You must not imagine that I am some privileged sybarite, languorously chronicling my cosseted self in an Esseintian retreat. I was not searching for fascination I had no interest in replacing my self-alienation with narcissism. Much of what I absorbed was predictable, mundane.
With these, I spent many industrious hours making records of various aspects of my being, internal and external, and many more hours engrossed in the perusal of these records. A syringe for extracting blood samples, and vials for storing them.
Open it, and find within: an inexpensive digital camera. Picture an ordinary backpack, medium-sized, of some synthetic material dyed a deep blue and festooned with the logos of some well-known sporting organization. As a consequence, I had decided to procure a range of technological equipment to aid me in an attempt to piece together my own selfhood. My own sense of self, once as firmly-rooted as any, had suffered a series of shocks in the summer of _82. Whose voice is that? Who am I, sitting here, listening to it? And when you begin to speak in that voice, you may never be entirely certain that it really was your own voice all along, even before you spent all that time listening to all those recordings.
IF YOUR VOICE emerges from a playback device – mechanical or digital – do you recognize it at once? The time may come when you have spent so many hours obsessively recording your voice and playing it back to try and fathom the precise timbre of your tone, the drift of your vowels, the crash of your consonants, the provenance of your accent and the frequency of your slurs and stutters and maggots, when you are so inured to the sound of your own recorded voice that you can listen to it neutrally, neither cringing not preening. The Ourorboros Apocrypha – illustration by Galen Dara – click image to enlarge
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