12 [13]. Thunder: of Perplexed Primordial Witness, Defiance, Applause (which, after the final run in 1980, allegedly thrummed 90+ minutes on end):
Time reverses space / the journey into darkness is a journey to “the beginning of everything at the END of each day,” said Lemaître, laying out his theory in the library of Mount Wilson Observatory in 1933, “we had fireworks of unimaginable beauty / then there was the explosion followed by the filling of the heavens with smoke,” the dying primordial light, the transition to something else entirely, vestiges of nothingness whose relationship with its flow mixes cartography, adventure, science and a compulsive kind of dreamwork that some furious alien forged, delusionally, from primordial Sound only it’s thrumming our Orb, so a powerful dissonance overtakes my mind, powerful in part because it is so difficult to use, so unyielding in its dailiness, for where quotations begin is in a cloud hovering o’er woe-begotten bowers song- and long-forgotten, contemporary forms of obsolescence did not quite understand a sodden-sock shock (no mere shenanigan or nickname for a shebang of shenanigans) as if time were reversing, and what was pressed down below the surface is now rising up over billions of years b/c 50% of the complete game, CER once whispered, is bounding off what’s in the main text vs. what’s in the endnotes, for distant plangencies and different harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I could not appreciate at my elbow and I cry there, surprised and helpless, deep in granite and darkness, weeping for feelings I cannot name, a combination of experiences rare within triptychs full and bright whose small acts of preservation and elegiac songs meander, spiral, explode appropriate contexts 4 the staticky remnant of white-hot hydrogen plasma that had suffused the neonatal universe during its first half-million years which, unfathomably, had lost something of their material quality and became vast and luminous and whoso should drowse-browse but a Javanese elevator operator briefly filled with a longing to step into a side tunnel myself, lie down and let the halite slowly seal me in for five years or 10,000 — to wait out the Anthropocene in that translucent cocoon, sentimentally to commemorate the co-memorious sentiment: in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you… I am here with you… don’t be afraid… go to sleep now, these seething silver sparks, deracinated mica, songs of the Fulani, these scattering star-shards, a ntumpan, male and female, ova scintilla of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, stasis Atlantis dressed in silk, the mystical current under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbolled and archaic embroidery of the skirts of God, is this what death feels like / or birth and I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you… you are not alone… don’t be afraid… go to SLEEEEEEP…
11. G, Act Three
The problem is not that the diary is trivial but that it introduces more stories than can easily be recovered and absorbed. It is one thing to describe Martha’s journey across the Kennebec, another to assess the historical significance of Nancy Norcross’s lingering labor, Obed Hussey’s sojourn in jail, or Zilpha and Ebenezer Hewins’s hasty marriage. Taken alone, such stories tell us too much and not enough, teasing us with glimpses of intimate life, repelling us with a reticence we cannot decode… Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s [daybook] lies. To extract the river crossings without noting the cold days spent “footing” the stockings, to abstract the births without recording the long autumns spent winding quills, pickling meat, and sorting cabbages, is to destroy the sinews of this earnest, steady, gentle, and courageous record… For her, living was to be measured in doing. Nothing was trivial.
…Some day the diary may be published. What follows is in so sense a substitute for it; it is an interpretation, a kind of exegesis… Because so few readers will have seen the original, I have transcribed ten long passages, one for each chapter… In each case, the “important” material, the passage or event highlighted in the accompanying discussion, is submerged in the dense dailiness of the complete excerpt. Juxtaposing the raw diary and the interpretive essay in this way, I have hoped to remind readers of the complexity and subjectivity of historical reconstruction, to give them some sense of both the affinity and the distance between history and source.
…Characteristically, the one obstetrical comment in the entry (“There was but a short space between the Births”) is embedded in seemingly extraneous references to the weather, her journey, the names of the men who assisted her across the river and of the women who sat up with her through the night. The biological events fades into the clutter of social detail. Where is the center of the picture? Is it Martha Ballard scrambling up the icy bank, Mrs. Dingley grasping one arm, Mr. Graves reaching toward her from above, while Ephraim slowly turns his boat in the ice-rimmed river below? Is it Mrs. Byrnes, exhausted from her eight-hour labor, bearing down for the second delivery? Is it Mrs. Conry easing two perfect babies into the cradle, or the three drowsy women leaning toward the kitchen fire, the midnight cold at their backs, small clouds of mist above their whispers? There is no center, only a kind of grid, faint trails of experience converging and deflecting across a single day.
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (Vintage, 1990), a book that belongs to that scarce genre which we can only call a book — to shelter what is precious, thirteen such titles sparkle in grayscale along the network, including From Dawn to Decadence, a tractatus logico-philosophicus architected by peripatetic Monsieur B. who, like innumerable daybookers, scribbled quiet portentous doggerel (HP made “the most original and powerful contribution to dramatic music on this continent”; “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and reality of the game”) — AMT perhaps the greatest micro-history in the universe — we’re guessing / there are simply too many things we cannot know — precisely because LTU welcomes our doubts; she demands that we don’t automatically swallow non-fictioneers’ incessant inventing their (necessary, meaningful) CONTEXTS, i.e., their most important decisions in inventing [re-viewing] F-words [“facts”]; “objectivity” is never even an end; her juxtapositions whereby everything seems (as in Götterdämmerung — “there’s hardly a bar in [it] that does not refer forward or back or sideways or all three”) both distant and proximate at the same time, repeatedly ring us that what we know of “it” [infinite pasts / finite future] is largely reverse-engineered; beyond the frame of any (bounded) space-time “event,” all of the rest of the galactic ticking, drumming, humming, and crackling is actually a figment of complex instruments and how we choose to monitor, and talk about, the voids of space, which, in terms of earthly acoustics, can propagate no sound; so to float invisible cinematic cameras (infinite invisible numbers of them, arrayed in a perfect orbis, surround any/every possible “center”) over the deep blue Kennebechtrhine itself, is to imagine ice as a “medium”… a presence permitting communication with the ghosts of people from whom we are descended, whose genes we carry in our bodies; those arcane devices yearn to sing, against quantum limits of communication, Here’s Everything; and indeed!, here’s GJ as transfigured Brünnhilde as Elena Makpropulos as social healer as Walt Whitisney’s Sleeping Beauty; what if Martha had had an elevator to negotiate that exceedingly specific landscape (the concept which in the last decade or so — why so late [in the day / book]?? — physicists have been grappling with, a theoretical multiverse of different possible spaces which could have drastically different conditions from our own); yes, just look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away / look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe [theory of everything]; LTU’s/MB’s unflagging diligence reassures us that it’s totally fine not to trust such elaborate and complete systems; after all, if you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent (like the one literally underpinning 13 Thirteen) you are probably on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff-bank you haven’t even climbed; just as Techne is so much more important than Science, so, too, noisy Urth remains more intricate, inexhaustible, intractable than the entire cosmos; all that is particular in its noisome splendor belongs to its finely granulated decision-making and chaotic blurs, its MYSTERY
10. G, to Act
It’s impossible to seriously contemplate the END of the universe without ultimately coming to terms with that it means for humanity… There has to come a point in any timeline with a finite extent where our legacy as a species just… [KM’s ellipsis] stops… At some point, in a cosmic sense, it will not have mattered that we ever lived… As a discipline within physics, the study of cosmology isn’t really about finding meaning per se, but it is about uncovering fundamental truths. To what extent there even exists an explanation for the nature of our universe is an open question too… It’s totally possible that there’s no theory of everything, and we’re never going to piece it all together in any sensible way. But just typing that makes my physicist toes curl, so maybe we can set that to the side for now in the “BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EXISTENTIAL EMERGENCY” cabinet… A universe cycling from Big Bang to Heat Death, over and over again, forever, with the tantalizing possibility that something — some imprint from a previous cycle — might make it through the transition. The notion that what passes through could contain meaningful information about any conscious inhabitants is just idle speculation at the moment, [Roger Penrose] says, but the implications of the possibility could be profound… So yes, you hold within you the dust of ancient generations of stars. But you are also, to a very large fraction, built out of by-products of the actual Big Bang. Carl Sagan’s larger statement still stands, to an even greater degree: “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
— O U K, all the telltale traces thrumming in place like that modest lieu in Boulez’s Paris which GP, through a knitting of imagery (underground rivers, inflation fields, Norns) and by evoking the names of people and things (there are ninety-three historical personages named), made “a tentative attempt at exhausting” [sic; by all means, skeptical students, do investigate AMM’s The Inexhaustible Document] in 1975: the year JG’s Steelers inspissated AP’s Vikings in a Superconducting Super Collider of a Super Bowl in New Orleans (source-space of super-sonic jazz; Mercer Ellington (the late Duke’s Volsung) played the halftime show); the orbit in which FR homered in his first at-bat upon becoming MLB’s first African-American manager; the Togashian tree-ring of the previous cycle that accomplished exactly nothing to solve the Unsolved Problem: whereas RW’s non-Ring trio of music-dramas — Tristan, Meistersinger, and Parsifal, the ones the faithful routinely exalt as greater works; certainly the view isn’t as good, but the best part of life is internal — make their meanings quite clear — through them, Cooke cooks in I Saw the World End, “we do find that our feeling is set at rest, that nothing remains for the intellect to search for, that our instinctive understanding of life is enriched, and that we become ‘knowers through feeling’” — this has never held for The Ring; the very existence of its “cosmos” is a contradiction; RW “believed myths to be humanity’s intuitive expression, in symbolic form, of the ultimate truths about its own nature and destiny / this is, of course, one of the things that makes it so many-sided and inexhaustible; yet the fact that this ‘play of ideas’ has proved opaque to our intellects makes the tetralogy fall short of being a perfect work of art, since we are always still puzzling over its meaning when we leave the theater,” which also helps explain why those scholarly re-viewings called History (a discipline that isn’t really about finding “fundamental truth” per se, but it is about uncovering meanings) will never actually “end,” but which does not explain (though the human mind is capable of a great elastic theater) why people perennially posit that a pile of puzzle pieces has a higher entropy than a completed puzzle, b/c hark!, within the completed puzzle’s surface intra-relations, a flat ontology now entices, a pattern language puzzling Perec’s puzzlers — “it is not too strong to say,” stabs PJS, “that the whole of the action of [Götterdämmerung, in which Wotan ne’er appears] takes place in Wotan’s mind, and everything — every development — must be appreciated relative to the watching eye of the old man, all his dreams shattered and his hopes ground down, sitting in Valhalla surrounded by his gods and the branches of the world-ash-tree, itself long dead, awaiting the end” — of infinite implied librettos within which a drastic slowdown and recursion of language occurs, a rhetorical enactment of fatigue and confusion… “backflowing,” a loss of causal drive, a gathering of hesitancies and stutters, inexhaustible investigations into the completed game’s lulls, bells, tells, spells, shells, ills that need end only with death, the cosmic gift (Notung; needful [no]thing) whose very certainty guarantees a certain bedrock-level of “meaning” — Andy sells a scintillating Vec Makropulos (sung in English) from ’71 starring Marie Collier (soon to expire), her cathartic renunciation of immortality (there is no joy in gewd-ness / theeere,,, is no jooyy,,, in eeee-ville: both the feeling of being replete, a feeling of satisfaction, and the feeling of loss, the sadness of having finished) elevating everything — environed beyond our capacity to know, Neil Armstrong’s step onto a dead planet [being] the most pressing statement of the question as to the life of matter / he was a human being carried in a machine to posture as if in a charade (the photographs of him standing by that insectlike spacecraft, the American flag starched into a semblance of flying in the wind, the unerasable footprints, and none ever to be discovered of a Friday there before him, the absolute uniqueness of the event, dreamlike, had been anticipated by hundreds of Max Ernst drawings and paintings) / the meaning of that charade is not only unknowable, it is unaskable, the contradiction, fate, destiny, direction, purpose, significance, end as in MEANING
9. Götterdämmerung, Prelude and Act One (so, two discs)
50.) Gelatt, Roland. “Conversations with Pierre Boulez.” Harper’s. 1969.
…excavation of the central cavity was pivotal. For it was only once ensconced within that pre-anechoic chamber (accompanied by a certain jazz musician (“from Saturn,” evidently) who had recently concertized in Switzerland), Boulez reveals, that he finally divined the polysemic stasis binding the varied leitmotif tENDrils to the architectonics of the crenellated tunnels themselves. But he singles out the first act of Götterdämmerung:
Nobody can really say where it’s going. I’d like to do an experiment with that act some time, making an aleatory piece of it by cutting it up into various sections and reassembling them in a different order, just making sure that the modulations are still all right. I’m sure than many listeners would never know the difference.
Whether this remark comes across as ppfflippant or perspicacious…
…52.) Gideon, Siegfried. Space, Time, and Architecture. 3rd ed. Harvard. 1952.
…basic technologies: “Wagner built the system of elevated and underground” stiles descending to the grotto, “without doubt one of the most uncompromising rooms” in Europe; “Wagner showed the same interest in the interpenetration of different streams” feeding the (evidently sourceless) Rhine as he did in the overall formal plan;…
…76.) Mathews, Harry. “That Ephemeral Thing.” New York Review of Books. 1988.
…parallels the quarry itself:
One of the transient inhabitants of Perec’s apartment building, Emilio Grifalconi, “a cabinet-maker from Verona,” gives Valène an unusual object in appreciation of a family portrait the artist has painted for them. The object resembles “a large cluster of coral,” and it has been produced by the solidification of a liquid mixture Grifalconi once injected into the tangle of minute tunnels that termites had bored inside the base of an antique wooden table. Even reinforced, the base proves too fragile to support the table top and has to be replaced; but Grifalconi salvages
the fabulous arboresence within, this exact record of the worms’ life inside the wooden mass; a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence, their undeviating singlemindedness, their obstinate itineraries; the faithful materialization of all they had eaten and digested as they forced from their dense surroundings the invisible elements needed for their survival, the explicit, visible, immeasurably disturbing image of the endless progressions that had reduced the hardest of woods to an impalpable network of crumbling galleries.
Since the object is referred to at one point as a réseau de vers, which can mean a network not only of worms but of verses, we can claim it for literature; most usefully, for this very book.
Réseau de Vers, of course, is one of five inscriptions lining the Pool’s tiled stiles…
…77.) Mathews, Harry and Georges Perec. “Roussel and Venice: Outline of a Melancholic Geography.” Atlas Anthology Three. 1985.
…elevate any given passage:
This was not the first time Roussel had used a title as a starting point (Les ensorcelés du Lac Ontario [Bewitched at Lake Ontario], the title of a novel by Gustave Reid that had been a bestseller in 1907, becomes “Amphores scellées dures a contrario” [hard sealed amphorae a contrario] (Com., 21) and gives rise to the story of the forger Le Marech’). Everything Roussel produced suggests an underlying unity that depends neither on “psychology” (which is incapable of describing the work or its development) nor, in spite of its enigmatic characteristics, on a coded hermetic message. Both in his life and in his work, what “changes the world rather than allowing the slightest alteration of the subject” is, to give a banal and literal answer, travel. As a real-life traveler, Roussel’s behavior was often baffling and inscrutable; in his written travels, he strode across vast, improbable continents [endnote omitted]. He went all over the world without seeing it, without looking at it, without being for one moment “impressed” by it. His “visible” journeys are not the ones to study. Roussel’s work is, we think, a unique commemoration of his other, invisible journeys, the ones that took place in the “secret topological system”… The site of this topography is Venice… The urban architecture of Venice is pure theater; it is a trompe l’oeil in the context of illusion itself, which can therefore be taken literally: here deprived of reference to anything outside itself, the reality of illusion — which is also Roussel’s reality — comes into its own… In this sense, Roussel’s journey to Venice was his only journey (Venice becomes voyage, voyage becomes Venice, and V comes to stand for both words.) And like every true journey it was not a departure but a return. He came home, he found his place. It was not an exile but a rediscovery of his origins.
What’s notable here: not just the mystical parallels between Roussel and Wagner (personal dispositions; palindromicyclical predilections); not just the mythical position occupied by Venice (where Wagner died and where he had reveled in composing Tristan’s endless feverish surging solipsistic all-annihilating chromaticisms); but the specificity of detail presented by the “brothers” who birthed this piece: an essay, it seems, in which stylized formal elements (endnotes, arcane names, precise bibliographic references) are clearly inventions, but which are, ironically and thereby, all the more true to the subject, suggesting that just as rivers — and, yes, pools! — often trace their origins to fugitive (diffuse, capillary, underground) sources, so, too, any given “everything” also can be traced backwards to any instantiated “end” of earthly detail, however fictional, trivial, or arbitrary.
— Val Cura, “‘That Amniotic Space, an Entity Complete in Itself’: An annotated bibliography of everything unearthable pertaining to the Swimming Pool at Bayreuth, including its natural cave system, shotcrete walls, energy transduction, and pattern formation,” in T. Atlin Brescia, ed., Bayreuth, Babe Ruth, Beirut: Annular Byways of the Wagnerian Paideuma (m.s., n.d.; distributed samizdat-style by S.OMNIA [née the Society for the Study of Radiophonic Epicycles and Cosmological STRUCTURE])
8. S, Act Three
Round Three: Everyhow: On hearing what had not been heard, could not be heard, should not be heard. Calibrating and recalibrating noise. Toward what END?
…“sudden uncontrollable variations in the strength of reception”… the rumbles, splashes, surges, clicks, and crackling heard over submarine cable connections, and the hissing and frying heard on radio headsets and telegraph lines, along with whistles, tweeks, hollow rustlings, chirpings, crashes, and a “swish” that sounded like “a flock of birds flying close to one’s head.” Some of these sounds could be explained by auroral excitements and ionospheric refraction; others were inexplicable, and Jansky in his spare time began to think that the “star static” he had heard came not from a single powerful source but from the thermal agitation of hot charged particles scattered throughout the Milky Way… “The cosmic shortwaves,” wrote the German astrophysicist Albrecht Unsöld in 1946, “bring us neither the stockmarket nor jazz from distant worlds,” as had shortwave radios. “With soft noises they rather tell the physicist of the endless love play between electrons and protons.”
…The Big Bang became such an audicon of astrophysics and so constant a cosmological figure in popular discourse because of the omnipresence and everyhowness of noise… It mattered little that the Big Bang was a misnomer, that the birth of the universe could not have been audible and was rather a swift unfolding than an eruption or explosion… In 2000, when the soundtrack was composed for a “multisensory re-creation of the first moments of the universe” in the bottom half of the Hayden Sphere of Manhattan’s Rose Center for Earth and Space, the Blast from the Past just had to burst out from the quiet electronic hum of ylem into cymbals, strings, and brass… In this respect the Big Bang had been less a manic solo than a downbeat for galaxies continuously configured by noise, and we would do well to abandon point-to-point analyses of cosmic events in favor of stochastic “densities” akin to the density of auditory experience with its simultaneities of sounds.
— Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (Zone Books, 2011), a thick brick made of up many intertwining narratives that combine the mythical and the lyrical with the mundane and the logistical whose ample/s/and sub-titular chronology seems super weird puzzlingly & portentously reversed and whose Wagnerian ambit envelops, critics complain, too much, though really, people must think literary aficionados are all addicted to painfully heavy, slow things / like the aircraft used for the lunar launches, good books only look heavy and slow: their speed depends on their internal engines and where they are pointed, but this one’s endnotes point only to some website, i.e., to the online Aether — evidently space is the place — causing epochs to yield to one another in an immense cycle of precessions, and its (integral, extant) index, while enveloping Cage (as “soundman”; Litany for the Whale is one of two listed compositions), PB, and HP (yet another Californian who had never been crazy about “pitch”), promenades neither “Sun Ra” nor (I’m not trying to get hung up on it) “AMM,” reminding us that all that is left behind by loss is trace — and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself, and indeed to savor “everything” in this most super-saturated of bootlegs is to reckon (somehow) with its congeries of sonic apocalypsi (all born of that most remarkable form of life known as field recording; the stereoscopic microphony here, the palimpsestic presence, is such that you could be one remove from Bayreuth’s stage) or — better? — to somehow listen through them all, all while silently elevating that parareligious fact: in each of five chapters, we’ll explore a different possibility for the end — Big Crunch, Heat Death, Big Rip, Vacuum Decay, Bounce — even as the kin-dread kinds of “extra-musical events” number five: 1.) below it all, below even this undersong, TAPE HISS, a bedrock of something like white noise that I cannot granulate with my human ears… the hum of something like silence, a taste of the primordial soup, galactic background radiation as a remnant of that initially stupendous detonation, those miniscule density fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, constant, completely enwombing; 2.) TAPE DROP-OUTS, very few, actually — just before Hunding proclaims this is my house; Waltraute’s monologue, mono 4 a logarithmic G — all of them wondrous photonegatives of this recording’s POWER to reach out and feel the vibration of space itself; 3.) STAGE SOUNDS, those crucial invisible clumps whereby through the medium, we sense Events Happening, especially potent here thanks to Chéreau’s kinetic stagecraft, how he dared to be angular, eccentric, barbaric, proscenium arch as post-modern laboratory channeling the Allure of the Invisible; 4.) AUDIENCE SOUNDS, not just your typical ahem & phlegm & “ylem,” matter-in-readiness, oh no, we’re talking actual boos at Bayreuth and — thrillingly, utterly taboo — irruptions into the drama itself, like when some punter (who AP or FR would’ve pummeled) blasts a ref’s whistle just as Siegfried blows his own crude reed, a collision of sorts, “although not one that causes bodily injury / it is a collision between the dimensional worlds” of the performers (PB unflappable, presumably amused) and the spectators posterity; 5.) THE NOTORIOUS PROMPTER — “it would be disappointing,” [s]he admits, “I mean, you have to accept what nature provides” — even if that’s this woman’s well-intentioned whisperings — pssst! — sssssibilant… insistent… INCESSANT — but still, if you wish to listen for sounds so faint they may not exist at all, you can’t have someone playing the drums in your ear, soulless scrim, sole-vox Stabreim, sinter smolder sync, I don’t, you don’t, Pete Palmer don’t, Whitey Herzog don’t and Pete Mazeroski don’t, neither, cicadas hiss in the acacias, setting fieldfares flaring to the west… a manufacturer’s defect in the fabric of the cosmos itself… whispers… world-makers… NOISE
7. S, Act Two
We’ve seen DWM. The Past is Infinite.[1] We’ve broken MK’s “laws.” The Future is Finite.[2]
Now comes Langdon Winner. (His initials echo those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher whose ideas “our” LW refashions. Cool?)
