Melted Honey; Sax and Sex
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the anosmia of the statue makes a nice metaphor for rehearsal and performance
experiences, which are characterised by sensually anosmic bodies in the former
case and by fully transformed bodies in the latter. In the case of band members
the rehearsal body is similarly musically petrified. This is the musical body
raised up in language; this is the body grasped and made still, statue-like,
rendered separate and beside, not within, the object world. This body is the
subject to &e objects of the instrument world and does not circulate inside
instruments, just as instruments are prevented from circulating inside players. It
is no coincidence that band members use metaphors of food and sex to articulate
the difference between rehearsal and performance experiences; each of these
experiences is penetrative of bodily boundaries, and each is vulnerable to
breakdown when the points at which the body meets the world are surveilled.
But the body is not linguistically petrified by the band members’ successful
attempts to reduce their sensual experience to a single sense. Instead, band
members render themselves unable to taste or smell by involving all of thensenses in a surveillance job on the others. The body of the Assumption, in this
ethnographic circumstance, is achieved when the hand is watched with the eyes,
but is equally achieved when the tongue is watched and heard through touch.
The edible body of Christ is achieved when these mixed-up senses turn thenattentions away from themselves and out into the world beyond the sited body.
Conclusion
Serres’s critique of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology is useful because
it allows us to recognise that habitual corporeal life is not lived one sense at a
time. Neither is the “present” bodily life of the rehearsing band member; even
surveillance of bodily boundaries, the veiy ushering in of the present body, is, in
this case, carried out multisensually. One multisensual engagement, that which
is experienced during performance, allows the sax man to eat melted honey: hot
golden stuff that emerges when man penetrates sax and sax penetrates man. The
other, experienced during rehearsal, reduces the sax man to reading about
melted honey on a page, and leaves him starving, able to watch, but not taste. It
is little wonder, then, that band members describe performances as close to
orgasm (in their view, very penetrative) and rehearsals as a series of uninspiring
technicalities. When musically eating and making love, the sax man and his
band of equally hungry musicians actively engage in penetrative activities that,
during peiformance, occasion and entail a taking in of, and an expansion into,
musical instruments. Constructing a recipe and fucking both leave the musicians
ravenous; they are held within prisons of their own body sites, of their own
making, as they lust after musical food they can eat and bodies they can lovingly
encompass into their own bodies. Activities of making love and eating are, for
band members, multisensually delightful, and can never be rendered down to a
language that might describe the sound parts that are products of such activities.