Prelude: 

It is strange to write about silence. It feels like an inherent tension or paradox. Or maybe an intrusion, as if a rule is being broken. If I speak the unsaid, have I broken its sanctity? Or does silence beget shame, which then festers into rot? Am I trying to explain something that should not be explained? Or perhaps that is the very constraint from which silence perpetuates itself, becomes a throbbing hole. 

The years of 2019 to 2021 went something like this: I lived in Brooklyn, I moved to Providence, Rhode Island for school, a pandemic happened, I spent a lot of time alone, I moved back to where I started. All this time, I tried to write. Of course, this is also not what happened. Of course, these sentences are steeped in silence. 

The experience of living within silence is already one of contradiction. Of my own phenomenology becoming strange to myself. And what is silence if not an opportunity to break it? To make a mess. To watch something crumble to bits. 

Methods: 

One day, in the Rock Library in Providence, Rhode Island, I searched the basement library stacks for Lisa Robertson’s essay collection Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, the Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias. The book’s baroque style speaks to Robertson as a writer of the loop, the tangle, the parataxis of logic. How, as a reader, we swing through her mind, get caught in knots, follow threads, loosen our hold on convention. A text about holes and monks and pornographic marginalia. About pronouns and speech and reading and submission and anxiety and cities as glimmers of elsewhere. The idiosyncrasy of her prose, the circuities that form its connective tissue, enable a kind of secrecy to assemble then break. I thought this capaciousness could be a method to pursue. 

I suppose if this were a formal investigation of the unsaid, I might distinguish sound from writing. Or writing from other disciplines of expression. I might ask, “what is speech?” I might pose definitions about what constitutes an act of saying. But I’m not interested in that kind of differentiation. The notion of “the said” that I am attempting to excavate—but not necessarily cleave—from the “unsaid” is a spoken word, a written word, a gesture, a brushstroke, a song, a walk down the street. As per what I understand as Robertson’s poetic ethos, I am interested in a method of culling. Of gleaning and making loose connections that radiate (I’ve always loved how the word gleaning can look like gleaming). 

Before I thought of gleaning as a potential artistic practice, I knew a painting. I’m thinking of Jean-François Millet’s 1857 oil painting The Gleaners, which depicts three women gleaning shards of wheat from a field. I don’t know anything about Millet—except that his painting, when shown at a French salon, was met with virulent critique—but I want to know what these women know.

Gleaning is a process of picking up the pieces. If we understand this work in relation to collaging, then it is nonlinear, perhaps circular, maybe undulating. This is what saying the unsaid is like: doing the thing no one wants you to do in the way they say you can’t do it. 

I think it’s good to make messes. So, I’m going to start. In seeking to understand how the unsaid can be punctured, I will consider two seemingly disparate modes: the dregs of silence and the tendrils of cacophony. Yet, I don’t like to imagine these as binaries. Rather, they are two maps for tracing an idea. If we consider the unsaid to be about borders (the edges of the mouth, the distance between bodies, the angles of space, the physical boundaries of sound) then we must also remember something else. That borders always permeate. And, if I know anything about the unsaid, I know it’s a seeping, oozing thing. 

Part 1: Silence & Quietude 

When I moved to Providence, I thought about loneliness a lot. About traversing the streets of this small New England city in isolation. I sensed a ghostly presence around me, yet no one could see it. I just looked like a silent woman. I liked to start the day with a walk. I rarely passed another person on the brisk streets. My isolation started before the broader isolation began in 2020. My silence started before the “real” silence unfurled in seminar rooms and student lounges. I began to think, perhaps silence is just always there. 

In this period, I first looked for art that could sit with me, hold the silences I wanted to hold, try to speak with me then fall back into the softness of quiet. 

*** 

When I felt my body pull into itself—settle like detritus—I thought of the first book that taught me about silence. That showed me silence could be written through/with/from. Not simply as an obstacle to “overcome” in one’s writing, but as a generative space of writing. I returned to the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. 

