![]() ![]() This moment is one where birth is no longer tied to genealogy. It is the singular amidst the plural, the inside amidst the everywheres of the outside, the interior decorated as exterior. “I’m going to be born.” A voice like your own but distilled, as in extracted, your own but multiplied by its exposure to the outside. One assumes from her account that her aphonia is temporary, another voice will emerge out of the loss. Cardinal joins Armstrong on stage and voices the desperate lyric “I’m going to die.” The performance on stage is about running off stage. There is something akin to birth in this near-death experience. Cardinal’s asphyxiation is such a case, particular as well as infinitely common. Playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo talks of “La importancia infinita del caso singular ” (Buero Vallejo, El Tragaluz 67). Is her panic a somatic manifestation of feeling the stage throb in all its “common differentness” (Leiris in Clifford, The Predicament of Culture 1923)? Michel Leiris used this formulation in relation to the absurdity of speaking of African sculpture as a single category, here I am speculating that Cardinal is possessed by a similar undifferentiated and undifferentiable fear. ![]() She is running and the wind is blowing against her, she is advancing backwards, her fast forward is rewinding. As a speaker, she is blown, ruptured by frequencies beyond her capacity. The stage and what it emanates slips inside skin and impacts the core. What engenders Marie Cardinal’s phobic phonics performance? Is her asphyxiation caused by Satchmo’s “quixotic leaps or ellipses (quantum lump in one’s throat)” (Mackey, Djbot Baghostus’s Run 19)? The sonic and linguistic channels are saturated with soma. She is running, she is going, fast forwarding the future, sprinting to her death. Not the death of performance, but death by performance. Marie Cardinal is facing death by contamination, death by Artaud’s plague. I’m going to die” (Cardinal in Stallybrass & White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression 181). Gripped by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd howling, I ran into the street like someone possessed… “I’m going to die. ![]() I was nineteen or twenty… the atmosphere warmed up fast… my heart began to accelerate, becoming more important than the music, shaking the bars of my rib cage, compressing my lungs so the air could no longer enter them. My first anxiety attack occurred during a Louis Armstrong concert. BABYLON NO.1: LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S POSSESSION ![]()
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