In “Technologies as Forms of Life,” Winner’s def is right in the title. Techs are “forms of life,” that is, species of experience, or, if you like, aspects of the human condition, or, again, unique activities that are able to be pursued. It’s not the thing itself that matters; the actual physical artifact isn’t the essence of any technology. What matters are the ENDS: the new range of possible practices, the uncharted social relations and aspects of identity, which USING the technology brings into our orbits. (N.B. LW is no determinist; users, not implacable “Tech,” are always the main actors.) LW’s T[hesis]: “If the experience of modern society shows us anything… it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning.” This comes straight from Wittgenstein. That LW said that when we speak languages, we actually play games (each one “complete” with its own logic/rules). It’s not words’ definitional “content” that makes language so important; it’s what we do with words: working within shared social systems to get real-world results, seamlessly switching from “joke” to “interview” to “lecture” to “giving orders” to “baby talk,” following the tacit yet binding rules of each of those games, each “form of life.” Dr. Winner sounds that motif unto technology. Artifacts are powerful not because of what they achieve, functionally, as things, but because of the unprecedented bodily activities and social relations — the forms of life — they permit. Ask Pat Patrick or Marshall Allen: a saxophone matters not because it lets you vibrate a reed and push buttons; it matters because it lets you incorporate “saxophony,” an exceedingly particular domain of skill and expression, into your repertoire of lived possibilities, of realizing unsuspected aesthetic and emotional potentialities. As Winner writes, “If one has access to tools and materials of woodworking, a person can develop the human qualities found in the activities of carpentry. If one is able — [recall poor Siegfried wrangling his makeshift reed!] — to employ the instruments and techniques of music making, one can become a musician.”
…dark matter of change, of emerging techs. Usually, LW says, people debate “pros and cons” from an instrumental p.o.v., i.e., they worry about reeds and buttons. “Is this thing feasible practically; what are the costs and benefits; who’ll make money; how ’bout the ‘inefficiencies’; etc.” And everything else — how, for instance, our (almost always unforeseen) uses of this tech might transform our very categories OF Body, Freedom, Teen, Sex, Health, Ownership, Time, Space — that’s treated as “side effects” of the technology. This bothers Winner. That’s because “as technologies are being built and put to use, significant alterations in patterns of human activity and human institutions are already taking place. New worlds are being made. There is nothing ‘secondary’ about this phenomenon. It is, in fact, the most important accomplishment of any technology.” As millions enthusiastically use “smart phones” b/c those things seem “obviously convenient” or “practical for accomplishing X tasks,” those folks usually do not — actually cannot?? — imagine how doing so doesn’t make our lives any “easier,” but only more complicated. That’s because their interacting uses birth Unintended Consequences (UICs): entirely new forms of Work and Culture and Politics and Identity and Power and Contradiction and Complexity. This process LW dubs technological somnambulism. “For the interesting puzzle of our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.” That is ironic. Maybe even (in the stylized eyes of Wittgenstein’s confrère, Walter Benjamin) tragic.
— “The Question for Langdon Winner, ‘Technologies as Forms of Life’,” an assignment in HIST 199, Technology in American History, a 20[-]20 course at the University of Richmond, the Fall Line city amidst whose river-cleaved contours in ’86, the exact orbit the Allen & Ginter Tobacco Co. issued “baseball cards,” Orb’s earliest “streetcars” danced about their confined sphere, another (perceived, catalogued) parapolarity — at Boulby they encased xenon in lead in copper in iron in halite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to see back to the birth of the universe / at Onkalo they encased uranium in zirconium in iron in copper in bentonite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to keep the future safe from the present — indicative of the sheer thrumming fecundity of Fate’s Yggdrasil’s endlessly commodious canopy of These-Not-Those Branches of Instantiation — small tweaks to our current, incomplete knowledge of the cosmos can result in vastly different paths into the future, from a universe that collapses on itself, to one that rips itself apart, to one that succumbs by degrees to an escapable expanding bubble of doom — suggesting that, rather than tracking some single “natural trajectory” or inevitable “arc of progress” from mission to vision — “first ‘we got’ the Iron Age, then the Bronze… now we’re finally inta THE Info Age” whose black myths impel intelligent interlocutors to imagine that new technological and theoretical tools are allowing us to make leaps and move us forward (toward… what?) — techne itself, that time- and place-specific constellation Yggdrasil comprising every THING we both create (bits of our Orb, transformed; there is nothing inevitable about the choices) and inhabit “second-nature”-style (LW’s title, The Whale and the Reactor: the machine which seems to be alive but isn’t; Chéreauian hybridity), always at the expense of infinitely cascading forsaken alternatives (now impossible to inhabit) — again a sense of doors locking behind us — remains at uttermost bottom profoundly evitable, so history no longer seems figurable as a forward-flighting arrow but rather as a network branching and conjoining in many directions like filigree capillaries of riverrhine deltae, the un-(w)hol(l)y writhe-worming Notung-edges of CONTINGENCY
6. Siegfried, Act One
Since light takes time to travel, and more distant objects are, from our perspective, farther in the past, there has to be a distance corresponding to the beginning of time itself… As a cosmologist, I work from the basic assumption that the universe can be described with math, and if that math works out, and is useful for approaching new problems, I go with it… It’s not that we just trust that math is fundamental to the universe, it’s that there doesn’t seem to be any other way to approach these things that makes any sense… As appealing as it sometimes seemed to have the whole story and meaning of life written down for me once and for all in a book, I knew I would only ever really be able to accept the kind of truth I could rederive mathematically… Today, the question of the future and ultimate fate of all reality is a solidly scientific one, with the answer tantalizingly within reach… This is a field in which incredible progress is being made, giving us the opportunity to stand at the very edge of the abyss and peer into the ultimate darkness. Except, you know, quantitatively… Simply stated, [the cosmological principle] is the idea that for all practical purposes, the universe is basically the same everywhere… The universe looks the same in every direction, and is made of all the same stuff. [Footnote:] Science fiction loves to ignore this. There’s an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which they accidentally travel a billion light-years in a few seconds and the place they END up in is some kind of abyss of shimmering blue energy and thought, which, if it really existed, we’d totally be able to see in our telescopes.
— KM, End of Everything, totally representative samples of uttermost bottom assumptions which, like RW’s mythos and/or dramaturgy (and/or SR’s hermetic music of thought), one is (probably) bound either to accept in its totalizing totality or to reject as absurd (all that’s “evident,” after all, is suspect; statistical methods can only determine with certainty which of two players is better if two conditions apply — first, that the statistics considered evaluate accurately every aspect of the player’s ability, and second, that the method employed to combine those statistics perfectly models the baseball universe / no statistical analysis can meet either of those conditions — indeed, it is farcical, virtually obscene, to believe that [any] can); if the former, then Mack’s your Mack, the sympathetic protagonist of U.S. Highball who, like HP himself, rode glacial freight-trains on colorful trans-orbital excursions whose very groundedness (and humor: if you zoom in to a small enough scale, do space and time act like discrete particles, or perhaps waves that interfere with each other? / are there wormholes? / are there dragons [i.e., Fafners]?? / we have no idea) seems to unlock the secrets of the cosmos; but if you happen — probab[u/a]llistically, understand — to fall into the bounded bucket of entities who sing like Mime, bitter and yearning, that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself / it seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science, then there’s actually an elevator of intractable Qs to traverse, among which (completing S.1’s game of plot-ridden riddles) number these: 1.) Is the prime problem here the (dark) matter of this specific book’s st’eye (which seems to swim downstream from the belief that the vernacular, unskilled, spontaneous, and unhindered by any discipline, is the only style natural to writing), or does the problem, much more fundamental, lie with Cosmology itself — the field — which, having followed a downwards trajectory to what surely must be a terminus of esoteric acronyms and literally infinitesimal returns from experiments that take decades to set up, must now join Economics and Evolutionary Psychology as Needless Knowledges (contra Notungs still a-forging: critical humane Gesamtkunstwerkology; exorbium webs); 2.) Is rejecting Cosmology tantamount to rejecting Logic — one thing leads to another, one thing cancels another thing out, they are all interconnected, and none of them interest me / after all, it has been proved, using highly sensitive equipment, that even a cup of tea is subject to lunar tides, plus, thanks to a gravitational wave crest warping space itself for 1.3 billion years, you were, on September 14, 2015, at 9:50 a.m. and 45 seconds UTC, for the briefest moment, just a little bit taller — or does it merely entail imagining alternative ends, such that we can go back to a nanosecond before the beginning, before the universe burst into being, but we can’t go back to the precise beginning because that would precede knowledge, and we can’t “know” anything before “knowing” itself was born, thus leaving other planes of “there” open to any putative Creators — KM: this doesn’t mean fully unconstrained flights of fancy / you can’t just randomly make stuff up… but… actually… we must, hence Art’s numberless species of Story — who await, like Blake, the apocalyptic day when this scheme will turn itself inside out and disclose an ultimate harmony as yet hidden by God for His own good reasons; 3.) Is reviewing TEoE possible without assigning structural qualities to certain resonant variables — nine epigramcycles representing nine distinct “non-fiction genres” (Ring: nine “acts”); thirteen total sections: first & last, 500 words apiece (2x the Quawtuh Mil; ’50 (ALG; apatite; dark side of the moon; FR’s two homerin’ elevators; per the Anthropocene Working Group, our epoch’s big-bang birthdate; like memorizing a fifty-word tongue-twister on the way down and then reciting it in reverse on the way back up)); every other 1, exactly 971 — w/o, IOW, sum cumulated cumulonimbae, an ark/hive d’arcane performance of portentous random NUMBERS
5. DW, Act Three
In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of ENDings: no one has yet to begin a life who will not end it. In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it… In the beginning was the Word. Western civilization rests upon those words. And yet there is a lively group of thinkers who believe that in the beginning there was the Act. That nothing can precede action — no breath before act, no thought before act, no pervasive love before some kind of act. I believe the poem is an act of the mind. I think it is easier to talk about the end of a poem than it is to talk about its beginning. Because the poem ends on the page, but it begins off the page, it begins in the mind.
…This is what Ezra Pound learned from Ernest Fenollosa: Some languages are so constructed — English among them — that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime. That sentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand… When I told Mr. Walküre Angel about the lifelong sentence, he said, “That’s a lot of semicolons!”… The next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in poetry) you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being — an Italian as a matter of fact — that allows us to go on and keep on connecting speech that for all apparent purposes is unrelated.
…Gaston Bachelard says the most succinct and astonishing thing: We begin in admiration and we end by organizing our disappointment. The moment of admiration is the experience of something unfiltered, vital and fresh — it could also be horror — and the moment of organization is both the onset of disappointment and its dignification; the least we can do is dignify our knowingness, the loss of some vitality through familiarization, by admiring not the thing itself but how can we organize it, think about it. I am afraid there is no way around this. It is the one true inevitable thing. And if you believe that, then you are conceding that in the beginning was the act, not the word.
— Mary Ruefle, “On Beginnings,” from Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), so not exactly essays; they’re entities freighted with strings of colloquial vitality and skeletal allusiveness sufficiently strange to elevate them right off the page; this one’s the premier and, despite its title, it actually addresses the entity half-blind Wotan, recounting “everything” that’s led to this moment (in his self-abnegating lecture to his favorite child, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde), most desires: das Ende; there’s no way around this, MR owls; it’s as if such structures as RW’s musico-dramatic legacy — not exactly “opera” — and SR’s shambolic discography — not exactly “jazz” — captivate us because of the distant tractions they exert, the event horizons they establish / their victims are trapped before they are even aware they have been caught, exactly anti-naught-y-lying the notorious phenomenon noted by Wittgensteinian philosophes of techne wrt reversals of “future” and “past,” “effect” and “cause,” “want” and “need,” namely, the eyes cannot see themselves but something other / the strange and paradoxical rule of nature is that we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being / to love nothing is to be nothing, to give is to have; IOW, before they integrated it into their heliocentric worlds, no Nibelung “missed” — Hades, none had any need to imagine — “the internet”; and yet, now, post-Fulbright-Triptych, were the nigh-infinite nucleation sites of that ekpyrotic cosmos suddenly to vanish, folks sure would miss ’em/it — abyssally; a spookily similar phenom holds for artistic creations; consider, paters, your own favorite offspring of others; if connoisseurship (Walter Pater-style) consists of a capillary series of acquiring acquired tastes worth acquiring, that compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weight what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands whose aesthetic pomegranates inevitably erode; the burden is to unbury the ones whose erosions outlast us; hence this guidebook here in the shadows, Brünnhilde’s lonesome summit of cloud-surround where space and time spill into one another / if life exists it is in the slow life of rock, it is the sea’s patient exploration of the mountain’s inside where Mind might mine portentous orbital co-incidences, the heady notion of eternal recurrence, where everything that has happened will happen again, in exactly the same way, forever — an Italian, MR says, like a certain “Giuseppe Verdi” (sole 19th-C rival to RW and born, like him, in ’13), a.k.a. “Joe Green” (Steelers defensive lineman and AP’s seventies nemesis); or EP’s heroes John Adams and TJ both expiring on 7/4/26, exactly fifty years after U-K-wut; or Stalin stealing Prokofiev’s thunder by expiring, like Sergei, on the palindromic 3/5/53 (a mere month(+) before Mickey Mantle, greatest player of the fifties, blasted his apocryphal 565-foot parabola), exactly (+/- a month) 1.5 years after Bobby Thomson tokamacked the Shot Heard Round the World the same day the first H-boomb detonated in Russia, th’underworld that spawned the periodic table, soil science, and Dimitri Shostakovich, samples of whose skeletal thirteenth string quartet spice 13 Thirteen, the aftershock palimpsest of The Room Extended (State 50) — because the self is by nature turned outward to connect with the harmony of things, to observer/experimenter-enact those bounded entities called (only in re-view) “events,” to participate in their “happening,” so that when at last Brünnhilde completes her retreat she feels vast as the skies, old as the mountains, formless as starlight, ubiquitous as LIFE
4. DW, Act Two
These pages at first glance look haphazard (as a Cubist painting seemed to first viewers to be an accident). They are not. There is a page that has the word man at the top, flower in the middle, and star at the bottom… Composition as I understand it must be both a concrete and abstract continuum. It is not enough for a work of art to narrate; the narration must be made of words that constitute an inner and invisible harmony… It is, for instance, electrochemical energy in brain cells derived from photosynthetic sugars in vegetables whereby we can see a star at all, and the fire of the star we call the sun thus arranged that it could be seen and thought of by nourishing the brain. Is that system closed? Did the sun grow the tree that made the paper you are holding, and the ink on it, so that it can read this book through your eyes? The eye as a kind of scanner for the sun is an idea with a glimpse of God in it. It is knowledge… Milton calls the mind “infinitude confined.” (Ronald Johnson retains these words in his erasure [of Paradise Lost, Radi Os])… Works of art in response to other works of art create a symbolic chord reaching across the two. Ulysses in Ithaca, Ulysses in Dublin: a web of meaning not entirely under Joyce’s control bridges the extremes and begins generating ratios… As I write this a spaceship is circling Mars, its computer eyes looking for a place to land. It will report back, if it functions, that there is nothing there but desolation. A similar voyage to all the other planets will report nothing, nothing, nothing. That we are alone in a universe of red stars and white stars, a catastrophe of light and electric thunder of time, vibrant forever, forever bright, fifty-eight sextillion, seven hundred quintillion, seven hundred and sixty quadrillion miles wide (by Einstein’s reckoning), is the plain fact our age will have to learn to live with… Ernst shares with Mach the phenomenological doubt that we witness anything except in agnosis. What we understand of an event is very little compared to our ignorance of its meaning. The greater our sensibility, the sharper our skepticism, the more we are aware of the thinness of the light that is all we have to probe the dark.
