Στον Φώτη
Spritely though our stride may be, here and now, not least with the current vernal quickening, nonetheless, encompassed as we are by so many disasters, where is the corner around which the sentiments of futility and foreboding will not again issue forth? At present how could one fail to notice a great chasm between what is incipient and all that is exhausted and near an end, as a demarcation of imminent collisions, widening itself but a step or two away from us?
Awareness generally shared of a future louring about and almost ready to strike, is a state of mind one would hope for, by way of averting that same prospect, and yet just this is conspicuous by its relative absence from the scene – at a moment when the threat of world-conflagration is trifled with, caution unconsulted or cast aside. Aboard these ill-steered rafts, where is the room for observers who’ve preserved their critical spirit, untouched largely by the self-induced figments of imagination so abundant everywhere, still capable of impartial assessment and prepared to address the culpable forthrightly? Alas, of this space, as of so many other goods, there is now a great shortage.
Yes, at the point we’ve come to, the main culprits reside within our own countries (der Hauptfeind steht im eigenen Land ), if we are First Worlders, for whom amidst today’s impasses the régimes which are “far more important” to change than this or that one abroad, have ensconced themselves at home. Above all, the criminal gangs in Washington, Brussels, London, and other capitals or locales that, it seems in direct proportion to the revolting decrepitude of their figureheads, are pushing everything into the worst danger, which merely a single miscalculation would now ignite – these should be broken down posthaste, on everyone’s behalf.
Naming the perpetrators, however, is made more difficult a task by reason of the willing acceptance on the part of many of what the régimes are currently doing and undoing, those immense flocks amongst which even the remnant of a skeptical response has been doused, since 2020. With what comfort have they embraced the inebriation that flows from downing, not even with acquiescence but indeed eagerly, draught upon draught of the intoxicant of our times, “Corona”! There it seems these followers do intend to remain; hence to pry them out of this self-induced stupor will not prove easy, assuming that it might be at all possible.
Organising their rescue would require an especial finesse, for not only have many of them narcotised themselves under the pretext of the “pandemic,” but what is still worse, they’ve become positively deaf in the process, henceforth incapable of hearing any words meant to awaken them, let alone of engaging in an active listening to – and listening for – the latter.
Absurdities are now readily swallowed by many who really should have known and judged better. The lack of discernment, so evident even at a first glance, discloses itself upon further reflection as being primarily auricular in kind: it is a deficiency of ear, or in other words, the inner capacity of hearing and listening, unique amongst the capacities of perception in its close rapport with the mind’s power of understanding, which has been revealed by those who’ve rushed forward to demonstrate their own servitude. Out of this obedience displaying itself with such abandon, and in such numbers, a world-situation has emerged which is at once eerily familiar and yet unheard-of, in several respects quite novel. By way of meeting adequately the challenge this poses, a fitting answer is hard to devise.
When a clown from Kiev is coronated as Churchillian, what retort other than significant silence would occur to the dissenter?
In instances of absurdity where the counter-thrust of the unspoken does not suffice and an audible rejoinder is needed, one will probably consider various options of ridicule, as a means of drawing forth laughter from the believers, even despite themselves. – The species of laughter at issue here can properly be called sovereign, where it is solely the individual, and nothing beyond nor underneath, who laughs. – Yet the deployments of terror by the new Leviathans, whose various degrees of efficacy the last years have afforded opportunity to ascertain, evidently do succeed quite often in blocking ears and gagging tongues which under other circumstances might be open to sharp criticism. Thus the possibilities of humour, alas, may in fact have been narrowed down very substantially indeed at present.
If, as seems to have been done since 2020, terror is utilised by the régimes in power in such a way as to render individuals uncertain whether, when the chips are down, each of them would be able to dispose over the constituents of his consciousness, such that an effective resistance by him could be reckoned with – then dread does begin to creep into the more intimate recesses of one’s self-awareness, and consequently the quite particular kind of unity prevailing amongst those intra-mental particles that is self-possession, without which the antennæ of irony might be stunted and laughter in its légèreté stifled, is imperilled. Should this basic self-composure evaporate under the onslaught, subsequently one’s very temperament might itself change, at least temporarily, and the otherwise merely potential inward discordance become aggravated into an actual discord manifest outwardly as sheer paralysis. Distemper of this sort would therefore go some distance towards squelching the wellsprings of sovereign laughter in advance.
