In the Footsteps of Orpheus

In the Footsteps of Orpheus Trackers, with Hidden Noise It is in broad daylight that they, in turn, prepare to track down the origin or the source of the noise that will lead them toward the one they are looking for, whom they do not even know yet. T ey are trackers. I would like to follow them in their ancient hunt, whose story now I hold in my hands: T ese pages from which their subdued cries and barks resound as if from far away. T e transmission has been quite bad for a long time now: In the papyrus of Sophocles’ T e Trackers, the mutilated passages are so numerous that despite the ef orts of philologists to restore them the text reads like a truncated telegram. Amid the cracklings of the line (which every now and then jumps abruptly), I hear these fragments: Let’s go . your feet, your step . Courage! Courage! . Oh, oh! Yes, you . forward, the thief . through cunning . coming to the end . How, by what means these clandes- tine, nocturnal thef s, hastily . if by accident, I were to f nd it . 118856-Szendy_AllEars.indd8856-Szendy_AllEars.indd 5959 99/21/16/21/16 111:081:08 AAMM Hello? Yes, I am listening, but the reception is very bad. It would appear that this is the chorus, yes, a chorus of satyrs that, following the commands of Silenus, who is their guide and chief, decided to pursue the thief responsible for stealing Apollo’s cattle in order to earn the promised reward. A little later—and I do understand it better now—Silenus speaks of “track[ing] down the abductor, the predator, the thief.” Furthermore, where the Sophoclean signal is truly scrambled, I can still get a connection through another line: To the extent that I can corroborate the information of one text by another, the play takes up again the argument of the Homeric hymn to Hermes. T e mission, nevertheless, is not simple: How are we sup- posed to follow these trackers, who themselves follow the path of the thief, when so many dif erent voices are mixed and confused here? Overhearing them from a distance, how would I know what they are saying? T ere they are, for example, the pursuers, divided into two semichoruses. T e trackers appear to have discovered a trail (“It looks as if we have them!”). T ey follow it as they encour- age each other: “Make way, and . pay attention. Listen if any internal noise reaches your ear,” says the second semichorus according to the French transcription that I am using. But when I look at an English version (another tele- scription), I decipher the following words attributed to the f rst semichorus: “if you hear any sound from the cattle.” In the confusion of the dif erent accounts that reach me in the middle of this call center where I f nd myself, I can nevertheless still f gure out that the trackers in the end reach the gates of Hermes’ cave, where the one responsible for the thef is hiding. T ey hear an “incomprehensible sound,” if we can believe my French informer, who transcribed the dialogue of the chorus in the following way: “First semichorus: I do not 60 )) IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ORPHEUS 118856-Szendy_AllEars.indd8856-Szendy_AllEars.indd 6060 99/21/16/21/16 111:081:08 AAMM clearly hear their voices, but it is clear that these tracks, these footprints, belong to the cattle: We can be sure of that. Second semichorus: Hey! As Zeus is my witness, the tracks turn around and go backward: Look at them. What does this mean? Why in this direction? What went forward, now goes backward; these contrary traces blur into each other.” T e satyrs appear to be disoriented—and so am I. Did this thief manage to mislead the searchers who were tracking him? Switching over to the other line, the line of the Homeric hymn, I learn that Hermes made the cattle walk backward. But beyond this trick through which the villain managed to cover his tracks, despite the jammed signal, I understand that the trackers are literally dumbfounded by the sounds ema- nating from the cave to which they had been led by the footprints. T is noise (psophos) “that no mortal has ever heard before,” that is not “anybody’s voice,” stops and terrif es them. “Why are you so scared, like children, when you have not seen anything,” Silenus yells at them, putting on airs only to take to his heels himself when the sound from the cave is heard again. It is precisely because they do not yet see anything that the trackers are afraid. It is exactly this secret noise, whose source is still impossible to f nd and is hidden to the eyes, that terrif es them. In order for the hunt to come to a happy con- clusion, however, it is enough for the courageous coryphaeus to raise some noise in order to make Cyllene, Hermes’ nurse, come forth from the cave; questioning her, he succeeds in identifying the origins of the sound. Even if the ending of Sophocles’ text is lost, even if I will never have access to it on my teleprinters, I know that as soon as the source of the sound is named (which is Hermes, the thief, playing on the lyre that he has just invented), I do know that the trackers have com- pleted their search. T e trackers, I tell myself, were in the end lucky: T ere was someone (Cyllene) who could answer for the origins of the IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ORPHEUS (( 61 118856-Szendy_AllEars.indd8856-Szendy_AllEars.indd 6161 99/21/16/21/16 111:081:08 AAMM mysterious sound. But what would have happened, had they found the gates of the cave closed? If they had been led in their search to a secret noise whose source had been def ni- tively hidden or sealed? With Hidden Noise—this is the title of a readymade that Marcel Duchamp created in 1916 with his friend Walter Arensberg. T is is how he described it: “T is Ready-made is a ball of twine between two squares of brass . and before I f nished it, Arensberg put something inside the ball of twine, and never told me what it was, and I didn’t want to know. It was a sort of secret, and it makes a noise, so we call this Ready- made with a secret noise, and listen to it. I will never know whether it is a diamond or a coin.” In this strange music box, in this haphazardly constructed artif cial miniature cave, sound appears to hide itself. At least, this is what the title suggests, since the adjective qualif es the noun it precedes: With Hidden Noise. Yet when Duchamp speaks about it, when he describes and outlines this secret without for that matter wanting to or being able to pin it down, it is no longer the noise that hides itself. It is “something”: “a diamond or a coin,” or some other object capable of producing sound. But can sound, as it is in itself, hide itself? T rough the metonymy that it contains (“something” noisy rather than noise itself), the readymade could very well hide a secret more abyssal than what a cursory f rst reading of its title might suggest: namely, that what withdraws itself here, what subtracts itself here is the very possibility that sound might be hidden, if it no longer has a hidden face. To put it dif erently, the real secret of With Hidden Noise might be that sound does not know any withdrawal, hiding place, or crypt. T at it keeps secret and conceals the secret itself. T is hypothesis that the readymade seems to formulate would therefore repeat a very old discourse that has been 62 )) IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ORPHEUS 118856-Szendy_AllEars.indd8856-Szendy_AllEars.indd 6262 99/21/16/21/16 111:081:08 AAMM readymade for a long time and has not stopped reverberating since the fall of the walls of Jericho: a discourse on the powers of expansion of sound that are impossible to contain. Sound, it is said, cannot be held in check, limited, or mastered. Con- sequently, you cannot enclose a noise inside a box or in a cave, because either it gets out and leaks through to the outside where the trackers can always hear it, or it is itself devoured by silence and, regardless of whether some old scholars like it or not, it disappears forever. Duchamp’s readymade appears to have inaugurated a series of art objects that implicitly or explicitly, secretly or openly, refer to it. Robert Morris, for example, constructed in 1961 T e Box with the Sound of Its Own Making: T e box consists of six walnut pieces put together as a closed cube. I constructed the box with hand tools: hammer, saw, etc. It took me three hours. While I was working, I recorded with a tape player the noises of its construction. Before clos- ing up the box, I installed in it a small loudspeaker. On one of its sides, I saved a little room so that a tape player can be hooked up to the loudspeaker. T is way, we can replay the recorded sounds. Morris has therefore implanted in the very heart of the object the auditory trace of its history. As if to increase the ef ect of its presence or, at least, the stubborn self- presentation of the thing that contains and encloses itself.

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