A Beautiful Lie. But beautiful... nonetheless.

A woman trying to understand the blues from But Beautiful:

- All that hurt and pain, she said at last. But... but...
- But what?
- But beautiful. 

Geoff Dyer interview in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER
That’s a book where the joins between fact and invention really are invisible, though. There’s that moment in which Monk peels an orange and says, “Shapes.” That feels so purely characteristic it can’t possibly be made up. 

DYER
No, it’s made up, I think. The writing of that book is difficult for me to remember, except that I do recall how enjoyable it was. I look back on it now, partly because I’ve become conscious of something it lacks. I think it would be better if it ended with Albert Ayler. For whatever reason, I didn’t do that then, and lately I’ve been listening to more Ayler and thinking that I would like to write something about him. Or, more accurately, wishing I had written about him in But Beautiful, because now I’m completely incapable of it. 

INTERVIEWER
How so? 

DYER
Well, first off, the Internet has made so much stuff available that one of the things that motivated me to write that book—loved jazz, couldn’t find all the stuff I wanted to in the books that were available, so wrote one myself—no longer pertains. On YouTube you can listen to Don Cherry describing his first meeting with Ayler. It is so wonderful, one of the greatest ever accounts of one artist meeting another. Which leaves me satisfied as an interested fan and somewhat redundant as a writer. Also, I just don’t have the confidence now that I did back then to write about African Americans. Relatedly, I’m too discerning now to tolerate some of the excesses that were a product and cause of that confidence. So I know where that writing came from, but I couldn’t do it now. It’s one of the things that makes the writing life interesting over the long term—what comes and what goes.

"In the West... you reach this level of playing for money, you know? But there's a few people that play for the love of God. And as a reflection from God. And Albert Ayler was one of these people." 

- Don Cherry on Albert Ayler

Ayler's interpretation of Summertime is remarkable. It's idiosyncrasy, it's insistence on the violence of translation, the blood on the floor that is interpretation. Chang Tzu's butcher slipping his blade effortlessly inside the spaces between the bones, dancing with the carcass of an ox that falls away entirely separated, a harmonic equation of blood, bone and flesh. Could Gershwin have ever imagined Ayler?

The poet Ted Joans likened the impact of this trio to hearing someone scream the word ‘fuck’ on Easter Sunday in St Patrick’s Cathedral.  

- The Penguin Jazz Guide by Brian Morton, Richard Cook

When Coltrane died, Ayler, whom Coltrane acknowledged as a profound influence, was asked to play the funeral. By all accounts, it was an intensely spiritual event, fitting for Coltrane as a man and a musician. Ayler opened with "Love Cry, Truth Is Marching In, Our Prayer" and Ornette Coleman closed with "Holiday For A Graveyard". Ayler's sax in particular becomes the voice of a Rilkean angel: simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. There is something of the Eschaton in Ayler's and Coleman's performances. Even poorly recorded, the music reverberates in a cul de sac, trapped in the apse of the Western musical cathedral, notes not so much fading as collapsing inwardly under the pressure of inadequacy into the absolute silence of the crypt. This is the haunting question: when is even music inadequate to task of surrounding human experience with meaning? Because here at John Coltrane's funeral, music a whole, always transcendent, verges on inadequacy, dissolving under the sense of an Ultimate Tragic realization : human being is not merely irrelevant to the gods, it is an unwelcome presence. The pressure of this active negation - call it malign fate or doom - is what resists the expected outward expansion of the music into the transcendent and pierces into the listener on the most primal ontological level. It is harrowing and unbearable.

In Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot has Becket state:

“When the figure of God’s purpose is made complete.
You shall forget these things, toiling in the household,
You shall remember them, droning by the fire,
When age and forgetfulness sweeten memory
Only like a dream that has often been told
And often been changed in the telling. They will seem unreal.
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

In other words, we live an unreal lie of the mind, in a state of active forgetting, unable to endure the brutal tragedy of the real. Nietzsche, in 1888, a year before his mind was lost, wrote in a letter:

Music … frees me from myself, it sobers me up from myself, as though I survey the scene from a great distance … It is very strange. It is as though I had bathed in some natural element. Life without music is simply an error, exhausting, an exile.

