Phenosong. Genosong. Epigenosong.
“The grain is the body in the voice as it sings” (Roland Barthes)
Dear Reader.
If you are new here, welcome to my Substack. For the next few weeks, every Friday I’ll be publishing writing that may become excerpts from the book I’m working on “Glottis: Love Letter to the Open wound”. It’s about grief, trauma, childbirth, singing and the erotic. If you would like to read it in order, you may want to go back to the beginning. Thanks for being here…
Beloved. I think, when I speak to you, directly to you, I am a better person. Last week, I decided to write my grown up story and what came out was my rage. Rage is mostly defense of ego. I am not ashamed of the wolf mother in me, but that wasn’t my goal when I started this project.
The moment I hit “send” on last weeks post, I felt sick. I deleted it, then replaced it with a different post I was working on, about the saxophone player Ryan Muncy. If the post you read last week was angry anti-German vitriol about war and polyamory. Lucky you. If you are new here. Welcome. If instead you read about our dear sweet uncle Ryan, I guess you have no idea what I’m talking about.
Grief makes me feel crazy. I have these intense feelings that overcome me like waves and I don’t know what to do, until I remember I have no choice but to relax into it and decide what to do later when the wave has passed. I am sad. And angry. I have never been more angry about anything in my life. Maybe I never will be. Maybe that’s exactly how I’m supposed to feel right now.
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.” (Oscar Wilde)
Beloved, you were conceived in Utopia. That land upon whose shores humanity perpetually arrives. Wherever we are. That’s it. That’s what we’ve got.
From very early in our relationship your Dad and I knew we wanted to make family together. It was almost instantaneous. We recognized each other in our marrow. Neither had ever felt something so intense before. On our second date he only half-jokingly asked me to move in. After 2 months, in the midst of an ecstatic 10 days locked in with Corona, he proposed we make a baby. I said, let’s wait a year. You were conceived exactly 12 months later.
“To be ecstatic means, literally, to be outside oneself, and this can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief. I think that if I can still speak to a “we,” and include myself within its terms, I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether it is in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage. In a sense, the predicament is to understand what kind of community is composed of those who are beside themselves.” Judith Butler
The philosophy of ecstasy and idealism plays an important part in our story. Your father is professional philosopher. Spelling out our philosophy of desire was much discussed. Right from the beginning. For what ever it is worth. Love, you were desired.
What we did not want was a conventional monogamous family unit. We were proud idealists, committed to creativity, freedom and eudaimonia, building our utopia of shared purpose with our lovers and chosen family. “Eudaimonia” is sometimes translated as living in and amongst “good spirits” or as a combination of well-being, happiness and flourishing. It’s an important concept in Aristotelian ethics. It emphasizes that for humans to flourish we need to think of the ways individuals are dependent upon and connected with those we walk alongside. In our early days the philosopher and the singer were beside-ourselves in love. Nevertheless I firmly believed pregnancy and motherhood would require primacy. The negotiations were heated, but it was my stipulation that in the event an external relationship was causing conflict that crossed into the unbearable “red zone”, the primary partner had a right to put a stop to it. In order to feel safe enough to consent to bringing a child into a polyamorous relationship, for me this was non-negotiable, at least for as long as my bodily autonomy was compromised by biological exigencies. I believed it was necessary for making a safe place for children.
Researchers of heart and body, we treated our partnership like an experiment in ways of living. We became each other’s conceptual editors, trying to integrate everything we knew about theory and practice. Our communication blew all previous experiences out of the park. We fought well. We fucked well. We were clear on our desires and practiced affirmative consent.
We even wrote a family constitution. It began:
“We of the chosen family, seek to create the conditions for one another’s equal, reciprocal access to (1) Eudaimonia (2) Creativity (3) and the easing of Suffering. We seek to create a set of practices and agreements that foster trust, reliability and security – while ensuring individual freedom and flourishing.”
Unfortunately, how exactly we would create equal access to all this good stuff was hard to nut out. Negotiations broke down during unresolvable arguments over the details in the “equal access” clauses. The constitution was never ratified.
To make a child is a project of almost insane optimism. To offer love to the shape of an outline of a person, unconditionally, forever, with no guarantee of return. I felt it was impossible to do otherwise than offer you that love. It was irresistible. Sublime. Like marrying the universe.
