the album

by Aodán McCardle

What if the only record of our society was literally that, a record, an album. What if it was found in the carcass of a space ship, dug up by people thousands of years in the future on a distant planet when the way home has been forgotten, when space travel itself has become a myth like Odysseus, a story of someone told as a story and no longer as a history when stories no longer hold the precedence of truth and history is a myth of truth. What if this exhumation is the answer but the code for unlocking it is an album, a record, an album, a disc of plastic with a spiral of grooves inside a cardboard sleeve decorated with images and strange text and what if the people who found it, the society into which it reemerges, a society that has dragged itself back out of disaster, out of extinction has now finally touched proof that it once really did exist in some manner beyond its current imagination and what if upon first turning and turning ponderously this flat circular small sun, this life giving disc, what if this people, these people, were deaf and no longer had any memory of hearing, of hearing at least in any sense that we understand hearing except perhaps in the lowest rumble of tinnitus that gauges gear shifts of slow deep machines or rumbling strata and volcano song. Sound then is outside of the time scale in which communication amongst mammals is of use but exists at a level and speed more akin to the singing of planets. Sound then is external to these mammals.

If so then this sentence would have no sound, reading it would produce no sound even, all communication would be visual,

‘Honestly’ she said, ‘I’m not sure how interested I am in whether people can hear or not? It’s not that I don’t care, I mean I don’t want anyone in pain, is deafness a pain, I mean it’s not,’ she squeezed her eyes dragging deeply on her cigarette, her over-long nails glossed beyond any natural realms and I wondered how she could type on her phone, I was trying to picture it when I realized she’d started speaking again, now waving her cigarette, both hands going, she was angry now, I’d made her angry, why did I always make her angry, ‘people who are deaf’ she said ‘why?, a whole planet, I mean, what do they wear?’ she kissed me then, cigarette and coffee and lipstick, are we programmed to find something sexy in that, I can’t help thinking, she’s already off down the street, walking gracefully in high heels, again I’m thinking are we programmed to find that sexy, and pointy toed shoes, and I think could I ever be more than friends with that person and I think could they ever be more than friends with me and I think why would they, we’d be angry all the time or she would whereas now we meet, we do things together, it’s a sort of collision of language and fluids and we burst apart all gestures and smells and tastes, and I think what sort of particle is that which is two elements colliding and mingling and bursting apart but essentially bursts apart as the same two wholes, maybe, if anything, confirmed in their singular states rather than altered by the encounter and she’s still gesticulating, still speaking but I can’t hear her so is she speaking to me or to herself so I can hear her anyway, or something like her, in my head, in my mouth, in my nose…would there be a form of ESP. If a whole people could no longer hear, if no one had heard for a thousand years, for more than a thousand for four thousand years and they weren’t average years, they weren’t wall street, television, summer holiday, new car years but survival, remaking the wheel, how to find shelter, how to sharpen a blade years then could there be ESP, extra sensory perception but not direct thought to thought rather smell taste and sight, could someone smell angry?

What if a culture didn’t know it was deaf? (What if a culture didn’t know it was stupid? what if that’s a stupid thing to say?) If it developed a completely visual mode of language and communication? What if it never knew that there was such a thing as sound? What if they then meet a people who use their mouths and tongues to make sound? What if they meet another situation where sound is key? Vibration, would vibration have had a prioritized relation as a sensory perception? If that people found the album, out there in the bowels of a dead spaceship then what would the key be for them to place a needle, a small tensile piece of material that can transfer vibration, the sound that enters your ears is a wave. Inside your ears that wave is translated into a similar wave, but this time electrical, in the brain. They’ve done experiments that show that you can determine the sound from the wave inside the brain, if you read silently, if you read a book to yourself, when you read you create those same soundwaves as if you had spoken, the same ones.

How can you talk about that while I’m kissing your nipples...

She sits up and lights up, something funny in that tobacco and I see the lipstick smears, when did she put on the lipstick. I can taste it even though it’s not a real taste, it’s not on my tongue this minute, I can taste it or the memory of it just by looking at it. Her hair is wild like this.

