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