03 July 2006

Silence + Feldman + Beckett + Home

No new posts until July 5. I can only jot down a few personal notes today.

Our wireless network is called 'Silence', but it has little to do with Wittgenstein. When I was a sophomore I had a friend named Natanael. Four of us would play Halo religiously, and then a few of us would study Greek. I was probably the best at Halo, but I scored quite poorly in Greek. Nate's handle was Silence, and I thought it was the baddest-ass handle to have. 'You have been killed by silence.' Our wireless network is named after Nate's avatar in a video game from three years ago...

The name of this blog is not related to Wittgenstein's silence thing, either. (The epigraph under the header is a quotation from On Certainty, prop. 47.) It has rather to do with Morton Feldman, of whom I'm a great admirer. The New Yorker ran a few weeks ago a rather nice profile of the large composer. The title of the blog, then, comes from Feldman.

(I notice a similarity, right, between, say, Earth 2, Sunn 0))) and all myriad dronecore bands and Feldman's later, loooong compositions. They're both glacial-seeming and intense, but really allow for the most careful aesthetic inspection and appreciation. And the similarities between Feldman's later compositions and Wittgenstein's ontological appreciation of the world! There are nodes and wires and in my mind a nearly Pynchonesque plot going about with all this.)

But the blog's title comes only half from Feldman. It comes, really, from the libretto written for Feldman's Opera, Neither, by Samuel Beckett. A libretto written by the greatest philosophical prose writer of the 20c. for one of my favorite modern composers. (Truth be told, the former claim just amounts to 'one of my favorite modern writers'; but have you ever read the Trilogy and then thought about the phenomenological reduction? You'll realize that Beckett's characters slip into the reduction, they live their lives in it. It's funny and sad.)

From the modernworld.com, the libretto (and some backstory) for Neither. (Further, The Modern World was one of those decisive websites of my youth. Just as important as, say, allmusic. The focus has expanded, but I learned so much about my early heroes, Pynchon, Joyce, Gaddis, Borges et al. Quite a fun resource, that Modern World is.)
to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow
--
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither
--
as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once away turned from gently part again
--
beckoned back and forth and turned away
--
heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other
--
unheard footfalls only sound
--
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
--
then no sound
--
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
--
unspeakable home
It's those last three lines that really get me every time. Call me a postmodernist!, but one of the great advances in my thought has been breaking down the law of the excluded middle (lem). As DeRose points out, most postmodern insights seem trivial: This is no exception. But life rarely can be propositionalized correctly such that we have a clear-cut situation to judge whose final outcome, value, will be a or ~a (a or not-a). But the form of the answer that the proposition demands is just incorrect. It's a bullying form. Either this or that: choose now! It excludes the middle, by nature; but aren't most people living their lives in the middle?
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home
The lines remind me of a Frost poem
“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”

“Home,” he mocked gently.

“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.”

“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” [emphasis added]

What is home. It seems that, for instance, Faulkner and McCarthy, both in their darker moments really get to what home is: And it's not some place where you want to live. It's not a or not-a, because a and not-a are in some sense ideal, constructs. Living on soil is (usually) not sterile; logic is in a sense sterile. Home across the wine dark sea, epi oinopa ponton, is not the home of the Beavers (pictured at the top).

The point: That which we exclude by trying to practice logic (that it's an action--rather than an essential part of one's life--that's a huge deal; logic is implicit and necessary, not a choice) is always included in our lives.