Long Distance Runaround

I will be in America & Australia for the next month or so. Expect sporadic posts concerning departure lounges, suburban decay, and dingoes.

Enclosures

“Behind dark curtains, snow seems whiter. Indeed, everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate.” (Gaston Bachelard)

There is a cupboard that I throw things in. Things that no longer belong belong in the cupboard. It is a half-way house. But between what? Certainly nothing is in transition in the cupboard. The entire space is inert. Yet, it builds upon itself, is disordered, confused and then reaches a plateau of clarity. There is so much I’ve stuffed inside it that I have now begun returning to it, thinking I might find something new in the bric-a-brac. Something lost and now regained. Yes, there are surprises even in places we frequent daily. Unspoken inscriptions I thought were indelible. They too become otherwise. To be sure, it would be impossible to maintain an itinerary of things lost and found, not least because so much is hidden within other things. Things upon things, things in things, things eroded into new things, things that are no longer recognizable as old things.

The inside of the cupboard is space made temporal. Stacks arranged like the archaeologist’s dig. A pantry discloses a timeline in which the sardines form the birth, pickled cabbage marks middle age and eucalyptus honey indicates that which should already be buried. Poe was right: “We appreciate time by events alone...by objects alone we estimate space.” On the inside of the cupboard the spatiality of time is altogether clear. Were it to speak, then a cat would confirm this too: idleness is possible because cluttered time gives rise to space in time. In my own cupboard it is not hard to lounge beside it even though it is beside the trash. It is like the alleyway in which respite supplants activity. Again you return, again new trinkets are found. There is nothing there but the fortuitous opening.

In drapery too, the muddle of objects accumulates against a suitably musty backdrop. Curtains feature heavily in evoking a lapsed sense of time. But they are no good at night. That is when they ought to be fastened to the wall. At night the dynamic is binary: it is both light and dark, and sometimes simultaneously. Afternoons, meanwhile, are complex. Unimaginable. The degree to which it is appropriate to draw the curtains in the afternoon depends in large upon the ratio between the sun and the clouds, and this is no doubt why Poe remarks that “an extensive volume of drapery of any kind is, under any circumstance, irreconcilable with good taste.” Taste is a matter of sensitivity to light. For the arranger of curtains and drapes, he will likely think it misjudged to close the curtains on an overcast day. A shame, for that is precisely the time in which the space of enclosure is at its most lively. I suspect I rely so much on my cupboard because here there are no curtains. Only skylights dreaming of curtains. And skylights, unlike curtains in the afternoon, are like curtains at night: it is only ever day or night and never anything in-between.

Sickness and Melody

Nietzsche is right: melody is sick. Redemption – what happens when the wandering Jew ceases to wander? He become defined, his eternity has been annihilated though respite. This is when melody becomes noxious through ferrying us into impotence and submission. One of the reasons collective participation is repugnant is because it overwhelms us in a Schopenhauerean fashion. We are lost in it. It is melodious in that it confirms a pessimistic diagnosis of life and so aspires to redeem that state by negating the self. The self is essentially an error and only through a seduction of the whole can it be ‘redeemed’.

Musically it is the same. Resistance to melody is – after Nietzsche – a symptom of strength. One of the reasons I adore Schnittke is because he mingles with melody, lets it seduce us, and places us in a familiar context, before displacing that context and inverting the melody. He has the confidence to withstand melody and so is able to turn it in on itself. There is no enticement to submission. He knows it’s a concession to defeat – to pessimism. Melody does not redeem Schnittke. Schnittke does not need redeeming:



Melodious people tend to hate themselves. Seneca and Plotinus, as is well known, loathed the body they found themselves in. Their sheer physically never ceased to repulse them. Immense fortitude was required in order to endure the daily confrontation with their faeces. Epicurus meanwhile, took to the garden by way of retreat. It was bliss for all of them. Even Seneca’s suicide in the bath could do nothing to extinguish the smug grimace from his face. Epictetus too: chained to the rack – but no less content were he free.

What does this self-debasement mean? Dissolving the self – what a farce! As though the dissolution of self is an act of charity! In fact, it is a venomous act of narcissism. A destruction of the self so that the self can arise – only this time cleansed. Again: Melodious people tend to hate themselves. They find birth problematic and seek out redemption in those periods where they themselves are less visible. In other words, when they feel melodious. Music carries them off into that overwhelming participation. It invites the self in and in return provides a space in which the self can be forgotten.

“The exhausted are attracted by what is harmful...sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant.” Nietzsche is also right here. There is a reason why a twilight age immerses itself in the adagio: it prepares a civilization for burial through nullifying the senses. It too is pessimistic. Music for relaxation. The passive receiver to the agreeable. Music that serenades and soothes, music for breakfast and tea. This is also why I adore Schnittke. There is never a moment in which the distance between melody and an absence of melody is sufficiently wide enough to afford respite. The creation of disjunction means that passivity is always jarred by some fortuitous disruption.