My belief is that in this god-vacated, god-absented, god-haunted world, music is losing its liberating and sobering power to "sweeten memory". Nietzsche's musical bath is polluted and no longer purifying. And life is becoming an undeniable error, an unrecoverable exhaustion and an irrevocable exile.

Edward Dahlberg in Can These Bones Live? is prescient and hopeful:

There are no abstract truths - no Mass Man, no proletariat. There is only Man. When the Pulse has been nailed upon the crossbeams, lo, Reason gives up its viable breath and becomes a wandering ghostly Error. Truth and folly are ever about to expire, so that we, like our beloved Sancho Panza, kneeling at the deathbed of Don Quixote, must always be ready to receive the holy communion of cudgels and distaffs for the rebirth of the Pulse.

Not only Reason, but Hope itself is the "wandering ghostly Error" haunting our language. For what is it when our subjunctive wishful could/would future hourly is overwhelmed by the ever-rising blood-dimmed flood that drowns every single ceremony of innocence? (Yeats) The word "Hope" has followed the recently deceased "God" into becoming an artifact of language, like "sunset" and "sunrise" and "sense of humor" and "heartache" - all disconnected fragments of bygone systems of belief. I am becoming resistant to it's use. Language and music both are increasingly emptied for me.

But not entirely. I am not so numb and dumb to the presence of meaning in my life and world. However, what I am becoming increasingly aware of is how terrible this meaning is. I once was amused by the Judaic joke: "What man calls thinking, God call laughter." Now, not so much. The sublime ridiculous is the everyday mode. Paranoia is the healthiest state of mind. The punch-line is always ready to pounce. Beauty, Truth and Justice are the usual suspects. Lesser animals, more marketable beasts such as Happiness, Pleasure and Entertainment are transient distractions: the angler-fish's glowing lure. And the Pretty and Sweet and Lovely are the over-painted whores whispering mindless temptations in my ear. There is meaning. But it is an alien, strange and monstrous creature. If we were able to endure even a syllable of its language, I believe it might sound something like Albert Ayler.

- All that hurt and pain, she said at last. But... but...
- But what?
- But beautiful. 

A Beautiful Lie. But beautiful... nonetheless.

Doomsday Clock: It Is Six Minutes to Midnight

[ source ]

NEW YORK CITY - January 14, 2010 - Citing a more "hopeful state of world affairs" in relation to the twin threats posed by nuclear weapons and climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) is moving the minute hand of its famous Doomsday Clock one minute away from midnight. It is now 6 minutes to midnight. The decision by the BAS Science and Security Board was made in consultation with the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors, which includes 19 Nobel Laureates.

BAS announced the Clock change today at a news conference in New York City broadcast live at http://www.TurnBackTheClock.org for viewing around the globe. The new BAS Web platform allows people in all nations to monitor and get involved in efforts to move the Doomsday Clock farther away from midnight.

In a statement supporting the decision to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock, the BAS Board said: "It is 6 minutes to midnight. We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons. For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable. These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization--the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change."

Created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock has been adjusted only 18 times prior to today, most recently in January 2007 and February 2002 after the events of 9/11. By moving the hand of the Clock away from midnight--the figurative end of civilization--the BAS Board of Directors is drawing attention to encouraging signs of progress. At the same time, the small increment of the change reflects both the threats that remain around the globe and the danger that governments may fail to deliver on pledged actions on reducing nuclear weapons and mitigating climate change.

          - From The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

[ source ]

 

Allegories of the Eschaton: The Eye of the Whale

While searching for allegories of the eschaton, I came across an image that just nailed me to the beam, something from an intensely personal dream, a necessary nightmare, a presagement of awakening (entrance via Stalker):

A man looking into the eye of a whale.
Fugues of resonance in this.
Ishmael the Outcast,
Dreaming on his coffin.
Ahab crucified in the depths,
Jonah 1:17 and Ezekiel 8.

It is an image from the film Werckmeister Harmonies, directed by Béla Tarr. I had never heard of either the film or the director. Here are a few comments from a BBC critic:

Based on the novel "The Melancholy of Resistance" by Tarr's frequent collaborator László Krasznahorkai, "Werckmeister Harmonies" unfolds in an unnamed provincial Hungarian town, gripped by a sense of crisis.