The psychological hypothesis of a multitude extant virtually within the mind, and susceptible to incitements to self-betrayal and even internecine war from without, was touched on in an earlier essay. – From this matrix the attitude so prevalent these last years of willing servility (servitude volontaire) has also crawled forth, and so, alongside the sovereign laughter whose possibility is now circumscribed more and more, there is another kind, coming to expression when some element inside or underneath the individual consorts with something beyond him, which may be called, in a word, hysterical. Where does this variety find its delight? In the very absurdities of our present condition. The greater the absurdity, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and if one listens to the inane pronouncements of the régimes, one might indeed infer that dies Nichts bildet sich ein, eine nie vorher erreichte Stufe des Menschentums erstiegen zu haben* (in other words, these proponents of “2030” are nonentities who imagine they have ascended to a level of humanity never before attained ) – the more palpable the absurdities, the higher degree of intensity of delight which the flocks of the willingly servile who’ve abetted that which we have seen thus far and, in all likelihood, shall see even more of imminently, take as the due compensation for their, as it appears, deliberate self-abasement. – Though an observer may shrink from examining the underside of volitions such as theirs, with a cursory acquaintance one does tend to conclude they will not voluntarily forego that ghastly laughter, and hence do expect the powerful to supply plentiful occasions for it. That is the tacit bargain.
* Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der „Geist“ des Kapitalismus, ii, 2
For opportunities to vent their ressentiment through this horrible compensatory laughter, their ears are peeled – while everything collapses around us – but mirth of the other kind, the sovereign declaration of an individual’s bemusement despite it all, streaks right over their heads unremarked. Something has been done to each of them separately, notably since 2020 but also, though less patently, prior to the “pandemic.” In instance after instance, readiness to listen and to comprehend has been suspended in their cases; while a critical observer, encountering such an obvious stasis, may seek to inquire how it can happen that these rather essential powers of the mind are as though switched off.
Here an answer does suggest itself provisionally. For, after all, one does know of gatherings over which that old figure Pan suddenly appears to preside, whenever it happens, to speak more prosaically, that panic terror strikes a throng, or multitude of people through which an overwhelming fear spreads wildly as there is alwayes in him that so feareth, first, some apprehension of the cause, though the rest run away by Example, and then the stampede in its imperative, inescapable urgency follows terribly from every one supposing his fellow to know why. Amidst these circumstances where instinct takes command, for better or for worse, the individual’s capacity of audition, both listening and comprehending, would almost necessarily be shut down. – With the latest technologies now woven throughout all social relations, however, an actual throng or multitude no longer is a sine qua non for the outbreak of panic terrors. Today those collectivities exist virtually everywhere, and a single keystroke could set alight the fears that roar without the apprehension of why, or what,* over distances previously reckoned as remote but which have taken on the immediacy of the tiny interstices inside a crowd. For the mind to exercise detachment, heeding its own inner power of audition, little room is left amidst these closer and closer proximities.
* Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, ch. vi
Susceptibility to panic, alongside the other varieties of terror upon which our Leviathans now work so assiduously, has increased markedly since 2020. – Suggestibility itself becomes so much more of a force now, amongst individuals and, even more strangely, within many of them separately, in a period when the habits engendered by “social media” settle ever deeper into most everyone’s second nature, willingly, wittingly, or otherwise. Supposing an idea, an assertion, an utterance to be well-founded mainly because one notices it after its electronic transmission via one’s virtual network of associates: how often is credulity of this kind now adopted en masse! It is so easy to assume any questions have already been answered satisfactorily and then to proceed simply to follow in the steps of others’ “examples.” At some point, after a considerable succession of repetitions, this inclination to assent will operate by default, also when one is alone by oneself, as by then the simple “occurrence” of an idea will appear to suggest the latter bears a reason within itself sufficient to warrant following wherever it leads – and this quite likely in a literal sense of the phrase. For, after such a thorough preparation, albeit perhaps mainly under catalytic circumstances abounding in tensions, someone could indeed be liable to inflict a high degree of panic upon himself, though there be none around him whom he would presuppose as knowing the why and the wherefore of the matter.
