Don't Cry...SCREAM!

"One can see this spectre of a soul as if intoxicated by the cries it produces, otherwise how explain Hindu mantras, those consonances, those mysterious rhythms in which the physical undersides of the soul, hunted down to their hiding places come out and tell their secrets to the light of day."

-- Antonin Artaud

Gregory Whitehead: Pressures of the Unspeakable

If you have the forty minutes or so to spare this is an absolutely fascinating radio project on the scream:

http://gregorywhitehead.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/potu.m4a

Here is the script: http://gregorywhitehead.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/potuscript.pdf
You can read more about Gregory Whitehead here:

http://gregorywhitehead.net/gw/bio/

Pharmakon -- Body Betrays Itself

"A shriek is more unnerving when it seems to come from a distance, because you can't tell which circle of hell spit it out."   -- Kevin Warwick, chicagoreader.com (read full article here )


See also:

Misha Gordin - New Crowd 62 (2004)

"What is this scream? Who will hear it, this scream that we do not hear? ...

...here the scream literally seems to provoke the silence and in abolishing itself in it, it is tangible that it causes it. It gives rise to it, it allows it to hold its note, it is the 

scream which sustains it and not the silence the scream, the scream in a way makes the silence curl up in the very impasse from which it springs, in order that the silence may escape from it. But it has already happened when we see Munch's image. The scream is traversed by the space of the silence without dwelling in it; they are not linked either by being together or by succeeding one another,the 

scream creates the abyss into which silence rushes."  

-- Lacan on Edvard Munch's The Scream (Der Schrei Der Natur)

Woyzeck, Werner Herzog (1979)

"The waves around thy
mountain,” answered the soothsayer, “rise and rise, the
waves of great distress and affliction: they will soon raise
thy bark also and carry thee away.”—Thereupon was
Zarathustra silent and wondered.—”Dost thou still hear
nothing?” continued the soothsayer: “doth it not rush
and roar out of the depth?”—Zarathustra was silent once
more and listened: then heard he a long, long cry, which
the abysses threw to one another and passed on; for
none of them wished to retain it: so evil did it sound.
“Thou ill announcer,” said Zarathustra at last, “that is
a cry of distress, and the cry of a man; it may come
perhaps out of a black sea. But what doth human distress
matter to me!"  - F.Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra






The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr (2011)

Heartbeat.

Only mouths are we. Who sings the distant heart

which safely exists in the center of all things?

His giant heartbeat is diverted in us

into little pulses. And his giant grief

is, like his giant jubilation, far too

great for us. And so we tear ourselves away

from him time after time, remaining only

mouths. But unexepectedly and secretly

the giant heartbeat enters our being,

so that we scream ----,

and are transformed in being and in countenance.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming

Nancy Spero, "Artaud Painting -- All Writing Is Pigshit," 1969

"It is not I who wants to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of...in short, a spasm"  

"The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering"

- G. Deleuze ('Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation')

"Between the motion

And the act.

    Falls the shadow" 

        - T.S Eliot ('The Hollow Men')

From 'Photographic Portraits from Behind the Canvas' by Luca Pierro (2014)

"Douglas Kahn notes that ‘people who have been in a life-threatening situation often must be told by others that they were screaming’ (2001: 245). In such instances,screams can occur outside of full consciousness – we scream before we ‘know’ that we scream." 

- Marie Thompson, 'Three Screams' in Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (2013)

Yoko Ono (oh no)

Scream of Fear (Original Title- Taste of Fear), dir. Seth Holt (1961)

"And scream that you may hear yourself,and scream that you may know you're still alive,and alive, and that life on this earth is possible."  - Mahmoud Darwish

Diamanda Galás 'Wild Women With Steak Knives (The Homicidal Love Song for Solo Scream)'







Antonin Artaud, 'Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu' / 'To Have Done With The Judgement of God'

"I have no mouth. And I must scream."

― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.” 

― Friedrich Nietzsche

"For this scream I must fall.
It is the scream of the wounded warrior who brushes past the broken walls with a drunken sound of glass.

I fall.
I fall but I am not afraid.
I give up my fear in the sound of rage, in a solemn roaring."

-- Antonin Artaud

"I want to attempt a terrible feminine. The cry of the revolt that is trampled underfoot, of anguish armed for war, of the demand for justice.