— Guy Davenport, “Ronald Johnson” [its second act, “Radi Os”] and “Ernst Machs Max Ernst,” two (of forty) essays comprising The Geography of the Imagination (North Point, 1981), the forty-year-old year in which R. Raygun commenced (or elevated) those erosions dubbed “neoliberalism” in the midst of Nibelungs’ somnolence, the surface of last scattering within which prophecies of the world’s END in fire have receded; now the eschatology is one of ongoing breakdown rather than apocalypse / the end times are here, present, all around now, no longer deferrable and against which historian Charles E. Rosenberg remarked Nothing ordinarily happens without alliances (reality doesn’t consist in water or atoms or gravity; reality consists in people (who invented science and technology) talking to each other); DWM published “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene” — gemini theses: Even though we gather together and look in the same direction at the same instant, we will not — we cannot — see the same landscape; and The central problem: any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads — whose ontopoetological Truths rather effortlessly render rather fantastical (not to say nonsensical) cosmologists’ casual hubris wrt THEE Most Impossible Q in the Universe, namely, What ACTUALLY happened — mark these twain: that whole thing where we can see the past directly by looking at distant things; and the most straightforward way to get a handle on dark energy is to figure out our full expansion history — huh?? — and Houston Conwill birthed The Cakewalk Humanifesto, a cosmogram pellucid as engraved glass, spirals nautilae’ing a grid upon which four chocolate cities (New Orleans, Atlanta, Louisville, Memphis) delineate a diamond (centered upon the Magic City, dwarf-star Tuscumbia) enshrining eroding rivers’ material residue of inscrutable histories, their pathos of abandonment, much as KM resides in Raleigh, stylish sis-city to Richmond (birthplace of baseball cards), themselves stereo-scale analogues of Louisville (where Honus “The Flying Dutchman” Wagner debuted) and Cleveland (home of the Browns fullback K[evin] Mack) — and even “scoring out” that pole-pointed diamond, that intricate cartography of map lichens “like-ends” susceptible to multiple projections of claim and belief, is to fathom something of the infinitudes of idiosyncrasy which color any “seeing” of any “entity” — sty, stye, sti; Mote in God’s Eye; sis and bro Volsungs; “stasis” in DM’s Kiwi accent; Stabreim; portentous central semicolon; orbits in reverse — including GD’s titles, one a Palimpsest (“radios” — Recorded Sound generally (along with Flight, our profoundest techne)), the other a Palindrome (the impossible irresistible ideal: prose technologies readers pore over like Perec poring over crossword puzzles en route to unearthing our orb’s protractedest palindrome (but even GP couldn’t un-Urth the Ultimate: a prose atlas to savor like a “word-find” wherein each directional trajectory, each line of reading, establishes novel/necessary relations to “everything other” which end up embodying the thrumming complexity of the universe whole)), both fruits of fruitless quests to see the pagescape, to overview, Heath Robinson-style, the illusion of regress, to achieve a richness of meaning comprising constant rhyme in images, and of translation of meaning from one image to another, so that somewhere in the textum a thread would become vivid, or a portion of the design would become clear and lead the attentive reader on into the rest / on the surface I had the sense, as did RW, HP, PB, SR, that a page could be dense in various ways, all susceptible to invention (finding; re-viewing) via CONSCIOUSNESS
3. Die Walküre, Act One
This book is an excuse for me to dig deep into the question of where it’s all going, what that all means, and what we can learn about the universe we live in by asking these questions. There isn’t just one accepted answer to any of this — the question of the fate of existence is still an open one, and an area of active research in which the conclusions we draw can change drastically in response to very small tweaks in our interpretations of the data1… It means I have to learn a lot about everything, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun. And we’re talking about the universe here, so I really do mean EVERYTHING2… The expansion of the universe makes a lot of things weird in astronomy, and one of them is that we use what is essentially a color, written as a number, to denote speed, distance, and “the age the universe was at the time when the thing was shining.” Physics is wild3… So, this background radiation should come from everywhere. And it should come from everywhere no matter where you are, because you can always look far enough away to see the hot phase of the cosmos. The speed-of-light/time-travel connection gives you this for free. Every point in space is the center of its own sphere of deepening time, bounded by a shell of fire4… There’s something about taking the opportunity to wade into that cosmic perspective that is both terrifying and hopeful, like holding a newborn infant and feeling the delicate balance of the tenuousness of life and the potential for not-yet-imagined greatness5… Some cosmologists even study whole hypothetical universes that are very explicitly not our own — universes in which the cosmos has a totally different shape, number of dimensions, and history6… This is, of course, one of the most fun things I’ve ever worked on, hence this book. I’m not sure why I like it so much. It may be a bad sign7… An expanding universe can be a hard thing to wrap your head around. Not literally, obviously. That would be both impossible and extremely inadvisable8… I like to think of the bright Cepheids like giant lazy Saint Bernard dogs, while the dim ones are excitable jumpy Chihuahuas9… I just now invented this term [“infernoverse”] and I’m feeling very proud of myself10… We do this by bouncing it [a single neutron]. Really. Physics is wild11… I first encountered the term ‘eschatology,’ the study of the END of everything, by reading about religion12… “…cool.” Cool.13
— Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (Scribner, 2020), this very re-view’s raison — up- and down-elevators, crossing, here pause in perspicacious stasis, the sweet spot of the edifice, impersonal (mortal-free) DR acceding to the seething human passions of DW (everyone’s favorite of the cycle; “Mack is brilliant, and my neighbor’s six year-old daughter loves her / I love her” (The Spectator)) — but since it’s always hard to locate with confidence the intent or significance of individual artworks in wider webs of cultural practice and since I sense that there is a difference between one’s ability to dominate the game at a specific time and a specific place, and one’s rank among the greatest; I cannot exactly define what that distinction is, perhaps it’s best to begin (as Chéreau did) by peering over a stile, you know, the book’s space- and time-annihilating tone, that nebulous entity which, Guy guys, “is imitation that has progressed into individuality… a skill, an extension of character, an attitude toward the world, an enigma,” of which here appear thirteen pictures, each new section of the response-stream posing a different puzzle of ascent: 1that “excuse” is disconcertingly coy, nearly indulgently casual; 2that “everything” presumably rings the mummified corpses of more than a million ibises, the spirals of ammonites and the bullets of belemnites, and Norns know which lang-clangorous metals Hunding and Siegmund keep mang-clanking in Act One; the passage also embodies the sty’ called Confiding Convo; she’s our Physics Sis, and some might balk — why go low / it’s a counter-intuitive action, running against the grain of sense and the gradient of the spirit — but the passage also evinces the century-old Rhinegold standard of Professional Prose, i.e., CLARITY, though who still wants that from “creative nonfiction”?; 4cool; Mack and clarity at their Boulezian best, the Zauberfeuer enveloping Brünnhilde’s rock in evanescent effervescence; 5cool; memories, myths, and metaphors thrumming the sentiments of Mingus’s Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia, ’71); 6for study, read imagine or perform or creatively chart; for history, definitely read past; Henry Glassie’s epigram to D[.]W[.] Meinig’s four-volume (he’d planned on three) multi-decade (conceived in the late-’70s) The Shaping of America ends with “history is not the past, but a map of the past made useful to the modern traveler”; “much of the joy of reading h[er] comes from the extravagant spectacle of a first-rate mind wasting itself on baseball,” or puzzles, or cosmology; 7hear those cosmic tones for mental therapy (which is “where [Ra’s] outer-space stuff begins with a vengeance,” claims The Penguin Guide); 8this indeed cool…?; 9the book’s PROSE cries out for so many more such strange strings, more surface perforations of gryke and clint, more stab-rhymed tone-pictures seized by the obscenity of intrusion which accumulate the corporeal gravity of leitmotivs so that across its chapters, in keeping with its subject, extends a network of echoes, patterns and connections, whereas instead it remains, for all its lucidity and cheek, curiously uninflected, studio-bound, and, wrt writhing dendritic mindworms, a void (translated title of Perec’s E-less French novel; pre-echoes kin-ecting Ra’s self-fashioning to Saturn’s rings); 10very well; 11nebulous whether the “wild” repetition’s arbitrary… arch… architectonic; 12à la “Ecclusiastics,” Mingus showcasing wailing Rahsaan Roland Kirk, blind pater of Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata (Atlantic, ’71); 13the book’s final two words: ambivalent Vo(we)lsungs upon its LANGUAGE
2. DR, Disc Two
absurdly, delectably… Columbia Records.[3] That venerable institution midwifed a please-y-yo-soar that “sounds,” blows partch666, “like it could have been performed hundreds of years ago in an alternative civilization. On the other hand, it will still sound futuristic one hundred years hence.”[4] And isn’t that The Very Thing we’re after, after all? Isn’t that Athena’s Super B. Owl rite th’air, the LiebestodT&I, the Prize SongMeistersinger, the GrailParsifal — singular talismans enshrining “engaged music-making that is neither abstract nor conventionally expressive but always intensely beautiful,”[5] those (in?)finite lapidary capillaries falling up thru their own magma to yield unspoilt stellae incognitae… the entire raisin-detroit END of ALG??
Well. An intractable problem now stytix our orbit. It’s the Q, in short, of “similar records”; the question, en longue, of which specific classificatory boundaries to inscribe around this specific Unique Listening Experience’s penumbra of Everything.
Hydrogen. One basic option: percussive jazz(+) rituals. Ample flotsam there.[6] But our avatar-fruit from that spunky family-tree branch has gotta be Strange Strings (Saturn, ca. ’66), the notorious LP created once upon thirteen o’clock when Sun Ra insisted his mates “should down horns and improvise on exotic stringed instruments instead.[7] Although none of the ensemble had played any of these before, the exercise produced some of Ra’s most astonishing and experimental music.”[8] Alien timbres; emergent morphologies; arcane rites; above all, complete (not gamed) conviction by all — the sole quality this universe-unto-itself lacks is Delusion’s lustrae-long gestation.
Hydrogen II. The other facile foray: non-“Western classical” theater. Let’s get unreal. Splitters, lumpers; foxes, hedgehogs; this dark matter’s too diffuse.[9] Because did Albert or Alfred[10] Einstein ever shore upon Java? Because that’s where we’re headed. O yes: tether your space-elevator to the isle where “the gamelan gilds the time.”[11] Here comes Giri Harja III, the puppeteer troupe unspooling its all-night outdoor show, six CDs catching “everything”: megaphones, microphones, ads, metallophones, homophones, homophobes, opaque longueurs.[12] Even sweeter: septuagenarians revivifying Prince Danuredjo VII’s Langen Mandra Wanara, “love for which emerges from the marrow of one’s bones. This serene and elegant dance-opera is of another altitude and time entirely…. [It] parallels… Pelléas et Mélisande, in what sounds, as does Debussy’s great masterpiece, like music from another, dreamier world…. Given the conditions — ambulant singers in a makeshift venue — the sonics are almost too good to be true: a wide, coherent, lifelike stage for the discovery, a miracle really, of vanished grace.”[13] Ah, yes. That last sentence: a valediction to retain as we voyage onward to…
O — Oxygen — Other — Hoo cd C Sum 3rd Hand Extending Down the Cliff-bank?[14] The Ring. You foresaw it. The impossible irresistible ideal: the Gesamtkunstwerk itself. Synthetic symbiosis — myth, poem, music, dance, mime, teche — sustained across colossal sequential arcs; Harry (literally) sculpting an entire sui generis instrumentarium so that half-naked performers could animate his sui generis (43-notes-to-the-octave) scale, thereby underpinning the “corporeal drama” in all its syncretic[15] “sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.” Naturally. But recall TBJHBA’s famous entry: “The interesting thing about Roger Maris is that almost everything that people say about him is false.”[16] Ditto for Germany’s famous RW. To wit:
- People often assume The Ring must be a cringe-y cavalcade of shrieking Viking Valkyries. But, because the work is “about” the beginning and end of the a world, a complete cycle requires about 13.8 billion years hours. Um, what >>diversity of incident, texture, mood, “form of life”<< do people suppose happens inside that orbital envelope? Boyden: “Wagner is often travestied as a bombastic bore… but this is way off target — his work is characterized by a maniacal attention to detail… precision… scenes of idyllic calm…. Suppleness is the key: Wagner wanted lyrical singers who knew how to punctuate, not shouters. Fluidity…. momentum… begins and ends with the image of the Rhine.”[17] Yes. Whet that bedrock apatite.[18]
- Punters might presume RW must’ve architected such a massive structure in a necessarily straightforward way. 180. Sorta. The bro sty’d the texts — the librettos, the “poems” — for The Ring’s four operas in reverse order. Only after completing the final text (for the first opera, Das Rheingold) did he write music for each individual episode, this time “in sequence.” Dowwwn and then up. Thus, the idealistic firebrand who penned the libretto for Götterdämmerung (“Siegfrieds Tod”) in 1848 (before realizing it required another (three!) prequel-libretto(s)), didn’t create that work’s score until the 1870s. Bien sûr, o’er the ensuing decades the wide-optified optimist had… lived… ripened… evolved. And yet: as the (composed, post-Schopenhauer) composer, he accepted, unaltered, his original text. Talk about CONSTRAINTS! A chromatic convoluted long-tail tale itself.[19]
- Initiates insist that when it comes to recordings, one must avoid hothouse studio baubles — Solti, Karajan — and instead commit to a live Bayreuth cycle. They’re right. They also claim that the commercially-issued Boulez Ring (Phillips, 1981) feels stiff, perfunctory, marred by “variable” singing. Also true. They therefore blithely dismiss “Boulez’s Wagner.” EGREGIOUS ERROR. For in July of ’76, the tenaciously punctilious moderniste commandeered the Jahrhundertring itself; and a bootleg exists; and it’s BLAZING. Everything — the contours, the cumulonimbae, the (inter)acting, the (ad)diction, the colors! coruscating kinesthetoscopes!, the palpable sense of occasion, the sheer collective URGENCY… Hear: for these artists — re-sanctifying / reverently desecrating the Master’s sacred sanctum; channeling transmuted Aeschylus and Shakespeare to bourgeois Bayreuthers at best bemused, at worst audibly hostile — there was no tomorrow.
— “State 26” [out of 50; Harry Partch, Delusion of the Fury (Innova, 1998 [Columbia, 1971])] from A Lurker’s Guide to Recorded Sound (2nd (“Quawtuh Mil”) ed.; Gruntl’d? Usufruct!, 2026), taking a tiny part in a mystery play run across multiple timescales to add fresh layers to the catacomb palimpsest called “Un-Ur-thing Every Recording w/ an Urgent Reason to Exist,” a futility stdreaming with a zillion options, and it will be years, seething interstellar lustrae, before sabermetricians can state with any sense of certainty which are the best of those options for bounding any such… ENTITIES
1. Das Rheingold, riven in twain (ere go, “DR, Disc One”)
“There!” shouts Bill née William, the one named Shakespeare, Aeschylan androgynonym of these three rhyming Rhine Maidens, but we mais oui are all already looking there, where the first block fell, for it seems that a white freight train is driving fast out of the calving face of the glacier, thundering laterally through space before toppling down towards the water, and then the white train is suddenly somehow pulling white wagons behind it from within the glacier, like an impossible magician’s trick, and then the white wagons are followed by a cathedral — a blue cathedral of ice, complete with towers and buttresses, all of them joined together into a single unnatural sideways-collapsing edifice — and then a whole city of white and blue follows the cathedral as we shout and step backwards involuntarily from the force of the event even though it is occurring a mile away from us, and we call out to each other in the silence before the roar reaches us, even though we are only a few yards from each other, and then all of the hundreds of thousands of tons of that ice-city collapse into the water of the fjord, creating an impact wave forty or fifty feet high.
And then something terrible happens, which is that out of the water where the city has fallen there upsurges, rising — or so it seems from where we are standing — right to the summit of the calving face itself, a black shining pyramid, sharp at its prow, thrusting and glistening, made of a substance that has to be ice but looks like no ice we have seen before, something that resembles what I imagine meteorite metal to be, something that has come from so deep down in time that it has lost all colour, and we are dancing and swearing and shouting, appalled and thrilled to have seen this repulsive, exquisite thing rise up that should never have surfaced, this star-dropped berg-surge that has taken three minutes and 100,000 years to conclude.
— two success[ful/ive] sentences — the two longest, actually — in RM’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey (Norton, 2019), ex nihilo excerpt for a seething plesiosaur’s plethora of purposes premier — yes, we’ve got it on record, the Jahrhundertring’s actual premiere: July 24, 1976 (fifteen days after Ra’s Arkestra exhilarheured Montreux); email Andy at operadepot.com for deets and, be you as collegially congenial as Katie herself, frag ’im ’bout ladies’ earrings getting torn off in the ensuing boofraccia of brickbats & broomsticks, or, better yet, demand elaboration wrt the diction underpitching his sales-pitch for DR (“from the get-go this production was volatile / there was a unified, and seemingly organized, faction in the audience hell-bent on fighting the changes that Patrice Chéreau was making to how Wagner, and opera, would be produced from them on / this tension is palpable in this recording… it is clear the whole cast has been galvanized by being part of a crucial pivot for all of opera direction and they, along with Pierre Boulez, deliver a truly electric performance”) or, Hades, just prod erething mythic penumbra’ing “the actual event” — among which is that, as the weaver himself wravels in his very first Wotanian foray, the way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree, the embowering bird-hoard branded Yggdrasil whose titanic branches Odin brazenly appropriated to fashion das Speer (the premier techne) upon which the scheming god engraved “everything” — all those labyrinthine laws and logics bedrocking civilization — even though, as Ian Monk’s heard-hoard of fifty(+) years of brazen Oulipoiana puts it, All That Is Evident is Suspect, an assemblage whose (literal) table of contents fills (and crisply splits) two pages — DR, mere “preliminary evening” of the Aeschylan trilogy to follow, requires (following its famous ex nihilo E-flat liquhordessence) an intermissionless river of two(+) hours (71-74 minutes per CD) to vomit up its diamond-bright freight-train inscenia — with the title lurking like some primordial Nibelung at the uttermost bottom of the first page’s fundament, “We Did Everything” (Monk’s “unpublished collection of poems that chop up the form and rhyming structure of the sonnet”), surging up linearly and invisibly, quantum-style, across any conceivable caesura (i.e., those pulsating within IM’s compendium’s polestar, Harry Mathews’ Oulipo Compendium) to conjoin the title emblazoned atop the second page’s firmament, “On the End of Time,” François Caradec’s slyly sincere address “on the theme of the end of days” whose second paragraph concludes with the sentriptynce “The Oulipo dozed,” though for precisely how longue a durée remains exposed to endless exegesis as, as Patrick J. Smith (whom we’ll meet at the end, earned-cycle-style) turn-styles, “the length of ‘actual’ time is directly related to that sense of mythic time or ‘timelessness-in-time’ which is also an integral part of the librettos / the love duet from Act II of Tristan und Isolde takes x minutes to sing… the time it takes in terms of the myth can be ten seconds or ten thousand years” which might, as might write our Mackrophysicist, “only make sense” since in the days following the calving I reflected often on our response to it — the way our shouts turned from awe to something like horror as that shining black pyramid lurched up out of the water, sea streaming from it / my stomach lurched too as the ice came up: the sublime displaced by a more visceral response to this alien display…. another order of withdrawnness, one so extreme as to induce nausea / Camus called this property of matter its “denseness,” that irreducible Actual whose heard-chord erodes seamlessly sensually senselessly insensately insatiably into “intensity”… “primitive hostility”… “something inhuman”… this trio of milligram sprites orbitin’ ’n’ cawhortin’ not at the uttermost bottom of Reekhard’s deep-time Rhine but, precisely two centuries after saturnine Jefferson universalized x-numbered not-neutral gear-nets into sleepless kinesis, beneath the pitiless pistons of a hydroelectric dam… THE ABSURD
0. ab ovo, ex nihilo, some specific expectant Silence
An Unlucky Number: I figure that the absolute, theoretical minimum number of batters that a pitcher can face and be credited with a complete game is thirteen. That can come about if a pitcher loses a 4½-inning game by a score of 1-0 and doesn’t allow any other runner to reach base — and it has happened. In Baltimore on July 30, 1971, Dick Drago of the Royals faced thirteen batters and got them all out except Frank Robinson, who homered.
