Sonanz

For two years, Elke Erb dedicated herself to a daily exercise: within five minutes, she would write down whatever came to her mind and pen, aimlessly and as idiosyncratically as her audience loves her for. "Among the recurring motifs," Elke Erb writes about her self-experiment, "irritating obsessions revealed themselves even during the writing process. At the moment they entered the notes, they acted autonomously. Only during the editing did I gradually realize that these semi-automatic sequences of words even addressed current, fundamentally existential and theoretical themes and tasks, brightly and swiftly, compared to dream work, driven by stimuli like desire. With the first sounds, I had, like one testing some keys on an instrument before playing, coaxed my subcutaneous being to the surface and tuned it so that it remained present as a corporeal instrument from then on! Shortly thereafter, I understood where a number of those obsessive leitmotifs that had puzzled me came from: the corner, the edge, the border, the verticals, the horizontals, the surfaces... A being tunes itself and orients itself... It orients itself fundamentally and comprehensively, not only spatially but also to its general conditions – down to the pre-human, animal, plant, and geological times, and it looks, as the moment of writing demanded, into the destinies of history, into the social horizon of rural work and existence, into the concerns of civilization and reason. The inscriptions beneath the skin had been evoked and took over the game... I watched the poems they produced and thought that I could hardly have achieved this.".