transcription

Thesis: I think that I often fail to understand the gravity of the various things I land myself in, and perhaps this is a good thing. 

An elaboration in the guise of an example: I'm singing again. Sorry? What? I don't like singing on my own. And neither do I identify myself as a person who hums randomly while washing the dishes, before bursting into song while hanging up the dishtowels to dry. Maybe it's the idea of singing that I love — that it comes from a primal place, a sacred place. Maybe it's the idea of "having a voice" that I am especially attracted to. It is a means of assertion, but also of deep inflexion and interiority; it is a site of power, but also a site for the transgression of power. It creates modalities of thought alongside tonalities that are musical and moving. There is a physicality tied heavily to the "conceptual" voice: how the muscles push air from the lungs through the vocal folds, how air is displaced to create waves, how this is received by an audience and transcribed into sound — the voice, a simple and complicated path of energy that is we give and receive, over and over again. To reference Barthes: like the photograph, the voice is a transparent medium that we glaze over to look into our own specific realities.

Clarifications to put me back on topic: it's not practical concerns that bug me, but purely theoretical ones. I'm singing in a choir (duh) and, inasmuch as committing requires some sacrifice, it's how this preoccupation fits in with larger questions about the roles that voice and text play in my experience of life. I enter into these projects without consciously perceiving their significance, and find myself discovering themes that recur mysteriously and wonderfully. 

Parenthetical asides that work paratactically:

A: Life is a consequence of love. 

Q: Is love a consequence of life?

What happens when the answers come before the questions?

I want to bake a mandarin-scented olive oil cake!