— The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (Villard, 1988), yes, that William James, Henry’s style-bro “answering” wtfhappenedin1971[.com], Robinson a lustrum removed from the ultimatest orbit any ballplayer ever enjoyed — Frank’s ’66, his vengeful (he’d been traded in the off-season) Triple Crown speer-heading the Orioles to their premier pennant — except, maybe, for the ’71 ringed by fella sepia-toned giant Alan Page, vœracious Vikings END, first defender to claim NFL MVP — only linebacker “LT,” three lustrae later for the NY Fafners, followed suit — and, post-retirement, Associate Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, itself a demi-universe removed from stately Paku Alaman Court in Yogyakarta, Java, the unearthly milieu where on 1/10/71 ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown recorded “Ketawang: Puspåwårnå,” that throbbing sonic thrombosis Sagan selected for Voyager’s Golden Record, languid molasses gamelania conspicuously fit for consumption in Berkeley, CA, whence the Oakland A’s’ charter departed (to face Frank’s O’s in the ALCS) on 10/1/71, Disney World’s Opening Day, its premier puller the langubrious riverride “It’s a Small World,” an (arguably) “adult” version of which, Henri Pousseur’s delectable three-CD assemblage, Paysages Planétaires, floats atop a “silent libretto” penned by palindromeer Perec’s pen-pal Michel Butor whose narrow-bo[re/ring] essay “Egypt” incarnates rind-gold of the Nile whose shores in ’71 hosted another dark-hued visionary, Saturn’s Sun Ra (b. Herman Poole Blount, ’13-ish, in Birmingham, AL) before he landed at Berkeley as ’71’s Artist-in-Residence jus’ ’cross campus from the university press which, that same year, published Hugh Kenner’s “x-ray moving picture,” The Pound Era, whose final line, Thought is a labyrinth — as Homerblivion’d as the black-hole borders of ’71 Topps baseball cards (set’s final specimen: Dick Drago) — spectra-warbled across “All Things Considered,” National Public Radio’s flagship “Begun in Good Faith and High Hopes on May 3rd, 1971,” the line engraved underneath a five-mark coin nailed to the back of sculptor(!) Simon Dinnerstein’s premier incipient painting, the once-looked-over-never-thenceforth-overlooked Fulbright Triptych (’71-’74) whose clear-eyed three-ness only now wonders, “If nonfictioneer Robert Macfarlane — ‘I first saw Stanley Donwood’s luminous Nether in ’13… / the eerie glow of the sun, the curling technicolour fingers of the trees, the sense of looking down into a radiant, dangerous underworld… I immediately knew… I wanted it to be the cover of my book’ — and astrophysicist Katie Mack — ‘I want you to live forward, but see backward’ — are our two bedrock H’s, then whatooz our single aqueous O”; OR, more celestial still, If (something like) SPACE and TIME are this universe’s Two… Greatest(?)… Things(??), then what’s Number Three; what, let’s complete this “everything” game, could be that uttermost OTHER
Sources (not otherwise attributed in the text)
Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (especially the chapter called “Color”) (Catapult, 2019); Sun Ra, Atlantis (Saturn, 1969); Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (Harper Collins, 2000); Jonathan M. Szanto, “The Partch Reverberations: Notes on a Musical Rebel,” corporealmeadows.com/reverb-1; Jacques Barzun, God’s Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words (Little, Brown, 1954); Richard David, “Wagner the Dramatist,” in Peter Burbridge and Richard Sutton, eds., The Wagner Companion (Cambridge, 1979); Sun Ra, Sleeping Beauty (Saturn, 1979) and Second Star to the Right: Salute to Walt Disney (Leo, 1989); Keith Rowe / Michael Pisaro, 13 Thirteen (Erstwhile 2CD, 2016); Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (10/18, 1975); AMM, The Inexhaustible Document (Matchless, 1987); Sun Ra, Super-Sonic Jazz (Saturn, 1957); Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study in Wagner’s Ring (Oxford, 1979); Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford, 1977); Patrick J. Smith, The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (Knopf, 1970); Leoš Janáček, The Makropulos Case (Mackerras; Opera Depot 2CD, 1971); Sun Ra, The Singles (Evidence 2CD, 1996 [various labels, 1950s-80s]); Susan Howe, The Quarry (especially the essay “Sorting Facts: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Chris Marker”) (New Directions, 2015); Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual (David A. Bellos, trans.; David R. Godine, 1987 [1978]); Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (Blue Thumb, 1973); Susan Howe and Susan Mitchell, eds., Sinter, Smolder, Synch: A Complete Chrysalyceum of Karen Hays (comprising “Dear Martlet” (orig. Iowa Review); “The Clockwise Detorsion of Snails” (Normal School); “4s↑↓ (in absentia, or, where iron is a tiny prey animal),” “CV x K,” “Writers on Writing” (Passages North); “The Cubes,” “32 Lemmas,” “Reconciliation Story,” “Frothy Eloquence & Loose Concupiscence” (Conjunctions); “Auto-Duet: Essays on Competence and Acoustics,” “Harm’s Way” (Georgia Review); Gruntl’d? Usufruct!, 2026); Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor (U. Chicago, 1986); Melvin Kranzberg, “Presidential Address: Kranzberg’s Laws,” Technology & Culture 27 (1986); Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (Guilford, 1992); Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago, 1991); Sun Ra, Black Myth / Out in Space [a.k.a. It’s After the End of the World] (MPS 2CD, 1970); Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare (California, 1963); Harry Partch, Enclosure Two (Innova 3CD, 1940s-1970s); Sun Ra, Other Planes of There (Saturn, 1966); Marthe Reed, Ark Hive (The Operating System, 2019); Sun Ra, Heliocentric Worlds, Vol. 1 (ESP, 1965); Don DeLillo, Pafko at the Wall (Harper’s, 1992); Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (trans. Raymond Rosenthal; Schocken Books, 1975); Charles Rosenberg, Our Present Complaint: American Medicine Then and Now (Johns Hopkins, 2007); D.W. Meinig, “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (Oxford, 1979); Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (Oxford, 1989); Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria Robinson, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (California, 2018); Sun Ra, The Magic City (Saturn, 1966); Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye (Simon & Schuster, 1974); Larry Niven, Ringworld (1970); Benjamin Grant, Overview (Amphoto, 2016); D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (4 vols.; Yale, 1988-2004); Sun Ra, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (Saturn, 1963); Georges Perec, La Disparition (translated as A Void by Gilbert Adair; Harvill, 1995 [1969]); Charles Mingus, Oh Yeah! (Atlantic, 1961); Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (7th ed., 2004); Don Cherry, Eternal Rhythm (MPS, 1968); Khan Jamal, Drum Dance to the Motherland (Eremite, 2006 [1972]); Alex Cline, The Constant Flame (Cryptogramophone, 2001); Christopher Tree, At the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (Quakebasket, 1970); Sean Meehan, Sectors (for Constant) (SoS Editions 2CD, 2002); Masahiko Togashi, Rings (East Wind, 1976); Ground Zero, Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (ver. 1.28) (ReR, 1996); Laurie Anderson, United States Live (Warner Bros. 4CD, 1983); Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach (Tomato 4LP, 1978); Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives (Lovely DVD, 2005 [1983]); Karlheinz Stockhausen, Licht (Stockhausen Verlag, 1980s-2000s); Cornelius Cardew, The Great Learning (Nima Gouresh; Bôłt 4CD, 2010); Hermann Nitsch, des Orgies Mysteries Theater — Das 6-Tage-Spiel: 5 Tag (Organ of Corti 11CD, 1998); Roland Kayn, A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound (Frozen Reeds 16CD, 2009); Henri Pousseur / Michel Butor, Paysages Planétaires (Alga Marghen 3CD, 2004); Keith Rowe, The Room Extended (Erstwhile 4CD, 2016); Tim Lewis, “Interview: Katie Mack: ‘I didn’t anticipate being in a pop song when I went off to study physics,” The Guardian, August 9, 2020; Radio Java (Alan Bishop, ed.; Sublime Frequencies, 1989); Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979); Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (Boulez/Bayreuth; Opera Depot 12CD, 1976); freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/theres-no-alternative-to-cultural; Aja Romano, “Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon is a sumptuous fantasy — but it makes a mess of Southeast Asian culture,” Vox, March 5, 2021; Mathew Boyden, The Rough Guide to Opera (3rd ed.; 2002); Congos, Heart of the Congos (Blood & Fire 2CD, 1977); Culture, Two Seven Clash (Gibbs; 1977); Charles Mingus, Thirteen Pictures (Rhino 2CD, 1993 [various labels, 1952-77]); Simon H. Fell Quintet, Thirteen Rectangles (Bruce’s Fingers, 2002); M. Owen Lee, Turning the Sky Round: An Introduction to The Ring of the Nibelung (Rowan & Littlefield, 1990) and Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks (Toronto, 2003); Ernest Newman, The Wagner Operas (Princeton, 1949); Sun Ra, Live at Montreux (Universe, 1976); Ian Monk & Daniel Levin Becker, eds., All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963-2018 (McSweeney’s, 2018); Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, eds., Oulipo Compendium (Atlas, 2005); Java: Court Gamelan (Nonesuch, 1971); Wikipedia on 1971 Major League Baseball Season, Jahrhundertring, Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, Alan Page, Frank Robinson, Streetcars in North America, Super Bowl IX, Superconducting Super Collider, Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, Voyager Golden Record, Walt Disney World; Michel Butor, “Egypt,” in John D’Agata, ed., The Lost Origins of the Essay (Graywolf, 2009); The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt (Leo, 1971-84); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (California, 1971); Daniel Slager, ed., The Suspension of Time: Reflections on Simon Dinnerstein and the Fulbright Triptych (Milkweed Editions, 2011); penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/robert-macfarlane-working-with-artist-stanley-donwood-for-underland.html; aeon.co/videos/i-want-you-to-live-forward-but-see-backward-a-theoretical-astrophysicists-manifesto
Cumulonimbae: end; everything; elevator; style; stasis; nothing; actually; puzzle; reverse; bound; portentous; envelope; probably; river; time; space; thrum; worm; techne; palindrome; palimpsest; uttermost bottom; under; bedrock; orb; ring; matter; complete game; event; cycle; after all; page; 13; 71; 50; 5; 3; 74; 75; 76; 77; 9; 4; infinite; [forms of] sleep
[1] From the Big Bang til now, one student objected last week, there must be “a finite amount of information.” Hmm. Philosophical rivers here… My response: an observer of “events” can always discern new relationships AMONG “actors” (be they people, things, ideas, fields of tension, leaves of grass, or atoms, all operating at different scales). Think invisible cameras: “let’s do a history of the relationship between these two tree branches; now, here’s another history (of the relationship between those two branches, and… that “third” branch up there)…” But. Let’s stipulate that she’s right. Let’s suppose some computer could somehow apprehend “all the information” ever generated. We’d still run into the fundamental problem, wouldn’t we? The computer wouldn’t know what to do with that info. Some living mind would have to provide context — a Meinigian lens — upon it, so that it could (simply, banally) “travel.” Historians like LTU do exactly that! How? By telling stories. They’re mappers. The only “completely” ACCURATE map would be one that exactly mirrored Earth. (It’d be huge, ever-changing, and utterly useless.) Yet even the most powerful GPS tech couldn’t map, say, my daughter Hilde’s mental cartography of backyard landmarks. (“Here’s where the worms ‘swim’; that’s the clanky swing; don’t go behind Pater-Vater’s shed, that’s the Danger Ring of Rayas…”) Only humans — beings with the ability to invent contexts — can do that. You might say, “Well, the computer doesn’t care about random five-year-old girls’ ‘mental maps.’ It’s not interested in that.” And I’d say, “Exactly. Maps — stories — must embody human interests.” And to the extent that we must abstract the general from the specific — to the extent that we all must LIE (by omitting/ignoring 99.9% of all possible “information” when making maps and writing non-fiction) — to the extent that others’ acts and stories will change our interests — to just that extent will the Past keep changing, or, if you like, keep accommodating new contexts.
[2] “Invention is the mother of necessity” means the chief achievement of any new tech is that it gives us needs that never used to exist. “Tech is not neutral” means as we adopt Technology X, we also commit ourselves to its unintended consequences — and forsaken alternatives. MK: “Once one has entered the door, are not one’s future directions guided by the contours of the corridor or chamber into which one has stepped? Equally important, once one has crossed the threshold, can one turn back?” So. Do you believe that Humans Have Always Wanted to Get from Place to Place Faster? Is it obvious to you that People at All Times and Places Just Want Everything to be as Convenient as Possible? Did you already know that as Technology becomes More Efficient, Society Advances? Well, in that case, I humbly predict that you may be in for quite a surprise. Our historians assume none of those things. (Mel Kranzberg doesn’t. Right?) Instead, they trace the origins of (the concepts of) “lateness,” “convenience,” “efficiency,” “progress” — of anything large and obvious, really. (“Just be true to yourself.” What “self”? That cultural invention of late 19th/early 20th-C America?) And often those concepts emerge out of — take their time- and place-specific forms — from people’s interactions with technologies that are themselves time- and place-specific (as specific, in fact, as wormholes: thru space-time; underneath slimy stile-lined limestone pools; writhing inside utterly forgotten furniture pedestals in a putative place in Paris).
[3] Yep, CBS itself: the label whose capitan, Goddard Lieberson, signed his letters “God”; the capital capital of Miles Davis (Live-Evil palindroming ’71) and hoo Ks whichelsewise Sinatrae.
[4] rateyourmusic.com/release/album/ensemble-of-unique-instruments-danlee-mitchell/delusion-of-the-fury. Recorded in California in the midst of Neil Armstrong’s penumbra; not released til ’71. Did that pre-reverb anti-electrifying delay drive Harry crazy? Lurk for yourself within the “climactic” pages of Enclosure Three, the richest (coffee-table-cum-scrapbook)-as-biography ever crafted (Philip Blackburn, ed.; Innova / American Composers Forum, 1997). Just imagine that thing being somehow “narrated” by New Zealander Donald McIntyre (Wotan in the Jahrhundertring, rich & resonant as a redwood), or “sung” by Wales’s Gwyneth Jones (vocal MVP of that same production: utterly fearless, absolutely free, the “horrid wobble” that plagued later orbits nowhere in evidence; crank the volume to the apex so that you can hear the floor, then eavesdrop upon her portentous riveting breathing when she awakes in Siegfried, and you may very well thank something), or superconducted by Pierre Boulez himself, who delivers in the final thirteen minutes of Act I of Siegfried the most viscerally exciting “classical music” I’ve ever heard, and whose symbiosis with the orchestra, whilst susceptible to common tropes like “white hot” (or “viscerally exciting”), might best be encapsulated by a single sentence from HK’s TPE of whose power (via re-viewable precision) Harry, I’d wager, would approve: “Though books call Montségur a fortress because it was besieged, it was properly a temple across whose unfortified threshold shadow bounds light diagonally at midsummer noon, and across whose annexed ‘cellula’ men waiting in darkness at midsummer dawn could see two slabs of light defined in dustmotes, entering by eastern slits and leaving by western, no stone within the stone box so much as grazed.”
[5] Cook and Morton on AMM [sic]. But… So… What would such a music sound like??? Hears any sonic voyager’s possible end: web.archive.org/web/20060811225840/http://www.matchlessrecordings.com/amm_review.html.
[6] Eternal Rhythm; Drum Dance to the Motherland; The Constant Flame: top-o’-muh-crown trio; eminently satisfying specimens of the species. But we could recon more raucous. Brötzmann, Mangelsdorff, Van Hove, Bennink, Live in Berlin ’71 (FMP 2CD), exhaustive & exhausting; Cecil’s Berlin big-band bonanza seventeen pal’in’pleasure-dromin’ orbits later, Alms/Tiergarten (Spree) (FMP 2CD): each record rarely-played rarefied rarebit. Or we could traverse the reverse: Spartan-sparse surveys of spacious portentous percushiana. Tree’s At the Cathedral of John the Divine; Meehan’s Sectors (for Constant); and certainly Masahiko Togashi’s Rings, smilingly severe (yet strangely palatable) in its purr-wreck’d embrace of palette-constraints.
[7] Lutes, ouds, lyres, tars, proto-kitharae… hoo Ks what eldritch shards of Yggdrasil populated that infinite urban underland underpinning Perec’s imagined apartment building! (Save two – 27 and 74; numbers Janáčekian, Ellingtonian – all chapters of GP’s La Vie mode d’emploi (’78) got anglais’d low (’87) by David Bellos.) Chapter 74, “Lift Machinery, 2,” a billowing Escherance of seemingly every Gigerian THING, is the one that fictionears 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier’s phantasticall cellars. It hits grotto’d-bottom like so (lo! Harry Mathews, translator): “…forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.” Franglophonic stabreim there — Wagnerian alliteration and word-assonance; JPS: it “tends to heaviness in its guttural sounds and agglutinative proclivities.” [[[But, IDK. I gotta ask… would any of this, the entire corpus surveyed herein, even… matter. To aliens. To those furious deluded beings. To some God-Entity who didn’t even “hear” or “see” etc., but who apprehended The Universe through unimaginable (& unimaginably other)… SENSES. Cosmos via sensual psilocybin saturation — all the time. Whorf-Sapir gone astrapoplectic. A completely different game. Can we get music like that.]]]
[8] “The Arkestra screeched their way through a set of echoing improvisations that force the various players to communicate with each other using a foreign creative language — seemingly without guidance from or consultation with their leader.” No “conductor”: the Mingusian/Braxtonian ideal of musicians who have no leader, but simply music to play. John Szwed, “Sun Ra,” in The WIRE Primers: A Guide to Modern Music (Rob Young, ed.; Verso, 2009).
[9] Korean court music; Noh plays; Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (ver. 1.28); perhaps United States Live, Einstein on the Beach, or Perfect Lives (if you savor Harry’s Amer vernacular); or then again Licht, The Great Learning (comp. ’71) or Nitsch (if you wish to waste your time); or, on some Z-axis, if what you’re after is the amplification of space, then A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound (Cy Young’s unfathomable career), Paysage Planétaires (Doc Gooden’s ’84 orbit), The Room Extended (Doc’s ’85, the most inexhaustible document of them all).
[10] Nothin’ on gamelan in his book (A Short History of Music (4th Ed.; Vintage, 1954)). And, like every single known Physics Star besides Katie Mack (whose taste, it seems, runs more to Hozier), Phat Albert exalted THE Classics.
[11] East-pointed diamonds here, everything from Debussy and Britten to Alan Bishop (Radio Java) and Arthur C. Clarke (The Fountains of Paradise). Pivotal cloud-quote: “The hours forget their usual course. The quarters shrink to golden minutes, minutes seems like blissful hours. Now in the softer moments, the music sounds as if I heard angels sing, now, when at half strength, as if I heard all the chimes in heaven. And then again, in the fullness of is mighty power, it is as if a storm of bronze thunders through my temples.” That’s Jan Brandt Buys, who witnessed the Paku Alaman Orchestra in 1920. Quoted in Charles Ives’s Hartford Advocate, February 20, 2003 (“Hello Bali: Nonesuch Releases Thirteen Classic Recordings of Music from Indonesia and the South Pacific”).
[12] Wayang Golek — The Sound and Celebration of Sundanese Puppet Theater (Music of the Earth 6CD, 1994).
[13] Mike Silverton, “Archaeological Dig,” La Folia 1:3 (August 1998). The double CD, split so awkwardly right in mid-flow, Das Rheingold-sti (bro…), was recorded by Jacques Brunet for Ocora on July 25, 1975, precisely one complete orbit prior to premiere of the Bayreuth/Chéreau/Boulez Die Walküre.
[14] Certainly not the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A complete ringer for any party game: Voyager’s Golden Record. There’s an entity that travels. On the one hand, one of its 27 music tracks is the very one I’d choose if I had to introduce random extra-terrestrials to a thing called “music.” I’m not even kidding. (And give me an hour to live? Same thing: first give me “Ketawang: Puspåwårnå,” from a ’71 Yogyakarta field recording. Enough — go to State 27.) On the other hand, how painfully obvious, how pathetically robust, was its built-in ye olde Western Classical pre/x/tincture? (“Artifacts have politics”: Dr. Winner’s truthful chortle.) Cue Sagan’s immaculately misconceived apologetics: “There are many forms of music made by peoples all over our home planet, which we call Terra or, simply, Earth. We here present a representative gamut, from the most ancient of folkforms to the most complex structures yet conceived by hominid minds.” Hence the architectonics: JSB to kick off; LvB to close. Of course! (On the third hand, execrable, Untouchable: “Johnny B. Goode.” Again: enough.)
[15] Thankfully there’s Freddie’s riposte, almost arrogant in cutting thru cant: “There’s No Alternative to Cultural Appropriation: Cultural growth is just cultural appropriation.” Of course. But in ’21 he was too optimistic (“as hegemonic as this particularly cruel strain of social justice politics has become, the worm has already begun to turn against it”). Because the Production was (and remains) institutionalized, entrenched. (You know. Throw a speer at the post-Obama/Trump cloud-board; ah, yes, here’s Vox on Disney’s unremarkable Raya and the Last Fafner: “the film’s writers, Qui Nguyen (The Society) and Adele Lim (Crazy Rich Asians) are, respectively, Vietnamese American and Malaysian American, and copious research has gone into making the film feel true to Southeast Asian viewers”; umm, “true”??? (and what about, say, generic or any viewers?); it gets worse; the film was criticized, says Vox, for casting actors of X-ethnicity instead of actors of Y-ethnicity for Z… “roles”; the film, let’s recall, is a work of fiction; it is ontologically impossible for any work of fiction to “represent,” to be “authentic to” [??] any (so-called) real-world culture; it gets worse; “there is another worry,” namely, “the blending of the distinct and varied cultures of Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and half a dozen other nations has left [the film] feeling indistinct and insensitive…. The most disappointing thing about Raya” — it’s eminently forgettable? — “is that Southeast Asian Disney fans may struggle to find any identifiable part of their specific cultures in the film’s gorgeous but messy world-building”; this piece actually got published; its core complaint is, presumably, un-“problematic.”) It is fair to wonder whether such Producers understand that Wagner himself confronted similar criticisms. “Wait, is this plot-element Icelandic, or German-ish, or something else? Why isn’t it staying true to Ahistorically Bounded Culture X? I’m confused…” Those critiques also missed the game completely. Thing is, that was 1.5 centuries ago. So it’s also fair to wonder whether this… entity — call it syncreticism, synthesis, hybridity, play, work, travel, noise, attention, culture, cultural appropriation, seeing, language, praxis, B-blurring, absurdity, truth, meaning, joy, art, change, life — is so powerful, so fundamental, that it guarantees perennial cycles whereby its own manifest existence is decadently unseen, even (utterly futilely) “reversed.”
[16] “People say that he was a one-year wonder, but how can you be a one-year wonder if you win two [consecutive!] Most Valuable Player awards?” Indeed. Just ask F. Robby — ’61 NL MVP (mirror-pole to Maris, that year’s AL winner), and ’66 AL (first man to win in both leagues; the Reds’ GM had deemed him “an old thirty,” not realizing the extent to which FR’s two elevators (one, physical capacities, indeed going down, but the other, maturity/mental/skill-honing perspicacities, still ascending) were about to thrum in historic synergy with each other). Or ask fans of Boulez bootlegs. Opera Depot offers Bayreuth Ring cycles from ’76 and ’77 (the first two years of Chéreau’s lustrumn). Which to prefer? Most say ’77. (They usually tout “the sound.”) But the further back in time we go, the more fresh and fiery and fulsomely fraught the entire affair. Swim against the current here; it’ll pay off. Besides, “1977” is particularly ambiguous wrt Posterity (the Golden Record being The Urxample). Yes, that year bequeathed over-esteemed pyrite from the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Les Rallizes Dénudés… But it also deposited mulchable moraines like Heart of the Congos, Two Sevens Clash, and the last great Mingus recording, “Cumbia & Jazz Fusion,” which kicks off Thirteen Pictures, which — strange strings — stood as an abiding polestar for SHF’s imperishable Thirteen Rectangles.
[17] Rough Guide to Opera, 268-70.
[18] Five point O on the hardness scale (evidently a creation of German mineralogists chalking upon Greek atlassi).
[19] Boyden: In 1848 RW “quickly sketched the plot of Siegfrieds Tod, but soon recognized the need to elaborate upon the events leading to the hero’s demise. Accordingly he wrote the text of Der junge Siegfried… then expanded the tale with a prelude to Siegfried’s life, Die Walküre, and a prelude to the entire three-opera sequence, Das Rheingold. Having completed the poems in reverse order, he composed the music in sequence, beginning in 1853,” not finally finishing until ’74 (a number Pagest, Dinnersteinian), with a nearly 13-year gap between Acts II and III of Siegfried. But how to convey a fundamentally different kind of attitude toward one’s own drama if the text itself remained unchanged? How to end a work whose “stated beliefs” must be subsumed beneath some superstructure? Through a kaleidoscopic catharsis of colors; through accreting resonances of portentous leitmotifs (resonances sometimes unintended, surely; let the listener co-create); through the only hope remaining, the hope that music would somehow embody, enwomb, elevate the “meaning.” The poet Mary Ruefle, appropriating a certain Monsieur B., is useful here. “Roland Barthes suggests there are three ways to finish any piece of writing,” she writes. “The ending will have the last word or the ending will be silent or the ending will execute a pirouette, do something unexpectedly incongruent.” And indeed, can it be otherwise? (A cosmos with those specific constraints upon “ends” — why?) Pater Lee is also helpful, but the most suggestive snapshot might be ye olde Ernest Newman’s. Here’s the uttermost end of his précis on The Ring: “The poet in [RW] was pulling him one way, the musician another. The man of feeling in him, as distinct from the man of intellect, was being quietly, subconsciously, but irresistibly drawn toward a dénouement in which the world should go down in outer ruin yet somehow be taken up into the arms of a redeeming love. This he could convey, and has conveyed magnificently, in his music to the closing scene; but how to express it in words was a problem that always baffled and finally defeated him.”
