the idea of creating voice-masks does seem silly & perhaps yes intimidating,
because it suggests you don't already possess voices, you must "find" one -
But the thought of a voice is pretty puzzling, I find, when we can see that
different writers have various writing styles, sometimes violently
idiosyncratic, and if style comes from an interior, and the interior was
already social, then our "voice" is the product of our entire lives, all the
crowd we've internalised as part of our being already outside.
Or Samuel Beckett: ‘Whose voice, no one’s, there is no one, there’s a voice
without a mouth, and somewhere a kind of hearing, something compelled to
hear, and somewhere a hand, it calls that a hand, it wants to make a hand,
or if not a hand something somewhere that can leave a trace, of what is
made, of what is said, you can’t do with less, no, that’s romancing, more
romancing, there is nothing but a voice murmuring a trace.’
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