I re-read pieces of Dictee, Cha’s transdisciplinary, multilingual book that traverses diaspora, gender, assimilation, colonialism, mythology, trauma, memory. I flipped around, finding the most fraught moments of sound. The places where speech didn’t stop but became fragmented, dislodged, caught, and, therefore reinvented into something like the sound of a woman cleaving out from the entrails of shame. 

Cha’s text, which contains scenes of strenuous “dictation” classes in French, descriptions of the mouth and jaw straining to forge sound, and fragmented documentation of memories that lapse into voids, also holds space for something else. A dexterity in its notion of lineage, in its typographic experimentation, and its ultimate playfulness with a canon that traditionally delimits the imagination of diasporic writing. 

The epigraph reads: 

May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve. 

Sappho 

A fraudulent invocation from one woman to another across centuries: this is also speech. To untether speech for the cogent formation of a word is a mode of interruption that severs the unsaid from shame. 

*** 

A body itself can be a mode of quietude that enacts its own rupture. When I passed by old Victorian homes in Providence, I thought of Francesca Woodman. How she occupied silence with her body in abandoned homes; her self-portraits estranged the everyday from normalcy and into an unreal, ghostly space. 

I knew Woodman attended Rhode Island School of Design and that many of her photographs had been made in this city. I tried to research her photographs because I wanted to trace her steps. I scoured the internet but could only find relentless iterations of the same facts. We have a narrative for Woodman, an art world fetishization. One that begins with a beautiful prodigal talent and ends with suicide. I was looking for the liminal spaces I couldn’t know. All the hidden silences in her photographs. The spaces that speak, even if that speech is untranslatable. 

I took photos on my phone and tried to let the gray days drip into my body like a slow rain. Attention is a kind of embodiment, and embodiment is a type of speech. I looked at Woodman’s photos, her body disappearing into door frames and fireplaces and cracked plaster walls. To make these photographs, she stood in front of the camera for sustained periods of time. Her technique of long exposure is a form of attention. Of speaking through time as a medium. I tried to speak too, to feel the city as I walked through its monochromatic gray. There is one photograph of Woodman that I returned to again and again. From the series Polka Dots (Providence, Rhode Island, 1976), it is a self-portrait of Woodman crouched down in a polka dot dress. The image feels as though she is in on a secret; a playful joke lurks somewhere on her face, on the wall, on her exposed skin. I wanted to hold that secret too.

*** 

In 2020, I taught a poetry workshop for the first time. Mediated by a screen, I thought about how to breach not just my own silence but what I imagined was a silence in my students, too. I became obsessed with teaching ekphrastic writing. I never liked ekphrastic exercises before, not until I tried them with abstraction. I put Agnes Martin’s With My Back to the World on the screen. I liked the way that emotion was the content of the work; highly abstracted but also precise and geometric. A sound or pulse communicated through the silence of hues. In class we listed associations with the painting: beach, sunset, layer cake, sedimentary rocks, childhood, innocence, toys, goodbyes, longing.

I wanted my students to imagine what sound this painting could make. 

*** 

When, in my writing program, I felt void of language, I liked to look at Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s minimalist installations. They take the ordinary (pieces of candy, a string of lights, a blank piece of paper) and imbue them with symbolic meaning, each object transmuting into a space for memory and history to aggregate. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA) is a candy pile that symbolizes the death of his partner from AIDS-related complications. Each viewer was invited to take a piece, which transmutes the installation into an act of communal speech. To pick up a piece of candy in Gonzalez-Torres’s installation is to engage in regeneration, to refuse governmental neglect and queer erasure. As a writer, I was drawn to Gonzalez-Torres’s Passport series in which stacks of blank paper are placed in a gallery for viewers to take. To do with them whatever they want; to see what is missing and imagine what could be there. There is agency in this temporality.

The passport means movement. Paper means a space for inscription. Emptiness can be space for dreams. 

What if the empty page felt like a possibility? 

Part 2: Sound & Circuity 

In Providence, I often spent my afternoons in the library. I was comforted by other people, alone, at their desks, absorbed in some other world. I’ve always loved escapes and the library is the perfect place to escape. I had a favorite spot in the Rock Library, in front of the tall thin windows from which the sunset would bleed like watercolors spreading across paper.

