The Voices That I Am

Abstract

This essay employs resources from Beckett and Heidegger to reflect on and analyze the breach that exists in the voice. The argument is made that this breach and the doubling of the voice that it involves can be understood as a silence that is the other of the voice and that makes being in communication outside oneself possible.

This essay addresses the role of silence and the silent voice in authentic speaking. By authentic I mean not only sincere and genuine speech but a speaking that resonates from the being of the one who is saying. A large part of the paper uses Martin Heidegger’s meditations on language as a resource from which to address this topic. However, I want to begin with a discussion of Samuel Beckett’s voices, prefacing that discussion with a few remarks, really personal reactions, to reading Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing.¹ I can upfront absolve myself from any claim to grasping these meditations, and to offering any kind of coherent explanation of their meaning, by acknowledging that I am sharing only some thoughts that were spoken to me as I read the text. To adopt for myself a remark from the text, I can say for sure in this case, “Here I am a mere ventriloquist’s dummy” (Beckett 113). And I would like to start with a quote: “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?” (91). My wife, Sandy Brown, sometimes says to me, “Your problem is you think you have a self.” And she is right, as you will no doubt see.

I am fascinated, I admit, by Beckett and particularly by what he says about the voice, not only the voice that says to you who I am, but also that other voice, the impossible voice, the silent voice that murmurs and vibrates but only as a sort of trace that occurs alongside the voice that I am and am not. For Beckett, my speaking—if I am truly giving voice at all to myself and thus to you—for Beckett, my voice occurs alongside and in dialogue with this other voice of mine. One of the most powerful experiences for me at the Santorini Voice Symposium occurred on the first day, when Kristin Linklater had me imagine that I was a tree with my diaphragm floating in the water and my roots reaching down into my legs. Then she asked me to place myself outside my tree self as my other self, looking in on myself, even leaning up against myself, speaking to and with the diaphragm that was the trunk of my voice. I am interested in these schizoid voices that I am, that inhabit me, and that I inhabit.

We philosophers have wasted a great deal of energy and told a great many philosophical stories about self-identity that were designed primarily to close off the space that allows this double self that I am to speak. But what I have learned from Kristin Linklater, perhaps wrongly I’m not sure, is that resonance is possible only because there are these two voices in me. And I hope to speak a bit not only about these two voices—secretly I would love to say them but I promise only to speak “about” them—but also to ask you to think along with me about the empty space that holds these voices apart, a space I think Kristin calls “the nothing,” and rightly so, but what I would also like to call “the empty space of possibility.” I am imagining that I can experience no intimacy with myself and with you unless I am able to be next to myself and alongside myself, leaning on the tree that I am. And I am supposing that this speaking to myself and looking at myself speaking and breathing has little directly to do with self-reflection in the usual philosophical sense. This is because I know that self-reflection is a philosophical trick to close off the circulation that I am and to achieve some sort of self-enclosure and insulated identity, whereas the intimacy of the two and the double requires that the spacing between these voices remains open and the two in touch with each other. If this is so, then I realize also that intimacy occurs not when I have closed off the circulation of life that I am with myself, but precisely when I can keep this circulation circulating; that life is circulation and I am nothing other than this double self that circulates.

What does Beckett mean to say, I wonder, when he incessantly speaks of the voice that tells my story and, in doing so, makes me be who I am; and then asks, but who am I who is inhabiting this voice that says my story and gives meaning to me in saying what is so about me? I spend so much time telling my story and impressing my self and your self about who I am and who you are for me that this other voice, not the voice that speaks and makes but that voice that is being spoken to when I say myself, this other voice tends to grow fainter and becomes more distant and is perhaps, from the point of view of the self I have constituted, a mere figment and no voice at all.

And so I find Beckett saying, “Weaker still the weak old voice that tried in vain to make me; in speaking of me it dies, it can’t go on; it says, it murmurs, a voice without a mouth” (137).² It feels as if there is left in me only the remnant of this voice, a breath that cannot be uttered, a trace that no hand can draw, a voice that no mouth can speak. Perhaps it remains as the other side, alongside me, but occupying no space at all; perhaps the tain of the mirror that allows my voice to surface and reflect and reverberate itself forward into the world but in doing so hides itself from me. I am interested in this other voice that I cannot hear, not only this other voice that I am, but also that other voice that you are and that invites me into an intimacy with you that cannot be voiced on the surface that I am when I speak to you.

