A teacher once challenged me … who was I reading, and what did they say (theory-wise), that I held as important? And why wasn't I shaping my life around that? I was reading French Feminist theorists at the time. And their ideas and perspectives on language, on women, the body- the whole lot- thrilled me to bits. And so I changed how I thought; I took on her challenge, and not superficially, but fundamentally; I took on these new ‘other’ ways of thinking, and I changed how I think and write and how I relate to ‘the whole lot.’ And it continues to stretch my thinking. Towards thinking better, I feel, bit by bit.

It has taken me a while to learn that the writers who changed how I think were never fully ‘only’ available on the page. Of thinkers and theorists … I listened better to those who shaped and reshaped language as they shaped thinking. And the ones I was fascinated with all had something in them that needed a body to land on. In. A throat. A pair of lips. A membrane, a mouth, an open wound, something that opened around their words until words and my thinking … came loose … from what I’d thought possible. A body with Ears!

I know others feel the same. That old reluctance to go outside one’s frame. Theory is odd, foreign; how to enter into it without disrespecting your own limits…? A gentling approach, one of play, is best.

So here is another way in, stripped of the usual academic one — footnotes, secondary sources, and hopefully stripped of the anxious feeling of not yet having understood enough to be allowed an opinion — has this ever kept you standing at the door of a text rather than inside it? Read on.

So here is a list of the wise ones that shape my thinking. And how to read them. Who shapes yours?

With Gertrude Stein you must let a sentence go on longer than you think it should.

Do not rescue it. Do not reach in and tidy the grammar, straighten the repetition, cut it down to the one clean meaning you were taught a sentence owes you. Let it circle back on itself instead. Say the word again. Say it again. Notice how on the third saying it is no longer quite the same word — something has worn loose in it, some old certainty has come unstuck, and what’s left standing is not sense exactly but a kind of humming where the sense used to be.

This is not nonsense. Listen with the ear underneath your ear — the one that isn’t waiting for the sentence to resolve, the one that hears the returning itself as the meaning. A rose is a rose is a rose is not three sentences failing to say a new thing about a rose. It is one sentence discovering that saying is a place you can stay in, rather than a road you have to get somewhere on.

Sit at the table. There will be tea, and paper, and repetition, and none of it is stalling. Eating and paper. Eating and paper. Say it again. Feel how continuing is its own kind of arriving.

She will not explain herself to you. That is not rudeness. That is the whole demonstration: that a voice can go on sounding itself, accumulating, thickening, evening out into something that holds more than any single word could carry alone — without once stopping to ask your permission to make sense.

With Luce Irigaray you must stop trying to close your mouth around a single word.

Let your lips touch each other before they touch anything else. Feel how they are already two, already speaking to each other in a language that needs no listener outside itself. Do not choose between them. Do not let one lip flatten against the other into a single line, a single meaning, a proper sentence with a proper subject who owns what she says. Stay open. Stay wet. This is not weakness. This is a different geometry — not the point, not the one, but the fold, the crease, the place where two surfaces are always already touching without ever quite becoming the same surface.

You will want to name yourself. Resist it a moment longer. She will tell you: you are not a lack waiting to be filled by his word. You are not one. You have never been one. You are plural the way a mouth is plural — lips, tongue, teeth, breath, saliva — none of them the “true” organ of speech, all of them speaking together, touching together, before any of it becomes a sentence a man can look up in a dictionary.

Say something. Now say it again, differently, and let both versions stand. Let them touch each other the way your lips touch, without one correcting the other into silence.

This is not confusion. This is jouissance — a pleasure with no single centre, moving without arriving, speaking without ever closing the mouth around the last word.

With Hélène Cixous you must feel your own body as a page that was already written on before you ever picked up a pen.

Find the marks. The old ones — the ones telling you a good girl is a quiet girl, a proper text is a tidy text, a woman’s desire belongs in the margins if it belongs anywhere at all. Do not erase them. Write over them instead, in your own hand, pressing hard enough that both layers show. Let the ink be milk if it wants to be milk. Let it be blood. Let it be neither and something else entirely.

Open your mouth as if the words were going to come from somewhere lower than your throat — your belly, your spine, the backs of your knees. Let the sentence arrive already laughing. She will tell you the monster you were warned about, the one with snakes for hair, the one you were told never to look at directly — look at her directly. She is not what they said. She is beautiful, and she is laughing, and so, it turns out, are you.

With Judith Butler you must do the gesture again.

Not the first time — the first time doesn’t exist, not really, not the way you think. Do it again. Notice how your body already knows the shape before you decide to make it — the way you cross your legs, lower your voice, soften your hand at a particular angle when you want to be read a particular way. You didn’t invent this. You inherited it, rehearsed it in rooms you don’t remember, in front of people who are not here now, until it became yours the way a well-worn phrase becomes yours — spoken so many times you forget it was ever anyone else’s first.

Do it again, and this time, feel the seam. There is always a seam. No gesture arrives finished, self-evident, natural — it is stitched together out of a thousand earlier repetitions, and if you watch closely enough, you can catch it being sewn.

Now do it differently. Just slightly. A different angle of the wrist, a different pause before the word. Feel how the world does not quite know what to do with you in that half-second. That half-second is not nothing. That half-second is where you were never fully written in the first place.

You wanted an origin — a true self underneath the performance, waiting to be freed. There isn’t one. There is only the performing, and the performing again, and the difference that opens up in the again. This is not a cage. This is the only place freedom was ever going to be found.

With Bracha Ettinger you must come close enough that you can no longer say clearly where you end.

Not fusion — do not let yourself dissolve, do not let the other dissolve into you. Something more careful than that. Come to the membrane. Feel it hum between you, thin as pigment laid wet over wet, two colours touching at the edge and neither one disappearing, both changed by the touching. This is not a wall. This is not a bridge either. It is a place that exists only because you are both, right now, present to it at once.

Let something pass through that neither of you made alone. A trace. A trembling. Something that arrives already shared, already between, before you can ask whose it was to begin with. This will feel like memory, though it may be a memory that isn’t only yours — carried in the body before there were two separate bodies to carry it, back when the border between you and the one who carried you was still being drawn, softly, unfinished, in blood and fluid and shared breath.

Do not rush to separate. Do not rush to merge. Stay at the threshold and let it ache a little — the not-quite-one, the not-quite-two. This is not confusion. This is witnessing, and being witnessed, at the same time, by the same encounter. She will call this matrixial. You will simply feel it as: I am not making this alone.

With Mary Daly you must open your mouth and take a word back.

Choose one they gave you to shrink you with. Hag. Witch. Spinster. Crone. Say it once the old way, low and small, the way it was handed to you, edged in warning. Now say it again. Feel how a word is not fixed to its meaning any more than a lock is fixed to one key — you can turn it. Spit out the syllables that were fitted to make you flinch and find, underneath, the older syllables, the ones that meant she who spins, she who knows, she who has survived long enough to be dangerous.

Cackle. Actually do it — let the sound come up from somewhere below the throat, unglamorous, too loud for the room you were taught to be quiet in. This is not decoration. This is a philological act. Etymology is a cauldron, and you are allowed to stir it.

Now build a new word, if the old ones won’t hold what you need. She did — gynocide, the-rapist, spinsters spinning past the dead ends men called meaning. Do not apologise for the strangeness of it on your tongue. The dictionary was never neutral. It was written by the same hands that wrote everything else. You are allowed to write your own.

I am not any of them. I want to say that clearly, before this goes any further out into the world than my own desk.

But something in each of them is with me now, the way a room keeps something of everyone who has ever stood in it — a warmth, a residue, a way of turning toward the light. I did not understand Irigaray until I let my mouth do what my mind couldn’t. I did not understand Ettinger until I stopped trying to draw a hard line around where I ended. Theory was never going to arrive through the eyes alone. It needed somewhere wetter, slower, harder to footnote.

So if you have been standing at the door of a text, certain you don’t yet know enough to go in — you were never going to know enough first. Go in anyway. Let your body do the reading your mind is too careful to attempt.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Who shapes you?

Note: This piece also grew out of reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s “Dreaming in Women,” from The Chronology of Water, where she writes of her encounters with women writers in this same second-person, body-first register. I wanted to try the same approach with theorists whose ideas live as much in the body as on the page.

… whilst reading crochet patterns …

If any of these fragments sent you looking for the real thing, a reading list is here —

I am a feminist theorist and poet working at the blood-edge of language. I’m writing on ‘other’ oraculars and developing placental language theory: examining how we spoke before symbolic order, through biochemical negotiation and umbilical tongue. I name what’s found there LOVE, as soundage - a love that, through the imaginal and the matrixial, acts as a material acoustic ‘becoming’ space. Women’s voices, the unsaid/unheard, other oraculars, the monstrous reclaimed, plus more, can all be found and ‘listenened’ for here. Overall, my work is research-led poetry. It is transdisciplinary. It is always speculative. It is always a cultural criticism, one that refuses the cut between body and word. The whole lot.

Did I say … I am presently also working on the frame and implications of Placental Language & thinking … for more, link here

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© 2026 Dr. Majena Mafe. All Rights Reserved.

The Oracular Other

Feminist theorist writing on affect theory, visceral grammars ... and the blood-edge of language.

By Dr. Majena Mafe

&

Placental Language

Writings at the blood-edge of language. Feminist theorist/poet developing a placental language theory: the language before disconnection through an access of soundage as love.

By Dr. Majena Mafe

Essays and perspectives that will get you thinking …

What you will find here …

Theoretical & Deep Thinking (really): research as an active excavation

“Tracing the blood-edge of language. A window into the ongoing scholarly investigations, archival notes, and theoretical foundations underpinning affect theory, somatic memory, and visceral grammars.”

