“I quickly try to give shape to what faces me, to catalog the assemblage of the audible; I try to locate it in terms relevant to a system of reference—and difference—which we call language. I try to say: “this is jazz, this is a river, this is thunder, this is a helicopter, this is Van Gogh.” Descriptive sayings to which I turn, having grown accustomed to the world of the visible, sayings that have been necessary for me to catalog the existence of things within the field of their representation, to tolerate this that is intolerable. To be silent? What I really ask myself is: how can I explain what just happened to me? And so, with the same scarcity as always, I turn to the same resource of the word… with which I exercise ways to contaminate what has happened to me. But what has happened to me is, rather, sonorous; I have been contaminated, and I try to give that some kind of smell. I have just faced the beastliness of sound, and in sound… in sound, I find an illiteracy that I cherish, a lack of laws and adjectives that make it impossible to pollute what occurs. “Then it is purest,” I think to myself. I find, in its overwhelming purity, an undifferentiated rawness, something that doesn’t determine itself in relation to anything else… I mean, something unrecognizable, something that resists saying, “ah, this thing resembles this other thing,” “ah, this reminds me of that,” or “this must be father, son, or cousin to something else.” It knows no kinship and escapes any genealogy of meaning. Sound, then, is not orphaned—it is pure emancipation… a flow without a code. It is something disobedient and heterogeneous, far more remote, opaque, and uncontainable than image or word. And so, as I remain with it, I am absolved by sound; it frees me, it passes through me without asking permission. I am the body that sound possesses, like the edge of a house on which the hornero builds its nest; I am that edge, and sound returns me to a world where I no longer need to do anything; I no longer even listen, precisely because sound is in me.” — Monim