Dear Friend (March 2010)

I met a person the other day that I don’t know that well. We were having a conversation about a job we had to do together. Suddenly she told me something very personal, something that had a deep resonance in my mind. I have never before met a person with precisely that same condition or struggle that I also know so well.

Later that day I went to the theatre. It was experimental theatre and the three actors recited different Kafka texts into empty air. They were speaking as if the others were not there. I am sure there was a perfectly sound artistic reason for this, but I found myself longing for the actors to speak to each other. I had this urge to speak to them, to start some sort of dialogue, but I was too shy to do that. It reminded me of Facebook, that place where we all speak into empty air, but rarely to each other.

A friend of mine has an exhibition right now where two voices are heard reading a text in the exhibition space. The text was written by this friend, and it represents the same voice, but with two slightly different perspectives. That is why he has asked two people to read this text, and I am one of the voices. Yesterday the other voice and I were part of a group who visited this exhibition again. The other voice and I were listening to our voices and joking about what kind of perspective this might have for us as a pair of voices – other voice “jobs” maybe, or maybe we should enter the world of the spoken word... Yes, we were joking, but what our friend had done to our voices also had a strong effect on me. He had created this intimate space that surprised me. A seductive space that I enjoyed being in. Normally I don’t like to listen to my own voice, but here I was seduced by it.

This morning in the bathroom I heard The XX on the radio through the door. What I like so much about The XX is the two voices of a man and a woman who sing together. The dynamic between their voices constantly changes. Sometimes there is a dialogue between them, sometimes they sing as if they are one. I can almost see their voices in front of me as a drawing: the lines are twisted, twirled, parallel, braided, woven. Moving towards each other, moving apart.