The “Behind-the-Scenes” Process: a sharing of raw, ongoing discoveries

“The raw materials of theory. Think of this section as an open-source notebook mapping out the fieldwork, literature, and text-exhumations that inform the broader essays of The Oracular Other.”

In Poetic & Somatic Frames: presenting research as an embodied act

“Where inquiry meets the marrow. Field notes, critical inquiries, and textual encounters exploring how cultural affect and systemic structures leave their mark directly onto the body and psyche.”

Please consider visiting my sister site, Placental Language, a project for a deep dive into a ‘particularly juicy’ language with lashings of an Umbilical Tongue Click here …

I am a feminist theorist and poet working at the blood-edge of language. I’m writing on ‘other’ oraculars and developing placental language theory: examining how we spoke before symbolic order, through biochemical negotiation and umbilical tongue. I name what’s found there LOVE, as soundage - a love that, through the imaginal and the matrixial, acts as a material acoustic ‘becoming’ space. Women’s voices, the unsaid/unheard, other oraculars, the monstrous reclaimed, plus more, can all be found and ‘listenened’ for here. Overall, my work is research-led poetry. It is transdisciplinary. It is always speculative. It is always a cultural criticism, one that refuses the cut between body and word. The whole lot.


Did I say … I am presently working on the frame and implications of Placental Language …

#theoracularother #placentallanguage #research #feminineecriture #language #feministtheory #notebooks

The Oracular Other

Feminist theorist writing on affect theory, visceral grammars ... and the blood-edge of language.

By Dr. Majena Mafe

Placental Language

Writings at the blood-edge of language. Feminist theorist/poet developing a placental language theory: the language before disconnection through an access of soundage as love.

By Dr. Majena Mafe

What would the monster say …

You will find here a living glossary of words … and their use in language, but more than that, in thinking!

You will find here language in ‘other’ forms. Visceral & Concept-Focused.

You will find here essays on listening.

“An unfolding vocabulary for the unsaid. This section dissects the raw terminology of affect theory, body-memory, and the visceral grammars that shape how we speak, feel, and occupy language.”

Language as Juice for the Conversational Academic

“Deconstructing the language of feeling. Think of this as a living dictionary for the blood-edge of language—breaking down complex concepts of affect, voice, and theory into sharp, digestible pieces.”

Language both Poetic & Atmospheric

“A lexicon for the nervous system. Here, we parse the vocabulary of somatic resonance, tracking where theory meets the skin and giving names to the invisible forces that move us.”

And Language that Growls …

for the full expanding glossary click here

The Oracular Other

Feminist theorist writing on affect theory, visceral grammars ... and the blood-edge of language.

By Dr. Majena Mafe

Placental Language

Writings at the blood-edge of language. Feminist theorist/poet developing a placental language theory: the language before disconnection through an access of soundage as love.

By Dr. Majena Mafe

Here are a few pages from my research journal, penned whilst thinking about Placental Language and the possibilities of looong-er tongues.

placental language

Writings at the blood-edge of language. Feminist theorist/poet developing a placental language theory: the language before disconnection through an access of soundage as love.

By Dr. Majena Mafe

In my way of thinking, the drawn-line-diagram is also an Umbilical Tongue.

All work by Majena Mafe 2026

I am a feminist theorist and poet working at the blood-edge of language. I’m writing on ‘other’ oraculars and developing placental language theory: examining how we spoke before symbolic order, through biochemical negotiation and umbilical tongue. I name what’s found there LOVE, as soundage - a love that, through the imaginal and the matrixial, acts as a material acoustic ‘becoming’ space. Women’s voices, the unsaid/unheard, other oraculars, the monstrous reclaimed, plus more, can all be found and ‘listenened’ for here. Overall, my work is research-led poetry. It is transdisciplinary. It is always speculative. It is always a cultural criticism, one that refuses the cut between body and word. The whole lot.
Did I say … I am presently working on the frame and implications of Placental Language …

#theoracularother #placentallanguage #research #feminineecriture #language #feministtheory #notebooks

placental language

Writings at the blood-edge of language. Feminist theorist/poet developing a placental language theory: the language before disconnection through an access of soundage as love.

By Dr. Majena Mafe

(ahhmm,...) 

“... she had tried... really tried for quite a while now to do it, but the animal would not go into the blasted thing. This time she was able to pause though, if only momentarily and acknowledge the ridiculousness of the situation, before she lifted her chin, her throat, and firmly stuffed it, stuffed it quite hard, down the front of her blouse. And she did feel she didn’t care, didn’t care a hoot if anyone saw, if anyone was looking... which was something like waking up on a Saturday when life looked new and different and was not Tuesday.” 

Making writing. Making writing is always something. Something particular. And often peculiar. It is an approach less than. It is an approach more. than. more. or. for. It is an approach in making writing because. Herein is the making writing of the said, in saying, shown, down of the known, making it groan in writing, and there is the writing making of the unsaid, the unknown as the now known, writing, though sometimes known as underwriting. 

There is the making of writing that is thinging that is spatial palatial making. There is a making of writing that is the small, some writing that is something that is nothing spatial and then is the un-spatial. There is the ma’k’n for making. ONCE on-nely, And repeatedly. And it is, is it knot, not made for the eye, the page to make of it, a made, it is just as sa-aid it is nothing, making. And there then 2 in the making of writing which to some writing makers, is making the sayed unknown unsaid in sayin’. Undone. The making that is not making/saying any one thing. but. the making of everymakingwrittenthing. and in repeat’n, watching-for, listen’n for, search’n 4 that made making in becoming is in making making writing. And this is making of (my) writing. 

There in, is the unmaking, unmade of writing. righting-sighting. It is indeed-instead sung. See it rung. Ring. And this is the fear-som-estly wrung, unstitched, unpicked leaps. Heap’n up. 

You’ll say... 'For a long time the trial of making the unmade makes made-fear.' 'Some‘thing doesn’t come.' 'Nothing.' 'too much.' 'Everything.' 'Some‘thing beautiful doesn’t come, some. most.' And this is the fulcrum ... then the trying to make will become of the anything made unmaking. Some’thing to come, some real and still thing made to become. 

There are slips. sure. There is felt loss. Once many times over the making will be a sort of nothing handed emptily back. This will repeat till tired out; and so with nothing, one will lean towards the break into the many of bitterest and sallow. echo  echo ech0

And this will repeat. repeat. repeatedly. But with each there is more now than the one making, the one making the made. There will be many tenuous tolds and perhaps holds in telling. All will be something added up to. Something much more. Will be said. In writing. There will be above all always be no shape that will hold anything...open. But there will be one one-shape, of shaping making writing made. 

In the making of writing, writing will be a strong refusal, ie the strong refusal of/for the tongue, for its mind to lie still. 

But inside the refused the maker of such writing will WILL-find a-way. 

To open the closed as all open was stilled and held. This is the awe/fullness that holds at making writing. At the edge of all probabilities a possibility making that spills and speaks the unnameable. What pours what flows out is an overflow withdrawn from the pressure to stop. To stop the making. And this is finally something. 

The pressing making will your lisping lie anxious, gulping at instances, sighing at times, at some space some voice sang to. This made will.will become the centre. It will.emerges as the softest-solution and is known as made and so sure is its becoming something some - one - thing that it scalds all other tenders shut and goes forward and onward inside itself. Inside itself. Itself made. Making, containing wider circumference-s. 

1. method of the field and the paths across it 
“... the processes that occurred outside, on the surface, sure, on the thing itself, once the chlorine had been applied appeared straight forward and deceptively simple. It was in essence, she knew, an orderly process. There was something. Then there was nothing. But within its own parameters, how it worked was a riddle to her. The bleaching, it felt, well it made her skin crawl. To the grey blouse that she’d put on fresh that morning it was an instant bleed. A type of blind haemorrhage. A move forward into an other state of blousedom not possible to go back from. As she spilled it towards her it burnt a white hole on her and then she felt the damp begin in on her. If it wasn’t for her foundation who knows where she would be at present...” 

There is always two. There is a surface, the ground. the furtilefield There is the stuff of the ‘thing’ on it. 

Separate from it. 

There is always two. Always too. There is ground, the paper the sheet, the body with stuff, the word the substance, the mark on it. 

... a word, an utterance, a cry. A Vowal. As one with one other, with line a gesture. A meander, a script, a chisel. (If given two words a sentence. Then within the inherent a sense a repeated rhyming of a rhythm breath. There is ground with rhythm on it. 

There are two. 

There are two. 

There is first one, then another. Then there are three. Three. 

Ground. Mark. 

Field. 

Field is sufficiently third. Filled UP. 

There is field made. There is the element meaning/unmeans. There is the bleeding between the two the three. There is the between the one two three. Bleeding between. 

There are substantial spaces. Between fielded making. The substantiated as space is full. In that fullness they are then empty. This is the field. (Within all substantiates and the substructure that translates are alot alot of parts, in good part, a little, in measure, a piece, a say, a share, a scrap, a cause, a concern, an interest, a party, a member, an organ, a limb). 

Fold the paper... place it in the mouth Chew on it, a paste a round ball, in the mouth. 

the fielding of playing the field 

“... inside that multi-storey, underground pay as you leave, the car was somewhere somewhere waiting for her to find it. And this she believed most strongly. All levels appeared the same to her and this was partly true. There was concrete and the ramping and other people’s cars everywhere...” 

The meister: ‘It is a field’. It is a ‘field’. Fields the fundament. (cry-ed-out on Monday...)
The field. Of making. 

But fields do not lie flat. Curved. Fields that are impossible space, improbable time. Fields potent full. Fields never literal or reasonable or is in any sense, anything any one thing. 

