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John Paul Ricco’s DROOL: LIQUID FORE-SPEECH OF THE FORE-SCENE isn’t new, but I stumbled upon when returning to a passage (quoted below) that has long been of interest to me.

“I am,” however, heard murmured by the unconsciousness of a dreamer, testifies less to an “I” strictly conceived than to a “self” simply withdrawn into self, out of reach of any questioning and of any rep­resentation. Murmured by unconscious­ ness, “I am” becomes unintelligible; it is a kind of grunt or sigh that escapes from barely parted lips. It is a preverbal stream that deposits on the pillow a barely visi­ble trace, as if a little saliva had leaked out of that sleeping mouth.

— Jean-Luc Nancy, “Self from Absence to Self”

Although Nancy’s focus is the corporeal present, his mention of “preverbal music” evokes the saliva primeval for me. The ancient utterances that become the locus of future libations.

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Saliva, libations, drool, the accidental loss of bodily fluids, the transformation of self into liquid ——

Once upon a time, in a land faraway and yet just around the corner, an Arcadian wood nymph known as Syrinx was being relentlessly pursued by the Greek god Pan. As she raced through the woods to escape the half-goat, half-man at her heels, Syrinx realized that his beastly parts gave him an advantage.

Maybe Pan was smitten. Or maybe he was just bored, hungry for fun, roused by the chase. When the river Ladon cornered Syrnix, she begged the gods to transform her into a reed so that she could escape being captured. The gods granted having granted her prayer, Syrinx sat quietly, secure in her disguise.

But Pan knew a ruse when he saw one. And so he cut those reeds from the banks and make some musical pipes from them. From that day forward, Pan’s iconic panpipes entered human history, as did his relationship to the reed mouth-organ (later, the harmonica). The Pan we know is two-hoofed god of tricks and wind music.

Some say Pan’s music is made from the melodies of his lost love's whispers. What captivates me most about the panpipe is less romantic and more visceral: the instrument, itself, is created from the broken body of the beloved.

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In Stefano della Bella’s etching of Pan et Syrinx (17th century), the Syrinx strikes an androgynous note, especially when compared to the feminized nymphet depicted in A. Sadeler’s Flemish engraving of Syrinx. The Flemish Syrinx has a dog at her feet and she is resting when a frisky, laurel-wearing Pan first spies her. Where the Flemish Pan is sprightly, the Italian Pan looks furious, animalistic, his visage marked by faint traces of the demonic.

Ricco draws on Nancy’s description of sleep as a shared sense of “the ontological impossibility of a common substance” in order to offer drool (particularly the drool of the slumbering) as “the trace of this ontological possibility— its elliptical sense.”

To quote the passage from DROOL: LIQUID FORE-SPEECH OF THE FORE-SCENE:

It is this “with”-ness that I am chasing, albeit with less elegance than Pan.

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Pan’s music is also associated with birdsong, or with the vocal organ of birds. The interesting thing about birdsong is that it lacks reverb. Where a dog bark has a short reverb, the birdsong has none. No reverb at all.

an and Syrinx, Metamorphoses of Ovid (series title), The god Pan pursues the nymph Syrinx. To escape him, she turns into reeds on the banks of the river Ladon. In the water nymphs. On the left, the river god Ladon rests on an urn.

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The 17th century engravings seem different from what develops in the 18th century.

Gregorio Lazzarini’s depiction of Pan and Syrinx, dated from the 1720’s, has little in common with the 17th century engravings. Only Syrinx’s feet look the same. In Lazzarini’s painting, Pan clearly resembles the Christian idea of Satan and Syrinx has come to resemble a princess fleeing the ballroom, naked but for the pearls strung around her neck as symbols of status. There is a “woe be unto all fair maidens” energy that builds in those associations.

I find myself staring at the red right hand clutching the lavender voile— the devils’ right hand is of course the red one. But the demonization of reed instruments follows from locating Pan among the emerging sinful/nonsinful binary administered by the churches.

Only Syrinx’s mouth is open here? Pan’s lips are sealed shut with a wooden grin.

But she will become the instrument he makes of her attempt to seek safety from him. That is what will come to pass in the frames following this one.

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In one of the engravings I saw, the river god Ladon was also pictured, sitting on urn, offering a necropastoral buzz to the scene. Someone should do a comparative study of various iterations of Pan’s horns next to various iterations of Satan’s. Of course someone has likely already done this, and I should hunt it down in my effort to get closer to the fore anterior.

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“In describing drool as the pre-cum of buccality, the outside and futurity (spatial and temporal opening) are understood as the provenance of speech and enunciation, and drool once again is more than simply metaphorically conceptualized,” Ricco wrote in endnote 20, drawing on the Latin root of the word provenance (its provenance), which translates as forth (pro) + come (venire). From the root of provenance, Ricco takes drool “as pre-cum” that may “trace a forth-coming futurity and fore-coming outside, neither of which are either initial or destinal, but a forth and a fore anterior to any origin or end, including even to any ‘pre-coming’.”

To Ricco, this “anarchic scene” which imagines the end of the pre-coming is an expansion of the field “opened up by drool and pre-cum.” I would like to smoke my pipe in it.