Advent 2022, Dec 20, Lawrence Lenhart, Toward an Unregulated Confessionalism: Prolegomenon to The Calling Party

Starting January 1, 2023, I will begin calling everyone in my phonebook. That's 431 calls total, or 1.18 per day for a year.

I am wary of this text [already] because it isn't mine. (Replace "text" with "life.")

How to begin writing a text for which I won't be the author? I stall by calling forth this prolegomenon.

My first false start was at a bonfire in 2015. I swiped through the digital rolodex as if it was a roulette wheel, and it landed on RM. I sputtered a bit before he hung up. Where I meant to break the seal, instead I soldered it shut.

"Each act of reading the 'text' is a preface to the next. The reading of a self-professed preface is no exception to this rule" (Spivak xii). Might someone, somewhere already be rereading the book I have not even begun writing?

The database is especially full of area codes in PA, OH, DE, AZ, and CA. My main milieus, strange avenues.  

This essay is no one's. Instead, "the text belongs to language, not to the sovereign and generating author" (Spivak, lxxiv).

I will call everyone, no exceptions: my best friend from the old neighborhood in Southwestern Pennsylvania; my old boss/lifeguard captain in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; whoever picks up at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Akron, Ohio; my ex-fiancée's mom in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; my estranged and incarcerated cousin in Huntsville, Alabama; my son's best friend's mom's best friend in Flagstaff, Arizona.

—at least initially. I will call back. I will get through.

Starting January 1, 2023, I will begin calling everyone in my phonebook. That's 431 calls total, or 1.18 per day for a year.

I probably have “telephonophobia” too but have irreversibly committed myself to this dare

“I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself” (Montaigne). But what if we are made through others?

I am calling…

• because I miss you and thus, I miss myself.
• because I’ve forgotten you and thus, I have forgotten myself.
• because I fear you and thus, I fear myself.
• because I’ve neglected you and thus, I have neglected myself.
• because I love to hate you.

In “Son,” Forrest Gander writes, “I gave my life to strangers; I kept it from the ones I love.” 

What then to do with the data of 431 phone calls? 

I will use a call recorder (Rev), transcription service (otter.ai), data analytics software (Dedoose), word processor (MS Word), and digital sound workstation (GarageBand) to create an audio-biography, a composite anti-memoir in the second-person comprised of my concatenated acquaintances. 

Derrida’s différance indicates both difference in and deferral of meaning.

Through différance, “meaning is disseminated across the text and can be found only in traces, in the unending chain of signification” (Mambrol).

The Calling Party is a collective heterobiography that signals the death of compartmentalization. A fuzzy feedback arena. 

One may choose to listen by area code/milieu. Or filter by theme. To hear all responses to, “What would be a fitting way for me to die?”  in succession, by toggling to Q13. There’s a randomizer too that produces a new text each time it is refreshed, resulting in a collage of sound bites. When I press that button on January 1, 2024, the resulting text will be the basis for the official codex for The Calling Party.