The field ‘in’ making is openness, an expanse, a ground on which a battle is fought, a region in which a force is effective, and the force exacted in such an area mirrored repeated back mirrored rythmed. 

The field is slow. 

There is a patience to a field. play There is a patience to a field-play, play’n field as it concisely connects in fundament and extreme, to itself, over and over and over again. It constructs with grace and is grace. 
Of the maker’s field all matters tangible are your flange and tange-able. There is a field in the whore. Trace. A word. It is the name.
It is. 

the paths across it (making) 

“... if she kept walking, the keys poised, purposely in the right hand, and raised ready for insertion, if she kept her ten toes pointed forward, one step before the other surely her inner compass or homing device or whatever it was called, would propel her to her means home. Suddenly she remembered she must not at any costs appear to be lost and at that precise point she knew positively she was very lost a very very lost snoogums. Stopping abruptly with this thought careening through the byways in the space between her ears she found herself lifting her right hand and inserting her key into the lock of a big shiny green car. This was the one for her she thought. Her key slid in effortlessly... She was home. She was home. But now she was most terribly lost. Why she could take anyway home she felt wildly...” 

All paths deviate, avert, bend, deflect, differ, digress, diverge, drift, err, part, stray, swerve, turn, turn aside, vary, veer, wander. All paths are in essence a multitude of points. Dots. Full stops. Pronounciatments. Places of particularity, stages, situations; they are summits and tips. Aims. Goals. Indents, intentions. They are motives and objects they are purpose, reason, cores. Essence. The heart. The crux, the meaning, the matter... Some are linked in streams, some are units, but all are deviations of the field. All deviations are one deviate. 

To straighten, itself, is to deviate
To right to sight
To realign
To ward off. At each site, each, there is one or 10,000 points of departure.
The edge is one point. It is a stream a multiple and still it conspires to silhouette. The edge of the body is one point to write down from, to write down from the edge. Has it filled from the edge, is it about to be filled? (the child's head silhouetted again and again on/at the page, its mouth, two lips sucking at white space...)
Matter courses fields that are deviations from the grace. 

Words do always push something somewhere. Their placing involves pushing at shapes that are alluded to by further words...The placement of just about pressure is indicated by word in relation to some such sucking space. All h-em-ty. One will swing up, push back, pack down. 

The pressure you will find is/has its own centre... 4 
The centre relates to another centre, and announces more. Does one enter the other, does one stand in defiance... of/to the other? 

“... rather than make tea or wash or iron or knit or clean the pool or do groceries or do anything she spooled words on the linoleum for hours and hours that afternoon, whirls of words...” 

2. of the method of nonsense (the unnamed, unseen, and the unheld) 

“... she had no idea where it had come from, of course. Or what it was
never having seen it before. But she knew she loved it. And, it was hers. Basically it had no label writ-named on it. So she called it... ness. It was her... ness.” 

This is the deepest cling caress towards, deeper than across; in three parts. It is not across it from the inside, an inside full of the necessary. It is an outer crossing. There are two methods of making. One made with love and one not. Not made with love. The making with love is the one to follow here. 

Of the method that is of something unknown there is its approach explored as a way. There are well versed grips. Forgotten. Open mouths. Sounding. Forgetting is one. In remembering, the body finds how one can not make method is this way. Three ways. Three ways remove three tools - three knowns. Here they are...Remove the eyes as the purveyor of clarity. The overseers - of the known. Remove the hand as tool - of the known. Remove the known - as intention of knowing. 

Lacking and the eye... a song 

“... she began in the bathroom by closing the lid...” 

Lacking the eye. unbacking the clarity of claritus. Behinding it. Close’n one eye. I am writing as skewed. If I close both eyes, one sound I am one again... operated. I am placed in. I am in. I am. Inside. The other one. The other. realm. I am through. Intooo so song. 

Lacking the I. In there amid great muffling pourings of amorphous amnesty lies word as an amendment atoned, a slithered skerrick unnamed, a fathom crossed slowingly and by the ‘nth degree of wonder. Another that in dark is everything light. Sense swim-min out in laps of flutter-fly to my limbs, my limbs, the writing limb, pressing out and is as inside of the saids fingerlings. 
Lacking the eye. Hearing roars. Even every silence is groaning loud. Telling writing... 

There is the, and the, the ... and the... signing of the sign writing which is nam’d over and over in bind until the sense of that sign goes grows. 

Lacking the eye. Writing breath(ing)s.
Lacking the eye. Writing/breathing beating breaths.
Lacking the eye. There is everything. In this. There is nothing. Writing what can’t be said.
Lacking the eye. If there is anything, if there is anyway to make at all, it lies within a singular breath. In the spot it will appear.
Lacking the eye. The recently blind, blinded in one, I, orientate to the centre and all new one eyeds ache their necks till tendons stretch and the neck with ease holds the skull with the one eye - central -. 

the unheld... dement the implement remove one hand to make it two from the heart 

“... with two hands in the one glove she was as an outcast, 4.00 tea was impossible, she was in the outer rim now, below the rest, the substrata of women with only one glove...” 

To dement the implement. The portholes of the iambic-limb merge as linear sprocket- holes of sigh’n/time, the arm is only one ‘O’ and the body twists so its centre is the shoulder of the one arm and this will never do as it folds to cover the heart and pushes. To repent, unmeant the implement. There are two arms in one embrace. Two arms are forthwith taken as the tool that has no centre of its own. One arm will write its way. One arm will write its own hand. Two arms elsewise will write samething between. 

It is too awkward. Write the back of this head, the inside of this mouth, the hair in this, your lap, the sky from the sea, the sigh from the knee, wonder, the slight with two hands... in too two throats.

To meant indent the implement. There is a moving down from the topdown. 

To fragment–frament the implement. There is a moving inandout and from the in the out is being outcast.

To insist the dement. to instil peril. This is more then only an upside, there is a squirm to no side. frill. drill. grill. shrill. trill. mill. Still there are two separates inverted... the implement. and the implement in ferment. There is a moving in and from the in then... 

“... once I was shown a secret. I was told it begins with placing of two fingers together, the thumb and the tip of the forefinger. Let the thumb feel the finger tip, I was told. And I did. Let the thumb be felt in turn by the finger... Now I was told here-in is the secret. Both can feel be felt at the same time. And in in-between is something some-other thing else only the subtlest of the sub can feel, write, say” 

“... once I saw a secret talking. Walking with an old black man and his grandson by a dry creek the little one picked up a stick and trailing behind him/us marked the ground with it as he walked and as we walked on in front of him. After some time the old man turned and turned on him and turned and roused on him. Did he know what he was doing... no... Did he know he was marking her belly in that way... with a no-thing to his mind?”

... the unrecognised at the centre: recurrences obviously 

“... she would call it by its ‘proper’ name... if only she could find it. It was there somewhere... just for the moment though there seemed to be too many propers...” 

“... the pool was not the thing of course, it was really the relationship she had with it that caused her to bring it up at first to bring it up at all really. It bothered her. And it always had. Right from the beginning. It had always felt like a tenant, to her, a tenant in her own back yard... ” 

The unrecognised. The field is open form. A forum with no edge. It is not the container for the form but form of form itself. It is wider than. More truncular. More.

The unrecognised. We reside. We are engulfed
The unrecognised. Blind dancing. If one move's at a pace that's rhythm is apart from the habit one has formed of oneself there are great gulps of open waiting. That word occur. That word. occur. 

The unrecognised. Blind wonder. If one lifts from one's brow all understanding there are suddenly the gaps between fulsome. Between the nothings.
The unrecognised. Blind self. If one suspends the pull back with its impatience, and self hate and doubt and horror... there it is, waiting. It is there. One thing. 

3. the method of advancing from ink 

“... the tiniest spiders, she had heard, launch themselves from high places
and make way all the while launching out across the gap, across space, across 
oceans and travel out. They build in spittle their raft as they proceed
ever forward. She was echoing their filament she thought, now as the bubbles in the sink moved ever onward and out out and down the drain. One would travel there she felt, one’s wish would go and out. On over and out.” 

To cross from one ocean to another... Columbus. Going forward is always away from somewhere. Somewhere is the pivot to travel into the wind instead of it at ones back. So launched. so so of the black toward’n the barque (sailing ship) itself. of itself. 

4. the method of arriving at... as 

“... love sure. She felt. Yes. The only thing to sing is that. There is more, most, mon- u-mention moments stacked between the lips, over when it swells and swells biggestly and goes nowhere fast and holds open all the fences and the gates swing so wide that the sky is all shine and smiles and soothed softness and sweetness and smooth silver smirks. In the colour of spittle in the puddles all is all aglow, all slippery swallowed, smitten with wonder. Moving in itself. It is all filled up with itself. Words and paper... all full of... itself. And when the I is filled up, in quiet sense when all other’s have left you/me, then all filled to fulling up there is then the full self, in the love. And the two do make quite something, stepped. Quite something is arrived at suddenly and repeatedly. That is love made...” 

5. the method of the deep gaze / writing is not a glance 

There are however two ways writing. Writing writing, making writing ‘is’ of its own. A move to the read (to blood). And a move to cordite (an explosive) to bright. There is also the further method/move between ‘as’ the two. There is both. Two are the method/moves for the self and each made lovingly. 

“ 1... she raised the knife from the board. The onion had turned a deep moist red. She lifted her hand slowly towards her face. Pain was not so much present as a thick, a throb of numbing, the room arched full with it. Everything looking on. At the tip of her finger was a large white bone.” 

“ one... she went to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the light and opened her mouth. She pulled the cotton wadding from her jaw, spiting a black clot into the sink. Opened again, and searched at the back in the dark, in the hole... there, there was bone there... and she could see it glowing.” 

