Worte gehen noch zart am Uns�glichen aus...
Und die Musik, immer neu, aus den bebendsten Steinen,
Baut im unbrauchbaren Raum ihr verg�ttliches Haus.
I hope I've found safe harbor in another November.
I am in the midst of taking stock, of re-indexing the years since attaining consciousness, which is an ongoing process; however, the light of this moon casts deeper shadows than the others. When I was a kid, this was concert season: it meant rehearsals every night for plays, choruses, orchestras. This is the magic season wherein Western Culture coughs herself awake like a eighty-year old dowager duchess.
This is also the traditional season for the heavy stuff: my dad was driving me home from rehearsal one night in November, the November when I happened to be twelve (that was a holy year for me). I looked out the car window at the moon, and, in the augenblick when the light from my eye hit her, that's when I realized I would eventually die. In some ways, that moment is my first memory, and all prior memories were reconstructed backwards from it. I became a very sombre child. It was also about now, during the November when I was in the third form, that I read Buddenbrooks for the first time.
I got up before eight this morning, which is the best thing that's happened in months. I filled out an application to be a barista at D**s*l. I cleaned, I cooked, I found or created pictures to use here when I can pay for a gold membership again. MLJM emailed me to say she was coming to visit. I invited people 'round to watch the new AbFab episode (drop me a line if you're in Boston and would like to come). These are little signs. I must learn to routinize this divine: I must learn to pull myself together more often, or else learn not to come unstuck so often.
I haven't really listened to 69 Love Songs since this time two years ago. I am listening to it again because it suddenly seems more relevant, like a restatement of the main theme in the coda, in apotheosis. The last two years have become a Gedenkenexperiment-- strichtly speaking, I have nothing to show for them. The differences are beautiful, mind you. I would not trade them for anything, not even your killer steelie. These have been two splendid years. But I am waking up very much in the same bed I did then.
The promise of age-old music is the promise of life without fear. (T Adorno, In Search of Wagner)
Ah, TA, my grand and noble opposite! -- remember, dear reader, that I am AT -- how nice to have been born before the Fall, when the meanings People leached from Things had to do with the way People had always leached meaning from Things. Nowadays, the whole thing's topsy-turvy: Things have voices and People are more often silent, the oppressed Objects have won their voice and are returned to lead the poor dispossessed Subject all the way back to the Promised Land; and from where you lay, sweet Teddie mine, with undergraduate breasts mocking you on your deathbed, you never thought pop music could free people. I'm staring down the barrel of a kitsch-object, a charm muttered at me to keep my thoughts at bay, a song tied animalistically to the inchoate crushes I suffered through as an adolescent [Busby Berkeley Dreams -- ed.]. At least I hope it empowers me -- it feels like it does, because it is now old, because it now approximates Objectivist musics, by performing the same sleight of hand with the Byrds or the Human League that Hindemith did with Bach.
As you can tell, my neck was barely muscular to keep my massive, throbulating brain upright today. It's partly because I was watching this rather fun documentary on rave culture while I read the Times this morning (Jon Reiss's Better Living Through Circuitry). Genesis P-Orridge says, about halfway through, something about electronic music taking up the tattered gonfalon of punk [not GP's words] by allowing the consumers of music to relate more easily to its means of production. I watched the end of the show, switched off the television, and read through some Fran�ois Couperin, and it felt (for the first time in months) like good yoga.
Sad little moon, in the timeless night
You may sleep but you will never die.