It is like the groan of an abyss that is opened: the wounded earth calls out but voices are raised deep as the bottom of the abyss, voices where are the bottom of the abyss crying.

Neuter. Feminine. Masculine.

In order to utter this cry I empty myself. 
Not of air, but of the very power of sound. I raise up in front of myself my human body. And having cast on it "THE EYE" of a horrible measurement, part by part, I force it to re-enter me." 

 - Antonin Artaud

The Cry of Clytaemnestra

THE CRY OF CLYAETEMNESTRA from John Eaton on Vimeo.

"The opera compresses the events of Aeschylus’s play into a densely woven 80-minute sequence. The story is unfolded through the distorted visions of Clytemnestra (mezzo-soprano), who recalls and anticipates past and future events in dream-like succession....The music of the opera is intensely expressive, reflecting the psychological focus of the dramatic presentation. Scored for a 17-piece chamber orchestra (plus electronic tape), the work employs microtonal tuning in both equal-tempered quarter-tone tuning and, more occasionally, just intonation. Eaton distinguishes the two types for dramatic effect, associating the former with states of extreme psychological conflict and the latter with innocence and purity. Formally the opera is organized around a series of recurring, piercing cries emitted by Clytemnestra as she recalls the dreadful events that have overtaken her life. These provide an important element of musical unity and also serve to articulate the overall shape, punctuating the dramatic continuity; they also undergo transformations that mirror Clytemnestra’s shifting psychological orientation: from anguished horror at the opening in reaction to the sacrifice of her daughter, to ‘pure and terrifying’ exaltation at the end as she prepares for her husband’s return and murder. "  -- Oxford Music Online

"How can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made the keeper of the holocaust were all was lost, including guardian thought? In the mortal intensity, the fleeing silence of the countless cry...

...Silence is perhaps a word, a paradoxical word, the silence of the word silence, yet surely we feel that it is linked to the cry, the voiceless cry, which breaks with all utterances, which is addressed to no one and which no one receives, the cry that lapses and decries. Like writing (and in the same way that the quick of life has already exceeded life) the cry tends to exceed all language, even if it lends itself to recuperation as language effect. It is both sudden and patient; it has the suddenness of the interminable torment which is always over already. The patience of the cry: it does not simply come to a halt, reduced to nonsense, yet it does remain outside of sense-- a meaning infinitely suspended, decried, decipherable, indecipherable." 

 - Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1980)

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“Ha! To forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts?" 

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos (1944)


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"Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the legs and so on. It knows all about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another element. It strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies.....


Music, for its part, is faced with the same task, which is certainly not to render the scream harmonious but to establish a relationship between the sound of the scream and the forces that sustain it.......
If we scream, it is always as victims of invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle and that even lie beyond pain and feeling. This is what Bacon means when he says, "I want to paint the scream more than the horror" If we could express this as a dilemma it would be: either I paint the horror and I do not paint the scream, because I make a figuration of the horrible; or else I paint the scream, and I do not paint the visible horror, I will paint the visible horror less and less, since the scream captures or detects an invisible force. Alban Berg knew how to make music out of the scream in the scream of Marie, and then in the very different scream of Lulu"


----Gilles Deluze

Ingrid Sings

"The fundamental reaction against displeasure and anxiety has been, since the beginning of life, the scream. We are born screaming. The reaction we should expect for example from our dreaming Ingrid in her “primitive fear” which she compares to the “fear of newborn children” is the scream. But instead of screaming Ingrid sings.

In their physical aspect it is already evident that scream and song are intimately related. Tone — a basic element of song — is a scream of a specific character differing from the scream in the regularity of its vibrations, or expressed in psychological terms, differing in being submitted to a certain order. Tone compared to scream represents for this same reason, — always in its psychological aspect —, a renunciation of something instinctive (Triebverzicht). Instead of the unrestrained scream, which is on the one hand an aggressive expression of a respiratory-oral nature, arisen as a reaction or defense against the sufferings and anxieties caused by frustrations of instinctive needs, and which on the other hand is an expression of demand for the satisfaction of these instinctive needs, — instead of this unrestrained scream, the tone appears, which, physically, is a scream of regular vibrations and which psychologically we experience —compared to screaming—as being less aggressive, as a more erotic, less terrified, and less terrifying expression." - Heinrich Racker