“Here,
a decision,
…. and….”
Beloved. You were the manifolded threshold of change. I do not mean to say “you” were the Glottis. But maybe, you, being in me, made my whole body glottal? The space between the manifolded folds of folds inside folds? As I circluded you against my will, willingly the whole becoming a circle of circles. You were a hole story of going in and coming out. Every mouth a portal. Every breath a means and an act in the habit of making itself happen. The first and second nature of opening too close again.
In, two, three, four, Out two, three, four.
Ingress is the act of going in. The means of entrance.
Egress is the act of going out. The means of exit.
This is as true for a voice as for a body as for data entry, traffic planning, construction, hospitality, real estate, medicine, law…
In astronomy, ingress is the act of entry at the beginning of an eclipse, when a celestial body begins at first to block the sun and cast its shadow. In a solar eclipse, ingress is when the moon begins to pass across the face of the sun. As it goes, obscuring our view of the star we have orbited as long as we have been breathing, we start to perceive something of the means of relativity of our place on earth.
The “means” of going in and going out are very important. Our bodies are so sensitive, so malleable. How we negotiate these points of entry is everything, as we project ourselves into the world. My voice, for example, reaches out of me and into you. Right now a vulnerable kernel of myself settles as residue in language. You can feel me. I know it. Offering what I have left, a seed for the foreign ground of whichever body finds this. Where we stand during ingress and egress, the degree to which we do or not really know our position, can be magic or catastrophy.
“Whenever I have given the talk, someone comes up afterwards and insists that the continuity was a planned one, in spite of the ideas that are expressed regarding purposelessness, emptiness, chaos, etc. One lady, at Columbia, asked, during the discussion following the talk, “What, then, is your final goal?” I remarked that her question was that of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to applicants for fellowships, and that it had irritated artists for decades. Then I said that I did not see that we were going to a goal, but that we were living in process, and that that process is external.” (John Cage in his famous lectures on indeterminacy).
Ingress & Egress are not neutral. Even with all this glorious chaos, we are oriented towards some objects and not others (Sarah Ahmed). The means of coming in and going out create the conditions for our enjoyment or “living in process” with creativity, eudaimonia, and a minimum of suffering. But projects moving with optimism towards indeterminacy, are also a luxury. A kind of gamble. For all the times I visited casinos, and I did, I never placed a bet.
It’s true that games have never been my thing. It bothered me, that I was supposed to enjoy the competition, and that I never quite understood what portion was skill, what effort, what chance? Or if it was simply rigged from the beginning.
When I am at the stake, the very fibre, the grain of me, how much of myself can I afford to put at risk in this project of projecting myself? Will there be enough of me to pay the bills? What happens if the project fails? What’s on the other side of losing it all? Permanent egress?
Ok. I guess.
“the grain of the voice is the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue” (Barthes)
A child is a grain of sand. No-one understands the infinite value of the singular better than its mother.
Colloquially, “grain” evokes the seeds of plants, and the small, naturally occurring parts that make up a larger object (rice, wood, sand). The grain can also be a texture inherent or given to surfaces where many small parts come together in waves, creating a sense of density and motion. Barthes’ “grain”, which is particular to the voice, represents not music, or text, or body but a nexus between them all.
Like Barthes, your father is a professional philosopher. In an effort to keep his character without naming his name. I’m going to start calling him by the name of his game. From here out I will call him “The Philosopher”.
The Philosopher loves wood. I think he would have spent his life at carpentry if the professional philosophy game had not worked out. Beloved. Your dad, with some help from your Uncle Surjan, is making a very special Stele with your name on it. It is made of a piece of solid oak they found at a saw mill when they went there to buy the wood for the floor of his apartment. It has a beautiful grain, really extraordinary. Your uncle Surjan, who actually is a professional carpenter, gave your Dad a lesson about how to negotiate the grain, that I will now pass on to you:
If you try to work against it, the work goes fast, but you get a rough result. It’s not so different to how your hair grows back more coarse if you shave against the grain. Working the plane along the grain in gentle repetitive motions you can start to read the body of your wood and its nature will reveal itself to you. As he spoke, the Philosopher pressed his lips coquettishly and the stroked the sensual air, as if demonstrating how to touch a lover.