Well, which of our present circumstances has not now become a catalyst, actually or otherwise? Where, due mainly to the ruling régimes and their sources of support, is there not already a fire, or else ample fuel? – Generally speaking, conditions have been rendered much more volatile since 2020, amidst the “pandemic,” a development taking place seemingly by design, not least because each individual can become a terror to himself once his life itself as a longevity, in terms of its possible quality, is said to be the pre-eminent raison d’être of state policy, while in practice the rationing of opportunities to live, in terms of their quantity computed as a single fixed sum, is made the overarching raison d’état.* When the individual’s life itself has been taken hostage by the ruling powers, how easy, indeed, how tempting it will be to consent to play a role in the usurpation, thereby allowing the old ἑαυτὸν τιμωρούμενος to return onto the scene in one’s own person: one becomes a self-terroriser, and either begins or pretends to find the condition decidedly agreeable! – A terrible pleasure, this, how ever real or affected it may in fact be. – The large admixture of absurdity in the situations which are the result, by now so common, constitutes not the least of the occasions for that hysterical laughter spoken of earlier.
* Though a neologism for this kind of gouvernementalité has been put into circulation, its construction is a bit awkward, and in any case, as my main aim here is concise summary, I shall eschew using it.
Circumstances like these are well-suited to the régimes in power, and they expend great effort to maintain them, while for dissenters, once one begins to examine them attentively and with detachment, they are utterly horrible. – Sovereign laughter, while it endures and perhaps afterwards, could help to extricate an individual from their sway. – Those who remain where they were, captives of the terrors inflicted from without and/or self-induced by their own connivance, will neither hear nor understand it.
Es hört doch jeder nur, was er versteht,* said Goethe. After all everyone hears only what he understands. Evidently, if that is so, the boundaries of that which one hears, on the one side, and that which one understands, on the other, co-incide at all points. A moment’s reflection should disclose the complacent self-satisfaction inherent in such an identity, and then one may well conclude the sage of Weimar was speaking mordantly of the dregs of a life, of a senescent moment when energy and curiosity both had long since dwindled, whereas earlier on what one understands would indeed unfold as more and other than what one hears, and conversely with the data of the other. Then, as though in a negation of a negation, that is, in an affirmation, the emphasis would be placed on the possibilities of both powers of the mind in their separate though conjoint operations, a joyously open instance of free activity stretching out in various directions, hence nearly the opposite of a depleted state narrowly demarcated by a single impassible horizon, or in other words, a fifteen-minute city of the mind, in a bad but relatively better case, the mind sequestered under lockdown, in a relatively worse. – Thus an espousal of a youthful curiosity and energy may be heard from within the aphorism, a sonic disclosure which turns his sentence on its head, though if one is to hear this, one must also be able to understand it, which is to say, such a reflection will occur only to those capable of the free choice whether to embrace it as a maxim, while for all others it remains beyond their reach categorically.
* Maximen und Reflexionen, Über Literatur und Leben, 887
Goethe, with this notation, may well have had in mind the unfortunate products of a university education, their minds superannuated in advance by what they underwent during it. – Because the number of those others is so much larger now, both in absolute and in relative terms, is it really any wonder that so often we all find ourselves in an impasse where a better hearing and a better understanding, separately and together, are held at bay by the cackles of hysterical laughter?
The destructive and also self-destructive attitude expressed in that sort of laughter, takes delight in displaying itself. This has been noticed by several of the most acute observers of our contemporary predicaments, and some have considered the attitude under a dual aspect, both as an obstacle, effectively blocking the way towards the modicum of sanity’s restoration which our polities may still be capable of, and as an occasion for a response which might nonetheless surprise us all by suggesting that a return to common sense, wherever we may reside, can be more of a possibility than we generally had hoped for.
Of this select group of observers, one in particular is especially deft at compressing large expanses of thoughtful reflection into pithy remarks capable, via the latest technologies, of reaching a very large set of people, and in particular those who still have much of their lives ahead of them. (That is, to add the obvious proviso, if the senility and imbecility of the nominal leaders of the present régimes in Washington, Brussels, and elsewhere do not succeed in fomenting the destruction of everything, as, alas, they seem on course to do, barring certain unforeseen turnabouts.) Evincing a talent to an exceptional degree, she is en route to perfecting her hand in the high art of thinking in other people’s heads and also bringing other people to think in hers, to vary something once said by Brecht.*
* untitled text, ca. 1930
One significant milestone on this path dates from around a year ago, though her words could have been issued now. It is the following, which I include verbatim.
Pretty soon you’ll be able to get a vaccine that will prevent war.
Then you’ll find it out it doesn’t actually prevent war or stop wars from spreading worldwide, but with two doses it can make wars less severe.
With the 4th dose, if war arrives, you’ll be less likely to die.– Candace Owens, Tweet, February 28, 2022
With this brief satire, her target is the common denominator which has allowed the “pandemic” and now the rush to war to play out as each has thus far, throughout our polities, or what is left of them, the credulity of such a large number of people.
