Bobby Parker's 'Ghost Town Music' reviewed

Bobby Parker

Ghost Town Music

The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2011, £7

9781907812446

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It is impossible not to connect Bobby Parker’s debut with the poetry of Charles Bukowski. The apprehension about doing so stems from the negative connotations inevitably brought forth by such a comparison – dreggy bedsit scribble, easy cheap indulgence, soggy English American affectation. It is both a shame and a testament to the singular Bukowski that his influence has become so ubiquitous; likewise, it is a testament to Parker that his incorporation of Bukowski poetics is for the most part transgressive and not derivative, even incidental at times. His project has the strange quality of both extreme affect and lack of artifice – a staged lack of poeticity that somehow comes across as authenticity.

Ghost Town Music is more notebook than collection, featuring a comic strip, photography, reproduced handwritten scraps and typewritten pages. Again, these come across as entirely natural, expected, a kind of vital ambience for the poems themselves. And it is the poems themselves that are most worthy of discussion. Therein, however, lies the problem. Quoting from any of the individual poems as representative exemplars of Parker’s shtick would inadvertently undermine the way GTM functions as a whole. There is an absence of metaphorical language throughout – one poem even featuring a deleted section: “(THE EDITOR THOUGHT THAT THIS LINE WAS TOO / LYRICAL TO BE INCLUDED IN THE COLLECTION)” – and a plethora of unabashedly crude rememberings of high, horny and broke adolescence. Situated together in a nonlinear progression of scrawled reminiscence, which is charmingly human and naked, the pieces blur together into a never-pitifully-melancholy shard of growing up, and while on their own there is nothing particularly exciting or interesting about the language the poems utilise, as a speedily read mass they insinuate their – how to put this? – genuineness into the reader.

For example:

In the time between

getting the sack

from one job in a factory

and walking into town

to the recruitment agency

for another job in a factory

I marvelled at

the way the sun

made people on the street

seem happy to be alive.

That is one poem (most are untitled and the book is unpaginated) in full. And in a sense, it’s not very good. If I were to read it on its own I would dismiss it as Bukowski-aping affect. It is hackneyed, and the marvelling at the people in sun is crudely functional. And yet as part of a collection read chronologically it, along with the other parts, coalesces into a believable authentic speaking self documenting an existence that is very much undocumented – as far as I can see – in the young contemporary poetry scene: a poetry about a particular kind of existence and formative surroundings free from mainstream stylisation, not locked into Movement-dogged bogstandard English plainspokenness. It is the fact that these poems read like they could not have been written any other way that gives them their aura of authenticity, of genuineness, despite the obvious affectation.

The fragments of introspection are what work best for me, when Parker is less concerned with portraying a lifestyle than expressing personal feeling. ‘Little Bean’ is, as Luke Kennard has noted, quite simply heartbreaking and I wouldn’t want to taint it by speaking of it further. But also affecting are the fragments like this one, appearing sporadically, little notes to self made public:

If I want sun

I close my eyes under a lightbulb

If I want sea

I close my eyes and listen

To the toilet flush...

Parker’s poetry in this collection, wilfully messy and semi-edited as it may or may not be, is a becoming. There is a humanity that presses against the words and helps give them their force, and as the poems ransack childhood and early adulthood for purpose, so their quality as poetry seems to be writing towards itself. It is a journey towards something enacted in the process of the poems together and the implication of what the poet is working towards as poet, and I think it will be a journey worth joining. 

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By Joshua Jones.

Some Reviews

Jonty Tiplady

Zam Bonk Dip

Salt Publishing, 2009

reviewed by Andy Spragg

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Choosing to engage with excess has long stood as a hallmark of a kind of poetry that tends to be labelled – sometimes pejoratively – as 'experimental'. As poetic strategy it is often embedded within a particular slipstream of theory; an acknowledgement that the poem's frame is one that inevitably works to exclude a variety of dialogues in favour of developing some form of narrative or epiphany-driven coherence. At its worse this exclusion creates a totality anchored in the tediously domestic, a sort of complicit agreement between reader and writer that asserts an absence of linguistic or thematic challenge. If such an approach defines itself by its ability to disregard the incongruities that hover beneath the surface of language then Jonty Tiplady's book forms its refreshing antithesis. He is all about excess, both linguistically and thematically. As a poet he evokes JH Prynne's 'Nearly too much / is, well, nowhere near enough' from Down Where Changed, an desire to engage with such a vast and eclectic range of stimuli that the poem's frame strains to contain it all.

