Depiction
To depict 〰 (tinnitus) is often to encounter, even embrace, paradox, one need be in at least two places at once.
〰 can be both simple and complex, inside and outside, a surface simplicity both concealing and implicated in layers of complexity.
As part of their first ever 2018 “Talking Tinnitus Expo’, British Tinnitus Association (B.T.A.) asked some of their ‘celebrity supporters’ to draw their tinnitus. Their drawings, primarily insectile in nature, ranged from ant crawling over brain, surrounded by onomatopoeic, ‘scratch, scratch’; auroras of tightly wound spirals bursting from a person crying; ubiquitous bees flying around a person clearly in distress, ‘bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz”; a bell ringing in ear’s concha, as if emerging from a cave, resounding amidst pulses of sharp lightning; a mosquito about to draw blood from ear; and a septet of octopus tentacles, choking someone whilst also stabbing them in head with swords and spears.
Having lived with 〰 for over fifteen years now, I’ve no desire to tell anyone how to communicate their own experiences, I’ve spoken with enough people to appreciate their diverse, temporal, oft-antagonistic, sensitive, contradictory and dynamic natures. It’s interesting to note however, that a prevailing tenet of drawings mentioned above, which I find hard to interpret any way other than literally, is one of inherent discomfort, a list who would, I imagine, promote feelings of anxiety, as well as sympathy, for those reading, regardless of whether they “have” 〰 or not. Conveying an overall impression that people who experience 〰 are “trapped” within them somehow.
One of the most prevalent 〰 tropes is that of a person at mercy of their inner and outer environment, covering ears with hands. This is keenly felt in a famous painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream, otherwise known as “Shriek.”
In 1892 Munch wrote in his diary that he sensed an infinite scream passing through nature, a sense he would later transmute to hearing. This is not a concern I will be following here, but nevertheless it remains a curiosity for me when I consider The Scream’s predominant association with 〰 experience, of placing hands over ears in desperation, which for all intents and purposes, has provided something of a lacquer that has not only obscured many deeper and more interesting interpretations of the painting, but has also served to define 〰 in a very narrow and stereotypical sense, folding them into a fixed mien of detail, reception, and intent.
As stated, I’ve no intention to linger on such reception, with their nervous dissolving treatment of colour. This brief introduction merely serves as a hopeful means that when we shortly return to Munch we will subsequently be able to move away from him in terms of fixed associations and finding thought’s way.
Returning to the B.T.A. drawings, I can’t help but wonder about (through some hybrid form of mark-making and writing) making clear just how 〰 can feel, how, even where, they take place? Equally, I can’t help but ask, if satisfied by a particular rendition, what of feeling as if there were a particular concept of 〰 who must be validated above all others? Is this where dynamic understanding makes themselves known, in process, in not managing to pin down, but following. An ongoing depiction of 〰 consists of lived and varied moments of 〰.
I imagine rendering 〰, or following, like river wye, in such a way that each utilisation is themselves an ongoing experience of 〰, blurring and bending, detaching, obstructing and drifting.
Perhaps one curve would denote when I would (or would not) notice my 〰 that day; another could reflect a moment who creates a sense of kinship, trigger a memory, caused me miss someone important, annoyed a friend because I couldn’t hear what they were saying …
Gaps between curves feel crucial, perhaps denoting aforementioned cancellation in between mention and motion, and yet with more gaps we can find lose ourselves readily. One means of exploring such depiction is ascemic writing, wordless and open with regard to semantic potential. I’m not trying to get at a prototypical dictum of “the thing in itself,” neither am I trying to abstract 〰 from any personal reality, rather, I would like to point toward an instance of depiction in whom we might find ourselves able to communicate in a register somewhere apart, or alongside, disposition and expectation, one who remains open enough to carry within a number of different ways of speaking, drawing, painting, writing and thinking about both the experience and communication of 〰.
In The Rustle of Language Roland Barthes uses ascemic as a term for a word produced by typographical mistake, which he called a “pure signifier,” released into “efflorescence”. To pay attention to ascemic writing can mean to try and resist word’s gravitational pull, their associations, our tacit memories, focusing on emotional effects rising from marks before our senses. Thinking back to my time with river wye, I can’t classify 〰 as an object in part because I can’t discern their limits.
Perhaps attempting to trace their lines, their curves, is a naive attempt at plotting an ever-vacillating topography?
This seems as difficult as mapping positions of every stone in river’s bed. One interpretation varying from another in this dynamic topography of 〰 experience, just as one classification could so quickly negate another, but perhaps, over time, such readings will be drawn closer until they are felt.
〰 could be imagined without ever needing to form a fixed and objective pattern, a constant flight who is in essence a pattern of patterns appearing to be periodic but rarely stabilising into fixed locations or sensations. But equally, such layered patterns could be reduced to unrelenting intensity of a single and continuous tone.
In W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, a narrator retells a story he first encountered in Claude Simon’s novel, Les Jardin des Plantes, about a painting by Gastone Novelli. At second world war’s end, Novelli is so traumatised by his experiences that he heads for Brazil, living for a time with a tribe whose language consists, Sebald (paraphrasing Simon) tells us, “almost entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless variations.”
