Letter about the Goat that once gave its name to tragedy

Romeo Castellucci wrote this letter to Scott Gibbons in the early stages of their collaboration on the Tragedia Endogonidia, laying out some of the conceptual foundations of the work and its aural quality. Selections are reprinted below:

Dear Scott,

During the performance some words must be heard but they must not have a literary origin. They must have an objective, final and alien valence. The text is a thing amoung other things and, like these things, it is subject to the destiny of a shape....The text must 'come' from a goat. The word 'tragos', after which 'tragedy' is taken, means 'the song of the goat'. Now the time has come that the eponymous animal takes back what belongs to it: the name...The goat becomes a body of writing and through it body it 'donates' us some words like a holy oblation (holy because it is unaware and indifferent, indifferent just like every creature).

...It means to have at one's shoulders an animal instead of a poet. And animal leads to the 'open', in a non-narrative dimension, that is to a dimension of real danger.

Now the technical problem that arises is: how can we obtain a series of words from a goat?

How can we obtain a medullar text that is issued by the very centre of all literatures, that is from the un-said of every body?...Another possibility, even more objective, could be reading what the goat has already, what all goats have already: the sequence of a protein, of an amino acid, of a substance that characterizes some organic processes.

...The most urgent thing is to find a technical-practical idea of how to get an objective and animal text. Then, it will be up to Chiara to give compactness and shape to what, at the very beginning, will be necessarily informal...

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