I knew that silence could be its own modality of speech; that emptiness is a way to hold space. I felt that in my body. What if silence could bleed into sound? I wanted to make noise; to feel my body occupy another register while honoring the silence I felt coursing through me. 

*** 

I started playing loud, cacophonous music in my headphones. I liked the affective dissonance. The library was silent. The other students hunched over what looked like chemistry and physics while I daydreamed with women’s voices pulsing through my body. I thought, am I still silent if there is a sound pulsing in my ears? I pictured a spectrogram. I wanted to draw it on my hand. Could people passing by my cluttered desk hear the aura of noise? Is a question about silence also a question about what is visible? Silence can be an absence. It can also be an opening. I listened to Screaming Females and Bikini Kill, but the one song I loved to play on repeat was Stef Chura’s Scream. I liked watching the music video on YouTube, where she wears a cheerleader uniform and dances around a high school gymnasium with her glasses and pink-tinted hair. A feeling that is complex and nuanced is sung so plainly, refusing to be dampened. 

She said, “If only you could hear me scream.”

*** 

The building I lived in was ominously quiet. It felt like no one else lived there. I rarely passed neighbors, but through the kitchen window I could see brown paper grocery bags appear and disappear. I created elaborate playlists, rhythms to make the day sound like something. All the albums I played felt like sonic odes to the unsaid. 

Providence Albums on Repeat: 

Show Me How You Disappear (Ian Sweet) 
Remind Me Tomorrow (Sharon Van Etten) 
Vagabon (Vagabon) 
All Mirrors (Angel Olsen) 
Anak Ko (Jay Som) 
An Overview on Phenomenal Nature (Cassandra Jenkins) 
Pity Boy (Mal Blum) 
St. Cloud (Waxahatchee) 
Crushing (Julia Jacklin) 
I Need to Start a Garden (Haley Heynderickx) 

I especially loved to listen to Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors album. I would lay on my bed with all the lights off and all the windows open in my apartment and blast it in my headphones. It was one of those albums that found me at the time I needed to be found by it. I lodged lyrics in my head, looping around/across/through the unsaid. 

On the title track she sings: I’ve been watchin’ all of my past repeatin’ / There’s no endin’, and when I stop pretendin’ 

On my favorite song of the album, Summer, she sings: Took a while, but I made it through / If I could show you the hell I’d been to 

It occupies a distinctive oscillation between the soft whisper and the operatic proclamation. A screenshot from her All Mirrors music video displays these contradictions, the mirroring of the same body, the kaleidoscopes within our own selves.

What I really wanted to experience when listening to the album was to hear how someone else can harbor a spectrum of sound and make it reverberate in my own body. 

*** 

In the summer of 2020, I read Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s book The Freezer Door. It was a book that made me cry and laugh and feel the least alone I had felt in a long time. 

It is a lyric essay that documents the loneliness, the pain, the pleasure, the creativity, the queerness, the alienation, the observation, the desire, and—importantly—the dancing, that weave in and out of Bernstein Sycamore’s life within the fraught space of a gentrified Seattle. 

The genre of the lyric essay offers a malleability from the constraints of criticism, of memoir, of non-fiction, instead fusing pieces of these genres into something that creates its own shape. The text wanders and embraces the elliptical form of thinking; it is a tautology that doesn’t get caught, that seeks something beyond the confines of our bleak cultural norms, the strictures that beget silence that beget more silence. She writes: The feeling of not being able to exist without not really existing. I can go outside, and hope the air will clear my head, but then there’s my head again, without air. What does it mean to open? I refuse to allow any flower analogies. By refusing to allow them, I allow them. 

The form of the text itself engages with the idea of breakage; of letting something in even if you don’t know why it has to be there. To leave space for anything to occur. There is blank space; there are interludes of an ice cube talking to an ice cube tray; there narratives that undulate through the next like waves. These spaces on the page are not in tension with the notion of speech, but in fact bolster it. When a single sentence has the space to resonate across a whole page, it invites an embodied reading. There is one page which simply reads, “Here is the gap where I don’t know what I can tell you, so I’ll just leave this gap.” To name the breaks. 

