Tag: Daniela Cascella

To sing the song unsung: A personal answer to Singed by Daniela Cascella

The voice soundless and then, records unheard, song unsung, voice also unsung
dipped enshrouded ensheathed enlandscaped tongueless tongueless tied no story no record.

Daniela Cascella is a literary ecstatic. She engages with the word—written, spoken, sung, depicted—at an essential point of being, at that place where the spirit, soul, or daimon resides.

She listens into the silences, to the whispers and echoes, to the frayed edges of meaning. As a native Italian who writes in English, she attends to the spaces between languages, bending and folding her adopted tongue to affect fractured layers of intent. To open yourself to reading her is to be challenged to read and write with a new sensitivity to sound, voice and significance.

If I sound like an enthusiast, I am. Daniela (if this was a review rather than an answer I would refer to her by her last name—I will honour her instead, as Brazil honours Clarice) has been a vital friend and mentor over the past year and half since I first came to know her. As an essayist, my primary goal is to reach toward an articulation of the ineffable, to give voice to an existence, not between languages, but between gendered experience in a way that gets closer to an expression of being as I understand it than the common dialogue surrounding trans identity allows. I have no idea if that is an attainable goal, but Daniela’s essays and meditations thrill, inspire and ignite me.

Inspire and ignite me.

Ignite.

Her latest book, Singed, takes its title from permutations of sing: sing, singed, sung. It opens with the account of a fire. A few months ago the room at the top of our house caught fire. A large number of books and cds were lost to the flames. I first read of these burned books from a PDF of the text. I responded with horror; I felt wrenched with every title. Returning to this accounting on the printed page a few weeks later, I sensed an exaltation, a calling forth, a rising to a challenge, a refrain to be reclaimed amidst the losses. And that is what Singed is. As Daniela sifts through the ashes and embers, sings through the ashes and embers, she calls forward precious voices—Clarice Lispector, Teresa of Ávila, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Elfriede Jelinek, Marlene van Niekerk, Isak Dinesen, Fleur Jaeggy, Ingeborg Bachmann and more—chanelling their words and their attempts to speak to otherness. Hers is a reading as inhabiting the spaces between words.  The observations she makes and questions she asks, hang in the air, inviting her reader to ponder the unspeakable and challenge the constraints placed on how we’ve been taught to read and to write.

Woven through her literary explorations, are reflections on music and art. These excursions help frame, and reframe, a multi-dimensional engagement with the written word. Hearing, seeing, and speaking are essential activities, as are silence, emptiness, and unfinished forms. A sigh, for example, Clarice’s in particular, which Cascella (at this moment, this feels like a review) first encounters listening to Lispector’s last recorded interview, inspires an intuitive and rhythmic engagement with the works of other writers, a series of echo and dub sessions on the page. The experience of reading and writing a review of Marlene van Niekerk’s The Swan Whisperer, a short tale in which a young student loses himself in his endeavour to transcribe the language of swans, leaves her spellbound, speechless and wordless, unable to write for months. Of that interlude she says:

Today I know that the silence I experienced was a deep working of the stuff that makes writing be. It was the encounter with the substance that eludes you and that causes such physical turmoil when you grasp it in other words, in words you read in a poem or hear in a song, and you recognize their subject as yours.

And the connections she draws when writing across languages are illuminating, especially for those of us who are unilingual. In an essay about Fleur Jaeggy’s as yet untranslated novel, Le statue d’acqua, Cascella writes:

Where did the spirit of the world hide that night its reservoir of dreamers?

The porous blank portions between the words in The Water Statues soak up Jaeggy’s discomfortable writing. They enfold the space of space, or as Gass wrote of Rilke’s Innerweltraum, the space made by Being’s breathing… Not just the space we call consciousness, but the space where we retire in order to avoid a feeling… These spaces are always palpable as though space were smoke, or the mountains of the heart where the last of the hamlet of feeling may be discerned. The blank spaces host echoes, speech where speech ends, the voices of ancestors. Jaeggy herself has acknowledged, in discussing herself hearing writing in between German and Italian, that German is the language of her dreams…

Voices and echoes, and echoes of voices.

Repetition of a refrain.

Call and answer.

If reading Daniela Cascella’s work—including her earlier books, En Abîme and F.M.R.L.— has nurtured in me an alertness to sound in language and imagery, and an awareness of voice, more explicitly a desire to voice what is known without words, Daniela, as a friend and fellow writer, has personally encouraged me to incorporate more photographs (or a photographic sensibility?) into the presentation of my writing—a process I am still just beginning to explore.

