who?
september tenth | five thirty post meridiem
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I've been fairly hermited for the last month or so, not paying attention to very much media, not searching out new music, not reading about new authors. Yesterday I started listening to NPR again on my way to and from work, listening to the rumbling build-up to the anniversary commemorations, and it seemed like they've run an inordinate amount of stories about art created in response to last fall, even for public radio. I listened to a story about a series of one act plays by various writers, to be performed by famous Hollywood and Broadway actors and directors. I listened to a story about the plan to perform Mozart's Requiem continuously in consecutive countries throughout the world. I listened to the announcer say, "And there has also been a lot of original music inspired by..." and I immediately switched the radio off. I turned it on again a few minutes later, to see if it was safe, but my ear caught the unsteady frequencies of a plucked acoustic guitar, and the short intake of breath that precedes a folky moan, and I frantically switched it off again, then thought about dunking my head in a bucket of ethyl alcohol.
If I could make just one plea regarding whatever it is that's going to happen tomorrow, it would be: please, no art. No music, no plays, no exhibitions, no readings, nothing. People like to poke fun at Adorno, and point out how wrong he was for arguing that making art after the Holocaust was barbaric, but I think we should accept the statement more for its spirit than its literal meaning. There does seem to be something offensive about taste in regard to a tragedy of this magnitude, to be asked to engage (or suspend) your critical faculties over something so superfluous, ephemeral, and luxurious overlaying something so horrific and, already, even before the mixers of colored drugs get to it, overmediated, over-represented, over-imaginable. And no wonky rhetoric about the timelessness or eternal verities of Ahht, please; during the Mozart story they played a clip of the Requiem, and -- genius piece of music that it may be -- all I could hear was the bombast, the antique tonalities, the boredom, incomprehension and sense of duty most people feel when confronted with classical music. All I could hear was creaking and plangent cultah swerving away from the reality of mass slaughtah.
If we have to play something tomorrow, let's make it Cage's 4'33". Let's have silence. The piece may have been a great joke, but it's also -- even if inadvertantly -- an extension of the moment of silence, of a space for contemplation of the dead, and it's the most subtle and affecting acknowledgment I can conceive of of the gulf between us and them. The irony of the piece, of course, is that it isn't silent: when it's "performed" there's the shifting and grumbling of the restless audience, but what originally inspired Cage to conceive it was his experience in a completely soundproof room: he expected silence, but instead could hear an everpresent low swooshing cutting currents underneath a high whining: the sounds created by his own circulatory and nervous systems, respectively. Silence is the barrier we, the living, come up against. It's an emblematic sensory threshold, and if we wanted to pay our proper respects in an unostentatious and ritual manner, we should just shut the fuck up for the day.