The first fragments of what became “Ipsa Corpora” arrived in a torrent, overwhelming my abilities to keep them straight. I thought that imagining them as individuals, like characters in a play, could be a useful mnemonic, so I tried assigning an identity to each, poaching from gauzy memories of long-dead relatives. These arbitrary associations failed. The new pieces couldn’t correspond to the old apparitions. They were real—subjects in themselves, paradoxically, synesthetically, embodied in sound. I wasn’t happy with this conclusion but I couldn’t shake it, and as more pieces of the eventual whole revealed themselves over the following months, the effect became like guests arriving: like physical visitation, when the air in a room is ruffled and displaced as a body moves into and through it.
During that period (Fall 2023) events transpired which severely complicated this mode of thought. As the world began to watch, with a crushing technological capacity for bearing witness, bodies instrumentalized—desecrated, barbarized, destroyed—for political, ideological, and eschatological ends, I relied on this expanding composition as an outlet for my grief and sputtering, impotent rage. It felt like a kind of ritual mourning device. It also offered a site for meditation on the seams of relation between individuals, in flesh or sound. Meantime the silences in the piece multiplied, each insisting on its own singularity. A “kind of interruption…” wrote Maurice Blanchot, “introduces waiting, which measures the distance between two speakers, not the reducible distance but the irreducible…. Now what is at stake is the distance between us.” The audible subjects had been prerequisites for their essential counterparts, connective tissues of decay, distance, silence: actual bodies themselves.
– Nathan Salsburg, March 2025
- 1. Ipsa Corpora