I wrote my wife on the first evening of the Santorini Voice Symposium that I thought I would be engaging in exercises that would help me to recover my primordial voice. I knew she would be enthused about this possibility for me, though I think if I were her, I would be more afraid of it than enthused. But in any case, Beckett has convinced me that this notion that I am searching for my primordial voice is naïve; I will never recover it. It is eternally lost. It belongs to the very character of this other voice to be apart from the public me that I have become and apart from how I have constituted myself through the voice that says who I am; in this sense, the lost voice is irrecuperable and unable to be recaptured, this other voice that I am. My other voice knows of this desire that I have to recoup myself and to grasp and hold onto myself; and in fact the greatest gift of this other voice that I am and am not is its withdrawal—a drawing away and concealing itself that opens the space in which I can speak and say and become and thus constitute myself as real. The desire to recover my other voice is in fact, for Beckett and for me, the desire to die. Or at least any hope of becoming one with this voice can be fulfilled only in death; for life circulates in the space of the otherness that the withdrawal of this voice allows and gives.

As I was saying, this lost voice is not, despite what I suggested to Sandy, anything like an original voice or a primordial voice that I can claim to be or to which I can authentically return. It is the voice of nothing. That is, if I understand Beckett correctly, it is—perhaps³—the voice of the here, the impossible occurrence of the instant, where, were it possible to be, I would be wholly what I say. Such a voice and such a word that says “me,” here fully to myself and to you, is impossible, if for no other reason than because such a voice would not go outside itself and so would be no voice at all, or else the voice of nothing. Beckett says: it is “a voice that makes no sound because it goes towards none” (92). So my hope that I can recover this voice and in doing so heal myself is ill conceived. There is no primordial voice to be recovered in this sense; this hope is, as Beckett says, “no’s knife in yes’s wound” (139).

If there is any sense at all to naming such a voice primordial, it might be that it is something like primordial desire. I suggest this because it is nothing and yet it is and thus perhaps, must perhaps, want to be; not the desire to be this or that, not desire as an aim or intention that can be fulfilled but desire as such, a readiness for being, whatever that can mean. It is perhaps this joyful, abundant desire that gives voice to a me beyond itself and generates in me the power to articulate and say, alongside this other impossible voice, who I am. My voice then becomes this pro-ject, the utterance of this possibility to be, this going beyond myself that I am.

For Beckett, this is the great dilemma and paradox of the voice. In order that I give voice to myself and thus be myself, I need to reach out beyond myself and thus deny myself. And he worries greatly about the damage and hurt that so often occurs when the voice turns on itself in this way. I think this is what Beckett is saying in one of his most poignant passages: “Is it possible, is that the possible thing at last, the extinction of this black nothing and its impossible shades [in other words, is it the destiny of all narratives that give voice to the self that they extinguish the nothing and all its traces?], the end of the farce of making [that is, the farce that I can constitute and make the self that I am] and the silencing of silence [that is the silencing of the voice that speaks only as silent]?” (139). Can we constitute our voice and have a voice without silencing the silence that empowers us to speak? And what would speaking be like that no longer grounded itself in the abysmal grounding of silence and attempted to speak about what is so without an attentiveness to the silence from which the voice arises? Would this be the idle chatter of the everyday public self of which Martin Heidegger speaks? I would like to turn with you now to some thoughts from Heidegger about this problem of the voice.

In a conversation I had with Valentina Cervi, one of the participants in the Santorini Voice Symposium, about my presentation on the silent voice in the work of Martin Heidegger, she asked me how I felt about Heidegger and whether in my view his philosophy of the voice is meaningful and poignant. I told her that I was passionate about this author and that it was when I encountered Heidegger’s philosophy that I first discovered my own philosophical voice. A voice is only truly a voice when it speaks with others and communicates. Heidegger’s philosophy spoke to me in a way that allowed me both to listen and to enter into the address. Valentina responded by saying how much she was looking forward to my talk. It occurred to me that she still did not know anything specific about Heidegger’s thought and that what was important to her was whether what I would say would be spoken out of a passionate commitment. I admire her insight into the true character of the philosophical voice.

In his famous text, Being and Time, Heidegger discusses the public voice some of us adopt as our own. It is a voice that has lost its connection to its authentic source and allowed itself to be determined instead by the voice from outside itself, the everyday voice that is all around us and always ready to tell us who we are and what to say. He calls this the voice of das Man, the anonymous self that takes on the viewpoints and persona of average everydayness and identifies itself with this voice whose agendas help to form the opinions of the masses. He labels this voice that says what “they” say Gerede, idle chatter or gossip. The everyday self lets its owned, authentic voice get lost in the cacophony of inauthentic speaking.

