ECHO
This time Harriet and Leone asks people to respond to the word, echo. From the start we go astray if we think a distance must be bridged between an echo and ourselves. Such a false bridge depends upon the premise that we can ponder what an echo is. A different poses a different question: how is an echo? Part of the cause of wandering astray of echo is assuming an echo is a “what.” But the strange power of echo is that it does not follow the structure of a what, but instead flows through the movement of a how. An echo is the quality of bounce in sound, the reverberations that draw from and make use of the solidity of objects while constantly becoming free of solid forms. An echo makes use of everything it is not, while it does not allow anything to become it. Often we mistake this as a feeble copy of form.
We are familiar with echoes as symptoms of other, missing things. It is to our detriment that we cannot get past the formlessness of echo. We often think echoes must follow. Ovid reminds of this when, in his version of the myth of Echo and Narcissus, Juno rids the nymph of the power of language. The result is as follows:
tantum haec in fine loquendi
ingeminat voces auditaque verba reportat
(Ovid Book III ll. 368-69)
or,
Echo can mime no more than the concluding sounds of any words she’s heard
(Mandelbaum, 92).
In her passion for Narcissus Echo’s form wastes away. At the same time, Echo is the force that moves more rapidly, more lightly, more transformatively than Narcissus. What Echo loses of language, she gains of sound. What she loses in body, she becomes in flight. She becomes sound, and thus can reverberate, duck and even pass through space in ways things with form cannot.
At times language has the set directability of a given form, and at other times, language becomes sound. Thus echo is the sounding-side of language, that part we can only upon occasion hear, and consistently misunderstand because we cannot “see” it, and cannot make use of it to communicate what we mean. This is not the feebleness of a copy. Echo is “what” we cannot do. Echo is also how we with form, and perhaps with language, cannot follow. Echo makes felt how words are not only not her own, they are not always our own. Echo is the strong autonomy of sound as sound per se: when sound need not be put to use in language, yet still passes through language. When we try to direct ourselves towards echo we cannot. Thus we choose to believe echo follows us. It does not. An echo is not made of us, but of what escape us, what cannot return to us. In a way, an echo makes use of both sound and form to enhance “itself,” becoming a funny, formless thing forever unburdened by form or with a self, the way we are.
This issue of Harriet and Leone brings about a rich mix of attempts to respond to echo. Happily, each attempt keeps going astray. We have a review of poetry, a discussion of how a sound recording can fail, an essay on memory, a series of photographs and a collection of thoughts on a film. Our collective attempt to create bridges to echo is a productive and varied failure. Instead of constructing bridges, we throw lines up, down and across space to see not exactly where they fly but how they fly. In this fashion, we end up following echo. In doing so, echo transforms us.
Enjoy.
Kerstin A. Schaars