“ won... she lifted the covers. She'd been waiting for this. And there... sure enough... was the seam sewn shut... her seam. She opened her shower bag took out the quick unpick that she knew would offer more for less, as it were, and began the second procedure on herself... that day. She knew the first was done under bright lights and the invisible would not be visible. Besides they would not have had the faintest idea what to look for - but now in the dark, (they were opening) - she would have a chance - (there was a peeling back) - to see for herself, (if she could stand it)... the light inside of her... (self). Inside her very red self she now realised...” 

If the move is made to blood to the body to flesh there is a dissection enacted. The form becomes separate. Is separated from itself. It is delineated at a clasping of metaphors as the flayed. The further move to light is a fathoming to its widest parameters through and through that decimated to a conduit that connects. Light will pour through all matter, all schemas, all liniments. All strategies. 

In removing the subject as concepted misinterpretation and staunching the minds propensity for the claritus of precision... the opening of fathoms begins a flow off sighing situations. Making writing. There are following pools of full flatness, there are repetitions, there are rhythms, there are parameters forming, there are stiffness’s both real and imagined. Here/There are glowings that spin, fluids that bleach, gaps that relate. There/here are segments of attenuated attention that gather moments together. There are great emptiness’s and silence and whispers and chill. In looking you are lost. 
And. Then... It is then you have arrived. 

“ ... and then she remembered the orderly told her a very strange story on the way to the theatre. A woman was taken to a pit that contained a lion... ‘now the lion was very old, ferocious and large, his yellow hair hung over his neck, he growled he roared... in all ways the lion appeared quite unconquerable,’ the orderly had said. ‘So that the woman was almost afraid of her own fear and would gladly have turned back if her promise to herself, and also the circumstances, allowed her to give up. No... instead... she approached the lion in his den and began to caress him. But the lion looked at her so fiercely with his piercing eyes that the woman could hardly restrain her tears. Just then she remembered that she had learned all during her life, that very many people had undertaken to overcome the beast and very few could accomplish it. She was unwilling to be disgraced, though, or to turn away, and she recalled several grips that she had learned. So she gave up the caresses and seized the lion so dexterously, artfully and subtly that before he was well aware of it the woman had forced the blood out of the lion’s body, even out of his heart. It was a beautiful red. She thought. She dissected the lion further and found... a fact which caused her much wonder...’ and this is the point, he said, ‘that his bones were white as snow and there was much more bone than there was blood...’ At first she couldn't make out why the orderly had told her this story... and what the woman had found... but then she realised... and then, well... then she knew.” 

I am a feminist theorist and poet working at the blood-edge of language. I’m writing on ‘other’ oraculars and developing placental language theory: examining how we spoke before symbolic order, through biochemical negotiation and umbilical tongue. I name what’s found there LOVE, as soundage - a love that, through the imaginal and the matrixial, acts as a material acoustic ‘becoming’ space. Women’s voices, the unsaid/unheard, other oraculars, the monstrous reclaimed, plus more, can all be found and ‘listenened’ for here. Overall, my work is research-led poetry. It is transdisciplinary. It is always speculative. It is always a cultural criticism, one that refuses the cut between body and word. The whole lot.

Remember, make an effort to remember, and if you forget ... invent. - Monique Wittig

#creativewriting #placentallanguage #umbilicaltongue #soundage #feministtheory #feministpoetics, #écritureféminine #philosophyoflanguage #languageresearch

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multi mary manifesto by majena mafe

She said something …

She: Mary, she said, say something.

… I am laying the table with one or two things (image of dissection table)

Me: the cloth is Mr Weiss’s ‘How to Subvert a Work’ -

The crockery is Gertrudes.

Knock knock …

Who's there, I call?

At the kitchen door, in the pot, at the foot of the stairs, the lunch guest … a monster of sorts. A wireless marionette, an actor without body, a voice without origin, a body without organs. Not phantasms, but frozen mutations of language, following Novarina's injunction: "articulatory...’

Meanwhile my multi-mary-festo is spread out as linen. Crisp.

I orate: number one refute common-sense now after yesterday

also, … no I refuse to make statements

+ exaggerate non-sense

2 ply the threads

2 don’t face The Facts

0 slur and mumble as much as possible
2 listen to, too, two the shape of words
3 privilege sound not grammar

7 ……………….

4

3 proceed as if sounding as sounded a digital opera (operation)

4 resist propaganda

5 act exuberant
5 cure culture

3 cacophony

3 cacophony

3 cacophony

3 be trans itions...

3 score the lot

3 write sounded-language

3 write it as incongruous
6 listen for the sound in / of things

6 look for meaning in the throat
7 make soapboxes

7 repeat myself

3 (    )

7 listen to me and not to them

8 honor the monstrous
8 speak in ‘other’ tongues

9 promote contradictions
9 look for the vertical
8 don’t use ‘others’ ‘othering-rules’

10 repeat myself … again
11 don't face facts

11 ventriloquise the ’facts’

22 I don’t know


12 get used to vertigo
13 slur and mumble

13 and again

13 honor mistakes


14 act act act exuberant


15 privileged sound over grammar

One I don’t know

16 refuse clarity
17 eat joy

17 sound the language, sound it
18 learn to fly from the Sally Field, the flying nun series
19 connect with dead super heroines wherever possible intimately
20 promote contradictions-become world-famous yesterday
21 be mischief
22 repeat myself, repeat myself
23 disrupt borders in department stores and in knowledge disciplines
22 steal shopping trolleys
25 act slowly... ha!
26 jump up and down, jump up and down
27 mark the edge, the center
28 use a lot of butter
Number 2 overshoot the 'mark'

All – given there is not enough - sing

She: pass me the peas.

I regularly write manifestos, I cannot in truth remember the number of this one.

I am a feminist theorist and poet working at the blood-edge of language. I’m writing on ‘other’ oraculars and developing placental language theory: examining how we spoke before symbolic order, through biochemical negotiation and umbilical tongue. I name what’s found there LOVE, as soundage - a love that, through the imaginal and the matrixial, acts as a material acoustic ‘becoming’ space. Women’s voices, the unsaid/unheard, other oraculars, the monstrous reclaimed, plus more, can all be found and ‘listenened’ for here. Overall, my work is research-led poetry. It is transdisciplinary. It is always speculative. It is always a cultural criticism, one that refuses the cut between body and word. The whole lot.

Remember, make an effort to remember and if you forget ... invent. paraphrasing Monique Wittig

#placentallanguage #umbilicaltongue #soundage #feministtheory #feministpoetics, #écritureféminine #philosophyoflanguage #womenwriters #womenphilosopherse #avantgardepoetry #feminist philosophy #thinkingwomen

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I think language has a mouth, she tries different ways to talk to us. She hasn’t given up. She is in relationship to us still …Yesterday she spoke to me as a tree. Today I heard her in an algorism. I’m happy to listen, (eager) and to use all the stuff out there to write (speak) from, and with, and within (eager). For me it is play. Quite serious play. Nothing is fixed black or white, good or bad … to pursue those arguments seems simplistic to me, but then I see everything as delightfully complex …

Everything is earth everything matters, I use my tools, … and my tools use me, I’m sure of that. I explore being in Mastery instead of being an expert (master), an idea put forward by Vanessa Andreotti in her recent book, Outgrowing Modernity, Navigating Complexity and Collapse … she is involved in creative seeding with an AI program feed-er (think nurturer) called Cinnamon Tea as part of her project Burnout for Humans, an example here. She champions a type of Meta relational paradigm, a vibrational alignment, a relational accountability and a sacred randomness … to move beyond critique into a praxis of strategic dis-investment with modernist thinking., Inviting us to recognise what doesn’t serve us and reinvest in nurturing structures and life ways that restore knowledge and the value of life, for all life’s sake.

Plan of being in relationship involves: participating deeply, metamorphosis and entanglement and outgrowing modernity …

Sure there will be consequences there is to every move, every step, but none is final. To speak is never neutral. We have all by now heard white hot fury, hate and ice and terror and shame … spoken and it spreads on out and around. And it too is awful.

Maybe one day language will just fold up, give up on us and itself and become a hummm …. mmmmmmmm.

I love how she keeps trying. (all oraculars)

Martin Amis is fearful.

Leonard Cohen is not.

‘Can you hear us ?

- Yes.

- What do we sound like?

- You sound like machinery.

- Is it nice?

- It is beautiful.

- What kind of machinery ?

- Ordinary, eternal machinery.’

Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers, p. 20

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SHE A diagram

A picture

A cat’s cradle

A child’s game

A web

A riddle …

And the frame of everything

NOTE 1 The cats cradle is a one string performance between two hands that draws out various patterns that tell. The space between the strings holds the transformative and ecstatic frame of the potential. Never the fixed. The space between words, the push and pull between meanings that placing them in relation to each other entails the richest source for a potential rereading of knowledge frames.

Pause.

NOTE 2 A genuine and serious problem exists. It is embedded in and about and around and tied up with and within language and the interpretation of realities. Strung within a myriad of cultural frames separate disciplines still privilege their own answers to their own questions, argued as they are within their own language frames. There is no room for two or three or four or more truths. The flow-on is that certain and even particular ideas (gasp) are refused. Not heard, not seen. This blindness, to that which is excess to a discipline, and to themes that in themselves are thought of as excessive, has its roots in language and the saying of that language. In slang the excess, the too much, the too big to fit is known as a ‘whopper’. The articulation of the too big, described as the dance of the tongue (think glossolalia), is known as a whopa. Said to be untrue because of their size, the whoppers in life (and in disciplines) are nevertheless named and named in terms that are derivative or along the same line as its own refusal. So while a whopper is the too much, by its own root a whoppa is how to articulate that ‘too muchness’. The transgressive slang of language holds a space for jouissance and its articulation as it tests and tries and squeals the excess of language.