According to Heidegger, it is no accident that we tend to let ourselves be determined by this public voice. In fact, this voice is part of what constitutes our very being. This is because there is a tendency within the human condition, and it is not merely a negative tendency that can be overcome, to let our being be absorbed by the world around us into which we are thrown at birth and from which we derive the structures of language that allow us to communicate. We belong to the world. The problem is that we often become so immersed in the world that our being gets entangled and sometimes even seems to be fused with what goes on around us and is of concern to us. Heidegger calls this “falling prey” to average everydayness, and when we do so we listen to the voices around us and become deaf to the existential voice from within our own being (Being section 38).

This tendency to run away from ourselves and flee in the face of our possibility to be authentically ourselves, this tendency to evade authentically connecting to the voice that is our own, occurs, according to Heidegger, because our being as humans is haunted by an existential anxiety (Angst) about the possibility of not being (sec. 40). Not choosing to be myself and running towards the secure site of an always already determined and constituted actuality promises to release us from the fragility and vulnerability of our human condition that is ongoingly open and undefined. In the face of this being that we are, we are exposed to our mortality and the possibility of not being that belongs to those beings who are aware that they are going to die. We experience our existential being as in jeopardy and our flight from this open but therefore vulnerable possibility that we are is the source of our desire to be other than ourselves, thrown outside of ourselves, comfortable in the security of what’s so and will remain so in the world of everyday reality.

But, of course, this desire to be other than ourselves can never succeed. Although covered over by the hustle bustle and idle talk of everydayness and the attempt to flee it, anxiety lurks beneath the surface. After all, what propels us away from ourselves into the world is this anxiety, so the more we flee it and attempt to hide from it, the more it is there, even if hidden and unrecognized. So it is a question of recovering our connection to this “lost” voice that we are and then also a question of whether these two voices, the one hidden and the other seemingly coming from outside, can ever be reconnected so that we can at all experience ourselves as a whole, both wholly attuned to our existential being and wholly present in the world around us. In a sense, the entire task of Heidegger’s major work, Being and Time, is to analyze how this might be so.

How is it, then, that we are able to get in touch with this authentic voice that is housed in our anxiety about our mortality? In order to understand this existential relationship to our mortality and the possibility of not-being that haunts our experience of ourselves, Heidegger offers a complex analysis of what he calls being-towards-death. The key concept in this analysis for understanding the structure that makes it possible for us to recover this lost and forgotten existential voice is what Heidegger calls Vorlaufen, anticipation (sec. 53). The possibility of not being is after all also the possibility of being, and thus fleeing in the face of the anxiety of death amounts to an attempt to evade owning our being as possibility. According to Heidegger, possibility belongs to the very being of the human being, even as it is being evaded. Anticipation is our way of always being ahead of ourselves and standing out towards ourselves. In anticipation, we experience ourselves in our possibility to be. Heidegger says, “Anticipation reveals to Dasein [the human being] its lostness in the they-self and brings it face to face with the possibility to be itself, primarily unsupported by the [everyday] concern that takes care, but to be itself in passionate, anxious freedom towards death which is free of the illusions of the they, factical and certain of itself” (266). The three words in this statement that especially stand out for me are passionate, anxious, and free. In recovering my connection with an existential self that is not defined by outside circumstances and the idle chatter of everyday discourse, I become, according to Heidegger, passionate and free and able to stand resolutely within the anxiety of my being as possibility. But Heidegger insists that this freedom to say who I am, this freed voice that is no longer lost in the they-self, is factical and certain of itself; that is, this free voice is every bit as tangible and concrete and “in” the world as the inauthentic voice that says who I am only in terms of the inherited discourse that is taken over from outside.

