The Picturesque

There are paintings that depict Horses and Carriages (by Monet or Pissaro, say) but few or no paintings of cars.  The distinctive idea of romance in the contemporary is missing.  Why is that?  Why is the car not picturesque?  Romantic?   Here what I mean by “romantic” has to do with the sense of the adventure of the individual imagination as it were. Something (increasingly) seems to prevent this from happening, as we move through the Century, for adventure and technology seem increasingly incompatible – exclusive.   A gross anonymity replaces, or seems to replace, the individual (the lyric imagination) in its hope for crystalisation in such terms: for identity to be resolved into the dimensions of an artefact.  From World War I on, it is possible to find illustrations of cars or aeroplanes or trains that are clearly important as objects to the persons depicting them but they lack in individual presence, there is a kind of corresponding ‘loss of soul’ in the successively new makes of car that have come out over the decades.  For example, while there is a definite iconography in the made-for-poster war images of spitfires, in stylishly simple white wall tyres of holiday Deusenbergs, they decline quickly into the real world more or less romance-less photographs of the present day: that is to say into clear cut adverts with all the attendent loss of texture and manners that this implies.  This is a postmodern condition: how all the icons representing our modern lives (cars; ipods; computers and so on) stand beyond artistic representation.  In romance terms in effect these all but existing as an invisibility.  The ipod silhoutte figure that one sees in adverts is the closest thing that technology can get to romance, but on the other hand that is just an advert and points not to the individual but to the mass culture of fashion’s endless bottle of ginger pop.

Recorded Music

What we understand as ‘the thing that it is’, with modern music, the ‘recording’, the artifact or record, can be described as a kind of platonic ideal; it takes on an objectivity that makes it the ’thing in itself’, the ding an sich, which all live performances are but the pale imitation of; often this is an accurate summation: it is in the nature of the artifact to disallow the possibility of a true live experience of the music in spite of the obvious appeal it has in granting us the sense, in listening to it, that ‘here we are’ in harmony with and ’fitting in’ to the culture of which we are a part, at least for that moment, because of its blueprinted recorded definition.  Traditional live folk music exists to be sung in the moment, by anyone, and does not need even the accompaniment of a musical instrument: but in what way should the difference between that ‘portability’ and say Leonard Cohen’s Songs from a Room be explained beyond the obvious contrast of electronically enhanced instrumentation?  There is a crucial categorical difference.  The fabric of overdubs, edits and so forth in which recorded music consists would be next to impossible to produce live, and one has to wonder at what the point of it would be – the creation live on stage of a note for note reproduction of the recording which can be more conveniently listened to in one’s own time?  Moreover, even for musicians playing conventional instruments this introduces a difficulty, since in leaning toward the achievement of any sort of ’live’ similarity it would likely involve a temptation to use pre-recorded material.  The record is the thing ultimately.  Or in other words, for it is the actual process of recording the music that discovers that music.  Without that (experimental) process of recording, it would never be found: discovered in the first place.  The crystallisation of the recording which is the ‘live’ sound – the sound that one hears in playback - is the sound’s electronic preservation or fixing in permanence – yet it still works as if it is being played at that moment … Performance becomes essentially mobile or contextless technologically.  (Someone listening to their ipod on a train.)

“The musician must have mimicry in mind.”  – Rather than something that can be ‘played live’?  (If the balance stands in reverse, leaving an artifact somewhat perfunctory in its execution, it is to be assumed that the tendency is towards the folk or acoustical: the actual live performance.)

(Two points here.  A recording captures a moment – since that is what it is in the nature of a recording to do – somewhat like a photograph it is able to capture, or perhaps to create, a zeitgeist.  One thinks of various recordings by …  well whoever: anyone, all: seminal events; they were records that captured key moments of cultural change, often inadvertently …  Inevitably, the act of recording music contains many of the elements of the technological and cultural progress which it is a part of.  And one sees how that affects each record too; builds on a previous record by ‘improving’ on it.  This is again inevitable, doubly so, thus the second point.  Progress.  With each year or decade that passes, there are new recording techniques; things change, improve, they follow new possibilities: and so everything is built on the idea or the ‘fact’ of progress; where analogue is replaced by digital, etc etc, and so on.  Thus, again, the next record is supposed to exist in some progressive aspect of the previous record.  Things can’t be static but have to be always a step further, newer, better.  If in nothing else, at least in its production values: they must be radically different – improved, tightened, advanced – and so on.  So even music wholly folk-based where the aim is to create a record still, works as a kind of anti-folk …)

The rational mind has no …

Suppose.  The world that common sense acquaints us with is not very real … such that what is more real … is what is not the case according to common sense: the more real is to be found elsewhere: in the impossible … Which is the only permissable. 

