WOUND

The words of the ancient poetess Sappho come to us as fragments of text preserved on papyrus, mere slips of things made of marks and of lack. On a roll of papyrus, text is written in columns without punctuation or lineation. In their contemporary reception, Sappho’s poems reverberate through the voice of another, that of translator and poet Anne Carson. This writer chooses not to fill in the missing pieces, to limn a fuller sense from time’s omission and empty space. Instead, Carson uses a kind of textual marker—a single square bracket—to, in her words, “give an impression of missing matter, so that ] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line … Brackets are an aesthetic gesture towards the papyrological event.”¹ Of the 10,000 lines of lyrics—words to be sung to the lyre—that Sappho is said to have composed, only one whole poem has survived intact. The rest are fragments. Through Carson, these gaps in language are preserved as a sort of wound. Run a finger down their spine: the ] or [ that marks this breach upon the page.²

] frequently
] for those
I treat well are the ones who most of all
] harm me
] crazy
]
]
]
] you, I want
] to suffer
] in myself I am
aware of this
]
]
]

The spaces in between are soft, supple, there to be stretched or prodded into coherence. Like the tongue that reaches for where the tooth once was, we want to fill the gaps with meaning. Sound the syllables in her mouth. Hear the shift in the subject who wounds, from betrayed (you, I want / to suffer) to inconsolable (I want / to suffer / in myself). Carson’s brackets give mouth to Sappho; mouth to mouth, we press meaning into wound.

WEIGHT

As these elisions make absence felt, they also map a yearning for understanding. Many centuries later and over a hundred years ago, the writer Gertrude Stein asked, “Why is a feel oyster an egg stir.” “Why is it orange center.”³ The wound has become a weight, a millstone around the neck. Stein was searching for a new way to write about the complexities of human existence; the conservatisms of language and its rules, there to be jettisoned for the new century. In her writing, adjectives, nouns, verbs all slip their straitjackets of meaning, and are let loose in a cascade of sibyl-tongued sibilance. There is pleasure: “What is a noun. A noun is grown with petals.” There is pain: “Prepositions are like burning paint.”⁴ As with Sappho, there is longing. Most language is approximate and insufficient. To fill up this searching, we make marks to pin it down.

One of Stein’s early stories, Melanctha, first published around the turn of the twentieth century, tilts about this axis—the difficulty of understanding and being understood by another, or perhaps more accurately, the nature of feeling itself. Through a humming parade of compulsive, ever-expanding sentences, its narrative recounts the gradual evolution of a relationship. Intractable differences between the mercurial, desiring Melanctha and sensible doctor Jefferson Anderson lead seemingly inexorably to its breakdown. The characters find language inadequate to describe their feelings: long sentences pile up with minimal punctuation, syntax breaks down, phrases repeat, and layers of eroticised innuendo begin to accumulate. As much as she is interrogating the ways in which language shapes experience—its imprecisions, evasions, limitations—Stein is reaching for connection. How do we communicate with one another, if words not only describe, but get in the way of emotion? As Melanctha implores, “Don’t you ever stop with your thinking long enough to ever to have any feeling.”⁵

BOND

In that dawning age when newspapers, cinema, photographs and radio thrust upon their audiences the images and sounds of what was happening, narrative had lost its relevance. For Stein, the only thing worth having was presence itself. We don’t need more stories about what people have done, she says, when “the thing that is important is the intensity of anybody’s experience.”⁶ Or maybe, the intensity of anybody’s feeling. Melanctha stretches the bonds of fiction and convention to become an exploration of, and a meditation on the possibilities of language. Language that exists in and for, as Stein would come to define it, the “continuous present.”⁷ Where Eadweard Muybridge used photography to hold a horse’s gallop still, Stein thought language must keep up with technology’s relentless flow. She compared the incremental changes in her undulating repetitions to the succession of frames in cinema, intended to convey a sense of ongoing motion that would unfold on the page as those moving images met the eye.