This credulity does not merely believe in absurdities, but through this belief it itself becomes infected by them, and then it is virulent: not least by dint of its own wilful stopping of the ears it also spreads, an occurrence which is yet an additional bit of absurdity. Thus the absurd proliferates further, all the more to the degree that it offers in exchange a perverse pleasure of its own.
How does the credulous attitude spread, more precisely? Not least by dint of the hysterical laughter mentioned before. As a vector of its contagion, this laughter is potent quantitatively: collectively it has shown itself capable of an unconcerted unison in the midst of which most everyone and everything else is deafened, and in the aftermath of this direct assault, the widespread credulity may indeed emerge with a greater quantum of power, in relative terms, other more skeptical casts of mind having been left stunned by this awful sound, or fleeing the scene on their own behalf, finding themselves unable to bear its tone.
Owens evidently has witnessed such outcomes of an unequal contest over and over again, and in consequence devises stratagems to re-arrange the battlefield in favour of the other side, hers. One of these is exemplified when, as in this brief satire, the words which would otherwise elicit the hysterical laughter are as though placed behind a layer of glass, in a virtual display case, counteracting to some degree their power of contagion, and turning them instead into an exhibit. By this procedure, presumably as its rationale, her satire occasions laughter of the other kind, which I’ve called sovereign. The butt of it, the thing observed which calls it forth, is first and foremost that hysterical laughter itself, the horrid sort wherewith the attitude of credulity, far from admitting that it is at fault and making amends, does whatever it can to tear everything down instead, the credulous person not excepted. – Over this perverse destructive pleasure, the other better laughter, her kind, raises up an observer such as herself in a sovereign manner, in free bemusement at the sheer folly of so many who appear to have embraced willingly their own active self-destruction, both as prospect and at present. Moreover, as a voluntary espousal of this sort of fate has something astounding about it (and to quite a pronounced degree this is so, a point I take as read), after one does witness it, in the laughter arising from the encounter there resounds one of the earliest attested sources of thoughtful reflection, namely, the incredulous wonderment that any such thing can be, θαυμάζειν.*
* Recall Socrates’ words in the Theaetetus (155d2-5), and Aristotle’s statement in the Metaphysics (bk. i, 982b12-13).
Unfortunate but unavoidable it is that sovereign laughter, in this instance, stemmed from the higher-altitude observation of our Western civilisation which is putting on a show of the signs of its decline and death, its inner resilience dissipated seemingly already some time ago. Yet this near-fatal condition worsens further whenever we who dissent refuse to face its reality squarely in thought, as a brute fact, even though we may well refrain from taking the self-defeating victory of credulity, crowned by horribly ruthless cackling which drones out other sounds everywhere, as representing a fait accompli – we dissenters who still would not care to say, in our own voices, What difference, at this point, does it make?
Precisely so that we ourselves not contribute something further, though without wanting to, towards the general dissolution, one should not discount out of hand the idea that a civilisation – or, to speak less dramatically but more precisely, societies in such need of satirists as are ours, also hardly hold open much ear for them at all. So often does satire propose itself only after the time when it might have done some good, rather than merely point out the spots to be cleared away! – Nearly two hundred years ago, Balzac may already have outlined the problem definitively. We would do well to admit, it might still be ours, or may soon become ours once more, and this is an even more conspicuous possibility since 2020. – Nous ne pouvons aujourd’hui que nous moquer. La raillerie est toute la littérature des sociétés expirantes…*
* La Peau de chagrin, vol. i, Préface
How far gone are we? – Effective action may yet accomplish something, one still has cause to hope so, anyway. (This sentiment, at the present moment, evanescent though it may prove to be, flows mainly from the French résistance now and from comparable developments in other countries, so long as they are genuine and not orchestrated by the intelligence agencies as means to ulterior ends, as continues to happen with the “colour revolutions.”) – If those two sarcastic sentences embody an inescapable conclusion, however, tempting it would be to await the moment when the programmatic flaunting of absurdity which the régimes in Washington and elsewhere pursue so recklessly, would meet its end, from within or from the outside, in the shape of a sanction biologique de l’impuissance* (as retribution of this kind has been termed, not without some reason) coming as the coup de grâce which they and their supporters, obsessed by their physical existence as they give every impression of being, seem despite themselves positively to yearn for, in times like these. – Then at least this nauseating spectacle would have been finished.
* Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du Pouvoir, bk. v, ch. xii
A bleak progression like that, is quite conceivable, given our situation amidst extremely perilous circumstances. – One aim of concerted action currently, is to avert any such outcome, allowing some other development to take place instead, better or at least not anticipated in dismay. – In the intervals of action, too, while reflecting on the point we’ve arrived at, amongst all the questions to consider, I for one intend to devote some further thought to a query that, though it is not exactly novel, may be raised from the present once more: how to awaken the power of hearing out of its credulous slumbers? (Thus one would help still the outbursts of delight at the farces of self-destruction now nearly monopolising the stage.)
At so late a time as this, may one reasonably seek to make audition youthful again?
When the dangers are so obvious, one has every right to hope for some response – this hope embodies neither a usurpation nor an audacity – and to attune one’s ears in the search for a fitting anthem. Indeed, over the course of the last years, amongst the aspects under which I’ve tended to consider sonic phenomena, the anthemic element in them has not been slighted.
Listening for the undertones of an anthem in any piece of music, or indeed in the other varieties of sound that interest me (and which in times like these are also, as the saying goes, interested in us), has been one of several self-assigned tasks during this period. From many those undersounds were entirely lacking, as soon became obvious, but every so often the anthemic was heard distinctly enough, and then accordingly I sought to understand its whence, what, where, and why.
The strains of an anthem I noticed especially in one piece of music towards the end of last summer, and in this case I can hardly call them undersounds, so forcefully did they strike my ears. Immediately I moved to include this composition, by way of a foretaste, in the notice with which the re-initiation of this musical project was announced, half a year ago, fully expecting to speak of it subsequently at length. Although some distance along other paths had to be traversed first, now the moment is opportune to circle back to it, on account of our present conditions.
Jonas Crabtree, resident in London, the artist whose work it is, goes by a moniker put together to indicate the specific genre of his musical productions, Daft Beatles. This name’s composite character says explicitly that what he makes, are mash-ups.
Ten years ago, in another text about his music, I wrote a bit about the mash-up as a form, and there is no need to restate any of that here, except to recall that he, like a raft of others, has known the erasure now called “cancellation” (an ironic word for a terrible thing). In his case it resulted from some factitious claims of copyright infringement levelled against his works, the music business being what it is – though of course, in such recourse to “the law” what one mainly observed was the unjust application of low means, to interdict and terminate an unwanted upstart.
He too did not let this challenge deter him, but moved ahead actively in his field of endeavour, and on at least as high a level as before. The accomplishment that is his anthemic composition, “On the Nature of Summertime,” confirms this.
The one constituent of this mash-up is the live performance of that older standard, “Summertime,” given by Ella Fitzgerald at Mister Kelly’s, the Chicago nightclub, on August 10, 1958. The song, for its part, had been written some decades before, by George Gershwin, for Porgy and Bess, recorded as an aria on July 19, 1935 by Abbie Mitchell (Abriea Mitchell Cook, 1884-1960), then re-made as full-fledged jazz by Billie Holiday the next year, a September debut.
Mixed with it is one other constituent, “On the Nature of Daylight,” the now well-known instrumental work, in the recording its composer, Max Richter, himself brought out. This was issued on his album The Blue Notebooks, a set of pieces written twenty years ago, released in February 2004; during the decades since, the composition has been performed widely, by a myriad of interpreters, while popping up a number of times in the soundtracks of films, and on television.
“Summertime” was first composed and sung in the middle of the 1930s, and if its lyrics are considered from various possible angles, conscientiously, one probably will discern something of the mark left upon them by the fears and the hopes – that is, by the expectancies of the better and of the worse which arose all throughout the course of that low dishonest decade. To point out an audible occurrence of this: in the aria’s first recording, as Mitchell reaches the lullaby’s key word “cry,” through her intonation and cadence there comes a slight pause, conveying palpably to an acute listener the sense that here one is encountering an entire inward response to the hard realities of those years, a resonance which the few piano notes, interspersed sensitively by Gershwin himself, well subtend. And a year later, through the potent syncopes in which the jazz version abounds, the whole period of the thirties hints at its inner dissatisfactions in a comparable manner, a clueing-in by sonority alone that is exemplified already as Holiday rolls the title over her tongue and stylises it into an expectant “some more time.” The decade of its origin, however, did not exhaust even the surface meaning of the lyrics. Far from it, and further decades brought out yet other resonances in that first layer, barely even there if at all to begin with. For the sake of concreteness, one instance of such a disclosure should suffice: when Fitzgerald sang
you’re going to spread your wings
and you take to the sky
in 1958, in the incipient space age, and just a year after the first satellite passed overhead, surely the words were freighted with considerably more significance than the same two phrases had carried, a bit more than twenty years before, when they were simply commonplace figures of speech?