But take this image:

July, 2015, mid-winter in Cape Town. This is the Company’s Garden, with the iconic façade of Table Mountain looming in the background. On that white columned building in the distance, if you could see it, is a poster advertising William Kentridge’s multi-media installation, The Refusal of Time. That is the South African National Gallery and this is my last full day in the city. I made my way through the gallery in near isolation and as I passed into the room containing the Kentridge exhibit, the recorded rhythms of metronomes and bellows were triggered and seemed, in the moment, to be contained within this dark space where I experienced the entire presentation alone, surrounded by noise and images, free to wander and absorb the full sensory explosion unhindered. Later, as I explored the rest of the gallery, I realized that the sounds and rhythms of the exhibit resounded and echoed through the entire building, enhancing my sensory appreciation of every photograph, painting and artwork I saw. I cannot think back on that visit to the gallery without hearing and feeling, the steady cadence, the heartbeat, of The Refusal of Time.

But that’s not all, and this where I answer Daniela Cascella and Singed. When we first connected, we shared our mutual appreciation of Marlene van Niekerk—The Swan Whisperer and her monumental novel, Agaat. It is a trace of the latter work I carried with me during my stay in Cape Town. Every time I came into the bowl from my B&B in Sea Point and saw Table Mountain stretching out before me, I could not help but hear the awed voice of the young Agaat after a trip to the cape with her mistress: “I saw Table Mountain.”

I saw Table Mountain.

 That young girl’s voice echoed in my head. Agaat’s voice became my voice. The voice of a past part of myself.

I saw Table Mountain.

 That afternoon, I sat in the café in the Garden, with Kentridge’s metronomes and Agaat’s wonder punctuating every breath, and started to write. I was, I believed, at the beginning of a process of writing my way back through the year that had just passed, from the breaking point of a serious manic episode to the renewal of a sense of self identity and an clear understanding of the unfinished business of being differently gendered in the world. A neat, circular journey  that would, in the writing, lead to healing.

As if.

Life (and death) still held lessons I could not, in that moment, anticipate.

Today, the pen still hesitates on the page. Small forays have been made, but I am only beginning to learn to listen to the voices I am trying to transcribe, the voices of the selves I am and used to be—girl, woman, man.

Somewhere, in the distance, I am calling back the beat of the metronome and a child’s voice: I saw Table Mountain. That child is me. In Cape Town I believed I could rewind time, solstice to solstice, one year back to the day I left my job,  and move on from there.

No.

I need to go back farther. Back into my past and listen for that child’s voice, the child who had a feeling, but no words to express it. To gather what one can know in absence of language, to salvage words from the margins of memories. Attend to that distant silence.

So much has passed in the two and a half years since I took this photograph. I almost died, then both of my parents faded rapidly and were suddenly gone, and the friend who drew me to South Africa committed suicide.

Just when I thought I was ready to write, my life caught fire and burned for over a year. Now it is time to sift through the ashes and embers, re-enter the remembering, and embrace the discomfortable, pen to paper.

Singed by Daniela Cascella is published by Equus Press.

Beginning to write through grief: A reflection & link to my poem at the Sultan’s Seal

I am, as many know, dealing with a multi-layered, complex grief—my mother, my father, and one of my closest friends—all lost within the last six months. When my parents died in July, I entertained an immediate grief project, my own mourning diary, an echo of Roland Barthes. I started with a subdued passion, an ache as intellectual as emotional. In truth, my emotions were, I can now see, constrained and intellectualized.

I was numb.

Others reached out to me in those early weeks, sharing their own stories. The terrain of grief is rocky, I was warned. The journey long. The pain uneven. But, although I am in mid-life, a loss of this nature—doubled and complicated—was something I had never faced.

Then my friend took her own life sometime on September 1st. Even though I knew, in my heart, that such an event was almost inevitable, the pain and anger tore me apart. I knew she had tried every available option she could afford to fight an erratic and devastating variation of bipolar disorder, and I fully respected her decision and her right to make it. But suddenly my world was a darker, lonelier place.

And she had lived half a world away.

Again, the first thing I thought of was to write. This time, my distance from her demanded and informed my need to write—and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to gather words and sentences from her writing and our communications, and together with some photographs from my trip to visit her in South Africa, create an elegy.

An offering.beach

Drawing inspiration from a prose piece by Breyten Breytenbach, and the sound driven writings of my friend, Daniela Cascella, I set to work. And I knew exactly where I wanted to publish this memorial if I was able to realize my vision—The Sultan’s Seal, a most wonderful space created and curated by Egyptian writer, Youssef Rakha.