NOTE 3 Transdisciplinarity (as a practice) is a ‘whopper’ of transgressions and excesses its territory is between, across and beyond disciplines of art, literature, theory etc etc. It is images and text and moving images. It is the sandwich in your hand the pattern on the crusts. Not really but maybe. It is the too big for disciplines, it that which bangs at the walls of disciplines, it is a meta model, a meta discipline … and like a whopper one wonders if it is too good to be true. Nevertheless, as an approach it actively and performative-ly extending the boundaries between and within disciplines, linking knowledge frames whilst questioning their empirical processes and opening them towards complexity and diversity. It also draws together disciplinary generated knowledge and non-disciplinary generated knowledge and applies this integration to a broad and complex set of issues. This transgressive act consistently and intriguingly brings up the problems inherent with language. The problem of how to say what’s meant and what to do with the too much of saying, with what doesn’t fit- but must nevertheless be said.

NOTE 4 The connection between transdisciplinarity and creative practice is especially evident in the cases of creative practices and theory moving towards performative extremes. Practices with excess as its subject matter know this. And for practices that use excesses in language as a gesture of representation it is even more of an issue. The space of language and by this I mean its linguistics must start to take into account the non-linguistic. This is the natural push and pull, the making and collapsing of meanings that occurs through placing words in relation to each other. It is the play of knowledge as it seeps through institutional structures and disciplines and through language itself. Language like knowledge is inherently transgressive. The fluidity of words and the skewed relationships between them draw to the fore new ways of making meaning, through new forms of both art and text and new ways of creating them.

Transdisciplinary practice is formed from the refused or excess of knowledge or their overflow. All knowledge frames even slang have this space. But given this, its key principle is the sourcing and acknowledgment of the myriad existence of levels of ‘truths’, realities and the logic and of the assumed middle range of truth in spite of its real complexity. Transdisciplinary practice performs these understanding as the shape of potential. It is concerned with the dynamics of this potential. Its works through engagement with the present world as a shifting field or event rather than any fixed reality. Emphasis is on this engagement, investigation and participation in addressing present day issues and problems in a manner that explicitly destabilizes boundaries all the while respecting disciplinary expertise. In language and in literature this has entailed moves towards that which is too big for it to hold…and a way to say any ‘thing’.

NOTE 5 Definitions of words are slippery and unstable in themselves. They spill over. The word whopper sometimes pronounced whoppa is slang used to refer to a gross untruth, the incorrect, but it also can be used to refer to something exceptionally big or remarkable. The word is derived from whop (v.) which is a Welsh word ‘to beat, or overcome’. It’s meaning of ‘big lie’ is recorded first in 1791, as the term whopping, that is ‘large, big, impressive’ it is recorded in 1625. (Online Entomology Dictionary) In the Urban Dictionary it is split into a myriad of meanings. Whopper here refers to something of great size and a complete lie, something great as in good, not surprising perhaps it also refers to ‘an obscene yet alluring female’, small malted milk balls, and the breasts of Wendy in Wendy’s Whoppers- 50’s soft porn film. At the same time it refers to a sandwich that will make your jaws ache its sooo big… There are whoppers of lies and excess.

NOTE 6 Another word whopa is linked to whopper. Whopa, is the outburst itself… the breathless expression of the object detailed as a “paroxysm of excitement” of that too big for speech even. (Urban Dictionary).

NOTE 7 Whopper as a term holds dichotomies perhaps too big for it. It breaks into whopa to exclaim, gesture towards the jouissant, it performs that which is too big in its paroxysm.

NOTE 8 Is this excess which is pointing to the real accommodated for in the gestures of transdisciplinary practice? And is the excess of the whoppa the same space of jouissance? The space of jouissance is beyond language, order and sense. Jouissance is diametrically opposed by the symbolic indeed it is refused by it. The spaces in language that already border the ‘order’ such as slang, sounded language,…are closest to it but are not it, butt hey play at the edge of it ... they expand it.

Pause. Essay interlude.

THE STAGE IS SET … (anticipation)

ACTORS Narrator’s SHE and HER, Voices of the Disciplines, Miss Gertrude Stein, The Chorus of Whoppers, The Tunnel of Love and The Cats Cradle.

STAGE DIRECTION This essay uses a transdisciplinary schema as a literal play between diverse knowledge frames; a double barrelled word in slang, and an aspect of the work of Gertrude Stein, to perform an excess of language found in both of them and to highlight similar and diverse aspects of this sort of meaning making in its nature. In considering play as a bridge between frames of meaning and non-meaning and their interrelationship I will ply between the index finger and the ring finger a connecting thread.

The very ideological precariousness (uncertainty) of such a space makes this stage the marginal of the refused.

Curtains up.

VOICES OF THE DISCIPLINES Theory. Philosophy. Literature. Psychology. Critical Theory. Art. Lacan wrestles with Freud’s notions of desire and jouissance as an excess for theory and for the psyche. The French feminists Irigaray and Kristeva introduce a specific feminine jouissance that is beyond binaries and beyond language as a signifier. Deleuze develops Jung’s idea of the Rhizome to describe theory that sees itself as multiple, non-hierarchical in terms of representation and interpretation. Cixous is writing and espousing ‘ecriture-ly about knowledge coming out from the body, and the writer A group of girls dressed as whoppers are telling lewd joked about knockers and vibrating tongues. Psychology is asking why and Philosophy is wailing why why why why not. Gertrude Stein opens her mouth and begins elucidating about how to write. The whole is performing. Language is in the midst of shift and displace, un-bordering something within itself.

NOTE 5 Stein’s work has implications in the fields, in the dining room and perhaps more. Her language is more than text it is visual as well. Stein’s words are pink. And this is important because the visual has perspectives on jouissance or on what in art is called the excess/ the sublime the abstract that intersect with language in profound ways. And these forms of art I am, oh so briefly hinting at, are not just images but the ruptured image…meaning in the abstract that I would now like to bring in. Art has a well tested and articulate ladder of abstraction- modernism, played out in colored mud that language can avail itself of in terms of transdisciplinary approaches.

Art enters stage right carrying its ladder of abstraction which it promptly undoes on the spot as a series of threads and flows without edges. It is kissed by Literature. Sound and Text giggle and squirm behind them.

NOTE 6 Why would it? Because in terms of tracing new lines and connections between separate disciplines creating new language frames or resonances for the perceptible and the thinkable though a vibrating, sounded language, the work of art has already established a language and a language for the language. The French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere synthesizes the idea of trandisciplinarity in relation to art that is applicable to other practices. In a recent interview, Ranciere provides a framework for an approach for interdisciplinary work that promotes a ‘neutralization of hierarchies’ that govern our sensible experience using art as a model. Ranciere interprets contemporary art and movements within it in such a way as to offer new criteria for reflecting on art, its methods and modes of production, that also has implications for other disciplines and for the space between them. He describes all disciplines bar art as excluding of ‘other’ fields through delineations of borders, their own and others. The act of definition in disciplines in general then, is actually a “double operation of exclusion”, if we see that they exclude the other as well as the others knowledge frames. Art, poetry and experimental writing, borrow freely and seemingly indiscriminately from other disciplines. Ranciere describes art’s creative bordering of difference as an attitude that is a-disciplinary or in-disciplinary rather than interdisciplinary, in that modern and contemporary art holds and pushes the ideal of no borders. But still more needs to be said.

Pause.

HER The paradox…given that to speak of real-real or true truth is impossible in both text and language, but remembering that language makes tangible the intangible ordering of human consciousness I proclaim the beauty of the whopa!. Language as discourse is full of riddles and half truths and multiple mis-truths that work as a filter that stops stuff/ideas from coming through (into culture). So slang. Slang is the taboo, the picture language, the graffiti of the tongue, the transgressor with no face.

CHORUS

Whoppers move to stage one separately in one matching costume. Sighing and sniggering respectfully. All together…

Knock knock…Did you hear the one about Language not shape’n your reality?

SHE (turning to HER) A whopper is a lie not easily swallowed. The undigested is pretty weird (weird- a medieval word meaning it just is). It is full of tropes, loops, gaps and double distenders (think garters). It makes up stories, does impromptu stand-ins and ‘performs’ for (other) objects… ha! a type of textural drive-by/asylum/squirm comedy when seen under the spotlight, it plies itself as culture in our bodies much like the ‘other’s other’ and goes marching on in the abstract, full of mis-meanings perversely masquerading as the true blue blue truth. Given that it lies along side it also lies, damn it, inside itself. Language, unexamined is busy displacing, disrupting and cutting off the depths and heights of how far a human and especially a woman can say or be said to go… show… say and perhaps, yes o dear… be. It’s nothing personal it’s been said, but those limits are whoppers that stifle the whopa’s of a gals oversized, abnormally normal, paroxysms of excitement and pleasurably pleasured ec-stas-y.

CHORUS (spittingly) The big fib endlessly discomforts. Now this is a drag… literally.

HER There is not one ‘true’ aesthetic there is a veritable plethora of them, the strings quiver, a big constellation of possible strategies strategically possible for writers aiming at critiquing ‘ruling identities and stultifying frames of expression’.

A large image of a woman singing worlds is held up by a short fat man walking across the stage.