“On the Nature of Daylight” dates from the first years of the new century, and was written during and against the run-up to another war, as its composer has affirmed on a number of occasions. The implication of this positioning of the music, as concerns the meaning of the title, would seem to be one by now familiar paradox: the nature of something can be comprehended only once the latter has vanished, either fully or mainly, and hence daylight, it appears to exclaim, already is scarce at best. The zone wherein this holds true, presumably, would then be what was earlier the public realm, henceforth transformed fundamentally after having been overtaken by so many falsehoods and such a lack of factuality, as to have been closed off to most any rays of light at all. Such was, roughly, already the outlook twenty years ago. In the interval, the basic problem has become so much more intractable that often one is cast into despair, even in the absence of any distinct volition bringing this mood to the fore, at which point the chords of lament, dirge, and elegy begin nearly automatically to play themselves in one’s head, soon laying claim to the inner auditorium, insofar as other musical options seem ill-suited to the terrible circumstances everywhere. Should it be found so strange, subsequently, when one hears in this composition by Richter a requiem for daylight, and indeed also for nature, given the reckless ways in which scientific and medical experimentation have set themselves far above nature’s regularities, especially during recent years. If this piece of music was so intended, are ears like mine faulty when they identify, in the initial statement of its theme, though it is slowed down by a factor of ten, a permutation upon the last passage devised by Mozart, the brief moment in his Requiem at the intro to the Lacrimosa wherewith its solemn and supplicant choir is announced?
While attending to the lyrics of the first of the constituents of this mash-up, striking is their sketch of the carefree years of childhood whose “living is easy” thanks mainly to a well-tended shelter which conscientious parents do their best to provide, even or especially amidst straitened circumstances or poverty and over against an oppressive policy like Segregation. For this time of life, of course, summer is the emblematic season, and entirely in keeping with this invocation of its innocent plenitude, through it one may discern, in broad outline, a full awareness that youth abides also in order that it then be elevated into a state of independence, at least an inward, regardless of the given conditions. Youth too can possess a dignity, and though the former will pass, the latter does call for fostering.
Suggestive also is the notion of human labour which a bit of reflection may draw out of these lyrics. Through the process that labour is, the circulation of sustenance from nature to the human being and back again is effected. As per the lyrics, this is a lesson imparted in a gentle fashion to children during the “summertime” when they reside under the shelter by which their parents do whatever they can to protect them – but make no mistake, it remains a lesson! Thus they are taught practically how some surplus should remain at their disposal once the labouring is done, not excessively but providently, both at day’s end and in the aggregate, and also introduced to the changes which the interaction with nature will bring about not solely in the latter, in the most extensive sense of the term, but also in the human nature of the labourers themselves, by the awakening of potentialities which would otherwise never be heard from. Considered from this angle, musical skills, for example, are abilities which may develop as fortuitous by-results of the processes comprising human labour, itself entirely necessary if the metabolism between the human being and nature (Stoffwechsel zwischen Mensch und Natur) or else the human metabolism with nature (Stoffwechsel mit der Natur) is to function properly, as though it were a locomotive’s steam engine, thus augmenting the power of movement of every human being and of the species altogether. Music, accordingly, as a superlative good, has developed throughout history by virtue of labour, defined as a specifically humanising capacity, through which the individual is able, within certain obvious limits, to assert dominion (Botmässigkeit) over his own nature and the play of its forces (das Spiel ihrer Kräfte), conducting them as he will.* But how could he ever direct that orchestra without some familiarity with the instruments, and this may best be gained during the season of life when indeed, thanks largely to the parental roof over his head, “living is easy.”
* The four terms stem from Karl Marx (Das Kapital, vol. i, bk. i, ch. 1, 1, for the first, and ch. 3, 1, for the others), and while one may wonder a bit about the slight possibility of a difference between the first two, this is certainly not the place to inquire into the matter, although the proximity between his postulates and the Darwinian hypotheses, which one might infer already when one thinks about the latter two, is a topic whose importance should not be ignored.
