The Time of My Life

. . . A period of mourning has kept me away frommusic, so my head fills with static bombs instead. I usually like to work with some sort of sonic signature. A subtle incentive laying down a basic beat, musical accompaniment allows me to pummel at a stubborn knot in life. In his work on cryptonymy, Laurence Rickels has claimed that background music rings a death knell. That may be so. I’m always hitching a ride on the death drive—the flex of my drivenness—a sure fire way to language. Doing without the rhythmic support that music supplies has presented complications in the mostly monogamous relation to writing. Ach! Despite my willingness to integrate silence and random noise into phrasal regimes, I become a bit sissyish when drafts recede so that nothing on the order of language assertion comes my way. Plunk, plunk. OK, so I’m still learning. As panic shivers through me: muteness happens. In some sectors the mute burble constitutes an upgrade in the grapple with the poeticity of being. But, let’s face it, regressive sputtering rarely scores points on my beat. At most, I can make something of “muttering”—or, with ears tuned to the German language, “mothering”—and stick it onto the subphenomena that constitute