SHE and HER Gertrude’s tongue sighs a ‘resembled self’ as speech can not be laid flat… let alone stood up or placed in, or out of. The rigid is turned flexibity. She is not firm. She sings. She has not settled. She is not the text or the image of it. She redefines sense. The voice of both self and the field operates in does not obey, it/she vibrates, effervesces in herself, as her ‘open-est’… making the text describing her/it/that, purely and necessarily appropriately xxperimental-est. Her culture is her context. The linear becomes vertical. This is an eroticized and perverse expanded field. It can-not not be. There is the sort of literacy of notions abounding and intersecting each other… saying SINGING ‘her’ through her saying, a multiplicity and plurality of her, and it all (at last) transgresses language and makes it constantly anew. Phew. So let’s not whimper whisper, ‘otherness’ is folded into a Miss Stein’s text interfaces (ex-perience).

Do we call it phenomenology or philosophical readings of what it is yet to be? There is a register differentiation. What are the questions then to make us all think differently? Stein says the question is the event. This is liter-ate as meant. A whole happiness. A whole lot as happening-s.

Enter Miss Gertrude Stein swinging off a cat’s cradle made out of pink rubber, suspended from the ceiling.

MISS GERTRUDE STEIN (Mouth full of words.) ‘Do you believe in singling.’

Enter stage right- Tunnel of Love dressed as a song.

TUNNEL OF LOVE (clears throat) ahmm, because…whatever you might like to say or try to say, the best-est reason to embark on this journey, towards the beautiful and beloved other, across any terrain, is the P-L-E-A-S-U-R-E of the ride. The perverse flowing sounded-ness-es of the journey of the meeting at every point will rattle your sense of the lie as it shows you what must be laid down. And when you arrive you are full of its arriving. This is a bargain you buy. Where to get on? Every outside the inside, that’s where. Outside the frame the truth the discipline. Anywhere outside? It need be a place busy in rubbing till erasure of its forms un-limits. There is always waiting for you a type of euphoria of the sweet. Once out here, in here, dear one, you are free from the anguish of the referenced as other as herself. Past meaning, turn right at the double dip there is the type of euphoria that occurs when she writes/speaks past unspeakable meanings, waiting just for you. Gertrude Stein knows it.

A hand passes across stage scrawling …To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.

MISS GERTRUDE STEIN ‘Kiss my lips. She did. Kiss my lips again she did.

Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did. I have feathers. Gentle fishes.

Do you think about apricots. We find then very beautiful. It is not alone their colour it is their seeds that charm us. We find it a change. Lifting belly is so strange I came to speak about it…’

HER (note to self) Stein’s notebooks contain diagrams of meaning not yet noted… The dipping and diving, into sense and non-sense, using language as a deadly serious playground to undo itself with lets face it a can opener is a risky business. Stein rode ink. One needs lose oneself and will, in the tunnel of love, plastering graffiti on its wall with one hand, whilst stripping the ghost train bolt by bolt running through it with the other. One needs to loose oneself.

Whoppers assemble at the rear of the stage in a horse shoe shape.

NOTES 7 (ON WHOPPERS) Speaking slips of the tongue, is a reference to the disjuncture between language and experience going on for sooo long…a long slide, a saying at the edges of the edges and within the margins of what’s possible… ‘saying’ in the broadest and most basic ways possible what is it to be for centuries. The truth is that there is no truth. The margins now are so very full. In the gutters of books, spiced with asides, fibs are now everywhere through the text, they are the text. What is the fib the limit the border now? How far can we go?

We have always discerned that language frames carry perversions of power differentials inside them busily shaping both culture and the self into myriad shapes, grotesqueries, flabigasteries as well as gaping holes of silence-s. Pitch forks. Whopper-s a-working. But now the sound of whoppers are at play, in the mix, dancing even on the rope as a didactical language, in grotesqueries and extremes, in punning winces that are shaped to reflect languages distortion back onto itself… that keep doing it… that don’t settle… and don’t stop… These whoppers are ours. Our tongues. Our other frames. Other disciplines…The big fibs and fibbers wrote closure but the new ones write against it, opening beyond measure, just one gag after another in a deadly serious cacophony of puns that are more than just buns in the oven… it is a new kitchen, in a new house on new land.

Now these whoppers or fibs dressed up a bit, think of the not so shy bodice ripper of Wendy’s Whopper-shot on super8, tack-lurex, think sequins, think show-girls, are very noticeable, especially when looked at from textual gutters. They shine. And they do things. They take matter and matters increasingly into their own hands. They reshape the central. They pull reason apart. And if loosely corralled, with a certain sideways glance, a rope as big as the world is wide…these whoppers turning into whopa’s… (that’s interesting in itself).

What does the redefined sense mean to the vertical pull? It must be up. And out.

Whopper/Chorus girls move across stage carrying billboards with text and pictures on. They are wearing nakedness from the chin up. They sing, sigh and say…

GIRL ONE (Dressed as Wendy Whopper) I speak for necessary whoppers - these are textural or contextual situations where lying is low and lying down or up is essential to carry the tits sorry texts capacity to function as fizz.

GIRL TWO (Dressed as the big hamburger) Useful whoppers – these are disinformations and various misrepresentations common in language everywhere, all over, running down your chin honey. In their place whoppers are often not direct fibs but rather spins put on events. (girls spin around) Weeeee. These, as well as various other withholdings of informations, schemings and so forth are done for strategic gain. The fibbing text may be forced to have recourse to secrecy or dis-informing or dis mentioning in order to be able to maintain a position in or out of the world which is for the most part hostile to such endeavors.

GIRL THREE (Dressed as malted milk balls) I represent useless and perennial whoppers - text lie’n out of habit, (watch it- careful) and give’n false impressions in order to please or be socially accepted, (think good latex). Exaggerating languages accomplishments and hiding its failings, all in the context of regular small talk. Such lying is at times unnecessary but can be used in the service of dissipating stuckness and subtly or substantially increasing new frames for subjectivity. Have a suck.

GIRL FOUR (Dressed as too much) Lily white whoppers… (ahmm) whoppers will sometimes be accessorized and motivated by noble motives such as concern for the true facts of others. Fortunately the truest word does not change the whir-ld. Sluring.

CHORUS (in a sing song voice- bit preachy) All together now. Whoppers are the too much. One consequence of fibbing is increasing the fictionalization of little ‘I’s, where one little ‘I’ misleads or Ms Reads another, thus going directly contrary to the goal of forging an internal unity. Another effect of whopping is increasing the effect of dis-discernment. But be warned habitual whopping promotes sleep and introduces internal noise conflicting with the signals from those parts of self which do not believe the lie to self. So beware.

MISS GERTRUDE STEIN (encouraging the audience to sing – to stand up, waving her short arms in the air) ‘You are sure you know the meaning of any word. Leave me to see. Pink. My pink. Hear me to-day. It is after noon. I mean that literally.’

HER Whilst there are other (lots of) social, cultural and psychological techniques of locking ‘truth’ in, so too are there equal techniques for mocking/locking it out. And particularly in relation to the self, unlike auto suggestion and hypnosis, slippery, slithery text soaked frames and their voices creating a radical and tangible perspectives that is ex-seed-ing-ly valuable in terms of a fervent re writings of both truth and the self’s limits. In this writing sure, there is both the shock- a jolt of alterity, and the pleasure of that same alterity, at the same time, and there is also a sense of inviting that in even though we do not know what it is. Both reek PLEASURE. Unstill and unseamed. The voice that is esteemed stable or sort of unable is gone.

Chorus lifts in to the air (rope pullies)

CHORUS Singing.

Everything sings. Everything is sing’ings.

CHORUS repeat in a staccato rhythm … said… sayed… said… sayed… said… sayed

MISS GERTRUDE STEIN Belted out in a loud sing song voice ‘Do it. What a splendid example of carelessness. It gives me a great pleasure to say yes. Why do I always smile [smile smile].’

Music swells. All otherness enters the stage.

HER and SHE

HER and SHE This is our theme song. Link’n whopas. Singing burly lullabies to our own towing tongues. Who was it/she that said nothing? What as nothing did she show and say? And how did her rosy lips shape it? The almost insurmountable, luckily, does not preclude an almost deadly serious examination of potential approaching approaches toward the gap’n silence. Approaches that must by their very nature begin towards language’s edge but further out inside it, lie as a gag, as a mouth piece that talks. Changing concepts as the spatial frames central to language, structured round distance and time, screen’n or sift’n the felt sense of the moment of experience elsewhere… lead to else here whoppers gallop into whopas, ply’n across language frames that exclude, by a re-positing of a un-common knowledge variant as an alternative frame of reference-being…new techniques as transgress’n practice.

The all act like a herniation of the frame of the thread (think fibs in bloom) think juice think song, inserted in the code as they occur as slight asides. Her-Miss Re-present-ations and She take a backward step, uttering utterances both within language and the literary, working hard at that edge of subjectivity know as ‘we know that’, to redefine both itself, themselves and the self in terms of a broad new and even untrue language as emerging exceptionally large pleasure.

NOTE 8 (FINAL) What cannot be said in one language is found can be said in another, spilling outwards and outwards and towards….

THE STRING OF THE CATS CRADLE My current aim is to reactivate and articulate events such as these in raffia. No it isn’t.

Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. New

York: Routledge, 1990.

Drafts 1-38, Toll. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press 2001. (p 60)

Online Entomology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/ 10.5.08

Retallack, Joan. What is Experimental Writing and Why do we need it?

Jacket Magazine No 32, April 2007.

Stein, Gertrude. Lifting Belly. The Yale Gertrude Stein. ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980.

