By learning Samuel Beckett’s monologue Not I, the singer Juliet Fraser reflects on processes of thought, inner speech, and creativity. Read an excerpt of an essay written for the video essay Inside Out by Fraser and filmmaker Jessie Rodger for MaerzMusik 2021.

It’s quite common at the moment to hear people referring to Alvin Lucier’s sound art piece I Am Sitting In a Room when they reflect upon the way they spend their days. With restricted horizons, we’re probably all spending more time «sitting in a room» and we may have developed quite a new relationship with that room. For the first performance in 1970, Mary Lucier created an accompanying sequence of Polaroid images (of the chair in which Alvin had sat to record his text) that had been similarly transformed and degraded. Their piece, then, was sonic and visual; a sound doubly framed. Beyond the title’s superficial resonance for these times, though, I am wondering how my perception of sound and space may have changed whilst confined.

I am thinking of my mind as a room. This space is not easy to describe with words: we often refer to the interior world, the «thought life», or an «inner monologue», but these fall short and feel clichéd. I’m particularly intrigued by the role that language plays in this space: some thoughts feel verbal, even if not verbalised; others seem more like sensations; still others are visual. So, «monologue» isn't the right word. «Soliloquy» is closer, but that is still performed, mitigated, somehow... It’s tempting to constrain this space by describing it as the arena of the «psychological», in order to distinguish it from the physical, but sometimes it’s all too clear that my inner world is extremely embodied: somany neural pathways have been worn by habit and some thoughts are triggered or accompanied by physical sensations. Actually, I love that it’s not simple – I am more and more interested in the grey, smudged areas of our understanding. Mystery is underrated; it keeps me engaged and humble.

Sound of the Inner Monologue

I don’t think I have ever listened to so little (and I distinguish here between listening and hearing). I am in a quiet place in the countryside, I am not travelling, I am, mostly, not encountering people, and I am very rarely listening to music. What I hear most are the environmental sounds around me – ticking radiators, birdsong, traffic on the breeze – and the voices of my parents or the tinny voice of someone I’m speaking to on the phone or on screen. Then there is the «sound» of my inner monologue. I can’t remember it feeling so prominent. Much of the time I don’t notice it, it just trundles along saying its things, observing this or that, remembering something, trying to remember something else... But then there are moments when it comes sharply into focus, when its «otherness» is uncanny. In her essay «The Delusions of Certainty», Siri Hustvedt asks:

«What is thinking? Are thoughts the utterances of each person’s internal narrator? Are thoughts identical to inner speech? There is no private language, as Wittgenstein argued. When I use words, they are words that I share with other people even when I’m talking to myself. Words are alive between you and me. Language happens among us. Do unconscious thoughts use words? Do thoughts take place only in a person’s mind and/or brain? Or does one think with one’s whole body? Do babies think? Could a false pregnancy be a form of bodily thought? Can the nervous,endocrine, and immune systems symbolize wishes and fears? How are a crow’s thoughts like mine? How is it possible for me to think what I have never thought before?»

Could Not Make a Sound

I’ve been spending a lot of time inside one particular monologue: Samuel Beckett’s Not I. This, of course, is not my monologue and, technically speaking, it’s no-one’s internal monologue. Each phrase, each cadence, each internal repetition or circling back or fork in the torrent of words is minutely controlled by Beckett; the art is in the artifice of Beckett’s rigorous script masquerading magnificently as his character’s stream of consciousness. A facial composite presented as a mirror. The more time I spend with this text though, the more I become it and the more it infects my own inner monologue. There’s also an intense embodiment of the words – I can think my way through it, silently, but it's much more difficult and I have to go slower without the muscle memory of the words in the mouth, the movement of the lips... cheeks...jaws...tongue... never still a second... mouth on fire... stream of words... in her ear... practically in her ear... not catching the half... not the quarter... no idea what she’s saying... imagine!... no idea what she’s saying!... and can’t stop... no stopping it... she who but a moment before... but a moment!... could not make a sound... no sound of any kind... now can’t stop... etc.

To learn Not I was a challenge I set myself during the first lockdown. For all its madness, and maddeningness, it has kept me sane. I’m relishing the opportunity to bring a heightened level of detail to the musical patterns – especially the loops and the not-quite-loops, which call to mind works by Morton Feldman or Bernhard Lang. It has also been a timely project in that it has given me something to do with my voice that is a step removed from my usual repertoire. I can bring a singer’s skill to this piece but without needing to sing. It can be learned in an armchair and muttered on long walks alone. I am fascinated by the tightrope one has to walk between an intense control over the material and the illusion of vertiginous confusion. That was the tightrope Beckett walked when he was writing, but now it’s me up there. It demands so much focus that my mind empties. I am no longer sitting in a room: I am the room and the great roar of words pours through it.