Singing the Zahir Away: Lucier Meets Borges
(…) The recorded versions of I am sitting in a room that I know of range in duration from twenty-five minutes—from one of Lucier’s last performances before his death in 2018—to forty-five minutes (1981). Should the act of remembering these therefore last twenty-five and forty-five minutes? Or just one instant? Would it suffice to evoke the formula of I am sitting in a room, in the form of a brief synopsis, to retrieve these memories? A fictional ethnomusicologist created by the pen of Claudio Morandini tackles this dilemma. He discerns the deceptive and fallacious nature of sound recording, which is nonetheless intended as an honest receptacle for sound memory. Dependence on the metaphor equating sound memory and sound recording, however, is so strong that getting rid of it requires a feverish delirium:
Some composers are known to be able to perform an entire piece note for note after listening to it only once. Well, I can do that too, recorder be damned. I’m listening: I’m gathering information, I’m visualizing notes on that series of staves that is my mind. In fact, I am not delirious at all, the fever that is plaguing me makes me perfectly lucid: I am nothing but a brain, I can perceive what others cannot even imagine exists. I transcribe into my memory an entire encyclopedia of songs, verses, calls, sobs, screams, and cries. I compose a symphony, indeed a cycle of symphonies, a twelve-hour oratorio, a four-day melodrama. And every sigh in this collective performance speaks to me, is endowed with meaning, as distinct as a syllable uttered by a good speaker on the radio.
(Morandini, Gli oscillanti (Bompiani, 2019). My translation.)
Whether the rememberer is delirious or not, memory seems to breathe, to oscillate between a linguistic compression of a few words (phrases folded in on themselves until they occupy very little space) and a perceptual decompression, in which pure memory, desiccated and shriveled like a dehydrated rag, rehydrates, reoccupying a volume and regaining form. In such an unfolding, it’s hard for us to say how much of the regained form is an invention (or an accident) and how much is the faithful redrawing of the original outline. This is made even more difficult because that form is nothing but consciousness itself, and perhaps it’s only within it that one can conceive of a recollection, avoiding the paradox of constant rebirth at every moment that would leave us amnesic and unconscious of our enduring in time.
(…)
(Alessandro Bosetti, E-Flux, April 2024)