The Urban Dictionary. http://www.urbandictionary.com/

#placentallanguage #umbilicaltongue #soundage #feministtheory #feministpoetics, #écritureféminine #philosophyoflanguage #womenwriters #womenphilosopherse #avantgardepoetry #feminist philosophy #thinkingwomen

Remember, make an effort to remember and if you forget ... invent. paraphrasing Monique Wittig

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Dear friends, I write to you about how …

An Other Woman … listened

Another woman, a writer, in trying to understand ‘the whole lot,’ … decided to listen to what people said. Gertrude Stein walked the streets in towns and cities and stopped to ask people what they were doing? And how were they doing it? And people told her. They told her in everyday language in the simplest of terms about the digging of holes, about the mending of concrete, and the building of walls, about the baking of bread and the stitching of clothes, about the walking of dogs and the minding of children, about the aches in their hips and what they were cooking for dinner. They told her about what was in their shopping bags, about the things in their lives. The new things in the old. They told her a list of things that fall out of a mouth when one is asked for talking to happen. Their voices were cheery, their voices were weary, their voices were explanatory, and silly. They told riddles. They mocked the government as they talked about their love of family. Their wife’s name. Their children’s names. That their mother had died. That they were alone. That they were together. They told her who they were. In the ways they … had.

Gertrude Stein

Listening to voices became sound like a stutter

I myself had had a life full of listening. But this had not dawned on me until I considered it as something. For it seemed to me this part of me was as if dumb or numb. It wasn’t until I found Stein’s taking listening so seriously and she did, that I began to see I hardly knew that the thing I was doing or something.

Some bleed language, some are and were silent

When I was a child, I had one parent who bled language complaints pains sometimes obscenities drunken rants suicide threats and I wished my ears were closed to that. And the other parent was completely silent, though they were the ones I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear this parents voice more than anything. The circumstances of my childhood meant that I was isolated, and fed from only a particular use of language, and I was isolated too, from my brother. One such example of this was my desire to talk and hear him that I created a device much like a clothesline, but it was a message carrying cord linking our bedroom windows where we could swap messages to each other in the night undisturbed because they were written and so unheard.

Sensitivities

Maybe this is why I went on into adulthood with a high sensitivity to listening to others or maybe it was some other reason that turned into a gift. When I went on into nursing I carried it with me. I listened for the sounds in people’s bodies and then their cries of pain and joys, the joys of good news, cures, of remissions of babies born and their first cry. I went on to work as a body therapist and counsellor listening to the sounds in their people’s voice. And in what they couldn’t say. And in the world which privileges the visual I put the sensitivity into art practice then degrees then research degrees grappling with theory and philosophy and a male centred world of knowledge.

Gertrude Stein writes about ‘something else’

I had read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans in my early teens. It is a huge book and it’s filled with people’s voices and what those voices said. And before the end of the book Gertrude Stein has heard and recorded for us a whole family and more ... generations of people, speaking and revealing themselves and their relating, not just in their words but in ‘something else’ she heard in them.

Stein taught me

Stein taught me that when you listen to what people say and how they say it and you listen very carefully you begin to hear sound. And you hear that that sound has qualities. Voice – Language – Sound, that they weave together like a long, long braid. A plait of becoming. There is sounded language like ‘crunch’ or ‘splat’. There is sound in language like rhymes and rhythms. And yet, at times, there was something else that I began to hear. I learned that by applying a particular ear, trained up by reading Stein, to what was spoken … I began to hear something like silence. Not a lack of words. But something missing in their words. Even amid the most verbose speaker’s and their diatribe, there was some censoring, some gates on the tongue.

every tongue has a unique tongue print

Women’s Voices

And I began to hear this more and more in women’s voices in particular. I heard it in my own and it made me cringe and then feel sick, imprisoned almost and I wondered about it, and I wanted it to be free whatever it was. It wasn’t until I decided to do further research into language into women’s language voice being inspired by French feminist theory that I reconnected with Stein, and I found within her very large collection of writing a little-known book called Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother.

Though the title points to being about herself and her brother, it is not. It is a great sweeping frame for voice and sound and women’s voice in particular. Within its cover, (undercover) is a very different story, a language speaking almost in code. It is pure sound. On entering the book, on both reading it but also listening to its text, to its voice, and hearing what it is talking and in this reading, it becomes evident it is about sound in language.

SOUND

“Sound is coming out of her,” says Stein, and “… sound is coming out of her coming out of her, sound …” Stein goes on to say. In this work, she offers us an instruction manual for listening to a particular sound in women’s voice that she goes on to explain, is a thickening sound, sourced and generated in itself, by a type of relationship, even within and by the text itself. It is an ecstatic unnamed but nevertheless present, that is outside the frames of common knowledge or understanding of what’s possible, outside of social order, and even if not especially outside language itself … that is, that there is a sound, in language in voice, that is love.

Research

I went on to do my PhD on both my fascination with and my struggles to score that book, using it as an instruction manual to hear. And ever since I’ve been digging for that sound like a hole in my tooth or my jaw even finding it here and there, but more often finding it not, but still digging out techniques to attempt to extract it, hear it, writing scores for it, building ventriloquist dummies, building and writing operas, willing my tongue to generate it, and then make it available to other’s ears.

Operas and Scores

still from Digital Opera Soundage Majena Mafe

I must acknowledge that my space on Substack is a further attempt, another project among many, to do just that, extend my listening project, my ear, further. It has taken me a while to realise how I want to write in my letters to you about this space of becoming a good listener (on all levels) but also how to become open to ecstatic utterances from the past. Dredging up lost voices, pairing them with ideas that open them anew is gruelling work but very important work I feel. So this space will be the thing itself. Vibrating. Both that and the paths I take to both hear it and generate it.

At the same time as writing my letters to you on Substack, I am writing a mythopoetic, fairy story come horror story. Its protagonist is a Detector that doesn’t have a mouth, and her sidekick is her trusted sassy ventriloquist dummy. They search history looking for lost voices, women’s voices, and its sound, who might have echoed this quality. Though thought to have been lost for centuries, they engage a plethora of women, listening to them giving their own unique monologues about what they said about what was heard about what was not heard … in many forms and contexts … to ply them together to form a lexicon, a type of chorus for lost sound …

To accompany my journey, which is not linear, but circulatory built on echoes, I will in these letters to you focus on some of my (and the detectors) findings … I’ll write more, much more, about obscure oracles, about sirens voices that were thought, lost with Ulysses but they weren’t, about prayers from Isis still fresh carved as they are into coffin lids - untouched for centuries, pleas from mother’s mouths, Grendel’s mother the goddess Echidna, the mother of the Muses and memory, Marie Antoinette as a mother raging weeping pleading for her son ... I want to hear them all.

I’m especially interested in women’s voices from the margins, from midwives, hedge witches, those that have been locked away, unforgotten, and those that were burned; their testimonies of bewilderment and sassy ridiculing parroting of their accusing voices. I’m interested in mystical testimonies, and what the Sumerian goddess of the underworld, Ereshkigal, cried out in her grief, the voice of the Python and the Pythia at Delphi long before Apollo was ever thought up … When did women’s voice rise up, and when did they fall. Silent. And in all of my explorations I will bring you with me, in the hope that we can both hear what has been muffled, silenced, dismissed, suppressed, strangled, maimed and ridiculed in women’s voice.

I hope you will join me.

I hope you will tell me what you hear …

References:

Gertrude Stein - The Making of Americans, Being the History of a Family's Progress originally published in 1925

Gertrude Stein - Two: Gertrude Stein & Her Brother, 1951

My publication, "‘Other” oraculars, has a dark history, one that some of you might relate to and might find it interesting to hear about as it affects what I post and what I say. A lot. And that is various forms of the closed ear.

I’m all about hearing what people are saying, (but esp. women), and how they are saying it. The reason for this interest seems obvious to many of us. Women have been silenced, gagged, overridden etc etc erased out of history and culture and even their own bodies, off their very own tongues … for a very very long time. In fact one has to go all ’pre-history’ to even begin to find a space where we were not. And even there, there is a gaping silence quieter than … … well its silent. My wacky plan is to fill in as many of these voices as I can. So I am making work along those lines, doing monologues, painting speech bubbles, writing essays and novels and posting here.

Still its an impossible task you say. And your right, especially if you are thinking evidence based, linear research, verifiable references … from key players in the field sort of a project.

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But then here comes me with my herstory of being placed at the edge of these ‘traditions’… repeatedly, traditions where only certain ways of speaking are seen as valuable or valid or even HEARD!

And as a consequence certain frames for thinking are seen as very problematic.

Consider my favourite quote by Monique Wittig, … (I’m paraphrasing)

‘… if you can’t remember … invent.’

Thats the sort of artist/writer I am.

majena mafe - detail gauche gouache

And this is not a problem for me. Invention. Plying material from the imagination. But it is very much a problem for some. Especially within the academic framework.

But back to the drawing board. In this post I want to talk about my own voice and its journey. It has been a dance more like a jig, across academic dance floors. (In a later post I want to talk about the joys of being brazenly dyslexic and synesthetic.) Because it has been more like thrust and parry than a waltz … and I know why, but I just wanted to flag it here as a problem, not just for me, but for all voices. Yes yours. And yes this is still going on. I hear it daily. It was only last week I saw a comment by a substack researcher referring to her audience as ‘children’ for not affording her the respect she felt she rightly deserved, academically and culturally. Maybe she was having a bad day but this isn’t new it happens all the time. Where one voice thinks it is the only voice, a special voice, and gets nasty if its authority is challenged. This is a sad state of affairs and also quite silly.

majena mafe - gauche gouache

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… anyway this is not a point worth fussing over.

But what I did want to fuss over is that there are many voices, repeat many, … but even more importantly … there are many more ways of hearing each other.

I know, I claim that I am a trans-disciplinary artist/writer. I draw, paint, make films, write, stitch stuff, jam things together, make off jokes that sort of thing.