Zam Bonk Dip collects together a number of Tiplady's chapbooks, and serves as an excellent showcase of his distinctive approach. The writing is defined by a technique that manages to be doggedly consistent without losing its innately compelling edge, a style that takes its cues from the saturated language of both the media and the internet. It's playful, funny and highlights the hyper-speed tenacity with which our vocabulary currently evolves. This is no more apparent than in the third section of the title poem, where Tiplady exclaims '{...}anoint the/blobject beckoning on the Olympic Stadium.' ('Zam Bonk Dip') He could well have pulled the whole thing out of a Guardian article on Stratford's latest folly, or from a comment posted under a Youtube clip, or found it amongst the quagmire of writing that populates blogspot – he may well invented it himself – and in that fact lies the most engaging aspect of Tiplady's work. It is full of such moments, and yet it manages to be tender as well: 'It's always time to sing again/careless soul.' ('Zam Bonk Dip') Here's Whitman's contained multitudes, albeit shot through with a twitter-feed attention span.

Tiplady is not the first of his contemporaries to make gestures towards an inclusive meshing together of high and low culture by any means. In fact, case could be made that it is an overly familiar strategy, even amongst the more 'mainstream' poets of the day. Luke Kennard (with whom Tiplady shares Salt as publisher) demonstrated an ambitious scope in source material throughout The Harbour Beyond the Movie, however his usage conceded to a certain authorial flourish, a sense of the writer signposting his own reading list. With Tiplady it feels like a natural extension of the language, the mode of expression itself, rather than a contrivance or device.

Another thing that distingushes Tiplady is his comparative fearlessness when it comes to the 'low' culture component in his writing. It's hard to imagine Kennard writing, 'I met this girl the other day, she had a nice ass. I wanted to tit-fuck that ass.' ('Dear World And Everyone In It') Taking such a line out of context is unfair as it strips away that which frames it; it does, however, highlight the intrinsic value judgements that usually deflate a poet's decision to engage with excess, that they tend to be guided by an unconscious aesthetic conservatism. For Tiplady no such reservation exists, or if it does then it plays out beneath the surface; his usage of such difficult concepts draws attention to the dialogues that infiltrate deep into culture. There is a curious double logic at play. Internet pornography's popularity embeds certain linguistic codes into the cultural strata, regardless of where the individual may stand morally; likewise when Tiplady exclaims 'LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE' ('OOV'), it is impossible to not know who he is referring to. There is an affirmation (a word that Tiplady charges with particular significance in 'Dear World and Everyone in it'): here are the dialogues, now what shall we do with them?

For all its heteroglossic intensity, Tiplady's work manages to describe patterns of love and human relationships in a novel and emotionally striking way. The poems that demonstrate real success are the ones that manage to contain elements of genuine tenderness in the narrative voice; no mean feat when you consider some of the aggressively chauvinistic language Tiplady's chosen to incorporate. Lines such as, 'and I love you, through to/pieces of heaven{...} give me my conker back' ('Manic Milk') are demonstrative of Tiplady's desire to communicate something of love, something of communication itself, through his fractal language games. It's the striking tension between these two that sustains Zam Bonk Dip throughout, a want for clarity amongst an excess of signification. Tiplady's success lies in his ability to make this a compelling exercise; one that acknowledges its own inevitable failure, but is no worse a read for it.

Sandra Tappenden

Speed
Salt Publishing, 2007
reviewed by Joshua Jones

1.