"Music, then, is a sort of dreaming with the ear; and endless, subtly readjusting refinement of a shriek. At the beginning of any finite musical act there is pandemonium, a vast-omni-expressive noise in which are located all the  sounds that the ear can hear; the musician simply elects a few possibilites out of this confusion of all frequencies and amplitudes. What is yearning? -- weakened terror. What is exhilaration? -- weakened terror. What is the soft cooing of lovers? -- weakened terror. A chord, a timbre, a snatch of song, is moving to the degree that it can allude to the primal scream that lurks behind it." -- Daniel Albright


How close?

"The scream is so intimately linked to pain that most adjectives describing it belong to the register of resonant space: one speaks of a “shrill scream,”“an acute pain”; one speaks of an insistent scream, an insistent pain. But what is a scream? Are we even sure that a scream is only a sound? We encounter here the same difficulty that we did when we approached the question of pain" 

.....

"Why not imagine the scream as a flux of energy gushing through the hole of the mouth considered as an erogenous ring? If we accept that the mouth is a libidinal orifice, we can consider that the flux of energy that runs through its center is a force defined in relation to another flux, to another force that runs along the lips. In other words, there would be a relation between the energy that passes through the center of the hole and the energy circulating around its edges. This relation between the scream and the erogenous edges of the mouth—between the gushing flux of the hole and the circulating flux on the border of the hole, between the surface (that is the void of the hole) and the orificial edge—was established by Stockes’s theorem in electromagnetic physics. With the aid of this theorem, we can con-clude that the flux flowing through the hole is equal to the flux running along the edge of the hole. Thus, there would be an equivalence between the energy of the scream and the sexual pleasure of the erogenous lips."


The Book of Love and Pain  -  Juan David Nasio

"The real Primal Scream is unmistakable. It has its own quality of something deep, rattling and involuntary. When the therapist suddenly removes any portion of defence and the patient is left naked with his Pain, he screams because he is wide open to the truth. Though the scream is the most usual reaction, it is neither the sole nor the perennial response to the sudden vulnerability to Pain. Some people moan, groan, writhe and thrash about. The results are the same. What comes out when the person screams is a single feeling that may underlie thousands of previous experiences....Sometimes the patient just needs to scream at first. He screams for the hundreds of shushes, ridicules, humiliations and beatings. He screams now because often he was wounded and wasn't allowed the luxury of bleeding. It's as though someone kept jabbing him with a small pin and could never once yell 'Ouch!'"   

- Arthur Janov 

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“there, manifest and stubborn (one  hears only that) beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form…something which is directly the cantor's body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages...The 'grain' is that" 

- Roland Barthes

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“...from the most troubled of such dreams we awake with a shriek, a cry, in which the affrighted Will expresses itself most immediately, and thus enters at once and definitely, through the cry, into the world of sound, in order to manifest itself outwards”
 
-Richard Wagner

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"The struggle with the shadow is the only real struggle. When the visual sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, it releases a force that is capable of vanquishing the invisible force or even befriending it. Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-too-visible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life detects, flushes out, and makes visible through the scream" 

- Gilles Deleuze

"Do you really hear nothing? Do you not hear the terrible voice screaming around us on every side, the voice known commonly as silence? Since I came to this silent valley I have heard it all the time, it won’t let me sleep, oh yes, Reverend, if only I could sleep again." 

-- Georg Büchner - Lenz

Edward Munch - Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature)

PJ Harvey and John Parish - Pig Will Not

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

"It was no sigh, no moan; it was a real scream. She screamed so hard that Tomas had to turn away from her face, afraid that her voice so close to his ear would rupture his eardrum. The scream was not an expression of sensuality. Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound. But her scream aimed at crippling the senses, preventing all seeing and hearing. What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even time..."

https://soundcloud.com/ros-steer/kundrys-scream

Sergei Eisentein's work was an inspiration to the artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

 "Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X"  (1953)

"...while people continue to laugh throughout their lives, they do not generally feel comfortable screaming beyond a certain age"

- Howard Suber

 Image from Battleship Potemkin (1925) by Sergei Eisenstein