perception – relation – intimation

Listening to the compositions of jgrzinich we are listening at the door of conventional signification. Something is going on in the space beyond which concerns us. In that space of suggestion, only the texture of signification reaches the ears, and it is received with the warmth of intimation. How we long to transpose ourselves into that space. How we long to be ourselves the object of interpretation. We like listening at doors. We like even better those perceptions which surprise us with their resonance to our own experience, to what is immediate, to what was only just beneath the surface.

Intimating to oneself within this texture of suggestion – what is the soundtrack of the relation of self to self? What is the medium of (self-)interpretation? What does it sound like? Is it smooth or textured? What obstacles does it present? Perception is built around changing structures – try to define one and it’s gone, it gives way to the next one. We perceive things, we hear and see and understand because a language, a context, a situation gives us the framework for interpreting sensation into sense. As soon as we try to put into words what made that sense of meaning possible, we become clumsy, we lose the certainty we thought we had. Through our minds a million sounds and textures a day pass and spin and rest and fly, a ceaseless movement of temporary relations, the intimation of interpretations and meaning,… and the intimation of intimations, the texture of self. We perceive this as the texture of our own perceptions – a texture without text, a resonance without framework… until we give it one.

When we stop for a moment to listen to this feedback system of personal intimation, do we bypass the changing structures of signification? When we take a moment to concentrate on our resonating self-perception and self-interpretation, do we step outside of language, context and situation? Or do we create personal ones, radically intimate ones, spaces of relation which deny the possibility of communication?

Intimations offers us the space in which to allow resonance to construct meaning – the stuff of interpretation. “Sound as the sense of internal presence.” Present to myself, yet composed of a complex of distractions and deliberations and repressions and inspirations, I can find in this resonance that which is mine, that which stops and starts the process of signification, and that which substitutes for significations’ rationality the resonance of my own interpretive feedback. I can choose to stay at the door’s threshold, occupying the space between conventional signification and white noise, intimating to myself the suggestion of my own sense.

On Intimations by John Grzinich