The result, “And I will Tell You Something,” was published this past weekend. Three hundred words, five images and almost three months shaping, reshaping, listening and accepting the silence that emerged. This is perhaps the most emotionally demanding piece I have ever written. Yet, now five days after my words were finally set free in the world, I feel a tremendous sense of rightness. An element of peace. I still ache, but, with this prose poem, I feel I can begin to heal.

And I hope that others may find something in it too.

Listening to voices in search of my own: A reflection

§ New Line of Thought

Every new line of thought is a departure.

Or a new way of arriving where one already is.

–  S.D. Chrostowska, Matches

I have been thinking about voice lately.

I am drawn to voices in literature, listening to the way stories are told, the language, the perspective, the vision, the content. I can’t say what I am looking for but I know when I find it. Or, more critically, I know when there is, in an otherwise worthwhile read, nothing for me at this time. As a reader I am grazing, hunting and pecking, listening for the voices that startle and ideas that stimulate. It is an entirely idiosyncratic endeavour driven by my own writing–reading to write that is sometimes at cross purposes with reading to review.

But it is reading that leads one down interesting side roads.

I’ve been immersed for the past few days, in en abîme, the blog of Daniela Cascella, in anticipation of reading her book of the same name and its successor F.M.R.L.. From the fragments and articles I have read to date, it is clear that she writes with an intuitive grace about the experience of language as rhythm, tone, and meaning. Reading, writing and listening are, for Cascella, deeply sensuous experiences. Most explicitly she is drawn to writing after sound, a project as seemingly elusive as the task that drives my own writing: that is, writing after being.

In her review of Marlene van Niekerk’s mesmerizing The Swan Whisperer for Music & Literature, Cascella prefaces her piece by describing this work as:

“ . . . a tale of transmission, disappearance, and utterance, of writing as it hovers at the edge of language, trafficking with the ephemeral and the unreliable; challenging the primacy of the written text through a compelling reflection on flow and interference, rhythms and non-origin.”

I am deeply interested in articulating the experience of being, an age old question I know, but I would suggest that its timelessness arises from the inherent challenge of adequately giving voice to an experience that, itself, “hovers at edge of language.”

We live in a world of sound-bites, of inspirational quotations, often ripped out of context and juxtaposed against images of flowers, beaches, or sunsets and spilled out on Twitter or printed on coasters and tea towels in gift shops. Authenticity is a watch word, To thy own self be true, as the Bard himself would say. We hunger after the healing journey of self-discovery, we admire it in our heroes, we long for it in our own lives.

I have sought it myself. My life has been a constant struggle to balance and rationalize an incongruent and conflicting experience of being in the world. I don’t know if my own challenges are, or have been, greater or less than those of anyone else, for in truth, the only truth I have is my own and even that is suspect.

“He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hinderance in turn, he deduces the proof that he is alive.”
– Franz Kafka, Aphorisms

What I do know is that I am possessed of a persistent sense of groundlessness, a very real and present awareness of a fragile and constant process of coming into being. It is an ongoing expression of inauthenticity that I experience – if I could capture a truth it would be momentary and fleeting, cancelled out by its negative in the act of expression. My writing is directed toward giving this experience, as I know it, voice.

Which brings me back to the point where I started. As I said, I have been thinking about voice. But until this point I was thinking of voice in the sense of expression, not sound.

Spring in silverMy own voice is damaged. Metaphorically and in fact. I sacrificed my voice a number of years ago in my endeavour to be real, and as a result I have lost power and depth. My voice strains easily. To speak loudly and project takes concentration and effort and leaves me hoarse. Yet I frequently read aloud to myself. I find that to write seriously, I require silence and the freedom to read my writing aloud as I progress. Those that have the misfortune to live with me have learned to accept this quirk, but I must confess I really love to write when I am alone in the house.

That makes me wonder about the necessity of an aural component to the process of writing about being. About silence and sound.

Interactive Silence

“A stillness that is initially a stillness ready to be, once it ceases to be still . . . An end, recurring so many times that in the moment that it ends . . . An ignited fire of the end to an extent of necessary measure . . . A braided braid . . . Getting to know one another and being known . . . In the trap of mental unification . . . Nonbreak-down . . . Silence, sounded over, blaspheming about silence and about not being silent . . . The inability to locate the word, and yet the necessity to seek it, as if the word could save one from that which is unsaid.”
– Róbert Gál, On Wing

To talk about being, for now, for me, begins with writing about my life. I need to be able to frame the angle at which I intersect with the world. To that end my first piece of “memoirish” writing will be published on Minor Literature(s) in the near future. I am concurrently exhilarated and horrified by the prospect. This is an openly queer piece, at once honest and guarded, and marks the beginning of a journey to find that elusive voice in all its permutations.