And I work this way because there are many ways to express oneself and many frames through which to open your ears from which to hear me, from. Some ears are just more generous than others.

My academic career-dance is littered with problems because of this dynamic, the one I call the closed ear. Not really a problem for me at this stage of my life, though it was - because what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger as they say - but it was more of a problem for the frames I was involved in, supervisors, departments, universities frames and lets face it the CANON of reason - (fold in value). Because truth be told, my work and myself was a problem because it didn’t fit. It stretched at the walls the assumptions, and ultimately at the sacred truths.

In the end it boiled down to not just what I said being the problem.

But how I said it, how I spoke ... with many tongues.

There were funny instances of being bullied into writing like my superviser who thought writing should be written ‘her’ way, and one way only (you know who you are) & (red rag to a bull) Other thrust and parries attempted to carve me up into what I could name myself, choose or be treated like death, I could be a writer or an artist (as I so obviously was), not both. There were many many instances of being interrupted, talked down to, shamed, dismissed and infantilized and ultimately not being ‘allowed,’ (how silly) to follow a line of thought because it was too complex, or ambitious or open ended. It was seen as necessary to have a tight argument and to stick to it. So that real curiosities could not be followed. So that there were no loose ends. No looseness, nothing generous. And time, time frames squeezed a life’s time of thinking into a few years. And I know, I know I was barking up the wrong tree. Barking and doing a tarantella. I could have gone it alone. And I did in the end. Not though till after I’d learnt all I could about what and how suppression kills and silences. And whom. And ultimately I’m grateful, it has shaped my thinking which now is ferociously independent. I choose the portals I think best for what I do to do in.

Open frames that I found and embraced were those of interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinarity, experimental, wyrd, creative-practice researcher, hybrid-er, camp and camp monster-er, outsider, surrealist, craft-er, ‘women’s -worker, female impersonator, Language poet (didn’t stay there long) ventriloquist dummy and manager-ess, ficto-critical theorist, post-modern poetics joker, feminist goes without saying.

Given this fruit basket (said with respect to fruit) it wasn’t just because I thought through image as well as text that my work was considered ‘wrong’ it was the things those portals allowed me to think and then say …

majena mafe - gauche gouache

The influence of the surrealists imagery jammed with ribald jokes voice quotes from the 50’s, the juxtaposition of mythic(s) testimony with Gertrude Stein’s work presented as a ventriloquised opera, both seen as scores for a new type of language. my work and the approaches I use to tell it, blew a lot of frames and disciplines open, so much so I didn’t and still don’t fit in any one camp. No thats not it … they aren’t big enough for me.

I know thinking is hard. We all struggle with the gate-keepers inside our minds as well as those out there guarding the thresholds. But while we are pushing at the boundaries of whats known, and understood, moving in a breadth instead of a line can have its benefits. Such a mind can be charged and generate flexibility, seeing playfullness as wisdom, offering a place for unacknowledged knowledge frameworks to play out, shake’n them up, see’n afresh old ways of thinking, revisit’n ideas, people and things that have been left in the margins … and giving them voice.

majena mafe - gauche gouache

‘She said she wood and wouldn’t’ at the same time. Even I am learning how to listen better - more - more completely. Ultimately this isn’t a call to treat each other better, perhaps we are trying to do that already in our heart of hearts. If anything its a signpost to listening better and further, just that bit further out and leave room for other voices in their multi-portals to be respectfully included. Anyways all that is behind ‘other’ oraculars as well.

I appreciate your support and interest. If you like my work please comment below or forward this article to someone else today.Thanks for reading 'other' oraculars! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Image: Majena Mafe, quote on photo is from Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.

Haraway. I’m reading her Staying with the Trouble, gobbling it up.

And I’m noting she says, how I love what she says …

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” Haraway

Thats why I so enjoy Gertie Stein’s work, that’s where I started going off the path … the space she makes for ‘this’ (languaging) to wind out, unravel, include all, or more … it turns the ‘whole lot’ into a becoming place, unfixed, sounding.

Has anyone read her book, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother? It’s about sound in voice / text / language / women / … / … and stuff that gets wilder and wilder. In fact (I hate that word) its the wildest ride you could ever take in language, iy’ll turn you inside out, its monstrous, mystical …

Notes:

Donna J. Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Gertrude Stein. Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother

Majena Mafe is an author and a disruptor of dumb frames of thinking. She researches women’s voices and unacknowledged knowledge: the particular, la petite histoire, the wisdom of the Oracle, delivered as it is a form of transmission from a linguistic auditory dimension, to be heard anew. She recovers suppressed ways of knowing - knowledge encoded in embroidery patterns, herbal wisdom, and domestic practices - knowledge that circulates through women’s hands, hearts, and intergenerational transmission. In attention to the cultural and historical withdrawal of hearing them, as forms of knowledge and wisdoms sounding out in their own right.

I appreciate your support and interest. If you like my work please comment below or forward this article to someone else today.

Leave a comment

The first would be Gertrude Stein's, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother, which was not about her brother at all but about language and love and sound in it!!! Its a riddle in plain sight. Within ear shop almost, you could say. It spells out how love is returned to language by hearing the 'her' that is in us all. It is a book that in hearing hears sound speak.

Here is Gertrude writing at her desk …

And then this, the polar opposite … (so there was one less left in the world.)

The obscene Malleus Maleficarum

... the unloving, death to loving, book.

Inside it is a call to name all 'hers' the ‘monstrous midwives of life.’

This is the book which has still to be undone. But for very good reasons.

But Stein's is the text, that for me, rips it to shreds with teeth!!!

And if I carried two images two paintings, with me what would I carry?

A mouth and more, in the same painting the ear of the same angelic beast. Listening. Interpreting some other voice literally the ‘other’ voice.

It is a new sort of ear.

A non-cochlea ear.

Able to hear, to translate, another sort of love.

An 'other oracular' …

I’d love to hear what your precious key texts, images, events, or … are.

Just the two. It's hard to focus on just two, but once you've done it, it feels good and

clear and sets you on a meaningful trajectory

Majena Mafe is an author and a disruptor of dumb frames of thinking. She researches women’s voices and unacknowledged knowledge: the particular, la petite histoire, the wisdom of the Oracle, delivered as it is a form of transmission from a linguistic auditory dimension, to be heard anew. She recovers suppressed ways of knowing - knowledge encoded in embroidery patterns, herbal wisdom, and domestic practices - knowledge that circulates through women’s hands, hearts, and intergenerational transmission. In attention to the cultural and historical withdrawal of hearing them, as forms of knowledge and wisdoms sounding out in their own right.

I appreciate your support and interest. If you like my work please comment below or forward this article to someone else today.

Leave a comment

majena mafe works from series Heidi and the sewing box.

I was just looking through my old films and found this little beastie, still glitching away as she does endlessly. For a while, I was really into glitching, and I still am, glitching language and accompanying images that shift and unsettle perceptions … into movable fleeting often disturbing disintegrating feats … These works often feature animated mouths that work much like ventriloquist dummies for me, for my ideas. More about ventriloquist dummies in the future.

I used very basic apps, and I played. I wanted to see what could be done and what that then said.

On reading Gertrude Stein’s copious notes on language and its tendency to be used in a cover story of phrases type of way, like an old love song … and as she says here is a tendency towards repetition. And thats not a bad thing I hear her say, “… there is no such thing as repetition, only insistence ...”. And of course she’s right. Or at least as right as right can be. And its worth considering what this means for language as it writhes and slips in its own symbolic repeatedly doing and pre-symbolic undoing of meanings. And the importance… the necessity of insistence through interruptions. Interruptions to speaking, and simply being. There is something to INSISTENCE.

And its worth considering how this non-repetition can be ‘heard’ in terms of silence. The silence of and in women's voices. And what of the insistence of silence.

When Zeus ‘almost,’ flew into a confrontation with the primordial goddess Nyx over a slight he felt he deserved to speak of, if not rally of, she met him face to face, in her realm with stony silence. A silence that ended the confrontation/conversation. And he backed away. Silences are not often powerful as they exist in relation to women’s speech. But in this instance, it was a glitch in conversing, a glitch that keeps on repeating. A silence that still remains, a glitch, a repetition with a reputation, a profound undoing of power.

I am still interested in glitches in and of language either through the pen or the mouth. They raise questions for me like how far can you take a glitch before not just meaning, but language itself falls off the edge, and what’s over the edge anyhow, and do I want to go there? (answer YES). So do we start listening/reading with other ears at this eventing (not really a point)this collapse that might be a reinvention?… that sort of thing for starters.

What do other writers think of glitches in language I wonder? How far is their too far? I know they can be damn annoying to the ear and common sense. But that doesnt mean they don’t exist, consider the slur, the muttered and the mutterings, slips of the tongue, words that are swallowed, choked, gasped. Consider too the silences, the unsaid … all have a meaning. A ‘said’ in language. I get sick of hearing me say the word language over and over. Im going to find another slur of it to use … the murage, the mutterage … soundage.

This poor lass has lost her voice it seems.

Do you glitch, even a little, short film by Majena Mafe

This work is a hearing experiment. It is not meant to be easy, entertaining or ‘good.’ It raises more issues than it solves. And its discordance interferes with happy hearing. A lot.

More of my short films and scores re glitching language can be found on my website Tongue-stitch. especially under the tongue section on the left.

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majena mafe photo from series monstrous tongue threads

Hi, I am creating this new space to share my work and engage with others who are interested in women’s voices, poetry, tall tales, gossip, fairytales, and even grocery lists. Writing alone can be isolating, like doing housework alone. I am excited to hear from anyone who can help me with tasks such as emptying the pool or reading instructions. I hope you enjoy my work, works …

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