Barthes borrows from Kristeva’s Phenotext and Genotext as models for theorizing two oppositional aspects of vocal music. He refers to phenotext as "the regular code of communication", and to genotext as "significance." ‘Phenosong’, encompasses expression manifested through breath, in phrasing, intention and conventions of genre. ‘Genosong’, encompasses vocal materiality, embodiment, the real inherited matter of the voice. I’ll ask you to follow the concept with me to its biological roots. We could say phenosong aligns with phenotype (the present observable expression of an organism’s characteristics also influenced by time and the environment) and genosong which aligns with genotype (the unique DNA inherited from one’s parents and their parents and their parents).
I was once told my dominant element in the Chinese astrological birth chart was wood. But “Yin” wood. As in, not wood from trees, but the feminine, flexible fronds that work their way through tricky situations. Like bamboo. Or weeds.
The signifier grain makes an ally of the genosong as well as the phenosong. The combination of their effects. A performer negotiates with phenosong, and genosong. Practicing the habits that allow them to slip between background and foreground. One moment just a body, pure presence, the next audible intellect, feeling, and meaning-making. As performers we know we need both to keep the audience’s attention. All genosong, and we become ideology. All phenosong and we make ourselves into signature sounds too ephemeral to bond with.
For a creative person, the risks involved in following ones inheritance too closely are obvious. To follow the traditions handed down to me in my musical DNA feels like an impossible negation of self. But at the same time, all this freedom of expression seems like something that only works if one is not dependent on the bonds that hold and the bonds you hold and their bonds and the ones under them.
Perhaps we need a third category : An Epigenosong. In 1977 Barthes asked how the history of music would be different if we were to give “more consideration to the grain”. I wonder at this point, what songs we would sing if we focused not on the sound (phenosong) or the inherited materiality (genosong) but of the way these traumas, habits and mutations are passed down between the generations to change the way the “genes” function (epigenosong).
Epigenetics are "stably heritable phenotypes resulting from changes in a chromosome without alterations in the DNA sequence" (Berger SL, Kouzarides T, Shiekhattar R, Shilatifard).
The inherited, altered, functioning of bodies. Formed not of our experiments or our ancestors but their interdependencies.
The experiment of your living was a voice on very old record.
I barely could have comprehended how much of the grit and grain of myself was at risk. What still awes me is that every human on this earth who decided to make more humans took this gamble too. It makes no sense at all. What do we do when the experiment fails? Would we be better not to think so much of the matter, but of the already historical forces at work when we love, without hope of reciprocity?
“who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love…There is a sense in which love’s truth is proved by its end, by what it becomes in us, and what we, by virtue of love, become.” (Christian Wiman)
Beloved, I am now going to call you by your name. Leo. You inherited it from my Grandfather. A family hero. For those of you who read last week’s post… I talked a lot about my first tattoo which says “Here, a decision, and I remember my place on earth”. My father, Alex, was so disappointed in me. He hates tattoos. Like many of my choices, it feels to him like an insult to everything the family has been through. My Dad will only ever see tattoos and think of the numbers the Nazi’s left on his father’s arm.
Your namesake, Leo Aszodi (the first), was an ordinary freedom fighter. He really wanted to live. The family legend goes that he made a run for it. Towards the end of the war. He and his friend Alex, escaped the Nazi concentration camp. Then walked in the direction of Hungary until intercepted by some Russians. Leo had somehow managed to get a hold of a long leather coat, which he credits with saving his life as he slept outside in the winter cold. But now its presence made the Russians think he was German. Tragically, no-one shared enough language to make themselves understood. They put my Poppa, in front of a waiting audience, in a line of men waiting to be shot. Then, the story goes, women and children in the crowd started to go crazy; the family of the man next to my Poppa. Hysterical, they threw themselves into the line of fire. The Russians took pity. They decided no-one needed to die that day. Leo escaped again.
The Philosopher and I spent some time over names, but it was sort of a forgone conclusion once I’d grown attached to the idea: Leo was the first and last name that came to mind. I think I hoped it would give you the means of egress, to make yourself free.