12 [13]. Thunder: of Perplexed Primordial Witness, Defiance, Applause (which, after the final run in 1980, allegedly thrummed 90+ minutes on end):
Time reverses space / the journey into darkness is a journey to “the beginning of everything at the END of each day,” said Lemaître, laying out his theory in the library of Mount Wilson Observatory in 1933, “we had fireworks of unimaginable beauty / then there was the explosion followed by the filling of the heavens with smoke,” the dying primordial light, the transition to something else entirely, vestiges of nothingness whose relationship with its flow mixes cartography, adventure, science and a compulsive kind of dreamwork that some furious alien forged, delusionally, from primordial Sound only it’s thrumming our Orb, so a powerful dissonance overtakes my mind, powerful in part because it is so difficult to use, so unyielding in its dailiness, for where quotations begin is in a cloud hovering o’er woe-begotten bowers song- and long-forgotten, contemporary forms of obsolescence did not quite understand a sodden-sock shock (no mere shenanigan or nickname for a shebang of shenanigans) as if time were reversing, and what was pressed down below the surface is now rising up over billions of years b/c 50% of the complete game, CER once whispered, is bounding off what’s in the main text vs. what’s in the endnotes, for distant plangencies and different harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I could not appreciate at my elbow and I cry there, surprised and helpless, deep in granite and darkness, weeping for feelings I cannot name, a combination of experiences rare within triptychs full and bright whose small acts of preservation and elegiac songs meander, spiral, explode appropriate contexts 4 the staticky remnant of white-hot hydrogen plasma that had suffused the neonatal universe during its first half-million years which, unfathomably, had lost something of their material quality and became vast and luminous and whoso should drowse-browse but a Javanese elevator operator briefly filled with a longing to step into a side tunnel myself, lie down and let the halite slowly seal me in for five years or 10,000 — to wait out the Anthropocene in that translucent cocoon, sentimentally to commemorate the co-memorious sentiment: in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you… I am here with you… don’t be afraid… go to sleep now, these seething silver sparks, deracinated mica, songs of the Fulani, these scattering star-shards, a ntumpan, male and female, ova scintilla of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, stasis Atlantis dressed in silk, the mystical current under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbolled and archaic embroidery of the skirts of God, is this what death feels like / or birth and I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you… you are not alone… don’t be afraid… go to SLEEEEEEP…
11. G, Act Three
The problem is not that the diary is trivial but that it introduces more stories than can easily be recovered and absorbed. It is one thing to describe Martha’s journey across the Kennebec, another to assess the historical significance of Nancy Norcross’s lingering labor, Obed Hussey’s sojourn in jail, or Zilpha and Ebenezer Hewins’s hasty marriage. Taken alone, such stories tell us too much and not enough, teasing us with glimpses of intimate life, repelling us with a reticence we cannot decode… Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s [daybook] lies. To extract the river crossings without noting the cold days spent “footing” the stockings, to abstract the births without recording the long autumns spent winding quills, pickling meat, and sorting cabbages, is to destroy the sinews of this earnest, steady, gentle, and courageous record… For her, living was to be measured in doing. Nothing was trivial.
…Some day the diary may be published. What follows is in so sense a substitute for it; it is an interpretation, a kind of exegesis… Because so few readers will have seen the original, I have transcribed ten long passages, one for each chapter… In each case, the “important” material, the passage or event highlighted in the accompanying discussion, is submerged in the dense dailiness of the complete excerpt. Juxtaposing the raw diary and the interpretive essay in this way, I have hoped to remind readers of the complexity and subjectivity of historical reconstruction, to give them some sense of both the affinity and the distance between history and source.
…Characteristically, the one obstetrical comment in the entry (“There was but a short space between the Births”) is embedded in seemingly extraneous references to the weather, her journey, the names of the men who assisted her across the river and of the women who sat up with her through the night. The biological events fades into the clutter of social detail. Where is the center of the picture? Is it Martha Ballard scrambling up the icy bank, Mrs. Dingley grasping one arm, Mr. Graves reaching toward her from above, while Ephraim slowly turns his boat in the ice-rimmed river below? Is it Mrs. Byrnes, exhausted from her eight-hour labor, bearing down for the second delivery? Is it Mrs. Conry easing two perfect babies into the cradle, or the three drowsy women leaning toward the kitchen fire, the midnight cold at their backs, small clouds of mist above their whispers? There is no center, only a kind of grid, faint trails of experience converging and deflecting across a single day.
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (Vintage, 1990), a book that belongs to that scarce genre which we can only call a book — to shelter what is precious, thirteen such titles sparkle in grayscale along the network, including From Dawn to Decadence, a tractatus logico-philosophicus architected by peripatetic Monsieur B. who, like innumerable daybookers, scribbled quiet portentous doggerel (HP made “the most original and powerful contribution to dramatic music on this continent”; “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and reality of the game”) — AMT perhaps the greatest micro-history in the universe — we’re guessing / there are simply too many things we cannot know — precisely because LTU welcomes our doubts; she demands that we don’t automatically swallow non-fictioneers’ incessant inventing their (necessary, meaningful) CONTEXTS, i.e., their most important decisions in inventing [re-viewing] F-words [“facts”]; “objectivity” is never even an end; her juxtapositions whereby everything seems (as in Götterdämmerung — “there’s hardly a bar in [it] that does not refer forward or back or sideways or all three”) both distant and proximate at the same time, repeatedly ring us that what we know of “it” [infinite pasts / finite future] is largely reverse-engineered; beyond the frame of any (bounded) space-time “event,” all of the rest of the galactic ticking, drumming, humming, and crackling is actually a figment of complex instruments and how we choose to monitor, and talk about, the voids of space, which, in terms of earthly acoustics, can propagate no sound; so to float invisible cinematic cameras (infinite invisible numbers of them, arrayed in a perfect orbis, surround any/every possible “center”) over the deep blue Kennebechtrhine itself, is to imagine ice as a “medium”… a presence permitting communication with the ghosts of people from whom we are descended, whose genes we carry in our bodies; those arcane devices yearn to sing, against quantum limits of communication, Here’s Everything; and indeed!, here’s GJ as transfigured Brünnhilde as Elena Makpropulos as social healer as Walt Whitisney’s Sleeping Beauty; what if Martha had had an elevator to negotiate that exceedingly specific landscape (the concept which in the last decade or so — why so late [in the day / book]?? — physicists have been grappling with, a theoretical multiverse of different possible spaces which could have drastically different conditions from our own); yes, just look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away / look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe [theory of everything]; LTU’s/MB’s unflagging diligence reassures us that it’s totally fine not to trust such elaborate and complete systems; after all, if you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent (like the one literally underpinning 13 Thirteen) you are probably on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff-bank you haven’t even climbed; just as Techne is so much more important than Science, so, too, noisy Urth remains more intricate, inexhaustible, intractable than the entire cosmos; all that is particular in its noisome splendor belongs to its finely granulated decision-making and chaotic blurs, its MYSTERY
10. G, to Act
It’s impossible to seriously contemplate the END of the universe without ultimately coming to terms with that it means for humanity… There has to come a point in any timeline with a finite extent where our legacy as a species just… [KM’s ellipsis] stops… At some point, in a cosmic sense, it will not have mattered that we ever lived… As a discipline within physics, the study of cosmology isn’t really about finding meaning per se, but it is about uncovering fundamental truths. To what extent there even exists an explanation for the nature of our universe is an open question too… It’s totally possible that there’s no theory of everything, and we’re never going to piece it all together in any sensible way. But just typing that makes my physicist toes curl, so maybe we can set that to the side for now in the “BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EXISTENTIAL EMERGENCY” cabinet… A universe cycling from Big Bang to Heat Death, over and over again, forever, with the tantalizing possibility that something — some imprint from a previous cycle — might make it through the transition. The notion that what passes through could contain meaningful information about any conscious inhabitants is just idle speculation at the moment, [Roger Penrose] says, but the implications of the possibility could be profound… So yes, you hold within you the dust of ancient generations of stars. But you are also, to a very large fraction, built out of by-products of the actual Big Bang. Carl Sagan’s larger statement still stands, to an even greater degree: “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
— O U K, all the telltale traces thrumming in place like that modest lieu in Boulez’s Paris which GP, through a knitting of imagery (underground rivers, inflation fields, Norns) and by evoking the names of people and things (there are ninety-three historical personages named), made “a tentative attempt at exhausting” [sic; by all means, skeptical students, do investigate AMM’s The Inexhaustible Document] in 1975: the year JG’s Steelers inspissated AP’s Vikings in a Superconducting Super Collider of a Super Bowl in New Orleans (source-space of super-sonic jazz; Mercer Ellington (the late Duke’s Volsung) played the halftime show); the orbit in which FR homered in his first at-bat upon becoming MLB’s first African-American manager; the Togashian tree-ring of the previous cycle that accomplished exactly nothing to solve the Unsolved Problem: whereas RW’s non-Ring trio of music-dramas — Tristan, Meistersinger, and Parsifal, the ones the faithful routinely exalt as greater works; certainly the view isn’t as good, but the best part of life is internal — make their meanings quite clear — through them, Cooke cooks in I Saw the World End, “we do find that our feeling is set at rest, that nothing remains for the intellect to search for, that our instinctive understanding of life is enriched, and that we become ‘knowers through feeling’” — this has never held for The Ring; the very existence of its “cosmos” is a contradiction; RW “believed myths to be humanity’s intuitive expression, in symbolic form, of the ultimate truths about its own nature and destiny / this is, of course, one of the things that makes it so many-sided and inexhaustible; yet the fact that this ‘play of ideas’ has proved opaque to our intellects makes the tetralogy fall short of being a perfect work of art, since we are always still puzzling over its meaning when we leave the theater,” which also helps explain why those scholarly re-viewings called History (a discipline that isn’t really about finding “fundamental truth” per se, but it is about uncovering meanings) will never actually “end,” but which does not explain (though the human mind is capable of a great elastic theater) why people perennially posit that a pile of puzzle pieces has a higher entropy than a completed puzzle, b/c hark!, within the completed puzzle’s surface intra-relations, a flat ontology now entices, a pattern language puzzling Perec’s puzzlers — “it is not too strong to say,” stabs PJS, “that the whole of the action of [Götterdämmerung, in which Wotan ne’er appears] takes place in Wotan’s mind, and everything — every development — must be appreciated relative to the watching eye of the old man, all his dreams shattered and his hopes ground down, sitting in Valhalla surrounded by his gods and the branches of the world-ash-tree, itself long dead, awaiting the end” — of infinite implied librettos within which a drastic slowdown and recursion of language occurs, a rhetorical enactment of fatigue and confusion… “backflowing,” a loss of causal drive, a gathering of hesitancies and stutters, inexhaustible investigations into the completed game’s lulls, bells, tells, spells, shells, ills that need end only with death, the cosmic gift (Notung; needful [no]thing) whose very certainty guarantees a certain bedrock-level of “meaning” — Andy sells a scintillating Vec Makropulos (sung in English) from ’71 starring Marie Collier (soon to expire), her cathartic renunciation of immortality (there is no joy in gewd-ness / theeere,,, is no jooyy,,, in eeee-ville: both the feeling of being replete, a feeling of satisfaction, and the feeling of loss, the sadness of having finished) elevating everything — environed beyond our capacity to know, Neil Armstrong’s step onto a dead planet [being] the most pressing statement of the question as to the life of matter / he was a human being carried in a machine to posture as if in a charade (the photographs of him standing by that insectlike spacecraft, the American flag starched into a semblance of flying in the wind, the unerasable footprints, and none ever to be discovered of a Friday there before him, the absolute uniqueness of the event, dreamlike, had been anticipated by hundreds of Max Ernst drawings and paintings) / the meaning of that charade is not only unknowable, it is unaskable, the contradiction, fate, destiny, direction, purpose, significance, end as in MEANING
9. Götterdämmerung, Prelude and Act One (so, two discs)
50.) Gelatt, Roland. “Conversations with Pierre Boulez.” Harper’s. 1969.
…excavation of the central cavity was pivotal. For it was only once ensconced within that pre-anechoic chamber (accompanied by a certain jazz musician (“from Saturn,” evidently) who had recently concertized in Switzerland), Boulez reveals, that he finally divined the polysemic stasis binding the varied leitmotif tENDrils to the architectonics of the crenellated tunnels themselves. But he singles out the first act of Götterdämmerung:
Nobody can really say where it’s going. I’d like to do an experiment with that act some time, making an aleatory piece of it by cutting it up into various sections and reassembling them in a different order, just making sure that the modulations are still all right. I’m sure than many listeners would never know the difference.
Whether this remark comes across as ppfflippant or perspicacious…
…52.) Gideon, Siegfried. Space, Time, and Architecture. 3rd ed. Harvard. 1952.
…basic technologies: “Wagner built the system of elevated and underground” stiles descending to the grotto, “without doubt one of the most uncompromising rooms” in Europe; “Wagner showed the same interest in the interpenetration of different streams” feeding the (evidently sourceless) Rhine as he did in the overall formal plan;…
…76.) Mathews, Harry. “That Ephemeral Thing.” New York Review of Books. 1988.
…parallels the quarry itself:
One of the transient inhabitants of Perec’s apartment building, Emilio Grifalconi, “a cabinet-maker from Verona,” gives Valène an unusual object in appreciation of a family portrait the artist has painted for them. The object resembles “a large cluster of coral,” and it has been produced by the solidification of a liquid mixture Grifalconi once injected into the tangle of minute tunnels that termites had bored inside the base of an antique wooden table. Even reinforced, the base proves too fragile to support the table top and has to be replaced; but Grifalconi salvages
the fabulous arboresence within, this exact record of the worms’ life inside the wooden mass; a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence, their undeviating singlemindedness, their obstinate itineraries; the faithful materialization of all they had eaten and digested as they forced from their dense surroundings the invisible elements needed for their survival, the explicit, visible, immeasurably disturbing image of the endless progressions that had reduced the hardest of woods to an impalpable network of crumbling galleries.
Since the object is referred to at one point as a réseau de vers, which can mean a network not only of worms but of verses, we can claim it for literature; most usefully, for this very book.
Réseau de Vers, of course, is one of five inscriptions lining the Pool’s tiled stiles…
…77.) Mathews, Harry and Georges Perec. “Roussel and Venice: Outline of a Melancholic Geography.” Atlas Anthology Three. 1985.
…elevate any given passage:
This was not the first time Roussel had used a title as a starting point (Les ensorcelés du Lac Ontario [Bewitched at Lake Ontario], the title of a novel by Gustave Reid that had been a bestseller in 1907, becomes “Amphores scellées dures a contrario” [hard sealed amphorae a contrario] (Com., 21) and gives rise to the story of the forger Le Marech’). Everything Roussel produced suggests an underlying unity that depends neither on “psychology” (which is incapable of describing the work or its development) nor, in spite of its enigmatic characteristics, on a coded hermetic message. Both in his life and in his work, what “changes the world rather than allowing the slightest alteration of the subject” is, to give a banal and literal answer, travel. As a real-life traveler, Roussel’s behavior was often baffling and inscrutable; in his written travels, he strode across vast, improbable continents [endnote omitted]. He went all over the world without seeing it, without looking at it, without being for one moment “impressed” by it. His “visible” journeys are not the ones to study. Roussel’s work is, we think, a unique commemoration of his other, invisible journeys, the ones that took place in the “secret topological system”… The site of this topography is Venice… The urban architecture of Venice is pure theater; it is a trompe l’oeil in the context of illusion itself, which can therefore be taken literally: here deprived of reference to anything outside itself, the reality of illusion — which is also Roussel’s reality — comes into its own… In this sense, Roussel’s journey to Venice was his only journey (Venice becomes voyage, voyage becomes Venice, and V comes to stand for both words.) And like every true journey it was not a departure but a return. He came home, he found his place. It was not an exile but a rediscovery of his origins.
What’s notable here: not just the mystical parallels between Roussel and Wagner (personal dispositions; palindromicyclical predilections); not just the mythical position occupied by Venice (where Wagner died and where he had reveled in composing Tristan’s endless feverish surging solipsistic all-annihilating chromaticisms); but the specificity of detail presented by the “brothers” who birthed this piece: an essay, it seems, in which stylized formal elements (endnotes, arcane names, precise bibliographic references) are clearly inventions, but which are, ironically and thereby, all the more true to the subject, suggesting that just as rivers — and, yes, pools! — often trace their origins to fugitive (diffuse, capillary, underground) sources, so, too, any given “everything” also can be traced backwards to any instantiated “end” of earthly detail, however fictional, trivial, or arbitrary.
— Val Cura, “‘That Amniotic Space, an Entity Complete in Itself’: An annotated bibliography of everything unearthable pertaining to the Swimming Pool at Bayreuth, including its natural cave system, shotcrete walls, energy transduction, and pattern formation,” in T. Atlin Brescia, ed., Bayreuth, Babe Ruth, Beirut: Annular Byways of the Wagnerian Paideuma (m.s., n.d.; distributed samizdat-style by S.OMNIA [née the Society for the Study of Radiophonic Epicycles and Cosmological STRUCTURE])
8. S, Act Three
Round Three: Everyhow: On hearing what had not been heard, could not be heard, should not be heard. Calibrating and recalibrating noise. Toward what END?
…“sudden uncontrollable variations in the strength of reception”… the rumbles, splashes, surges, clicks, and crackling heard over submarine cable connections, and the hissing and frying heard on radio headsets and telegraph lines, along with whistles, tweeks, hollow rustlings, chirpings, crashes, and a “swish” that sounded like “a flock of birds flying close to one’s head.” Some of these sounds could be explained by auroral excitements and ionospheric refraction; others were inexplicable, and Jansky in his spare time began to think that the “star static” he had heard came not from a single powerful source but from the thermal agitation of hot charged particles scattered throughout the Milky Way… “The cosmic shortwaves,” wrote the German astrophysicist Albrecht Unsöld in 1946, “bring us neither the stockmarket nor jazz from distant worlds,” as had shortwave radios. “With soft noises they rather tell the physicist of the endless love play between electrons and protons.”
…The Big Bang became such an audicon of astrophysics and so constant a cosmological figure in popular discourse because of the omnipresence and everyhowness of noise… It mattered little that the Big Bang was a misnomer, that the birth of the universe could not have been audible and was rather a swift unfolding than an eruption or explosion… In 2000, when the soundtrack was composed for a “multisensory re-creation of the first moments of the universe” in the bottom half of the Hayden Sphere of Manhattan’s Rose Center for Earth and Space, the Blast from the Past just had to burst out from the quiet electronic hum of ylem into cymbals, strings, and brass… In this respect the Big Bang had been less a manic solo than a downbeat for galaxies continuously configured by noise, and we would do well to abandon point-to-point analyses of cosmic events in favor of stochastic “densities” akin to the density of auditory experience with its simultaneities of sounds.
— Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (Zone Books, 2011), a thick brick made of up many intertwining narratives that combine the mythical and the lyrical with the mundane and the logistical whose ample/s/and sub-titular chronology seems super weird puzzlingly & portentously reversed and whose Wagnerian ambit envelops, critics complain, too much, though really, people must think literary aficionados are all addicted to painfully heavy, slow things / like the aircraft used for the lunar launches, good books only look heavy and slow: their speed depends on their internal engines and where they are pointed, but this one’s endnotes point only to some website, i.e., to the online Aether — evidently space is the place — causing epochs to yield to one another in an immense cycle of precessions, and its (integral, extant) index, while enveloping Cage (as “soundman”; Litany for the Whale is one of two listed compositions), PB, and HP (yet another Californian who had never been crazy about “pitch”), promenades neither “Sun Ra” nor (I’m not trying to get hung up on it) “AMM,” reminding us that all that is left behind by loss is trace — and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself, and indeed to savor “everything” in this most super-saturated of bootlegs is to reckon (somehow) with its congeries of sonic apocalypsi (all born of that most remarkable form of life known as field recording; the stereoscopic microphony here, the palimpsestic presence, is such that you could be one remove from Bayreuth’s stage) or — better? — to somehow listen through them all, all while silently elevating that parareligious fact: in each of five chapters, we’ll explore a different possibility for the end — Big Crunch, Heat Death, Big Rip, Vacuum Decay, Bounce — even as the kin-dread kinds of “extra-musical events” number five: 1.) below it all, below even this undersong, TAPE HISS, a bedrock of something like white noise that I cannot granulate with my human ears… the hum of something like silence, a taste of the primordial soup, galactic background radiation as a remnant of that initially stupendous detonation, those miniscule density fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, constant, completely enwombing; 2.) TAPE DROP-OUTS, very few, actually — just before Hunding proclaims this is my house; Waltraute’s monologue, mono 4 a logarithmic G — all of them wondrous photonegatives of this recording’s POWER to reach out and feel the vibration of space itself; 3.) STAGE SOUNDS, those crucial invisible clumps whereby through the medium, we sense Events Happening, especially potent here thanks to Chéreau’s kinetic stagecraft, how he dared to be angular, eccentric, barbaric, proscenium arch as post-modern laboratory channeling the Allure of the Invisible; 4.) AUDIENCE SOUNDS, not just your typical ahem & phlegm & “ylem,” matter-in-readiness, oh no, we’re talking actual boos at Bayreuth and — thrillingly, utterly taboo — irruptions into the drama itself, like when some punter (who AP or FR would’ve pummeled) blasts a ref’s whistle just as Siegfried blows his own crude reed, a collision of sorts, “although not one that causes bodily injury / it is a collision between the dimensional worlds” of the performers (PB unflappable, presumably amused) and the spectators posterity; 5.) THE NOTORIOUS PROMPTER — “it would be disappointing,” [s]he admits, “I mean, you have to accept what nature provides” — even if that’s this woman’s well-intentioned whisperings — pssst! — sssssibilant… insistent… INCESSANT — but still, if you wish to listen for sounds so faint they may not exist at all, you can’t have someone playing the drums in your ear, soulless scrim, sole-vox Stabreim, sinter smolder sync, I don’t, you don’t, Pete Palmer don’t, Whitey Herzog don’t and Pete Mazeroski don’t, neither, cicadas hiss in the acacias, setting fieldfares flaring to the west… a manufacturer’s defect in the fabric of the cosmos itself… whispers… world-makers… NOISE
7. S, Act Two
We’ve seen DWM. The Past is Infinite.[1] We’ve broken MK’s “laws.” The Future is Finite.[2]
Now comes Langdon Winner. (His initials echo those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher whose ideas “our” LW refashions. Cool?)
