I’m grateful to David
for drawing attention to Ratcliffe’s writings on Grenier’s Cicada as, by
coincidence, I’ve been composing a piece on this very instance of image-sound
refraction, an excerpt of which I include for anyone interested:
THE HAUNTED
HEMIPTERA
What
therefore allows us to go beyond the image which alone
is
present in
consciousness, and to refer the latter as an image to a
certain
extraconscious object? To point to the resemblance between
image and
thing will not help. ( Husserl, 593)
As the words we see on the page are
not images of images we must tread carefully in this semantic field crowded with
minims and phonemes. In the case of Robert Grenier’s four cicadas, it would be a
mistake to suppose, as Stephen Ratcliffe does, that they represent four
different individuals in the double page they disport in, merely because the
four words have distinct colours and scripts. It may help the confused spectator
to consider this an image of a singular, though fit and mobile, individual whose
solitary condition is both lament and existential self-disclosure but – and this
is important – a monadic creature undergoing the trauma of
metamorphosis.
It hardly helps us to
keep in mind that the Latin origins of the word is onomatopoeic, as the page
itself remains silent, but one feature it behoves us to attend to with
particular emphasis is the transformed nature of the dot above the ‘i’. When the
artefact is read left to right, as it were in lateral pairs, we see how this dot
first appears as a distant triangular shape, alluding to a child’s drawing of a
flying saucer. In the second CICADA that craft is decidedly larger. In the
third, still more enlarged and potentially menacing, and in the fourth it has
landed on the stalk of the ’i’, merged with it as though training a powerful
beam of light on the solitary insect. At the same time the line that has
underlined each of these word-images has risen jaggedly to bisect the insect
itself, as if the thrumming resonance of the UFO’s engine has joined with the
vibratory physical apparatus of the cicada, or even, though it may be
objected that this begins to situate my argument in the zone of the speculative,
as if the call of the cicada has drawn the attention of extraterrestrials who
have begun to enter into a symphonic counterpoint with this earthling insect
which not only delighted the Greeks and Romans of ancient days but has been
heard by others of its kind and of other kinds through aeons of pre-human
settlement...
I’m hoping that the full essay will
be up on PennSound by the end of July.
Jamie
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 7:32 AM
Subject: Cicada/ Nada?