Sandra Tappenden’s second collection is a wilfully idiosyncratic, forcefully contemporary and strangely confessional work of fractured lyric and prose poetry, riddled with absurdism and wreathed in irony. It is for all of these reasons that it, initially, is a compelling read, but upon closer inspection reveals itself to ultimately be lacking in force. While she has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of striking imagery, her phrasing is always cocooned in a rather banal safety net of irony, and while she is evidently aware of the difficulties of using language, particularly in light of the philosophy of the 20th Century and poetry since the Language movement, she seems content to merely present an awareness of this, an acknowledgment of its difficulty{1}, the – “constantly uncapturable” (5) – before retreating from the danger of meaning into the supposed prevention of criticism that is blank irony; or, more irritatingly, into Bridget Jones-esque domestic singledom. In ‘Blame’, following on from the above quotation:

Tenuous moral concepts depend upon

where anyone stands. It’s easier

to lay down, groovy-single,

playing the same track

over and over.

True. But surely the role of poetry is to resist the easy option? Of course, the poem from which this is taken can also be read as ‘giving in’ ironically – earlier in it the speaker makes reference to her “compromised heart”. But where does that get us? For a collection entitled Speed, Tappenden really is often a quite lazy writer, happy to rehash postmodern poetics, sprinkle in a bit of self-conscious idiosyncrasy” (“I’ve found it helps to carry an egg in pocket” [1]) and trite, ironised confessionalism, and voila, we have a book of poems happy to sit there not really doing anything much other than chasing circles around itself.

Which is not to say the book is without merit. On the contrary – her imagery at the very least creates the illusion of singing with movement and vitality. So why not apply the same exuberance to content? In a characteristic line, again from ‘Blame’:

Naivete is forgivable when both parties

are unaware they’re innocent.

2.

The story now has gaps where once I knew all the lyrics.

[...]

There are clues here in a lyric full of holes.

(‘St Swithin’s Day’, p. 16)

In a long sequence – ‘Matthew Arnold Refuses To Exit the Building’ – Tappenden somehow manages to create what I can only describe as a pastiche of pastiche{2} . The second in the sequence (‘To behave repeatedly like an idiot does not mean I am an idiot’):

All I can think to say is that if I had a hammer

there’d be one less cat in the world or I’m sorry

I seem to have confused you with my dad.

But it’s not really a shop, it’s a mist-ridden 7 a.m.

Sunday boot fayre where you rush up in red or dead

hangover shades with a fiver for a something lovely.

It takes moments to realise crucial pieces are missing

but hey you say it’s all part of a long game

a bit like bridge or that other one called crevasse.

(25)

To which all I can muster is a yawn. Throughout the sequence, cats and arrows and other deliberately blank signifiers appear, their sole purpose being to relate with one another to produce the implication of a possible meaning, one that clearly isn’t there; but even this isn’t done with a purpose, with a political or philosophical aim the way the Language poets consistently did. Instead it is simply being ironic for the sake of being ironic, behaving like an idiot for the sake of behaving like an idiot. This is a poetry which seems terrified of even the possibility of having to engage with anything beyond banality and pointless circularity. More than that, she seems to actively have little faith in her own medium. References to poets and poetry abound:

Where does anyone live nowadays?

Certainty is a product like anything else

and poets are not much use are they

I often think I overhear someone say.

(‘People who are drawn to take free stress tests’, 42)

If I tell you the sunset is salmon topped with grey...

[a long breathless assault of imagery follows which is actually pretty decent]{3}

call me a liar will you

(‘Mastery’, 4)

I should like to be rigorous without seeming pedantic.

I should like to drink the Indian and the Atlantic.

I should hope. I do, but I’m howyousay? compromised, so.

(‘There must be something in the water’, 55)

Once upon a time being a poet meant more

(‘The unexamined life is not worth living’, 65)

And so on.

Tappenden knows how to write appealing, infectious, bouncy, exuberant images and how to play with enjambment and to deadpan &c&c. The problem is her poetry takes failure as failure, and despite all its energy it seems to me it has little faith in the concept of movement{4}. I’d recommend not bothering with this collection. Kennard’s nailed contemporary absurdist, ironic and distinctly English poetry that is actually doing something and believes in itself; Speed, on the other hand, is fluff.

Notes

1.  "to state the difficulty, to state the difficulty of stating, is not yet to surmount it – quite the contrary" - Jacques Derrida

2. I picture Fredric Jameson hitting himself over the head with his own book.

3. The parenthesis is, in case it’s not apparent, mine. (I also happen to think it would, if developed, make a far superior poem to the one that is actually there. But hey, that’s just me, right?)

