Punningly, ‘terror incognita’ puts imperialist terror into the unknown. Maybe only ethics can give pleasure to outright alterity, over terror. A reference to referentiality, the ‘classical reference’ achieves the force of logic but affords no theorem, given logical propositions for Retallack are useful to poetics.¹ Closer reading reveals that, carrying over from the previous page which ended with ‘read olia for marginalia a tenor sang,’ the ‘men’ in ‘figmenst’ and the ‘coarse’ in discoarse echoes the tenor’s tonalities. The vocal remainder leaves its grains. Read silence with ‘late orts,’ orts being Archaic for food scraps or leavings. Font size and print type ensure these letter slips remain material. Read in translation, ‘O Music, my beloved silence’ redefines what music is: something close to silence, always approaching it. What results? At least one error with music’s entry into the lexicon. The OED defines music as ‘The art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds to produce beauty of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, expressive content, etc.; musical composition, performance, analysis, etc., as a subject of study; the occupation or profession of musicians.’ Yes, a science as well as an art. Music as education, as study. But a dispute with this definition would begin with its omission of silence from its elements of composition and combination, which Retallack reads into the fourteenth-century song. At the time of composition, Retallack had been listening to this song and other music from the Codex, meaning that the process of composition was (and is still) a process of preconscious listening, of writing as listening.² Cage and Cascia, silence and science, twined in haunted dictation.³

Three questions for class:

Q. What does it mean to listen to silence, listening being a little more conscious than porous hearing? This question must involve questions of attention and perception.

Q. When does hearing (the ear never shuts) turn/tune in to listening? Is this a worthy distinction?

Q. How then to really read error?

Taping Silence: ‘Varications’

Retallack spent many hours with the American composer John Cage towards the end of his life, recording his late thoughts. These conversations are collected in the book Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music (1996). In the Introduction, ‘Conversations in Retrospect,’ Retallack writes:

Each time I went over the transcriptions of our conversations, listening to everything all over again, I dreaded coming to the last of the tapes recorded on July 30. It takes up only 10 minutes of a 30-minute side. Cage is the last to speak. His words are followed by the sound of the recorder being switched off and then by a blankness that is a stark contrast to the noisy silence of pauses filled by the sounds of the loft. I found myself listening to the blank tape each time, not wanting to turn it off. Listening for more, thinking maybe this had really not been the end. Perhaps there was something more that I had forgotten. Fast-forwarding. Wanting more. Finally finding it. At some point that blank silence too became fully audible as a delicate, microtonal whir. A whir of music both in and of silence: John Cage’s gift, again.⁴

The off-switch of the tape recorder signals an explosion (or amplification) of noise. Cage’s well-known gift: silence, and, in the microtonal whir of the blank tape, the knowledge that there is no silence (but perhaps in death), gives amplified attention to noise in its diminishing. Retallack’s own ears search for a void in the blank tape. Silence comes to life. More noise, other noises. Noises after the fact: the last conversation in Musicage took place on July 30, Retallack notes, only twelve days before the massive stroke that killed him on August 12, 1992.

