Call Yourself
Duration: about 20 minutes
Props: a silent place
Effect: double
Firstly, prepare your surroundings so they are sparse and attend to the silence, knowing you are going to speak and hear. Acknowledge it; pick up on the smallest ruffle. Prepare yourself for the intrusion of human speech.Duration: about 20 minutes
Props: a silent place
Effect: double
Now say your first name out loud. Articulate, and then repeat it, distinctly. Imagine hailing someone from a distance, across a crowded station or to the other end of a bar. From the other side of a field, or across a roaring river. Make yourself heard.
At first you just feel damn foolish: calling into space. You are calling someone who isn’t there – or who can’t hear you. It seems absurd, and you try varying your call, lengthening vowels, stressing syllables. The door is closed.
Persevere.
As the lark progresses, your voice becomes a detached body; you have the feeling of being called. It’s imperceptible at first, is that you? Concentrate. It’s your voice all right, but it’s also that other’s, over there.
Neither your voice nor you have doubled, yet there is a doubling effect. You are calling and yet you are being called. There is urgency to the call, yet you are beyond reconciling your capacity to discover what this person wants from you.
The experiment consists in prolonging this game of within and without, of calling and listening. Try and feel, from as remote a place as possible, the strangeness of this name that is so familiar. Only other people call you this; you don’t, normally, call yourself.
Continue to call, shout even, and solicit the – slightly unpleasant - sense of unease that comes when the self comes a little bit unstuck from the self.
To escape it? To bridge the gap and stick the edges back together? Simply say in a loud, clear voice, and as naturally as possible:
“Yes, I’m coming!”
Credit to: Roger-Pol Droit
The experiment consists in prolonging this game of within and without, of calling and listening. Try and feel, from as remote a place as possible, the strangeness of this name that is so familiar. Only other people call you this; you don’t, normally, call yourself.
Continue to call, shout even, and solicit the – slightly unpleasant - sense of unease that comes when the self comes a little bit unstuck from the self.
To escape it? To bridge the gap and stick the edges back together? Simply say in a loud, clear voice, and as naturally as possible:
“Yes, I’m coming!”
Credit to: Roger-Pol Droit