In “Technologies as Forms of Life,” Winner’s def is right in the title. Techs are “forms of life,” that is, species of experience, or, if you like, aspects of the human condition, or, again, unique activities that are able to be pursued. It’s not the thing itself that matters; the actual physical artifact isn’t the essence of any technology. What matters are the ENDS: the new range of possible practices, the uncharted social relations and aspects of identity, which USING the technology brings into our orbits. (N.B. LW is no determinist; users, not implacable “Tech,” are always the main actors.) LW’s T[hesis]: “If the experience of modern society shows us anything… it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning.” This comes straight from Wittgenstein. That LW said that when we speak languages, we actually play games (each one “complete” with its own logic/rules). It’s not words’ definitional “content” that makes language so important; it’s what we do with words: working within shared social systems to get real-world results, seamlessly switching from “joke” to “interview” to “lecture” to “giving orders” to “baby talk,” following the tacit yet binding rules of each of those games, each “form of life.” Dr. Winner sounds that motif unto technology. Artifacts are powerful not because of what they achieve, functionally, as things, but because of the unprecedented bodily activities and social relations — the forms of life — they permit. Ask Pat Patrick or Marshall Allen: a saxophone matters not because it lets you vibrate a reed and push buttons; it matters because it lets you incorporate “saxophony,” an exceedingly particular domain of skill and expression, into your repertoire of lived possibilities, of realizing unsuspected aesthetic and emotional potentialities. As Winner writes, “If one has access to tools and materials of woodworking, a person can develop the human qualities found in the activities of carpentry. If one is able — [recall poor Siegfried wrangling his makeshift reed!] — to employ the instruments and techniques of music making, one can become a musician.”
…dark matter of change, of emerging techs. Usually, LW says, people debate “pros and cons” from an instrumental p.o.v., i.e., they worry about reeds and buttons. “Is this thing feasible practically; what are the costs and benefits; who’ll make money; how ’bout the ‘inefficiencies’; etc.” And everything else — how, for instance, our (almost always unforeseen) uses of this tech might transform our very categories OF Body, Freedom, Teen, Sex, Health, Ownership, Time, Space — that’s treated as “side effects” of the technology. This bothers Winner. That’s because “as technologies are being built and put to use, significant alterations in patterns of human activity and human institutions are already taking place. New worlds are being made. There is nothing ‘secondary’ about this phenomenon. It is, in fact, the most important accomplishment of any technology.” As millions enthusiastically use “smart phones” b/c those things seem “obviously convenient” or “practical for accomplishing X tasks,” those folks usually do not — actually cannot?? — imagine how doing so doesn’t make our lives any “easier,” but only more complicated. That’s because their interacting uses birth Unintended Consequences (UICs): entirely new forms of Work and Culture and Politics and Identity and Power and Contradiction and Complexity. This process LW dubs technological somnambulism. “For the interesting puzzle of our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.” That is ironic. Maybe even (in the stylized eyes of Wittgenstein’s confrère, Walter Benjamin) tragic.
— “The Question for Langdon Winner, ‘Technologies as Forms of Life’,” an assignment in HIST 199, Technology in American History, a 20[-]20 course at the University of Richmond, the Fall Line city amidst whose river-cleaved contours in ’86, the exact orbit the Allen & Ginter Tobacco Co. issued “baseball cards,” Orb’s earliest “streetcars” danced about their confined sphere, another (perceived, catalogued) parapolarity — at Boulby they encased xenon in lead in copper in iron in halite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to see back to the birth of the universe / at Onkalo they encased uranium in zirconium in iron in copper in bentonite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to keep the future safe from the present — indicative of the sheer thrumming fecundity of Fate’s Yggdrasil’s endlessly commodious canopy of These-Not-Those Branches of Instantiation — small tweaks to our current, incomplete knowledge of the cosmos can result in vastly different paths into the future, from a universe that collapses on itself, to one that rips itself apart, to one that succumbs by degrees to an escapable expanding bubble of doom — suggesting that, rather than tracking some single “natural trajectory” or inevitable “arc of progress” from mission to vision — “first ‘we got’ the Iron Age, then the Bronze… now we’re finally inta THE Info Age” whose black myths impel intelligent interlocutors to imagine that new technological and theoretical tools are allowing us to make leaps and move us forward (toward… what?) — techne itself, that time- and place-specific constellation Yggdrasil comprising every THING we both create (bits of our Orb, transformed; there is nothing inevitable about the choices) and inhabit “second-nature”-style (LW’s title, The Whale and the Reactor: the machine which seems to be alive but isn’t; Chéreauian hybridity), always at the expense of infinitely cascading forsaken alternatives (now impossible to inhabit) — again a sense of doors locking behind us — remains at uttermost bottom profoundly evitable, so history no longer seems figurable as a forward-flighting arrow but rather as a network branching and conjoining in many directions like filigree capillaries of riverrhine deltae, the un-(w)hol(l)y writhe-worming Notung-edges of CONTINGENCY
6. Siegfried, Act One
Since light takes time to travel, and more distant objects are, from our perspective, farther in the past, there has to be a distance corresponding to the beginning of time itself… As a cosmologist, I work from the basic assumption that the universe can be described with math, and if that math works out, and is useful for approaching new problems, I go with it… It’s not that we just trust that math is fundamental to the universe, it’s that there doesn’t seem to be any other way to approach these things that makes any sense… As appealing as it sometimes seemed to have the whole story and meaning of life written down for me once and for all in a book, I knew I would only ever really be able to accept the kind of truth I could rederive mathematically… Today, the question of the future and ultimate fate of all reality is a solidly scientific one, with the answer tantalizingly within reach… This is a field in which incredible progress is being made, giving us the opportunity to stand at the very edge of the abyss and peer into the ultimate darkness. Except, you know, quantitatively… Simply stated, [the cosmological principle] is the idea that for all practical purposes, the universe is basically the same everywhere… The universe looks the same in every direction, and is made of all the same stuff. [Footnote:] Science fiction loves to ignore this. There’s an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which they accidentally travel a billion light-years in a few seconds and the place they END up in is some kind of abyss of shimmering blue energy and thought, which, if it really existed, we’d totally be able to see in our telescopes.
— KM, End of Everything, totally representative samples of uttermost bottom assumptions which, like RW’s mythos and/or dramaturgy (and/or SR’s hermetic music of thought), one is (probably) bound either to accept in its totalizing totality or to reject as absurd (all that’s “evident,” after all, is suspect; statistical methods can only determine with certainty which of two players is better if two conditions apply — first, that the statistics considered evaluate accurately every aspect of the player’s ability, and second, that the method employed to combine those statistics perfectly models the baseball universe / no statistical analysis can meet either of those conditions — indeed, it is farcical, virtually obscene, to believe that [any] can); if the former, then Mack’s your Mack, the sympathetic protagonist of U.S. Highball who, like HP himself, rode glacial freight-trains on colorful trans-orbital excursions whose very groundedness (and humor: if you zoom in to a small enough scale, do space and time act like discrete particles, or perhaps waves that interfere with each other? / are there wormholes? / are there dragons [i.e., Fafners]?? / we have no idea) seems to unlock the secrets of the cosmos; but if you happen — probab[u/a]llistically, understand — to fall into the bounded bucket of entities who sing like Mime, bitter and yearning, that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself / it seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science, then there’s actually an elevator of intractable Qs to traverse, among which (completing S.1’s game of plot-ridden riddles) number these: 1.) Is the prime problem here the (dark) matter of this specific book’s st’eye (which seems to swim downstream from the belief that the vernacular, unskilled, spontaneous, and unhindered by any discipline, is the only style natural to writing), or does the problem, much more fundamental, lie with Cosmology itself — the field — which, having followed a downwards trajectory to what surely must be a terminus of esoteric acronyms and literally infinitesimal returns from experiments that take decades to set up, must now join Economics and Evolutionary Psychology as Needless Knowledges (contra Notungs still a-forging: critical humane Gesamtkunstwerkology; exorbium webs); 2.) Is rejecting Cosmology tantamount to rejecting Logic — one thing leads to another, one thing cancels another thing out, they are all interconnected, and none of them interest me / after all, it has been proved, using highly sensitive equipment, that even a cup of tea is subject to lunar tides, plus, thanks to a gravitational wave crest warping space itself for 1.3 billion years, you were, on September 14, 2015, at 9:50 a.m. and 45 seconds UTC, for the briefest moment, just a little bit taller — or does it merely entail imagining alternative ends, such that we can go back to a nanosecond before the beginning, before the universe burst into being, but we can’t go back to the precise beginning because that would precede knowledge, and we can’t “know” anything before “knowing” itself was born, thus leaving other planes of “there” open to any putative Creators — KM: this doesn’t mean fully unconstrained flights of fancy / you can’t just randomly make stuff up… but… actually… we must, hence Art’s numberless species of Story — who await, like Blake, the apocalyptic day when this scheme will turn itself inside out and disclose an ultimate harmony as yet hidden by God for His own good reasons; 3.) Is reviewing TEoE possible without assigning structural qualities to certain resonant variables — nine epigramcycles representing nine distinct “non-fiction genres” (Ring: nine “acts”); thirteen total sections: first & last, 500 words apiece (2x the Quawtuh Mil; ’50 (ALG; apatite; dark side of the moon; FR’s two homerin’ elevators; per the Anthropocene Working Group, our epoch’s big-bang birthdate; like memorizing a fifty-word tongue-twister on the way down and then reciting it in reverse on the way back up)); every other 1, exactly 971 — w/o, IOW, sum cumulated cumulonimbae, an ark/hive d’arcane performance of portentous random NUMBERS
5. DW, Act Three
In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of ENDings: no one has yet to begin a life who will not end it. In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it… In the beginning was the Word. Western civilization rests upon those words. And yet there is a lively group of thinkers who believe that in the beginning there was the Act. That nothing can precede action — no breath before act, no thought before act, no pervasive love before some kind of act. I believe the poem is an act of the mind. I think it is easier to talk about the end of a poem than it is to talk about its beginning. Because the poem ends on the page, but it begins off the page, it begins in the mind.
…This is what Ezra Pound learned from Ernest Fenollosa: Some languages are so constructed — English among them — that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime. That sentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand… When I told Mr. Walküre Angel about the lifelong sentence, he said, “That’s a lot of semicolons!”… The next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in poetry) you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being — an Italian as a matter of fact — that allows us to go on and keep on connecting speech that for all apparent purposes is unrelated.
…Gaston Bachelard says the most succinct and astonishing thing: We begin in admiration and we end by organizing our disappointment. The moment of admiration is the experience of something unfiltered, vital and fresh — it could also be horror — and the moment of organization is both the onset of disappointment and its dignification; the least we can do is dignify our knowingness, the loss of some vitality through familiarization, by admiring not the thing itself but how can we organize it, think about it. I am afraid there is no way around this. It is the one true inevitable thing. And if you believe that, then you are conceding that in the beginning was the act, not the word.
— Mary Ruefle, “On Beginnings,” from Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), so not exactly essays; they’re entities freighted with strings of colloquial vitality and skeletal allusiveness sufficiently strange to elevate them right off the page; this one’s the premier and, despite its title, it actually addresses the entity half-blind Wotan, recounting “everything” that’s led to this moment (in his self-abnegating lecture to his favorite child, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde), most desires: das Ende; there’s no way around this, MR owls; it’s as if such structures as RW’s musico-dramatic legacy — not exactly “opera” — and SR’s shambolic discography — not exactly “jazz” — captivate us because of the distant tractions they exert, the event horizons they establish / their victims are trapped before they are even aware they have been caught, exactly anti-naught-y-lying the notorious phenomenon noted by Wittgensteinian philosophes of techne wrt reversals of “future” and “past,” “effect” and “cause,” “want” and “need,” namely, the eyes cannot see themselves but something other / the strange and paradoxical rule of nature is that we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being / to love nothing is to be nothing, to give is to have; IOW, before they integrated it into their heliocentric worlds, no Nibelung “missed” — Hades, none had any need to imagine — “the internet”; and yet, now, post-Fulbright-Triptych, were the nigh-infinite nucleation sites of that ekpyrotic cosmos suddenly to vanish, folks sure would miss ’em/it — abyssally; a spookily similar phenom holds for artistic creations; consider, paters, your own favorite offspring of others; if connoisseurship (Walter Pater-style) consists of a capillary series of acquiring acquired tastes worth acquiring, that compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weight what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands whose aesthetic pomegranates inevitably erode; the burden is to unbury the ones whose erosions outlast us; hence this guidebook here in the shadows, Brünnhilde’s lonesome summit of cloud-surround where space and time spill into one another / if life exists it is in the slow life of rock, it is the sea’s patient exploration of the mountain’s inside where Mind might mine portentous orbital co-incidences, the heady notion of eternal recurrence, where everything that has happened will happen again, in exactly the same way, forever — an Italian, MR says, like a certain “Giuseppe Verdi” (sole 19th-C rival to RW and born, like him, in ’13), a.k.a. “Joe Green” (Steelers defensive lineman and AP’s seventies nemesis); or EP’s heroes John Adams and TJ both expiring on 7/4/26, exactly fifty years after U-K-wut; or Stalin stealing Prokofiev’s thunder by expiring, like Sergei, on the palindromic 3/5/53 (a mere month(+) before Mickey Mantle, greatest player of the fifties, blasted his apocryphal 565-foot parabola), exactly (+/- a month) 1.5 years after Bobby Thomson tokamacked the Shot Heard Round the World the same day the first H-boomb detonated in Russia, th’underworld that spawned the periodic table, soil science, and Dimitri Shostakovich, samples of whose skeletal thirteenth string quartet spice 13 Thirteen, the aftershock palimpsest of The Room Extended (State 50) — because the self is by nature turned outward to connect with the harmony of things, to observer/experimenter-enact those bounded entities called (only in re-view) “events,” to participate in their “happening,” so that when at last Brünnhilde completes her retreat she feels vast as the skies, old as the mountains, formless as starlight, ubiquitous as LIFE
4. DW, Act Two
These pages at first glance look haphazard (as a Cubist painting seemed to first viewers to be an accident). They are not. There is a page that has the word man at the top, flower in the middle, and star at the bottom… Composition as I understand it must be both a concrete and abstract continuum. It is not enough for a work of art to narrate; the narration must be made of words that constitute an inner and invisible harmony… It is, for instance, electrochemical energy in brain cells derived from photosynthetic sugars in vegetables whereby we can see a star at all, and the fire of the star we call the sun thus arranged that it could be seen and thought of by nourishing the brain. Is that system closed? Did the sun grow the tree that made the paper you are holding, and the ink on it, so that it can read this book through your eyes? The eye as a kind of scanner for the sun is an idea with a glimpse of God in it. It is knowledge… Milton calls the mind “infinitude confined.” (Ronald Johnson retains these words in his erasure [of Paradise Lost, Radi Os])… Works of art in response to other works of art create a symbolic chord reaching across the two. Ulysses in Ithaca, Ulysses in Dublin: a web of meaning not entirely under Joyce’s control bridges the extremes and begins generating ratios… As I write this a spaceship is circling Mars, its computer eyes looking for a place to land. It will report back, if it functions, that there is nothing there but desolation. A similar voyage to all the other planets will report nothing, nothing, nothing. That we are alone in a universe of red stars and white stars, a catastrophe of light and electric thunder of time, vibrant forever, forever bright, fifty-eight sextillion, seven hundred quintillion, seven hundred and sixty quadrillion miles wide (by Einstein’s reckoning), is the plain fact our age will have to learn to live with… Ernst shares with Mach the phenomenological doubt that we witness anything except in agnosis. What we understand of an event is very little compared to our ignorance of its meaning. The greater our sensibility, the sharper our skepticism, the more we are aware of the thinness of the light that is all we have to probe the dark.
