There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music. John Cage
She is in an unspeakable mood. I try to circumvent her, but her foulness is everywhere. When she moves, space reorients itself around her. I get a sense of vertigo when this happens. I feel sick.
She sighs and some air escapes the pressure between us. She sips her tea, her downcast eyes protecting me unwillingly from what will remain unuttered between us.
I am unable to speak, but still, words wring themselves from me. The silence she returns resounds of me, echoing inside me. It leaves me breathless. Hollow.
It’s not a matter of when a person listens but of where he listens. He listens to the resounding of something within himself caused by something outside himself. Some exteriority is inscribed in his interiority.
Nancy writes that his is a ‘sonorous body’, a body which is ‘always at once the body that resounds and [a] body as a listener where that resounds, or that resounds with it’ (8, my emphasis) .
We're both listening then, at the same time, but more importantly in the same shared place or rather our listening creates our co-presence in sound. I've never listened this intently to her silence before. I must have never listened to hear before. Something crucial is approaching. Some secret is at stake.
Nancy is in search of an ontological tonality and asks: What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening , listening with all his being? (4)
What does it mean indeed? I don’t know, but I know this. I am hollow, her silent exteriority reverberates my interiority, the outside is enveloped by the inside. She is Echo, but I am no Narcissus.
What reaches me, what extends from me to her and thus vice versa, what travels in res between us, is an echo, a renvoi, something that returns to itself, in itself, by itself. We are rebounding/resounding of each other. When we are ready to return to ourselves we have departed already, again, over and over.
At this point I recall Kafka's Burrow, a parable on the exteriority of the interiority or the interiority as exteriority, a tale of folding/unfolding, of invagination. The burrower obsesses with silence, his burrow must be silent. (There’s a thread in here of the relation between silence, safety and topology)
He is continuously haunted by the omnipresence of rhythmic sounds punctuated by a noise-like hissing which seem to be always arriving in an ever-increasing crescendo without ever reaching its destination.
As he sets out to investigate he is acutely aware of the burrow as a listening body but fails to identify himself as such a sonorous body. His burrow has become an anechoic chamber. He is reverberating with himself.
(What happens to his plan to transform his beloved Castle’s Keep into a hollow separating it from the walls surrounding it, creating an island within his burrow which is already an island?)
He longs to be in his Keep with nothing but the rushing of silence to accompany him. Poor thing. He fails to realize he is not listening i.e. ‘straining toward a possible meaning’ (6) at all. ‘Sense opens up in silence’, writes Nancy, our task, and the burrower’s, is to listen to the ‘silence of meaning’ (26).
‘Silence is an arrangement of resonance’, it is ‘exactly as when in a perfect condition of silence your own body resonate[s], your own breath, your heart and all its resounding cave’ (21).
The animal deep inside its burrow is experiencing the absolute non-phenomenality of sound, its lack of intentionality. His fear of alterity and exteriority is evoked from his interiority. This animal's haunto-topological predicament consists of ‘acoustic oto-emissions’ (16).
Her silence mingles with these auto-produced sounds of my inner ear. What starts as an itch, excavates me while it burrows deeper into me. It sits in my stomach now, a dense mass of emptiness stretching me from the outside in.
(Numbers refer to Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy (2007))