Upon his return, Novelli began to paint pictures. “His main subject, depicted again and again in different forms and compositions … was the letter A … in ranks of scarcely legible ciphers … rising and falling in waves like a long-drawn-out scream”
If we consider this depiction of a “long-drawn-out scream” alongside Munch’s Scream, who, if anyone, might arise with regard aforementioned lacquer of certain conceptions of 〰 if we replace, or even blend, 〰 ubiquity of Munch’s Scream with Novelli’s morphemic scream?
For a time I was under a “mistaken” believe that Novelli’s painting (whom I continue to think with regarding 〰 depiction and possibility) is focussed around a cicada, surrounded by yellowed verdigris of vowels and consonants, flecked with red veins, “top” row of whom so resembles an undulating wave, a microcosmic ecotone along cicada’s chirp periodically blend with environment.
Upon learning their title, Boat Under the Sun, of course my perception couldn’t expanded, and yet I still see insect, surrounded by linguistic by-products of thrumming bodies and environments in whirling relations.
Cicada, boat, (ambiguity appears to be more than binary, as friends who have spent time with Novelli’s painting have seen a variety of images appearing and reappearing) atmosphere’s grammar (whom I feel could easily be interpreted as sun, the great scream of nature, but equally, as schema following blurred lines of ‘rabbit-duck’ leads me toward a somewhat Gestaltian state of mind when I try to hold all floating parts until they ascemically dissolve and are recast, similar to how I continue to try and think, to potentise behaviour and myriad causes and effects of 〰 in relation to aforementioned motion and mention of flies.
Can Novelli’s Boat be considered as an addition to predominant tropes of 〰, with all their ambiguity and pattern, alongside Munch’s Scream?
If we perceive such paintings together, figure and ground invert and oscillate.
Their screams pass and map each other like a warbling moiré of allusion.
As part of a series of recordings available at PennSound’s Archive, poets Robert Grenier and Stephen Ratcliffe discuss, among many others, Cicada, a drawing poem by Grenier. They attempt to place Grenier’s practise in relation to The Cratylus, a Platonic dialogue primarily concerned with imagination’s role in literature. I mention this here to once again call as a question, tinnitus?
Whilst the primary motive for this section is to think about how Grenier has quite literally drawn a series of poems as testimonies to his engagement with sound-patterns in environment, and to think through some implications for 〰 depiction, I also wish to reassess some constructs who surround tinnitus.
Constructs and processes, such as meaning, onomatopoeia, diffusion … can create an antagonistic relationship with attention’s volume, often serving to keep many individuals who live with 〰 (myself included), at a remove from a sense of understanding or reconciliation, i.e. “I do not experience my 〰 as ringing, what is it, where am I?”
Perhaps a subtle reassessment of some of the terms and their implications, by way of spending time with Grenier’s depiction of Cicada, may help to foster a perception of 〰 as they who, for example, not only ring or buzz, and not exclusively reside in head.
Grenier alters cicada’s morphology in part, to reflect sound, he changes their color to correspond with greater intensity to their dynamic environment. We might imagine that both name and term formation arise from a kind of natural grounding through consistency, an encounter who repeatedly reinforces themselves, creating habits of naming.
But what about tinnitus? A term so invested in their own etymology, in their “ringing.”
For me 〰 symbol reflects a need to devise new ideas of who tinnitus ‘is’ and what qualities and relations they ‘have’, keeping in mind difficulties inherent in depiction. Tinnitus (a term supposedly coined by Jean Itard in the nineteenth century) cannot be contained by a single definition, there is so often someone left over who can and cannot be moulded into dynamism of their ongoing relational depiction, in a multiplicity of mediums.
Throughout their conversation, Ratcliffe and Grenier enunciate sound patterns of Cicada drawing-poems in what they call electric rhythmic relations. Grenier is recalling and performing a concert, we might say, of possible phonemic and spectral elaborations of cicada as set of relations. Drawing-poems hold possibility in productively ambiguous form, with Grenier standing in and among any number of insects as they call, responding to their imagined pitch changes in accord to temperature, intent, proximity, perhaps even stress …
This is all part of a reverberating field of energy reflecting relationships between words on a page and familiar sound-patters. Visual bugs, contained and invented by their name, feed into an onomatopoetics.
Grenier’s cicadas are partly seismographic, their many possible registers of delivery in his drawing-poem for me reflect tonal dynamisms of 〰, a highly sensitive curve arching in accord with mood and circumstance, atmosphere of air, ground, weather, sometimes to no one in particular.
Imagine drawings, paintings, writings, depictions of 〰 following such undulations in accord to body-mind-environment, tracing these endless (for some) marks who correspond to subtlety as well as volatility.
I wonder, as this practice of depiction unfolds, whether possible pitfalls of prolonged attention as feedback (anxiety /volume /attention / anxiety) would somehow be negated, or altered, through repetition? Which information could such an endeavour impart about a person’s 〰, about their environment?