This is the world’s unleavened ground: what is not the case.  Impossibility.  By analogy, as with many laws of physics.  Let’s suppose – but see the world’s logic as answerable to reason.

Cut

The phrase “… in the world”.  Is this a product of the early talking movies?  We say: “This is the most cut book in the world.”  “This is the most difficult job in the world.”   This, that or something “… in the world.”  But why does it seem especially a movie phrase?  Does it seem such a visual reality?

A – Secret ?

You have to learn to like what you write: but you also have to learn to hate it.  It isn’t one way.  Self-argument is needed.  This is because the human mind is not a true functional unit in its conception of human values … and so intellectually one has to keep working - until the thing one can like is there on the page evident and clear.  The most the human mind can produce is a strategy.  Life is given to words by mystery.

Zoning the Reagent

I imagine it is like one of those cricket scoreboards; in fact just like one; beyond a screen with a half-hidden figure moving behind it, untidying it so to say, shrunk across a field of short scorched grass, periodically slotting numbers in, the cumulative show of runs edging up throughout the day, and the process somehow convincing despite the clear evidence of the strings suspending the puppets on the pitch reaching up to heaven: in this case of the wickets and so on – the day of the week, do they do that too? – or perhaps like on a tv quiz where a short-skirted miss with a half unbuttoned blouse takes a stack of lettered cards or numbers and so on; she takes a brisk step or two across the studio and magnetically attaches them to a wall with a deft upward swing and where someone else decides what word they can make from them, and her skeptical but enthused face darkens or lightens depending on the plausibility, or the nearest to a number number that they can reach by dividing, multiplying and subtracting that she herself calculates; in either case the essential thing being the blanks, the clearly marked absences where the word or number has to go and where finally – this is the happy part – something is decided on and yes we have the word, we have the number and we can all go home.  That I imagine is what it is like to write poetry.  You have a definite space, as between two brackets (thus: [                                     ]) into this a word or phrase has to fit and so you concentrate, you reach deep, search your memory, and you think up associations, perhaps you recall what happened yesterday or the day before and after a while it all works; say a phrase like “zoning the reagent with parafin” or a word like “equinoctial” it becomes clear is the missing piece, the final part of the jigsaw, if I may descend into cliche – in any case what you have is the completed burnished chrome article.

A Faster Poem

To be able to write a poem one must be a poem - the physical form of a poem is of the body; and so its silences are likewise corporeal.  An example would be Thom Gunn.  Gunn’s passion for Ben Jonson’s poetry created a kind of absolute from which his exacting sense of the unique impossible drew breath.

He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him selfe to be a true Poem.

- Milton

The Anti-Poem

Poetry’s sense ‘cannot be articulated’.  Its achievement is silence.  In the moment of impossibility, of the experience that cannot be articulated, so, thus it begins.  Then how does one write it, experiencing this, in which the impulse to express gets crushed by virtue of the simple reality into which it is born?  Well, life is fatally predictable here of course; it mostly fails to get written.  It falls flat.

The Anti

Four

The Literal Truth

Early period Pink Floyd is better than middle or late Pink Floyd.

The Adventures of Odysseus are better than The Adventures of Bilbo Baggins.  Flat cartoons are better than three dimensional …

Why is it more interesting to say “There you will find the desert” – the void – than “There you will find djinns”? 

The mirage condenses into a – fantasy.  Towers, castles and princesses.  The intangible is literalised; anthropomorphised.  Nothing that isn’t part of the human image remains.  The ‘escape’ is only an escape back into the human image.

The first Pink Floyd is just psychedelia.  No image condenses from it.  Sense is suspended in the intangible inordinate.

Early Pink Floyd is better than middle or late Pink Floyd.