With the other constituent of this mash-up, insofar as it embodies the sound of a requiem, a resonant epitaph for light and perhaps for nature too, its listener is turned around towards the past and then invited to reflect upon the meaning of the facts before him. Amongst these, first and foremost, is the condition of the public realm, almost entirely buried under heaps of rubble, the massive remnants of the integrity of an older form of government, ever more fully suborned from within by a new system of rule which, even perhaps already twenty years ago, a quick-witted spectator or auditor might have had good reason to call totalitarian, while at present the burden in any such discussion concerning a fitting term for it, should probably be laid on the other side. Hence on this as on other adjacent topics it is the non-dissenters who should be asked to argue the contrary case, if they can. However, in the absence of that variety of reasoned confrontation over all this, to his own sad solitary train of thought, prompted by the instrumentation with its repetitions, a listener can hardly set an end other than a simple arbitrary breaking-off, with or without a sigh.
Another element may be found in the instrumental music: arrangements which convey the longing audible in the Latin verse sung directly after the intro from which its theme was derived. Though daylight but barely illuminates the public realm when it is reviewed in sorrow by this piece’s audience, in accordance with its composer’s suggestion, nonetheless, and now heeding the choral source, on “that day” (dies illa) the light will be renewed and in its resplendence many mortal faults might be forgiven, while there and then it is not wrath but rest which is to reign. Yet beyond the universal fulfilment of repentance as evoked by the verse, how ever tentatively, eternal life may be awaited as a promise of still more than that, indeed as comprising a thorough restitutio in integrum, an ἀποκατάστασις of every soul.* Through that promise, in turn, as it echoes around this pensive musical architecture, if one’s ears are keen enough, one might catch the sound of something else also wished for, and this most likely in all periods and in all places, with a longing all the greater as it has hardly ever been spoken properly, neither over- nor under-accentuated: that in the afterlife not only all souls be restored but also the semblances of all bodies, each when it displayed its beauty, energy, and prowess to the fullest. Unjust it would be, after all, to slight them; something is owed to each, not least as they all represent unlikely accomplishments, insofar as the human body, amidst all the earthly forces which at best only ever refrain from destroying it, remains by itself always quite tiny and vulnerable (ein winziger gebrechlicher Menschenkörper).** Hence, in lieu of the respect the body might have been accorded during its lifetime, at least it should be restored afterwards: that is the wish whose sound one ought to listen for. And then, from the awareness of how often that respect was not given, not least by oneself on one’s own behalf, trains of thought are engendered which foment sorrow in their wake, a sentiment reverberating upon the body and inducing troubled states in it as well. Antiquity knew of this problem – met with today too, needless to say! – and so it is likely that the common resort in medicine to the notion of restoration (ἀποκατάστασις) echoed on when it became a staple of eschatology. In any event, to treat a sad and to some degree self-inflicted distemper, one authoritative prescription was mainly physical in its recommendations, ending with a plea to restore the body’s nature (φύσις) to its original state, also by a revivification or renovation (ἀνάπλασις) of the condition of its flesh (σάρξ) and the strength (ἰσχύς) of its powers (δυνάμεις).*** What was the ailment which this treatment sought to overcome? Melancholy.
* As just such an inclusive assembly was eternity conceived by more than one Father of the Church. Being an outsider, here I read between the lines of the verse, but to just this liberty everyone is frequently invited in the case of devotional works, and so too with this text in its Mozartean setting. ** As, not without some pathos of distance, Walter Benjamin termed it, first in his fugitive essay “Erfahrung und Armut,” and subsequently at least once again, when the context was set up perhaps with a bit more finesse. *** As per the proposal by Aretaeus for a cure (Περί αιτιών και σημείων οξέων παθών, bk. vii, ch. v).
Undertones of summertime sadness, when the attentive listener returns to the first constituent of the mash-up, now become more and more audible there. For, as is obvious, the shelter extended by parents over their children, that they be given the latitude to grow up into a proper independence during life’s other seasons, is an ideal often absent from the actual practice. Then the attitude that “living is easy” gets turned on its head and can become a pitfall for the unwary, while from this difficult situation, if it be recognised in time, could proceed the plaintive tunes of melancholy, whenever it cares to undertake to express itself in music. Already in Holiday’s version one’s ear begins to catch just a slight intimation of them, and this perhaps precisely when her intonations seem sweetest: in 1936 there could well have been the faint tracery of a question mark throughout the cadence by which the lyrics’ idyllic affirmations were delivered. By the late 1950s, with Fitzgerald’s performance, what had been the subtle suggestion of an irony was raised to the level of the sarcastic, the delivery still pleasing yet decidedly gritty, the appeal of it now inseparable from its biting humour. And this was just the case with the lyrics – not to mention the impromptu commentary on them that she supplied of her own accord and which makes the point as clear as daylight!
