Long ago I read an essay by French author Roland Barthes entitled The Grain of the Voice, which was included in a (translated) collection called Image • Music • Text. The collection itself was rather influential in certain (English speaking) academic and intellectual circles, particularly for such essays as The Death of the Author and Garbo's Face — but it was The Grain of the Voice that particularly resonated with my sensibility at the time, and it still does, although I think my remembered sense of it has likely evolved enough to be considered a considerable departure.
Actually, it was my departure from it that was part of its sustained pleasure for me, and what allows it to still register on me as an influence. Any creative work I love, and which I can cite as an influence, has this feature: I leave it behind. It puts its breath in me (like a magician blows breath into clay to make it human) — or at least, its breath fills my sails (my "motivation" — as if that can truly be said to exist as any less a metaphor than sails are said to be), and off I go. Where I go and I how go and where I come to rest as a result of that may be fairly judged as divergent, if not contradictory — but regardless, I am happy if I can say that it is different. It's an evolution.
So, that being said, I was thinking about it again — about that phrase and how I understand it: The Grain of the Voice — and the way that it is interesting to me to allow both "grain" and "voice" be generally representative of expression with creative works. I should probably put 'creative works' in quotes too — but at a certain point, everything should be put into quotes, which can be rather tiresome. Therefore, let me express a proviso in this post that 'everything is anything according to some context'. If that context is not clear here, oh well. But let me just say that I was thinking of the "grain" of the "voice" in terms of an ineffable quality in works of "creative expression" (and that I put these words in quotes to signify what should always be apparent anyway, which is, that it is not necessarily obvious nor final what is meant by them).
Not too long ago, I suggested to someone who works as a professor at a local University that "reading" could have a loose enough meaning that it could encompass any process of analysis, decoding, comprehension, cognition, etc. (such that you could speak of literacy or competancy in the context of various cultural languages ["languages", i.e,. social grammar, social syntax, vernacular, argot, etc.] and hence, for instance, broaden the perspective of research methods and analysis with regard to literacy itself), and he was rather imperiously disinclined to accept this connotation. That is his prerogative, of course, as it is mine to consider his refusal symptomatic of an unfavorably narrow-minded scholarship. I don't pretend to be right, but I do like to write and reflect on what is interesting and stimulating and moving to me.
I think the concept of grain is as difficult to explicate (perhaps inevitably, perhaps necessarily) as that which it inexactly refers to. I like the word. It reminds me of the Chinese word li [理 "the markings in jade; the grain in wood; the fiber in muscle" —c/o Alan Watts] (in the context of Taoism), and it makes me think, naturally, of seeds in general, and of the famous "grain of sand" within which one might see eternity. It makes me think of wood grain of course, and the understanding of the difference between going with and going against it. But these are material in a way that the grain of the voice might not seem to be so obviously similar.
The concepts are married in the notion that the grain of wood and the grain of the voice are both expressions of an inherent order, being, soul or spirit. At the subatomic level, things may share a common structure that makes them indistinguishable, and that is interesting, but at the level where they are distinguishable, and where there is interaction and relationship, what can be truly remarkable, interesting and even profoundly moving, is how their difference is expressed.
The grain of the voice is an allusive trace of something equally allusive, and yet both, the sign and the signified, are palpably evident: felt, experienced, known as a knowledge that is inadequate to the task of exposition. This inadequacy, this limitation is not a disappointment to me. I consider it a natural consequence of what might be called the course of being.
The more material something may be, the more its meaning and value may be managed by various economies and power structures. This is even true of philosophical (or spiritual) principles. What is truly seductive to me about the grain of the voice is that it is not managed. To any extent that there is an attempt to do so, it disappears — slips out and away from under that thumb. It is present as a natural consequence of being. It is being, really — or if you prefer, life, presence — and always different, unique — and yet also, somehow, strangely, inexplicably, familiar. It cannot be had.
