I’m very pleased to have contributed The Borderlands to Sibyl’s Mouths, a Pure Fiction publication edited by Rosa Aiello, Ellen Yeon Kim, Erika Landström, Luzie Meyer and Mark von Schlegell, published by Sternberg Press and distributed by MIT Press.
The Borderlands was originally conceived as a guided meditation and prelude to a lecture given at NSCAD in 2020. This re-edited meditation on humming draws on the work of Hannah Arendt and the Music Historian Suzanne G. Cusick:
“In our common sense, we believe the voice is the body, its very breath and interior shapes projected outward into the world as a way others might know us, even know us intimately” (Cusick, 29). To hum is to catch oneself in a liminal state between thought and expression, until you inhale again. Perhaps a hum is an unexpressed secret. Perhaps a thought, living amidst your cogs, needs no words to soothe itself; because perhaps a thought is invulnerable, even if this labial buzz, this frequency conjuring the first wordless attachment to a body, will be its only relational trace.