Despite the freezing conditions, disgruntled crowds of men have gathered in the central square to witness a travelling circus, whose attractions include a giant stuffed whale and a promised public appearance from the mysterious "Prince".

Named after 17th century musical theorist-composer Andreas Harmóniák, it's a work whose meanings are almost impossible to pin down.

And this from MovieMartyr.com:

When János returns to the Square, he finds a veritable cult has gathered around the attraction. After sneaking into the truck where the whale is stored, he overhears a disturbing tirade from The Prince. “What they build and what they will build is illusion and lies. What they think and what they will think is ridiculous,” he says in his mechanical voice. He continues, saying that he likes things that fall apart, seeing “construction in the ruins.”

And from the Guardian Observer:

The Hungarian director Bela Tarr goes beyond surreal, beyond miserablist, beyond anything I have ever seen with this quite bizarre, dream-like film in monochrome: an apocalyptic vision of - well, what?

A young man in a desolate Hungarian town is devoted to his elderly uncle, a musicologist working on a revisionist theory of the music of the spheres. Some kind of circus arrives, the kind of circus at which no one is expected to have a good time. It consists of a single corrugated-iron pantechnicon containing a dead whale. The presence of this, and someone called the Prince, incites the populace to a strange, somnambulist uprising.

If genius is close to madness, then Tarr's genius - because genius has to be what it is - is closer to autism, a kind of untrained savant touch for compelling imagery. Famously unschooled in European cinema, he has developed his own vernacular language of movie-making.

He is a master of the long, long take: mostly compelling but sometimes just outrageously weird. He has a close-up of the young man and his uncle wordlessly walking down a street which goes on for minute after minute. God only knows why.

Who to compare him to? David Lynch? Tod Browning? You've got me. This will be a tough watch for many: an uncompromisingly difficult and severe experience. But I found it unique, mesmeric and sublime.

Absolutely fascinated, I now wonder: should I see the film at all? In the last couple of hours of reading about it and looking at the few stills I could find online, the film in my mind has attained its own sort of poetry and mysticism. There is no fear of disappointment here. It is more in the sense of Chimage: I do not want to forget the film that I imagine Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies to be.

How many books and films have you heard about all your life and never experienced, but know - in a deep sense of the phrase - by heart? I wander constantly through the Library of Unread Books and sit with patient meditation in the Theater of Unseen Films.

In the end, I know that I will not be able to esccape the Eye of the Whale, that there will be no choice: under the pressure of certain sign and portent, so much of the future is already irrevocable. But here, just for a moment, it is all so beautiful with possibility....

From the John Huston film, Moby Dick.

Addendum: From Waiting for the Prince: An Interview with Bela Tarr on the Senses of Cinema site:

BT: You know how it happens, when we started we had a big social responsibility which I think still exists now. And back then I thought "Okay, we have some social problems in this political system - maybe we'll just deal with the social question." And afterwards when we made a second movie and a third we knew better that there are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos. And there's the reason. You know how we open out step by step, film by film. It's very difficult to speak about the metaphysical and that. No. It's just always listening to life. And we are thinking about what is happening around us.

FD & MLC: What do you think this shit is that's coming from the cosmos?

BT: I just think about the quality of human life and when I say 'shit' I think I'm very close to it.

FD & MLC: But in terms of the cosmos, how does that fit in? If man is responsible for the shit, how does the cosmos come into it?

BT: Everything is much bigger than us. I think the human is just a little part of the cosmos.

FD & MLC: If there's evil going on, do you think it comes from elsewhere? From outside the human sphere?

BT: No. I think human responsibility is great, enormous. Maybe the biggest factor. You know, I don't believe in God. This is my problem. If I think about God, okay, he has a responsibility for the whole thing, but I don't know. You know, if you listen to any Mass, it looks like two dogs when they are starting to fight. And always, I just try to think about what is happening now.

FD & MLC: So the main character in the film who's saying "God created a beautiful thing in this whale", whose view is that?

BT: No, he believes.

FD & MLC: Believes in God?

BT: No. He believes this is a big thing, bigger than humanity. And in this case he says "Maybe." Maybe God still exists, that's all. He just says everything is wonderful. God creates this big whale.