Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes

Abstract

Music moves us, both physically and emotionally. It vibrates on the skin and the ear drum and sets off emotional resonances. Although the eyelid can close and the hand can withdraw, the body is opened and vulnerable to sound through the ear. Sound is a phenomenon that transgresses the boundary between the self and the world with ease and is intimately tied to human emotion. The subject is vulnerable to sound from without, and also hears him or herself from within. For Merleau-Ponty we are sonorous beings. Sound plays a role in that chiasmic relationship between self and self, and self and world. He writes: “[L]ike crystal, like metal, and many other substances, I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat.” ¹ In a similar vein, Jean-Luc Nancy thinks of the body as a “resonance chamber.” ² He compares the listening body to an instrument, a drum: “Isn’t the space of the listening body, in turn, just such a hollow column over which a skin is stretched, but also from which the opening of a mouth can resume and revive resonance.” ³ It is this self-reflexive sonority and the response of the subject through which sound passes that will set the terms for this exploration of this play. Ghost Trio is filled with resonating chambers: the chamber in which we find F, F himself, and the small cassette recorder held on his lap. All the objects, including F, emerge out of the gray background, but are gray themselves. Like sound, they do not obey the boundaries of wall, floor, body-skin, but echo each other, return and diminish in rhythmic patterns.