tin hurtling down an unfamiliar country rain whilst thunder cracks outside. My littlest sister widens her eyes and waggles her wormy, pink tongue at me and I respond by twisting my mouth grotesquely and furrowing my brow. The sound of rain punctuates our silent game, pummels the windscreen with a rhythmic crash, crash, crash. The storm slices up the landscape with silver back slashes:

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I roll my eyes as far back into their sockets as they can go, flashing the whites. Crash, crash, slash, slash, slash...

An obscenely morbid blog post about death or something.

I. It's January now, and that means that the sidewalk is strewn with dead Christmas trees put out for the council clean up. The heady smell of rotting pine trees imbues the neighbourhood with a sort of gothic festivity. Most houses have pulled down their seasonal fairy lights and fluorescent reindeer, but occasionally one will still pass some plastic Santa Clause decoration, wilted in the heat and covered in a thin layer of grime. The dead trees make for a melodramatic portrait, lying on top of each other like plague victims. Why does everything seem dead in summer? The trees look like dead birds, their green-brown feathers rolling out of their follicles, revealing their craggy, prehistoric limbs.

II.

The Head Next to Mine on the Pillow 

When I awoke in the morning

There on the pillow beside me lay the moth.

His fluffy head was still tucked down

Like a late sleeper's, but the eyes, those fascinated

Lamps that had drunk so deep of light

During the night, the eyes were dull.

And a soft powder had fallen

From the tattered wings folded

In the high final dive.

I might have been, perhaps,

The last thing he saw as the light flooded

His gentle body - why, yes, it could be

I was a big thing in his life at the last,

Enigmatic as an Easter Island statue,

Before the tide took him out

To where there is only flying

And all the filaments are friendly.

— Bruce Dawe

III. Down at Wylie's Baths, a dead blowfish is floating on top of the water, bobbing up and down like some absurd, swollen apple at a county fair. Its slimy white belly flashes white amongst the blue-green of the water. No one is swimming in the pool anymore. Everyone is watching the fish. Although surely all manner of dead creatures lie rotting on the floor of the ocean pool, nobody dares to share the water with one as visible as the fish. Eventually, one of the life guards wanders over with a long pool skimmer and scoops the blowfish out of the water, along with an empty coke bottle and some seaweed. Slowly, people go back to swimming.

IV.

"Caterpillars Eating a Tomato" from Food Chain by Catherine Chalmers.

A particularly horrifying but also beautiful but mostly horrifying photography series from the 90s that I first heard about on this episode of This American Life.

V. I am walking my dogs along the beach front when a black helicopter lands on the hill near the memorial. Literally hundreds of spectators have gathered to watch. I trudge up to the top along the path. Beach goers with their phones out crane their necks over the railing along the cliff face to glimpse at what is going on at the foot of the cliff. A person in a white suit is abseiling down the cliff, whilst another prepares a portable gurney to be winched down. There are several police vehicles parked on the grass, and officers amble around casually behind the police tape. Two reporters with iPads arrive and station themselves on the grass next to the police tape, tapping away at their screens. They seem to know one another, and chat amicably about their morning. Also present: a young mother and her son, watching. She is pointing out the different types of emergency vehicles present. A police officer skulks around to her and stands over her. You should leave, he says to her, you don't want the kid to see this.

VI. I find a dead beetle on my walk home one day. The sun is setting. I kneel on the nearest nature strip and dig a hole in the grass with my fingertips. I bury the beetle in the hole. I brush my hands on my jeans and continue walking.

VII. I have nothing more to say now. Goodnight.

I am pored, haired, often oozing somewhere or other and sometimes objectively disgusting in my private habits in the way nobody cares to admit. As neither a result of nor in spite of this, I am a woman. I am alive. I am able to read a poem and decide that it is beautiful... I am able to look at another porous and hairy thing and decide that it is beautiful... I don't know why I find this surprising.