The problem that Heidegger now addresses is whether there is any site where these two voices we have described as belonging to the human being come together: the evasive, disowning voice of the “they” that says who I am within the confines of ordinary language and the structures of meaning derived from everyday discourse, and the free, existentially owned voice that says who I am in terms of my possibilities to be. Can I bring my freedom, my free voice, to bear on this everyday voice? Can I hold these voices together and thus stand resolutely as ready to be fully myself in my existential facticity? Heidegger’s analysis shows that this is indeed possible and occurs when we are attentive to what he calls the Stimme des Gewissens, the voice of conscience (Being secs. 55–58). Stimme in German is related to the German word Stimmung, which means tuning or pitch, and Gestimmtheit, which means attunement. And the German word for conscience is Gewissen, which for Heidegger does not have religious connotations, but has to do with the gathering of Wissen, knowledge or awareness. So the voice of conscience is for Heidegger a kind of attuned awareness. This voice of conscience finds us in our lostness and failure to hear ourselves. It breaks into and disrupts our tendency to be absorbed in the noise of idle chatter. It jolts us out of the stupor of everydayness by inserting another kind of hearing: the hearing of silence, of what is not being said and not being addressed in public discourse. But idle talk covers over this voice, and in everyday discourse this other voice cannot be heard. It calls to us silently. It calls us back from a failure to listen to ourselves and calls us away from a listening to the everyday voice that evades. The call of conscience requires a kind of poetic listening to the voice that speaks silently in the levelled down and trivializing speech of the everyday. It robs us of the refuge and subterfuge that occurs in our ordinary tendency to flee in the face of anxiety and allows us to hear the repressed voice of our being.

How is it that I hear this silent voice that I am? First of all, to hear the silence requires that we be capable of listening to it, that we have the potentiality for hearing it. In order to hear in a genuine way, we must in advance be ready to hear, not just in a passive sense, though this hearing is passive in the sense of being receptive and attuned to what is being said. This way of listening is a kind of active, attentive, and even impassioned stance of receptivity; without this stance, genuine listening is impossible. In a sense we must already be listening in order to hear. Similarly, to be silent is not just a mindless, mute condition. To truly be silent, we must have something to say. And to have something to say requires a potentiality for hearing, even if only for hearing what it is that needs to be spoken (Being sec. 55).

The silent voice is not something we can have or possess. It is rather something we can want or desire and something we can stand resolutely ready for. It is not something we can decide to hear as if it could be generated and controlled, but rather a kind of authentic receptivity for what can only be heard silently. It is never something we can have in a comfortable or familiar way. The call of conscience that speaks to us comes suddenly as a kind of breakthrough. It does not say anything; or rather, it says the nothing. It is the voice that resonates in the empty space of possibility and does not refer, therefore, to anything actual or objective. It speaks to us solely in silence, what Heidegger calls reticence (Verschwiegenheit) (sec. 60). Reticence is a kind of holding back and refusal to speak, but it is precisely this withdrawal of the voice that allows us to speak to each other and communicate without losing ourselves. It is not grounded in an arbitrary reserve that selfishly holds back what it has to say; rather it is the source of what can be said. It is the possibility to say that therefore itself cannot be said. Reticence is for this reason, in my view, the erotic, desireful voice that is ungraspable and not subject to domination or possession. What speaks in this voice of silence is the self apart from the they-self, the self apart from itself. It is the voice that calls us back to ourselves from our lostness. Since this silent voice is our own, we can conclude that, as human beings, we are constituted by a double voice, and it is this double voice parting from itself and returning that makes resonance and genuine communication possible.

I would like to conclude by briefly sharing one additional aspect of the silent voice that Heidegger mentions in another of his works, Contributions to Philosophy. It has to do with the failure of the word. For Heidegger, there is a certain impotentiality that belongs to the power of language and is a fundamental aspect of this capacity to speak and communicate. He says, “Es verschlägt einem das Wort” (26/36). The word fails. This common expression can also mean that I find myself dumbfounded or struck dumb, and this sudden incapacity to say, for Heidegger, is not a shortcoming but a fertile lack that underlies the very nature of language. It is not just that, in the face of the silent call of conscience, I am at a loss for words, but that this failure is an originary condition for language. My ability to speak, the fact that as a human being I am language-bound, is beholden to a fundamental condition of speechlessness. The genesis of authentic speaking and the recovery of my double voice lie in a powerlessness before speaking. The failure of my primordial voice, the catastrophe of this loss of voice, the need to recover from a condition of inauthentic everydayness rooted in a tendency to flee in the face of the insecurity of this voice, is not an unfortunate accident but the very condition of language. The gifting of language, and the capacity to communicate with each other in the world and to share with each other our common experience of the world around us, is connected to this withdrawal of the original saying. This failure of the word cannot be avoided or overcome. This stillness resonates

in us and resides in the power of the voice to speak, and empowers it. In order to speak and be connected with what I say, I need to be attuned to the peal of stillness that belongs to my voice and yours. The silent voice preserves the secret of my being and yours, and allows the mystery that I am and that you are to unfold.