*** 

I read and re-read Anne Boyer’s book Garments Against Women. I thought of re-reading as its own kind of circuitous speech. 

It was a book that I clung to because it created a constellation of themes that were not typically bridged; the unsaid as an untangling of rage. In an almost tautological style Boyer takes seriously everything from allegory, philosophy, sewing, the perfect chocolate cake recipe for a small pan, and—similarly to Cha—a penchant for making up quotes (ex. BE MONEY like the universe. – René Char). 

These dynamic meditations are not tangents: they are the materials of a life. The life of an individual writer amid precarity and joy and loneliness and imagination. By life, she means the days on end that the heat is off. She means staying up late to finish stitching a seam. She means a full-page poem describing the implications of wearing a fake shark fin or selling a painting of a lamb for $385. 

The everyday glimmers of these poems read like philosophical treatises. The moments we are told “don’t matter” are often left unsaid. If we dismiss the everyday, we dismiss the body. And if we dismiss the body, we actively silence everything seething through it. The lines I kept repeating: I spilled my coffee on the outside of my car. I wanted in my melancholy to carve a stamp of a bird. I did laundry. I drew a hand. It looked like a claw. 

*** 

When one’s everyday life feels unsayable, sometimes putting the pieces together is a kind of radical noise. Douglas Kearney’s collage poems taught me that secrets can live in cacophony and opacity can live in sound. The collages in his books Patter and Mess And Mess And both express a poetic process that is also a creative ethos. He writes, “If my writing makes a mess of things, it’s not to flee understanding, but to map (mis-)understandings as a verb.” 

The collages I can’t stop thinking about address the body. In a way, all collages are like bodies, a series of pieces assembled into a fractured whole. A body is a mess. And Kearney’s understanding of mess reclaims the term and asserts it as a mode of beauty. Sorrow, too. Grief, too. But always, in a web of interconnection.

Kearney’s collages understand that the unsaid is not a void of feeling but a knot of contradictory emotion. His pieces imagine noise as the generative tension that scaffolds the unsaid. 

Outro: 

When I moved out of Providence in May 2021, I wished I had something to say. Something to scream. Instead, I watched the New England landscape recede from the window of a U-Haul. One of the first memories I have of returning to New York is watching Bo Burnham’s Inside. The comedy special, written, produced, and filmed entirely by Burnham in his house during the pandemic, elicited praise and critique and prompted a wave of think-pieces. I saw someone making something to move through the unsaid. At one point in the special, which traverses parody, self-documentation, and a series of comedy songs, Burnham simply asks us to sit with him. He turns 30 alone on camera and, after a short monologue, we watch the clock strike midnight with him. Then we transition out, into whatever weirdness he has in store.

Watching on a couch in Brooklyn, everything felt so far and close at the same time. That’s what silence feels like—something too close to bear and something so far away it can’t be seen save for a fog against the horizon. Under the regime of silence, past and present become one unyielding pressure. There is no making sense of this. There is only the making of new shapes from which the mess can radiate. 

Postscript: (Rituals for Occupying the Unsaid) 

Inspired by CAConrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals

1. Eat a hard candy in silence. Feel it dissolve in your mouth. Consider Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA). Think about loss and growth. Write.
2. Play a role-playing game (RPG). A fictional mask can break silence. To occupy imaginative space is a way to break the deepest of silences. If silence can be a mask (a kind of hiding) then invert that paradigm. I recommend Avery Alder’s games.
3. Look at an Agnes Martin painting. Write down its sound. 
4. Answer one of Bhanu Kapil’s unanswerable questions in her polyvocal text The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (My favorite is What would you say if you could?). Then ask this to the person you care about most. 
5. Find a deserted overpass. Think of the place you most want to go in the whole world. Face what you imagine is the direction of that place. Scream.