"such is the resiliency of man that he can become fascinated by ugliness which surrounds him everywhere and wish to transform it by his art into something clinging and haunting in its lovely desolation." -- from the unabridged journals of sylvia plath, pp. 35

Today I feel brainless. I am at a total loss for what to do, and so I write. Sitting on my bed in the quiet of my room, I can hear all the little sounds my body makes-- the squelch and crack of my joints, click of my jaw, the tiny gurgle in my throat after I take a sip of water from the cup on the bedside table beside me. I roll my ankle around and hear the bones click in their sockets. 

My computer begins to whir on my lap and I immediately make a mental comparison between the computer and my body. A worn out kitten sticker is embedded on the metal next to the mousepad, faded and peeling at the edges. The keys chatter like teeth under my fingers; I pause and fiddle with the "I" key trying to shift a crumb which has become trapped there. Click click click.

Where does my computer end and the body begin? How much of my body have I left on, inside my computer? The cracks and vents must be filled with microscopic fragments of my skin that have been shed from my hands. Surely it smells of me, carries my pheromones, the residue of my sweat. This computer wears a coat of me. How delightfully disgusting! How hilarious our bodies are, constantly falling apart and leaving pieces everywhere, as if these spores will spread and fester into mushrooms. I am reminded of a quote from Aracelis Girmay:

"When the piece of a body is left (or a home is left) then the body begins being a constellation: one piece is there! one piece is there! If I leave my hair in the comb in my mother’s house & walk out the door to go to the airport, then all of a sudden the body is everything between me & that lost piece. The body is made up, then, of roads & crickets & azucena & mud. How large we are. How ramshackle, how brilliant, how haphazardly & strangely rendered we are. Gloriously, fantastically mixed & monstered. I have been asking myself to be more attentive & porous–to pay attention to the way every inch of me is animal, every inch of me is earth. I am trying to remember this. Where is my cloud? Where is my sea? What do the lungs hunt? What does the eye have in common with the teeth?"

In my copy/pasting, the font has changed. I figure I will leave it that way as I have no idea how to change it. The gooey afternoon light continues to seep through the clouds like grey saliva. At some point during the process of typing this, a hair has detached itself from my head and now lies diagonally across my computer screen.

Welcome to the void! Enjoy your stay.

The new year has arrived, her umbilical cord cut and the knot neatly tied, placental fluid still oozing- so I suppose that means that it is a good time for me to start this little blog. My rash choice of a url (the viscera chronicles) stands as an unsubtle reference to my obsession (love, fixation, fearful worship, delightful everlasting horror) with my beloved meat lump. Will any of this make sense? I kind of hope not.

Tonight my room is filled with bugs. A molasses brown cockroach has been ambling back and forth along the wall opposite my bed for the past half hour and I am extremely curious as to what she is looking/waiting for. I used to be terrified of roaches before I realised the sheer irony of despising something I share a name with and came to the conclusion that I probably have a lot more in common with them than I think. I've been listening to Shonen Knife's cover of When You Sleep by My Bloody Valentine which makes me want to weep hot wet tears and grin from ear to ear. I've decided to declare it my new January manifesto. I love it so much I want to die listening to it. If by any chance you are reading this after I have passed, please play it at my funeral.

Another image to contemplate: The other week I went down to the women's ocean pool near my house. In the middle of the pool an old, topless woman floats calmly on her back. The downpour of sunlight, the blue water lapping at her ribs, her lily-pad breasts. My whole body shudders with the weight of all the beauty in the world. All of the weightlessness.

I feel as if I spent 2015 clawing myself back into the sunlight. my body flush against the ground, ants under my nose my hipbones and elbows and chin grazing the dirt. This year I think I would like to float like that woman in the pool, on my back and be utterly weightless. I will write more, I will listen to Shonen Knife and I will practice the under-appreciated virtue of lying on the ground (Lying on the ground is one of life's finer pleasures and I firmly believe that everyone should lie on the ground for at least 10 minutes a day, every day.)

Right. That's it for today. The cockroach has crawled onto my bookcase. I have just remembered that I have run out of my medication. It is nearly the 2nd of January.

yours, Perri