Published a year after Cage’s death and beyond the end of the tape, 5uite is haunted by Cagean silence, procedurally and elegiacally. Performances of Errata 5uite used the tape recorder as an instrument alongside voice. One of these performance, called E-5 Varications for John Cage: Whispers, Sighs, Silence, Noise, created using magnetic tape, featured Charles Weigel on tape 1 reading from Luigi Russolo’s astonishing The Art of Noises (1913), and on tape 2, Retallack reading source-phrases used in the composition of Errata 5uite. Another, titled Errata 5uite / Varications I for John Cage, for instance, was a wall installation and vocal performance of Errata 5uite and Serbo-Croatian ‘5lips,’ created and composed by Dubravka Djurić and Joan Retallack, performed as part of John Cage’s Rolyholyover A Circus held at Guggenheim Museum Soho in Spring, 1994. In this performance, Retallack and Djurić positioned themselves in ‘booths’ at diagonally opposed corners, reading to one another the errata 5lips, sparsely plein-sung. The photo-electric boxes were, as Retallack recounts, ‘wired to switches on the two tape-decks, placed inconspicuously in room so that audience entering and reading slips on walls will naturally pass by them without necessarily noticing them. When anyone passes close to one of the boxes the attached tape recorder turns off when s/he moves away or stands still the recorder comes back on. At any point when both tapes switch off, both readers stop reading so that there is complete silence until at least one tape switches back on.’⁵ The tapes, activated and deactivated by the proximity and alterity of bodies, recalls the closeness and intimacy of Cage in the tapes. In live performance, the audience as moving readers cannot help but stumble into the work itself. If you have stumbled within the ambit of a photo-electric box, quite by mistake you have been materially welcomed into the book and the range of the tape-recorder, which switches off in the presence of other’s ears. Hidden, like the stave, the photo-electric box becomes the book’s prosthetic ear, like the ear that recorded Cage’s late thoughts. Tape, like bare stave, serves a silent function.

A poetics of reading error is matter for pedagogy. Nerys Williams identifies error as a principal component in reading lyric in Language Writing.⁶ Williams proposes an ‘erring poetics of readership’ (235), which is attentive to ideolects, malapropisms and indeterminacy, drawing a provisional line from aesthetics to ethics to politics. As Anne Vickery has stressed, such pedagogical and political questions cannot be free of gender questions, especially with regard to the ‘masters’ or ‘fathers’ in the postmodern Language Writing community. Vickery examines not only the thriving centres San Francisco and New York but a ‘third’ and much smaller cultural node: Washington, D.C. In the mid-eighties, for instance, Tina Darragh, Lynne Dreyer, Joan Retallack and Phyllis Rosenzweig, met in D.C., often at Retallack’s house, to discuss poetics and gender. The culmination of this, ‘Intraview,’ remains unpublished.⁷ Barrett Watten, in his reading of Vickery’s ‘multiauthor’ model of history and community, finds it in need of a further exploration of the differences between form and social process, or a conception of the matrix of form itself as gendered.⁸ Yet the question remains: In a climate of resistance and/or judgement, even silencing of women’s experimental writing, how to read—let alone teach—such work? What is the value of not just ‘excluded’ but ‘silent’ work? While there already is a ‘thick’ archival and oral critical tradition for experimental male writers, what about such a tradition for women? How to listen to/write gender critically in a climate of cultural silencing? Returning to the beginning of 5uite, the first ‘staved’ 5-line stanza on page 2 reads:

read read for real if men spit (res) upon ras -er- first go halfway 
to set in motion inset for suffixed breast motion of aberration solo eyes
do not hear (her his) (his her) dislodged utensils insist on liken to elbow
to Old Norse angr  ’s grief erratic 5th aug /dim /wheel / column : for
cling read kling read klang erratum in farbenmelodie

The work of this passage begins with the reader, who may inquire about tone. Is the opening, ‘read read,’ to be sounded ‘red reed for real’ (past tense) or ‘reed red for real’ (future tense)? Either way, it is certainly read for real. Whatever she or he may hear first up, it becomes a gender-critical poetics of reading error and/or listening. Eyes that ‘do not hear (her his) (his her)’ may suggest a lack of gender-criticality or more positively offer the distinct, if not utopic, possibility of an androgynous poetics. Retallack’s link to musical modernism through Cage to Schoenberg, Cage’s teacher, is made with the morphing of cling to kling to klang (sound), as it drifts away from ‘farbenmelodie’ which is also from ‘Klang-farbenmelodie,’ a term derived from Schoenberg’s 1911 text Harmonielehre (trans., harmonic teaching, study in harmony). Melodic colour is soundless (silent), or it clings to sound, sometimes drifting off on its own.