The light whose day is done and which for just this reason did elicit the requiem to its nature which is the other constituent of the mash-up – what light was it? The role seemingly played in its instrumentation by one short memorable phrase from Mozart’s last work, might suggest the beginnings of an answer, when one recalls the self-designation of the times in which he lived and worked. If an overarching question may be construed from the thoughts provoked by this composition of Richter’s, as per his own comments, it could well be, What was Enlightenment? Human beings at last casting off the shackles of tutelage they permitted themselves to be bound by – perhaps the most vital idea of the entire Age of Enlightenment – where ever did it go, especially over the course of the last twenty years? Has it truly vanished from the scene, too stunned to speak up after witnessing how many people there are who dare to think and to do nothing counter to the régimes and the security services – or is it biding its time, so long as strategic retreat remains a well-advised choice? And will proponents of the Sapere aude! ever again have hope it might be known as anything but an entry on the target and cancellation list? Then, the answers to these queries remaining in abeyance, and mindful of the turn against the Ancien Régime which the Enlightenment eventually did take, resonant throughout this instrumental music written in its honour there is not only the sorrow aroused by the dismal conditions of today, but some incipient movement towards an active opposition as well.
Even though the beneficent rapport of parents with their minor children displays the tutelary bond in its primordial form, the one whose existence is or should be the easiest of all to justify, about it too doubts are audible in the first constituent of Daft Beatles’ mash-up. When – ostensibly – this rapport’s praises are sung in Fitzgerald’s interpretation of the song, considerable reservations resound unmistakably: no longer does it come across as a locus of sweetness and light wherein the young, even when life’s adversities do press in, are defended that they may grow with dignity up into their independence. Instead, by the grit in her voice and by her intonations, as she sings the lullaby the listener may sense that tender this night is not. Here the parents are missing or have proved themselves otherwise never to be relied on, and thus the rationale of all tutelary bonds is broken, the parental home where shelter was to be found now become a crack-up. Subsequently the lesson about the vital importance of labour which would have been best conveyed by parental example during the summertime of one’s life, is not passed on, with some degree of improvidence being the likely later result: the forlorn situation of such a labourer, encountering his own φύσις over against himself as a sheer limit, is spoken of plainly when, going beyond the lyrical text, she ventures some pointed remarks of her own. “Perspiration,” as she says, and little else will be the lot of all these sad young men, whose state of dejection then is largely a response when the fruits of their labour along with its potentials, and often even their very lives, are either stolen outright from them, expropriated in some other slyer manner, or perhaps simply lost in the middle of their distress. She hardly had cause to note their unfortunate condition as being a frequent one, during this performance, nor to insist it stands in need of a decisive retort, for one does hear through her own words as recorded the sound of a sarcasm of distance akin to the sort of laughter that is sovereign – a variety which often embodies the beginning of a stronger response.
At present, when tutelage becomes a model for every relation of the state (or the formations of rule how ever one may term them) and those who are to be its subjects (or whatever else these subordinates should be called), while the rapport between parents and children is exploded from within, with the former so often now offering up the physical integrity of the latter on a novel altar, opting for their fundamental transformation by chemical and surgical procedures, evidently having accepted the absurdity that the natures of human bodies are in essence nothing but constructs – at present, the dissenting sounds of sovereign minds are amongst the first things for which one should listen, in one’s immediate vicinity and/or scattered throughout cyberspace.
Then perhaps around oneself one can begin to make an acoustic clearing within the general absurdity.
Speaking on my own behalf, as is proper, the clearing-away of absurd noise is one major piece of what I have been waiting for.
Daft Beatles’ mash-up assembling those minds in a sonic venue, is itself a significant gesture, at the present moment. Bringing forth an anthem out of their unlikely juxtaposition – it is a musical feat.
What is specifically anthemic about this mash-up, under our current conditions? Just on its own account, probably, an acuity of ear without which the mutual rightness of its two constituents could not have been heard to begin with, would support its designation as such. To anticipate a possible concord between them, an especial sensitivity was requisite, ears still young despite all acoustic temptations, or, freed of habits that had deafened it and returned towards its pristine state, an auditory power made young again. That via “On the Nature of Summertime” itself, his skills in listening can set an example for others, prompting them if need be towards the effort of renovating theirs, this active encouragement of the audience leads me to call the music an anthem.
Anthems are for retrospection, and for rallying. – Will those whose ears are new or new once more join together while there is still time?