Time, like language, is elastic. It expands like breath; it stretches to greet the past in the present. Stein’s words rise up to meet us, harbingers from another era that once made mutability from her silver-shifting speech. Inevitably, her incursions into the arbitration of the everyday—of reality—via language were often subject to reactionary misinterpretation. Today, those same forces now crack the farce of legibility for the mirror it always was. The avant-gardist’s dream of life as art and art as life moves ever more out of reach. A rose by any other name. Are we still speaking to one another?

DECEPTION

Before she was a writer, or perhaps more accurately, as she became a writer, Stein studied the workings of the human mind under psychologist William James. In his seminars, she devised a series of experiments that questioned how the brain pays attention, testing the effects of distraction. In one, she attempted to read a novel while her lab partner spoke random words aloud at intervals for her to write down. At first she could focus only on either reading or listening. But before long, she was able to write his words without breaking her consciousness, simultaneously reading something else without registering the effort at all.⁸

These days, many voices attempt to make themselves heard, advancing their incursions upon our consciousness from innumerable screens that hold our gaze. The potential for misunderstanding, for miscommunication or misfire—like that between Melanctha and Jefferson, between Sappho and those who do her harm—is its own kind of potency. Language contracts and is made sclerotic; such struggles now break the bonds between us.

In some instances, we describe this decline—the deliberate impoverishment of meaning enacted by cerberus-entanglements of artificial intelligence and populist sloganeering—in words of one syllable: slop, rot. Here language’s severance from the world, from the forms of life and longing it attempts to describe, has become irrelevant. It coheres—comes together, communicates—only as much as it circulates, populates our feeds, slips and slides through ever more frictionless channels. This evisceration of its relational meaning—that between bodies and urgencies—seems most obvious in language deployed as shield, one mobilised to mask evasion and untruth. Simplicity is only a costume for mendacity.

ECHO

Across a sloping green valley, another kind of language calls—composed of sounds we’re only just beginning to hold in our mouths. In this territory, kākā whisper to each other at dusk, gnawing, scratching, tearing through the dense undergrowth. There is a textual pleasure to their search for sustenance. To make a mark on, to transform, to leave trace and sign for others to follow, like crumbs in the dark.

Where Stein’s writing attempts to bind together experience and its representation, now we concern ourselves with bridging another kind of divide, that between species—reimagining kinship as mutual dependency in a time of permanent crisis. We have tried to translate the utterances of these birds—their whistles, gestures, cries—into human forms of language, yet our efforts expose the limits of this endeavour. This kind of communication is not really for understanding or comprehension, for reciprocity or exchange, but for gain: we observe the bird and attempt to make its voice fit within a system we have devised ourselves. In return, the bird observes our relationship to this thing we call language and mimics it, subverts it, and finds us wanting. A group of kākā might cry or sob to indicate real emotion or pain, like hunger, but in front of a willing audience, their speech act is instead its imitation—they have learnt they will be fed. The birds are not born with nor innately acquire this knowledge; rather, its efficacy is practiced socially, through the repetition and mimicry of the behaviour patterns of those around them.⁹ As Stein knew well, the same sound makes more than one meaning: “Anyone knowing anything is repeating that thing.”¹⁰

Once nearly extinct, kākā now thrive in the borderlands of enclosure; once nearly silenced, their refrain rings out through the hills. As if it was somehow lacking, we taught it how to sing¹¹:

]
]
]
]
]
] in a thin voice
]

BIOGRAPHY

Jess Clifford is a writer, editor and curator based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, where she is interim Director of Enjoy Contemporary Art Space. Across writing and exhibition-making, her practice is informed by the intersections of literary poetics and artistic practice, moving image and performance. Curatorial projects include Things are, they do not happen (2025), Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery; Inas Halabi: The Centre Does Not Hold (2024), Enjoy; I’m so into you (2024), The Physics Room; Pillow Talk: films by Barbara Hammer and To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (2023), both Enjoy.

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Related to the exhibition: Echo

Published October 2025