— Guy Davenport, “Ronald Johnson” [its second act, “Radi Os”] and “Ernst Machs Max Ernst,” two (of forty) essays comprising The Geography of the Imagination (North Point, 1981), the forty-year-old year in which R. Raygun commenced (or elevated) those erosions dubbed “neoliberalism” in the midst of Nibelungs’ somnolence, the surface of last scattering within which prophecies of the world’s END in fire have receded; now the eschatology is one of ongoing breakdown rather than apocalypse / the end times are here, present, all around now, no longer deferrable and against which historian Charles E. Rosenberg remarked Nothing ordinarily happens without alliances (reality doesn’t consist in water or atoms or gravity; reality consists in people (who invented science and technology) talking to each other); DWM published “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene” — gemini theses: Even though we gather together and look in the same direction at the same instant, we will not — we cannot — see the same landscape; and The central problem: any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads — whose ontopoetological Truths rather effortlessly render rather fantastical (not to say nonsensical) cosmologists’ casual hubris wrt THEE Most Impossible Q in the Universe, namely, What ACTUALLY happened — mark these twain: that whole thing where we can see the past directly by looking at distant things; and the most straightforward way to get a handle on dark energy is to figure out our full expansion history — huh?? — and Houston Conwill birthed The Cakewalk Humanifesto, a cosmogram pellucid as engraved glass, spirals nautilae’ing a grid upon which four chocolate cities (New Orleans, Atlanta, Louisville, Memphis) delineate a diamond (centered upon the Magic City, dwarf-star Tuscumbia) enshrining eroding rivers’ material residue of inscrutable histories, their pathos of abandonment, much as KM resides in Raleigh, stylish sis-city to Richmond (birthplace of baseball cards), themselves stereo-scale analogues of Louisville (where Honus “The Flying Dutchman” Wagner debuted) and Cleveland (home of the Browns fullback K[evin] Mack) — and even “scoring out” that pole-pointed diamond, that intricate cartography of map lichens “like-ends” susceptible to multiple projections of claim and belief, is to fathom something of the infinitudes of idiosyncrasy which color any “seeing” of any “entity” — sty, stye, sti; Mote in God’s Eye; sis and bro Volsungs; “stasis” in DM’s Kiwi accent; Stabreim; portentous central semicolon; orbits in reverse — including GD’s titles, one a Palimpsest (“radios” — Recorded Sound generally (along with Flight, our profoundest techne)), the other a Palindrome (the impossible irresistible ideal: prose technologies readers pore over like Perec poring over crossword puzzles en route to unearthing our orb’s protractedest palindrome (but even GP couldn’t un-Urth the Ultimate: a prose atlas to savor like a “word-find” wherein each directional trajectory, each line of reading, establishes novel/necessary relations to “everything other” which end up embodying the thrumming complexity of the universe whole)), both fruits of fruitless quests to see the pagescape, to overview, Heath Robinson-style, the illusion of regress, to achieve a richness of meaning comprising constant rhyme in images, and of translation of meaning from one image to another, so that somewhere in the textum a thread would become vivid, or a portion of the design would become clear and lead the attentive reader on into the rest / on the surface I had the sense, as did RW, HP, PB, SR, that a page could be dense in various ways, all susceptible to invention (finding; re-viewing) via CONSCIOUSNESS
3. Die Walküre, Act One
This book is an excuse for me to dig deep into the question of where it’s all going, what that all means, and what we can learn about the universe we live in by asking these questions. There isn’t just one accepted answer to any of this — the question of the fate of existence is still an open one, and an area of active research in which the conclusions we draw can change drastically in response to very small tweaks in our interpretations of the data1… It means I have to learn a lot about everything, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun. And we’re talking about the universe here, so I really do mean EVERYTHING2… The expansion of the universe makes a lot of things weird in astronomy, and one of them is that we use what is essentially a color, written as a number, to denote speed, distance, and “the age the universe was at the time when the thing was shining.” Physics is wild3… So, this background radiation should come from everywhere. And it should come from everywhere no matter where you are, because you can always look far enough away to see the hot phase of the cosmos. The speed-of-light/time-travel connection gives you this for free. Every point in space is the center of its own sphere of deepening time, bounded by a shell of fire4… There’s something about taking the opportunity to wade into that cosmic perspective that is both terrifying and hopeful, like holding a newborn infant and feeling the delicate balance of the tenuousness of life and the potential for not-yet-imagined greatness5… Some cosmologists even study whole hypothetical universes that are very explicitly not our own — universes in which the cosmos has a totally different shape, number of dimensions, and history6… This is, of course, one of the most fun things I’ve ever worked on, hence this book. I’m not sure why I like it so much. It may be a bad sign7… An expanding universe can be a hard thing to wrap your head around. Not literally, obviously. That would be both impossible and extremely inadvisable8… I like to think of the bright Cepheids like giant lazy Saint Bernard dogs, while the dim ones are excitable jumpy Chihuahuas9… I just now invented this term [“infernoverse”] and I’m feeling very proud of myself10… We do this by bouncing it [a single neutron]. Really. Physics is wild11… I first encountered the term ‘eschatology,’ the study of the END of everything, by reading about religion12… “…cool.” Cool.13
— Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (Scribner, 2020), this very re-view’s raison — up- and down-elevators, crossing, here pause in perspicacious stasis, the sweet spot of the edifice, impersonal (mortal-free) DR acceding to the seething human passions of DW (everyone’s favorite of the cycle; “Mack is brilliant, and my neighbor’s six year-old daughter loves her / I love her” (The Spectator)) — but since it’s always hard to locate with confidence the intent or significance of individual artworks in wider webs of cultural practice and since I sense that there is a difference between one’s ability to dominate the game at a specific time and a specific place, and one’s rank among the greatest; I cannot exactly define what that distinction is, perhaps it’s best to begin (as Chéreau did) by peering over a stile, you know, the book’s space- and time-annihilating tone, that nebulous entity which, Guy guys, “is imitation that has progressed into individuality… a skill, an extension of character, an attitude toward the world, an enigma,” of which here appear thirteen pictures, each new section of the response-stream posing a different puzzle of ascent: 1that “excuse” is disconcertingly coy, nearly indulgently casual; 2that “everything” presumably rings the mummified corpses of more than a million ibises, the spirals of ammonites and the bullets of belemnites, and Norns know which lang-clangorous metals Hunding and Siegmund keep mang-clanking in Act One; the passage also embodies the sty’ called Confiding Convo; she’s our Physics Sis, and some might balk — why go low / it’s a counter-intuitive action, running against the grain of sense and the gradient of the spirit — but the passage also evinces the century-old Rhinegold standard of Professional Prose, i.e., CLARITY, though who still wants that from “creative nonfiction”?; 4cool; Mack and clarity at their Boulezian best, the Zauberfeuer enveloping Brünnhilde’s rock in evanescent effervescence; 5cool; memories, myths, and metaphors thrumming the sentiments of Mingus’s Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia, ’71); 6for study, read imagine or perform or creatively chart; for history, definitely read past; Henry Glassie’s epigram to D[.]W[.] Meinig’s four-volume (he’d planned on three) multi-decade (conceived in the late-’70s) The Shaping of America ends with “history is not the past, but a map of the past made useful to the modern traveler”; “much of the joy of reading h[er] comes from the extravagant spectacle of a first-rate mind wasting itself on baseball,” or puzzles, or cosmology; 7hear those cosmic tones for mental therapy (which is “where [Ra’s] outer-space stuff begins with a vengeance,” claims The Penguin Guide); 8this indeed cool…?; 9the book’s PROSE cries out for so many more such strange strings, more surface perforations of gryke and clint, more stab-rhymed tone-pictures seized by the obscenity of intrusion which accumulate the corporeal gravity of leitmotivs so that across its chapters, in keeping with its subject, extends a network of echoes, patterns and connections, whereas instead it remains, for all its lucidity and cheek, curiously uninflected, studio-bound, and, wrt writhing dendritic mindworms, a void (translated title of Perec’s E-less French novel; pre-echoes kin-ecting Ra’s self-fashioning to Saturn’s rings); 10very well; 11nebulous whether the “wild” repetition’s arbitrary… arch… architectonic; 12à la “Ecclusiastics,” Mingus showcasing wailing Rahsaan Roland Kirk, blind pater of Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata (Atlantic, ’71); 13the book’s final two words: ambivalent Vo(we)lsungs upon its LANGUAGE
2. DR, Disc Two
absurdly, delectably… Columbia Records.[3] That venerable institution midwifed a please-y-yo-soar that “sounds,” blows partch666, “like it could have been performed hundreds of years ago in an alternative civilization. On the other hand, it will still sound futuristic one hundred years hence.”[4] And isn’t that The Very Thing we’re after, after all? Isn’t that Athena’s Super B. Owl rite th’air, the LiebestodT&I, the Prize SongMeistersinger, the GrailParsifal — singular talismans enshrining “engaged music-making that is neither abstract nor conventionally expressive but always intensely beautiful,”[5] those (in?)finite lapidary capillaries falling up thru their own magma to yield unspoilt stellae incognitae… the entire raisin-detroit END of ALG??
Well. An intractable problem now stytix our orbit. It’s the Q, in short, of “similar records”; the question, en longue, of which specific classificatory boundaries to inscribe around this specific Unique Listening Experience’s penumbra of Everything.
Hydrogen. One basic option: percussive jazz(+) rituals. Ample flotsam there.[6] But our avatar-fruit from that spunky family-tree branch has gotta be Strange Strings (Saturn, ca. ’66), the notorious LP created once upon thirteen o’clock when Sun Ra insisted his mates “should down horns and improvise on exotic stringed instruments instead.[7] Although none of the ensemble had played any of these before, the exercise produced some of Ra’s most astonishing and experimental music.”[8] Alien timbres; emergent morphologies; arcane rites; above all, complete (not gamed) conviction by all — the sole quality this universe-unto-itself lacks is Delusion’s lustrae-long gestation.
Hydrogen II. The other facile foray: non-“Western classical” theater. Let’s get unreal. Splitters, lumpers; foxes, hedgehogs; this dark matter’s too diffuse.[9] Because did Albert or Alfred[10] Einstein ever shore upon Java? Because that’s where we’re headed. O yes: tether your space-elevator to the isle where “the gamelan gilds the time.”[11] Here comes Giri Harja III, the puppeteer troupe unspooling its all-night outdoor show, six CDs catching “everything”: megaphones, microphones, ads, metallophones, homophones, homophobes, opaque longueurs.[12] Even sweeter: septuagenarians revivifying Prince Danuredjo VII’s Langen Mandra Wanara, “love for which emerges from the marrow of one’s bones. This serene and elegant dance-opera is of another altitude and time entirely…. [It] parallels… Pelléas et Mélisande, in what sounds, as does Debussy’s great masterpiece, like music from another, dreamier world…. Given the conditions — ambulant singers in a makeshift venue — the sonics are almost too good to be true: a wide, coherent, lifelike stage for the discovery, a miracle really, of vanished grace.”[13] Ah, yes. That last sentence: a valediction to retain as we voyage onward to…
O — Oxygen — Other — Hoo cd C Sum 3rd Hand Extending Down the Cliff-bank?[14] The Ring. You foresaw it. The impossible irresistible ideal: the Gesamtkunstwerk itself. Synthetic symbiosis — myth, poem, music, dance, mime, teche — sustained across colossal sequential arcs; Harry (literally) sculpting an entire sui generis instrumentarium so that half-naked performers could animate his sui generis (43-notes-to-the-octave) scale, thereby underpinning the “corporeal drama” in all its syncretic[15] “sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.” Naturally. But recall TBJHBA’s famous entry: “The interesting thing about Roger Maris is that almost everything that people say about him is false.”[16] Ditto for Germany’s famous RW. To wit:
- People often assume The Ring must be a cringe-y cavalcade of shrieking Viking Valkyries. But, because the work is “about” the beginning and end of the a world, a complete cycle requires about 13.8 billion years hours. Um, what >>diversity of incident, texture, mood, “form of life”<< do people suppose happens inside that orbital envelope? Boyden: “Wagner is often travestied as a bombastic bore… but this is way off target — his work is characterized by a maniacal attention to detail… precision… scenes of idyllic calm…. Suppleness is the key: Wagner wanted lyrical singers who knew how to punctuate, not shouters. Fluidity…. momentum… begins and ends with the image of the Rhine.”[17] Yes. Whet that bedrock apatite.[18]
- Punters might presume RW must’ve architected such a massive structure in a necessarily straightforward way. 180. Sorta. The bro sty’d the texts — the librettos, the “poems” — for The Ring’s four operas in reverse order. Only after completing the final text (for the first opera, Das Rheingold) did he write music for each individual episode, this time “in sequence.” Dowwwn and then up. Thus, the idealistic firebrand who penned the libretto for Götterdämmerung (“Siegfrieds Tod”) in 1848 (before realizing it required another (three!) prequel-libretto(s)), didn’t create that work’s score until the 1870s. Bien sûr, o’er the ensuing decades the wide-optified optimist had… lived… ripened… evolved. And yet: as the (composed, post-Schopenhauer) composer, he accepted, unaltered, his original text. Talk about CONSTRAINTS! A chromatic convoluted long-tail tale itself.[19]
- Initiates insist that when it comes to recordings, one must avoid hothouse studio baubles — Solti, Karajan — and instead commit to a live Bayreuth cycle. They’re right. They also claim that the commercially-issued Boulez Ring (Phillips, 1981) feels stiff, perfunctory, marred by “variable” singing. Also true. They therefore blithely dismiss “Boulez’s Wagner.” EGREGIOUS ERROR. For in July of ’76, the tenaciously punctilious moderniste commandeered the Jahrhundertring itself; and a bootleg exists; and it’s BLAZING. Everything — the contours, the cumulonimbae, the (inter)acting, the (ad)diction, the colors! coruscating kinesthetoscopes!, the palpable sense of occasion, the sheer collective URGENCY… Hear: for these artists — re-sanctifying / reverently desecrating the Master’s sacred sanctum; channeling transmuted Aeschylus and Shakespeare to bourgeois Bayreuthers at best bemused, at worst audibly hostile — there was no tomorrow.
— “State 26” [out of 50; Harry Partch, Delusion of the Fury (Innova, 1998 [Columbia, 1971])] from A Lurker’s Guide to Recorded Sound (2nd (“Quawtuh Mil”) ed.; Gruntl’d? Usufruct!, 2026), taking a tiny part in a mystery play run across multiple timescales to add fresh layers to the catacomb palimpsest called “Un-Ur-thing Every Recording w/ an Urgent Reason to Exist,” a futility stdreaming with a zillion options, and it will be years, seething interstellar lustrae, before sabermetricians can state with any sense of certainty which are the best of those options for bounding any such… ENTITIES
1. Das Rheingold, riven in twain (ere go, “DR, Disc One”)
“There!” shouts Bill née William, the one named Shakespeare, Aeschylan androgynonym of these three rhyming Rhine Maidens, but we mais oui are all already looking there, where the first block fell, for it seems that a white freight train is driving fast out of the calving face of the glacier, thundering laterally through space before toppling down towards the water, and then the white train is suddenly somehow pulling white wagons behind it from within the glacier, like an impossible magician’s trick, and then the white wagons are followed by a cathedral — a blue cathedral of ice, complete with towers and buttresses, all of them joined together into a single unnatural sideways-collapsing edifice — and then a whole city of white and blue follows the cathedral as we shout and step backwards involuntarily from the force of the event even though it is occurring a mile away from us, and we call out to each other in the silence before the roar reaches us, even though we are only a few yards from each other, and then all of the hundreds of thousands of tons of that ice-city collapse into the water of the fjord, creating an impact wave forty or fifty feet high.
And then something terrible happens, which is that out of the water where the city has fallen there upsurges, rising — or so it seems from where we are standing — right to the summit of the calving face itself, a black shining pyramid, sharp at its prow, thrusting and glistening, made of a substance that has to be ice but looks like no ice we have seen before, something that resembles what I imagine meteorite metal to be, something that has come from so deep down in time that it has lost all colour, and we are dancing and swearing and shouting, appalled and thrilled to have seen this repulsive, exquisite thing rise up that should never have surfaced, this star-dropped berg-surge that has taken three minutes and 100,000 years to conclude.
— two success[ful/ive] sentences — the two longest, actually — in RM’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey (Norton, 2019), ex nihilo excerpt for a seething plesiosaur’s plethora of purposes premier — yes, we’ve got it on record, the Jahrhundertring’s actual premiere: July 24, 1976 (fifteen days after Ra’s Arkestra exhilarheured Montreux); email Andy at operadepot.com for deets and, be you as collegially congenial as Katie herself, frag ’im ’bout ladies’ earrings getting torn off in the ensuing boofraccia of brickbats & broomsticks, or, better yet, demand elaboration wrt the diction underpitching his sales-pitch for DR (“from the get-go this production was volatile / there was a unified, and seemingly organized, faction in the audience hell-bent on fighting the changes that Patrice Chéreau was making to how Wagner, and opera, would be produced from them on / this tension is palpable in this recording… it is clear the whole cast has been galvanized by being part of a crucial pivot for all of opera direction and they, along with Pierre Boulez, deliver a truly electric performance”) or, Hades, just prod erething mythic penumbra’ing “the actual event” — among which is that, as the weaver himself wravels in his very first Wotanian foray, the way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree, the embowering bird-hoard branded Yggdrasil whose titanic branches Odin brazenly appropriated to fashion das Speer (the premier techne) upon which the scheming god engraved “everything” — all those labyrinthine laws and logics bedrocking civilization — even though, as Ian Monk’s heard-hoard of fifty(+) years of brazen Oulipoiana puts it, All That Is Evident is Suspect, an assemblage whose (literal) table of contents fills (and crisply splits) two pages — DR, mere “preliminary evening” of the Aeschylan trilogy to follow, requires (following its famous ex nihilo E-flat liquhordessence) an intermissionless river of two(+) hours (71-74 minutes per CD) to vomit up its diamond-bright freight-train inscenia — with the title lurking like some primordial Nibelung at the uttermost bottom of the first page’s fundament, “We Did Everything” (Monk’s “unpublished collection of poems that chop up the form and rhyming structure of the sonnet”), surging up linearly and invisibly, quantum-style, across any conceivable caesura (i.e., those pulsating within IM’s compendium’s polestar, Harry Mathews’ Oulipo Compendium) to conjoin the title emblazoned atop the second page’s firmament, “On the End of Time,” François Caradec’s slyly sincere address “on the theme of the end of days” whose second paragraph concludes with the sentriptynce “The Oulipo dozed,” though for precisely how longue a durée remains exposed to endless exegesis as, as Patrick J. Smith (whom we’ll meet at the end, earned-cycle-style) turn-styles, “the length of ‘actual’ time is directly related to that sense of mythic time or ‘timelessness-in-time’ which is also an integral part of the librettos / the love duet from Act II of Tristan und Isolde takes x minutes to sing… the time it takes in terms of the myth can be ten seconds or ten thousand years” which might, as might write our Mackrophysicist, “only make sense” since in the days following the calving I reflected often on our response to it — the way our shouts turned from awe to something like horror as that shining black pyramid lurched up out of the water, sea streaming from it / my stomach lurched too as the ice came up: the sublime displaced by a more visceral response to this alien display…. another order of withdrawnness, one so extreme as to induce nausea / Camus called this property of matter its “denseness,” that irreducible Actual whose heard-chord erodes seamlessly sensually senselessly insensately insatiably into “intensity”… “primitive hostility”… “something inhuman”… this trio of milligram sprites orbitin’ ’n’ cawhortin’ not at the uttermost bottom of Reekhard’s deep-time Rhine but, precisely two centuries after saturnine Jefferson universalized x-numbered not-neutral gear-nets into sleepless kinesis, beneath the pitiless pistons of a hydroelectric dam… THE ABSURD
0. ab ovo, ex nihilo, some specific expectant Silence
An Unlucky Number: I figure that the absolute, theoretical minimum number of batters that a pitcher can face and be credited with a complete game is thirteen. That can come about if a pitcher loses a 4½-inning game by a score of 1-0 and doesn’t allow any other runner to reach base — and it has happened. In Baltimore on July 30, 1971, Dick Drago of the Royals faced thirteen batters and got them all out except Frank Robinson, who homered.