So what are you saying, that they can read minds. Can you read my mind?

With that look on your face I can actually. You’re a nymphomaniac.

What else do we have in common?

She burrows under the clothes.

What vibrations do they pay attention to during sex? Do they have vibrations like music, like percussion, that they use? The album. If they could make it work, if they could find a way to extract the vibrations? Would it become a best seller, a hit? I’m assuming they have an economy. Why am I assuming they have an economy? Maybe they trade. How would they reproduce the album, would they reproduce it in a different technology…

She’s waving again and talking as she walks away, every time she does this I think, that’s the last time I’ll see her, she’s oddly awkwardly beautiful, I know very little about her, there’s no intention, no planning involved in our relationship, its like a bus and a bus stop, they keep meeting up briefly, sharing fluids and flesh, and then they part except its sort of random buses or bus stops or maybe its not so random and I think in this relationship I’m the bus stop and she’s the bus, she knows where I am and she stops, within the abstract terms of sharing fluids she knows what will happen but as a bus stop I know nothing really about what happens on the bus, she carries all those possible lives around with her and I can only speculate as to what really goes on. I realize that this is why I really like this relationship. She drops bits of information, whether its for me to hear or respond to is questionable, really, as she disappears around a corner, gesticulating, really she may right now be saying similar things, simply talking to the air, which would make me air, or a sort of shadow. A bus stop, air or a shadow, no a shadow is too close, knows too much so air or a bus stop. Air seems much too free. Bus stop it is. Except as a bus stop I’m available to passengers and other buses but yes that’s about right, we pick up bits of people and things, we carry them and their things, one by moving the other by standing still but every so often we stop long enough to share these bits with each other without making any other demands. Sex then is only the mechanics of how to get off and on a bus, an aesthetically beautiful intense, and on a wet day smelly soggy and in summer a sweaty dance, functional, coordinated sometimes clumsy depending on the baggage. I think to myself I wonder what she’ll say when I describe her as a bus.

Something rude I think.

What would the album be I think? What would the best album be for a race that hears no sound but is hypersensitive to vibration, for whom vibration might be a superpower, what would the very best album be to have sex with and would it be enough for them to build spaceships and come looking for us?

***Stay tuned for Aodán McCardle next monthly installment on August 9, 2025***

Photo of Aodán McCardle

BIO: Aodán’s current practice is improvised performance/writing/drawing. His PhD is on ‘Action as Articulation of the Contemporary Poem’ though physicality and doubt are the site of meaning and the stance respectively where the action operates. He opened the Performance Month at Beton7, Athens 2015, and the Performance Philosophy Centre Uni. of Surrey Sep 2016. He was a member of the anti-performance group LUC, London Under Construction and the Collaborative/Improvisational Performance group Cuislí.

Three books of poetry, Shuddered and ISing from Veer Books and most recently just out Small Increments from Beirbua Press plus an online chapbook LllOoVvee, Smithereens Press. New book of long poems/scores for performance that lean into the concrete and sonic elements of language coming this summer from Veer Books, based around issues of censorship and power structures. Recent critical work in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric on the poetry of Maurice Scully, Shearsman 2020, and in Hilson Hilson, Crater Press, on the Organ Music poems of Jeff Hilson. What Happens If A Poem is About Nothing? On the poetry of William Rowe, Esla (English Studies in Latin America; A Journal of Cultural and Literary Criticism, No.28 January 2025 https://ojs.uc.cl/index.php/esla/issue/view/3820

663 Reasons Why; What Might Seem Extreme on the poetry of Stephen Mooney. Enclave Review No 18, Contemporary and Modern Art Magazine, Ireland, Eds. Fergal Gaynor and Ed Krĉma, 2024

Current Project is a series of paintings and a series of etchings using dynamics from within Performance, improvisation as a mode of investigation and immersion in a subject and environment, and considering ‘experience’ in Twombly’s terms as our most intimate form of commonality. The works are a residue of these performances rather than simply an object of desire.