— The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (Villard, 1988), yes, that William James, Henry’s style-bro “answering” wtfhappenedin1971[.com], Robinson a lustrum removed from the ultimatest orbit any ballplayer ever enjoyed — Frank’s ’66, his vengeful (he’d been traded in the off-season) Triple Crown speer-heading the Orioles to their premier pennant — except, maybe, for the ’71 ringed by fella sepia-toned giant Alan Page, vœracious Vikings END, first defender to claim NFL MVP — only linebacker “LT,” three lustrae later for the NY Fafners, followed suit — and, post-retirement, Associate Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, itself a demi-universe removed from stately Paku Alaman Court in Yogyakarta, Java, the unearthly milieu where on 1/10/71 ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown recorded “Ketawang: Puspåwårnå,” that throbbing sonic thrombosis Sagan selected for Voyager’s Golden Record, languid molasses gamelania conspicuously fit for consumption in Berkeley, CA, whence the Oakland A’s’ charter departed (to face Frank’s O’s in the ALCS) on 10/1/71, Disney World’s Opening Day, its premier puller the langubrious riverride “It’s a Small World,” an (arguably) “adult” version of which, Henri Pousseur’s delectable three-CD assemblage, Paysages Planétaires, floats atop a “silent libretto” penned by palindromeer Perec’s pen-pal Michel Butor whose narrow-bo[re/ring] essay “Egypt” incarnates rind-gold of the Nile whose shores in ’71 hosted another dark-hued visionary, Saturn’s Sun Ra (b. Herman Poole Blount, ’13-ish, in Birmingham, AL) before he landed at Berkeley as ’71’s Artist-in-Residence jus’ ’cross campus from the university press which, that same year, published Hugh Kenner’s “x-ray moving picture,” The Pound Era, whose final line, Thought is a labyrinth — as Homerblivion’d as the black-hole borders of ’71 Topps baseball cards (set’s final specimen: Dick Drago) — spectra-warbled across “All Things Considered,” National Public Radio’s flagship “Begun in Good Faith and High Hopes on May 3rd, 1971,” the line engraved underneath a five-mark coin nailed to the back of sculptor(!) Simon Dinnerstein’s premier incipient painting, the once-looked-over-never-thenceforth-overlooked Fulbright Triptych (’71-’74) whose clear-eyed three-ness only now wonders, “If nonfictioneer Robert Macfarlane — ‘I first saw Stanley Donwood’s luminous Nether in ’13… / the eerie glow of the sun, the curling technicolour fingers of the trees, the sense of looking down into a radiant, dangerous underworld… I immediately knew… I wanted it to be the cover of my book’ — and astrophysicist Katie Mack — ‘I want you to live forward, but see backward’ — are our two bedrock H’s, then whatooz our single aqueous O”; OR, more celestial still, If (something like) SPACE and TIME are this universe’s Two… Greatest(?)… Things(??), then what’s Number Three; what, let’s complete this “everything” game, could be that uttermost OTHER
Sources (not otherwise attributed in the text)
Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (especially the chapter called “Color”) (Catapult, 2019); Sun Ra, Atlantis (Saturn, 1969); Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (Harper Collins, 2000); Jonathan M. Szanto, “The Partch Reverberations: Notes on a Musical Rebel,” corporealmeadows.com/reverb-1; Jacques Barzun, God’s Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words (Little, Brown, 1954); Richard David, “Wagner the Dramatist,” in Peter Burbridge and Richard Sutton, eds., The Wagner Companion (Cambridge, 1979); Sun Ra, Sleeping Beauty (Saturn, 1979) and Second Star to the Right: Salute to Walt Disney (Leo, 1989); Keith Rowe / Michael Pisaro, 13 Thirteen (Erstwhile 2CD, 2016); Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (10/18, 1975); AMM, The Inexhaustible Document (Matchless, 1987); Sun Ra, Super-Sonic Jazz (Saturn, 1957); Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study in Wagner’s Ring (Oxford, 1979); Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford, 1977); Patrick J. Smith, The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (Knopf, 1970); Leoš Janáček, The Makropulos Case (Mackerras; Opera Depot 2CD, 1971); Sun Ra, The Singles (Evidence 2CD, 1996 [various labels, 1950s-80s]); Susan Howe, The Quarry (especially the essay “Sorting Facts: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Chris Marker”) (New Directions, 2015); Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual (David A. Bellos, trans.; David R. Godine, 1987 [1978]); Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (Blue Thumb, 1973); Susan Howe and Susan Mitchell, eds., Sinter, Smolder, Synch: A Complete Chrysalyceum of Karen Hays (comprising “Dear Martlet” (orig. Iowa Review); “The Clockwise Detorsion of Snails” (Normal School); “4s↑↓ (in absentia, or, where iron is a tiny prey animal),” “CV x K,” “Writers on Writing” (Passages North); “The Cubes,” “32 Lemmas,” “Reconciliation Story,” “Frothy Eloquence & Loose Concupiscence” (Conjunctions); “Auto-Duet: Essays on Competence and Acoustics,” “Harm’s Way” (Georgia Review); Gruntl’d? Usufruct!, 2026); Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor (U. Chicago, 1986); Melvin Kranzberg, “Presidential Address: Kranzberg’s Laws,” Technology & Culture 27 (1986); Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (Guilford, 1992); Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago, 1991); Sun Ra, Black Myth / Out in Space [a.k.a. It’s After the End of the World] (MPS 2CD, 1970); Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare (California, 1963); Harry Partch, Enclosure Two (Innova 3CD, 1940s-1970s); Sun Ra, Other Planes of There (Saturn, 1966); Marthe Reed, Ark Hive (The Operating System, 2019); Sun Ra, Heliocentric Worlds, Vol. 1 (ESP, 1965); Don DeLillo, Pafko at the Wall (Harper’s, 1992); Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (trans. Raymond Rosenthal; Schocken Books, 1975); Charles Rosenberg, Our Present Complaint: American Medicine Then and Now (Johns Hopkins, 2007); D.W. Meinig, “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (Oxford, 1979); Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (Oxford, 1989); Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria Robinson, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (California, 2018); Sun Ra, The Magic City (Saturn, 1966); Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye (Simon & Schuster, 1974); Larry Niven, Ringworld (1970); Benjamin Grant, Overview (Amphoto, 2016); D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (4 vols.; Yale, 1988-2004); Sun Ra, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (Saturn, 1963); Georges Perec, La Disparition (translated as A Void by Gilbert Adair; Harvill, 1995 [1969]); Charles Mingus, Oh Yeah! (Atlantic, 1961); Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (7th ed., 2004); Don Cherry, Eternal Rhythm (MPS, 1968); Khan Jamal, Drum Dance to the Motherland (Eremite, 2006 [1972]); Alex Cline, The Constant Flame (Cryptogramophone, 2001); Christopher Tree, At the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (Quakebasket, 1970); Sean Meehan, Sectors (for Constant) (SoS Editions 2CD, 2002); Masahiko Togashi, Rings (East Wind, 1976); Ground Zero, Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (ver. 1.28) (ReR, 1996); Laurie Anderson, United States Live (Warner Bros. 4CD, 1983); Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach (Tomato 4LP, 1978); Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives (Lovely DVD, 2005 [1983]); Karlheinz Stockhausen, Licht (Stockhausen Verlag, 1980s-2000s); Cornelius Cardew, The Great Learning (Nima Gouresh; Bôłt 4CD, 2010); Hermann Nitsch, des Orgies Mysteries Theater — Das 6-Tage-Spiel: 5 Tag (Organ of Corti 11CD, 1998); Roland Kayn, A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound (Frozen Reeds 16CD, 2009); Henri Pousseur / Michel Butor, Paysages Planétaires (Alga Marghen 3CD, 2004); Keith Rowe, The Room Extended (Erstwhile 4CD, 2016); Tim Lewis, “Interview: Katie Mack: ‘I didn’t anticipate being in a pop song when I went off to study physics,” The Guardian, August 9, 2020; Radio Java (Alan Bishop, ed.; Sublime Frequencies, 1989); Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979); Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (Boulez/Bayreuth; Opera Depot 12CD, 1976); freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/theres-no-alternative-to-cultural; Aja Romano, “Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon is a sumptuous fantasy — but it makes a mess of Southeast Asian culture,” Vox, March 5, 2021; Mathew Boyden, The Rough Guide to Opera (3rd ed.; 2002); Congos, Heart of the Congos (Blood & Fire 2CD, 1977); Culture, Two Seven Clash (Gibbs; 1977); Charles Mingus, Thirteen Pictures (Rhino 2CD, 1993 [various labels, 1952-77]); Simon H. Fell Quintet, Thirteen Rectangles (Bruce’s Fingers, 2002); M. Owen Lee, Turning the Sky Round: An Introduction to The Ring of the Nibelung (Rowan & Littlefield, 1990) and Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks (Toronto, 2003); Ernest Newman, The Wagner Operas (Princeton, 1949); Sun Ra, Live at Montreux (Universe, 1976); Ian Monk & Daniel Levin Becker, eds., All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963-2018 (McSweeney’s, 2018); Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, eds., Oulipo Compendium (Atlas, 2005); Java: Court Gamelan (Nonesuch, 1971); Wikipedia on 1971 Major League Baseball Season, Jahrhundertring, Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, Alan Page, Frank Robinson, Streetcars in North America, Super Bowl IX, Superconducting Super Collider, Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, Voyager Golden Record, Walt Disney World; Michel Butor, “Egypt,” in John D’Agata, ed., The Lost Origins of the Essay (Graywolf, 2009); The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt (Leo, 1971-84); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (California, 1971); Daniel Slager, ed., The Suspension of Time: Reflections on Simon Dinnerstein and the Fulbright Triptych (Milkweed Editions, 2011); penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/robert-macfarlane-working-with-artist-stanley-donwood-for-underland.html; aeon.co/videos/i-want-you-to-live-forward-but-see-backward-a-theoretical-astrophysicists-manifesto
Cumulonimbae: end; everything; elevator; style; stasis; nothing; actually; puzzle; reverse; bound; portentous; envelope; probably; river; time; space; thrum; worm; techne; palindrome; palimpsest; uttermost bottom; under; bedrock; orb; ring; matter; complete game; event; cycle; after all; page; 13; 71; 50; 5; 3; 74; 75; 76; 77; 9; 4; infinite; [forms of] sleep
[1] From the Big Bang til now, one student objected last week, there must be “a finite amount of information.” Hmm. Philosophical rivers here… My response: an observer of “events” can always discern new relationships AMONG “actors” (be they people, things, ideas, fields of tension, leaves of grass, or atoms, all operating at different scales). Think invisible cameras: “let’s do a history of the relationship between these two tree branches; now, here’s another history (of the relationship between those two branches, and… that “third” branch up there)…” But. Let’s stipulate that she’s right. Let’s suppose some computer could somehow apprehend “all the information” ever generated. We’d still run into the fundamental problem, wouldn’t we? The computer wouldn’t know what to do with that info. Some living mind would have to provide context — a Meinigian lens — upon it, so that it could (simply, banally) “travel.” Historians like LTU do exactly that! How? By telling stories. They’re mappers. The only “completely” ACCURATE map would be one that exactly mirrored Earth. (It’d be huge, ever-changing, and utterly useless.) Yet even the most powerful GPS tech couldn’t map, say, my daughter Hilde’s mental cartography of backyard landmarks. (“Here’s where the worms ‘swim’; that’s the clanky swing; don’t go behind Pater-Vater’s shed, that’s the Danger Ring of Rayas…”) Only humans — beings with the ability to invent contexts — can do that. You might say, “Well, the computer doesn’t care about random five-year-old girls’ ‘mental maps.’ It’s not interested in that.” And I’d say, “Exactly. Maps — stories — must embody human interests.” And to the extent that we must abstract the general from the specific — to the extent that we all must LIE (by omitting/ignoring 99.9% of all possible “information” when making maps and writing non-fiction) — to the extent that others’ acts and stories will change our interests — to just that extent will the Past keep changing, or, if you like, keep accommodating new contexts.
[2] “Invention is the mother of necessity” means the chief achievement of any new tech is that it gives us needs that never used to exist. “Tech is not neutral” means as we adopt Technology X, we also commit ourselves to its unintended consequences — and forsaken alternatives. MK: “Once one has entered the door, are not one’s future directions guided by the contours of the corridor or chamber into which one has stepped? Equally important, once one has crossed the threshold, can one turn back?” So. Do you believe that Humans Have Always Wanted to Get from Place to Place Faster? Is it obvious to you that People at All Times and Places Just Want Everything to be as Convenient as Possible? Did you already know that as Technology becomes More Efficient, Society Advances? Well, in that case, I humbly predict that you may be in for quite a surprise. Our historians assume none of those things. (Mel Kranzberg doesn’t. Right?) Instead, they trace the origins of (the concepts of) “lateness,” “convenience,” “efficiency,” “progress” — of anything large and obvious, really. (“Just be true to yourself.” What “self”? That cultural invention of late 19th/early 20th-C America?) And often those concepts emerge out of — take their time- and place-specific forms — from people’s interactions with technologies that are themselves time- and place-specific (as specific, in fact, as wormholes: thru space-time; underneath slimy stile-lined limestone pools; writhing inside utterly forgotten furniture pedestals in a putative place in Paris).
[3] Yep, CBS itself: the label whose capitan, Goddard Lieberson, signed his letters “God”; the capital capital of Miles Davis (Live-Evil palindroming ’71) and hoo Ks whichelsewise Sinatrae.
[4] rateyourmusic.com/release/album/ensemble-of-unique-instruments-danlee-mitchell/delusion-of-the-fury. Recorded in California in the midst of Neil Armstrong’s penumbra; not released til ’71. Did that pre-reverb anti-electrifying delay drive Harry crazy? Lurk for yourself within the “climactic” pages of Enclosure Three, the richest (coffee-table-cum-scrapbook)-as-biography ever crafted (Philip Blackburn, ed.; Innova / American Composers Forum, 1997). Just imagine that thing being somehow “narrated” by New Zealander Donald McIntyre (Wotan in the Jahrhundertring, rich & resonant as a redwood), or “sung” by Wales’s Gwyneth Jones (vocal MVP of that same production: utterly fearless, absolutely free, the “horrid wobble” that plagued later orbits nowhere in evidence; crank the volume to the apex so that you can hear the floor, then eavesdrop upon her portentous riveting breathing when she awakes in Siegfried, and you may very well thank something), or superconducted by Pierre Boulez himself, who delivers in the final thirteen minutes of Act I of Siegfried the most viscerally exciting “classical music” I’ve ever heard, and whose symbiosis with the orchestra, whilst susceptible to common tropes like “white hot” (or “viscerally exciting”), might best be encapsulated by a single sentence from HK’s TPE of whose power (via re-viewable precision) Harry, I’d wager, would approve: “Though books call Montségur a fortress because it was besieged, it was properly a temple across whose unfortified threshold shadow bounds light diagonally at midsummer noon, and across whose annexed ‘cellula’ men waiting in darkness at midsummer dawn could see two slabs of light defined in dustmotes, entering by eastern slits and leaving by western, no stone within the stone box so much as grazed.”
[5] Cook and Morton on AMM [sic]. But… So… What would such a music sound like??? Hears any sonic voyager’s possible end: web.archive.org/web/20060811225840/http://www.matchlessrecordings.com/amm_review.html.
[6] Eternal Rhythm; Drum Dance to the Motherland; The Constant Flame: top-o’-muh-crown trio; eminently satisfying specimens of the species. But we could recon more raucous. Brötzmann, Mangelsdorff, Van Hove, Bennink, Live in Berlin ’71 (FMP 2CD), exhaustive & exhausting; Cecil’s Berlin big-band bonanza seventeen pal’in’pleasure-dromin’ orbits later, Alms/Tiergarten (Spree) (FMP 2CD): each record rarely-played rarefied rarebit. Or we could traverse the reverse: Spartan-sparse surveys of spacious portentous percushiana. Tree’s At the Cathedral of John the Divine; Meehan’s Sectors (for Constant); and certainly Masahiko Togashi’s Rings, smilingly severe (yet strangely palatable) in its purr-wreck’d embrace of palette-constraints.
[7] Lutes, ouds, lyres, tars, proto-kitharae… hoo Ks what eldritch shards of Yggdrasil populated that infinite urban underland underpinning Perec’s imagined apartment building! (Save two – 27 and 74; numbers Janáčekian, Ellingtonian – all chapters of GP’s La Vie mode d’emploi (’78) got anglais’d low (’87) by David Bellos.) Chapter 74, “Lift Machinery, 2,” a billowing Escherance of seemingly every Gigerian THING, is the one that fictionears 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier’s phantasticall cellars. It hits grotto’d-bottom like so (lo! Harry Mathews, translator): “…forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.” Franglophonic stabreim there — Wagnerian alliteration and word-assonance; JPS: it “tends to heaviness in its guttural sounds and agglutinative proclivities.” [[[But, IDK. I gotta ask… would any of this, the entire corpus surveyed herein, even… matter. To aliens. To those furious deluded beings. To some God-Entity who didn’t even “hear” or “see” etc., but who apprehended The Universe through unimaginable (& unimaginably other)… SENSES. Cosmos via sensual psilocybin saturation — all the time. Whorf-Sapir gone astrapoplectic. A completely different game. Can we get music like that.]]]
[8] “The Arkestra screeched their way through a set of echoing improvisations that force the various players to communicate with each other using a foreign creative language — seemingly without guidance from or consultation with their leader.” No “conductor”: the Mingusian/Braxtonian ideal of musicians who have no leader, but simply music to play. John Szwed, “Sun Ra,” in The WIRE Primers: A Guide to Modern Music (Rob Young, ed.; Verso, 2009).
[9] Korean court music; Noh plays; Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (ver. 1.28); perhaps United States Live, Einstein on the Beach, or Perfect Lives (if you savor Harry’s Amer vernacular); or then again Licht, The Great Learning (comp. ’71) or Nitsch (if you wish to waste your time); or, on some Z-axis, if what you’re after is the amplification of space, then A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound (Cy Young’s unfathomable career), Paysage Planétaires (Doc Gooden’s ’84 orbit), The Room Extended (Doc’s ’85, the most inexhaustible document of them all).
[10] Nothin’ on gamelan in his book (A Short History of Music (4th Ed.; Vintage, 1954)). And, like every single known Physics Star besides Katie Mack (whose taste, it seems, runs more to Hozier), Phat Albert exalted THE Classics.
[11] East-pointed diamonds here, everything from Debussy and Britten to Alan Bishop (Radio Java) and Arthur C. Clarke (The Fountains of Paradise). Pivotal cloud-quote: “The hours forget their usual course. The quarters shrink to golden minutes, minutes seems like blissful hours. Now in the softer moments, the music sounds as if I heard angels sing, now, when at half strength, as if I heard all the chimes in heaven. And then again, in the fullness of is mighty power, it is as if a storm of bronze thunders through my temples.” That’s Jan Brandt Buys, who witnessed the Paku Alaman Orchestra in 1920. Quoted in Charles Ives’s Hartford Advocate, February 20, 2003 (“Hello Bali: Nonesuch Releases Thirteen Classic Recordings of Music from Indonesia and the South Pacific”).
[12] Wayang Golek — The Sound and Celebration of Sundanese Puppet Theater (Music of the Earth 6CD, 1994).
[13] Mike Silverton, “Archaeological Dig,” La Folia 1:3 (August 1998). The double CD, split so awkwardly right in mid-flow, Das Rheingold-sti (bro…), was recorded by Jacques Brunet for Ocora on July 25, 1975, precisely one complete orbit prior to premiere of the Bayreuth/Chéreau/Boulez Die Walküre.
[14] Certainly not the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A complete ringer for any party game: Voyager’s Golden Record. There’s an entity that travels. On the one hand, one of its 27 music tracks is the very one I’d choose if I had to introduce random extra-terrestrials to a thing called “music.” I’m not even kidding. (And give me an hour to live? Same thing: first give me “Ketawang: Puspåwårnå,” from a ’71 Yogyakarta field recording. Enough — go to State 27.) On the other hand, how painfully obvious, how pathetically robust, was its built-in ye olde Western Classical pre/x/tincture? (“Artifacts have politics”: Dr. Winner’s truthful chortle.) Cue Sagan’s immaculately misconceived apologetics: “There are many forms of music made by peoples all over our home planet, which we call Terra or, simply, Earth. We here present a representative gamut, from the most ancient of folkforms to the most complex structures yet conceived by hominid minds.” Hence the architectonics: JSB to kick off; LvB to close. Of course! (On the third hand, execrable, Untouchable: “Johnny B. Goode.” Again: enough.)
[15] Thankfully there’s Freddie’s riposte, almost arrogant in cutting thru cant: “There’s No Alternative to Cultural Appropriation: Cultural growth is just cultural appropriation.” Of course. But in ’21 he was too optimistic (“as hegemonic as this particularly cruel strain of social justice politics has become, the worm has already begun to turn against it”). Because the Production was (and remains) institutionalized, entrenched. (You know. Throw a speer at the post-Obama/Trump cloud-board; ah, yes, here’s Vox on Disney’s unremarkable Raya and the Last Fafner: “the film’s writers, Qui Nguyen (The Society) and Adele Lim (Crazy Rich Asians) are, respectively, Vietnamese American and Malaysian American, and copious research has gone into making the film feel true to Southeast Asian viewers”; umm, “true”??? (and what about, say, generic or any viewers?); it gets worse; the film was criticized, says Vox, for casting actors of X-ethnicity instead of actors of Y-ethnicity for Z… “roles”; the film, let’s recall, is a work of fiction; it is ontologically impossible for any work of fiction to “represent,” to be “authentic to” [??] any (so-called) real-world culture; it gets worse; “there is another worry,” namely, “the blending of the distinct and varied cultures of Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and half a dozen other nations has left [the film] feeling indistinct and insensitive…. The most disappointing thing about Raya” — it’s eminently forgettable? — “is that Southeast Asian Disney fans may struggle to find any identifiable part of their specific cultures in the film’s gorgeous but messy world-building”; this piece actually got published; its core complaint is, presumably, un-“problematic.”) It is fair to wonder whether such Producers understand that Wagner himself confronted similar criticisms. “Wait, is this plot-element Icelandic, or German-ish, or something else? Why isn’t it staying true to Ahistorically Bounded Culture X? I’m confused…” Those critiques also missed the game completely. Thing is, that was 1.5 centuries ago. So it’s also fair to wonder whether this… entity — call it syncreticism, synthesis, hybridity, play, work, travel, noise, attention, culture, cultural appropriation, seeing, language, praxis, B-blurring, absurdity, truth, meaning, joy, art, change, life — is so powerful, so fundamental, that it guarantees perennial cycles whereby its own manifest existence is decadently unseen, even (utterly futilely) “reversed.”
[16] “People say that he was a one-year wonder, but how can you be a one-year wonder if you win two [consecutive!] Most Valuable Player awards?” Indeed. Just ask F. Robby — ’61 NL MVP (mirror-pole to Maris, that year’s AL winner), and ’66 AL (first man to win in both leagues; the Reds’ GM had deemed him “an old thirty,” not realizing the extent to which FR’s two elevators (one, physical capacities, indeed going down, but the other, maturity/mental/skill-honing perspicacities, still ascending) were about to thrum in historic synergy with each other). Or ask fans of Boulez bootlegs. Opera Depot offers Bayreuth Ring cycles from ’76 and ’77 (the first two years of Chéreau’s lustrumn). Which to prefer? Most say ’77. (They usually tout “the sound.”) But the further back in time we go, the more fresh and fiery and fulsomely fraught the entire affair. Swim against the current here; it’ll pay off. Besides, “1977” is particularly ambiguous wrt Posterity (the Golden Record being The Urxample). Yes, that year bequeathed over-esteemed pyrite from the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Les Rallizes Dénudés… But it also deposited mulchable moraines like Heart of the Congos, Two Sevens Clash, and the last great Mingus recording, “Cumbia & Jazz Fusion,” which kicks off Thirteen Pictures, which — strange strings — stood as an abiding polestar for SHF’s imperishable Thirteen Rectangles.
[17] Rough Guide to Opera, 268-70.
[18] Five point O on the hardness scale (evidently a creation of German mineralogists chalking upon Greek atlassi).
[19] Boyden: In 1848 RW “quickly sketched the plot of Siegfrieds Tod, but soon recognized the need to elaborate upon the events leading to the hero’s demise. Accordingly he wrote the text of Der junge Siegfried… then expanded the tale with a prelude to Siegfried’s life, Die Walküre, and a prelude to the entire three-opera sequence, Das Rheingold. Having completed the poems in reverse order, he composed the music in sequence, beginning in 1853,” not finally finishing until ’74 (a number Pagest, Dinnersteinian), with a nearly 13-year gap between Acts II and III of Siegfried. But how to convey a fundamentally different kind of attitude toward one’s own drama if the text itself remained unchanged? How to end a work whose “stated beliefs” must be subsumed beneath some superstructure? Through a kaleidoscopic catharsis of colors; through accreting resonances of portentous leitmotifs (resonances sometimes unintended, surely; let the listener co-create); through the only hope remaining, the hope that music would somehow embody, enwomb, elevate the “meaning.” The poet Mary Ruefle, appropriating a certain Monsieur B., is useful here. “Roland Barthes suggests there are three ways to finish any piece of writing,” she writes. “The ending will have the last word or the ending will be silent or the ending will execute a pirouette, do something unexpectedly incongruent.” And indeed, can it be otherwise? (A cosmos with those specific constraints upon “ends” — why?) Pater Lee is also helpful, but the most suggestive snapshot might be ye olde Ernest Newman’s. Here’s the uttermost end of his précis on The Ring: “The poet in [RW] was pulling him one way, the musician another. The man of feeling in him, as distinct from the man of intellect, was being quietly, subconsciously, but irresistibly drawn toward a dénouement in which the world should go down in outer ruin yet somehow be taken up into the arms of a redeeming love. This he could convey, and has conveyed magnificently, in his music to the closing scene; but how to express it in words was a problem that always baffled and finally defeated him.”