4. For a nice summary of what I mean by movement see Neil Williams’ essay here. It is of particular interest in its situating its discussion of movement in Plato’s philosophy, which serves to reinforce and further explicate notions of movement familiar to readers of Heidegger and Derrida.
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Jim Goar - Seoul Bus Poems and David Gewanter - The Sleep of Reason
by Rovert Van Egghen


Urgh, I thought, when presented with Seoul Bus Poems by Jim Goar. A collection of poems, most of which, according to the blurb, “began on a bus, [one] began in Bangkok, and others in rooms in rooms between Yonsei University and Bongwon-sa”. No doubt there will be a lot of gap yah anecdotes and half-baked political pieties in a bubble-wrap of self-righteousness. Fortunately, proving that old adage about books and covers true, I was wrong, very, very wrong.

Seoul Bus Poems is a subtle collection, and indeed at first reading it can seem rather flat and uninspiring. Opening with “I don’t want to write / about leaves. The change in / seasons. my love”, almost begs the response of well, good for you. It also does not help that Seoul Bus Poems contains some absolute clunkers: my favourite being “Just do me a favour, my suicidal rose / And get of the ledge / You’ll kill the dirt if you fall”. Emo angst has never been done so well. Yet it would be too easy to dismiss Goar’s collection as the kind of poetry the ‘experimental’ kid reads at your local Open Mic.

The key to appreciating Seoul Bus Poems instead lies in appreciating the sounds of the words on the page, the dances with language which Goar undertakes. Lines like “breaking little rakes akimbo” and “blocks of western migration / lemon rubbed teeth of cicadas” roll around the tongue, and sound fantastic when read aloud. What Goar is doing then is creating a sensation of sound, a Cageian clangour of percussion in a most wonderful impression of the noise of a bustling Seoul. What does “lemon rubbed teeth of cicadas” mean? Who cares? What matters is how it sounds, the way the sound of a city rises from Goar’s words.

These poems appear then like little sketches of an environment, fleetingly viewed from a bus window as the landscape passes by, already gone before it can be comprehended. It is this transparency which gives Goar’s poem their curious lightness, There is a fluid lucidity to them, as images are revealed with all the vividness of rememberance. Witness:

        Opera of Korea

             fish in the store     window


                red lights

                    and around      more

                        red lights

Simultaneously a capturing of the fish viewed, the baffling uniformity of a city at night, and the sense of journeying through a city at night, Goar is able to create a challenging urban perspective through his masterful formatting and economy with words.

Goar’s collection then is one which promises little but delivers lots. Its loose fluidity means Seoul Bus Poems is unlikely to stay in the mind days after reading, but it does provide food for thought, evoking a landscape which is slipping away as it is being seen. It is, as Goar puts it, “a map under glass remembering”.

If only the same could be said for David Gewanter’s The Sleep of Reason. Again proving that old adage, The Sleep of Reason sounds great, promising “alternately delightful and startling poems” where “allegory comes alive” and “Gewanter’s delicate musicality and keen sense of humour sparkle”. Instead the only sound to come out of the collection is one big cumulative yawn. By the end of the collection, I felt like a cheerleader who had snagged a date with the star quarterback, only to find out he cried when we made love.

Not to say that our star quarterback does not have some good qualities; his hair is nice. And the concepts behind a lot of Gewanter’s poems are promising. ‘Gag’ is about a comedian who eviscerates his family for laughs, which could, indeed should, be fantastic but Gewanter does not so much press the moral of the poem as slam it in our faces, ending with “Should we call it art / just because real people / get hurt”.

This also occurs with the last poem in the collection 'Hocus Pocus' which begins with a quote from Mariah Carey. However, apparently Mariah is not enough name-dropping, as soon Cassius Clay, Adam Ant, Mr Graham and, inevitably, Oscar Wilde appear - none of them adding anything to the poem, other than giving it an air of burlesque comedy which jars with Gewanter’s moral about mortality and “the Angel / hustles back to the girl’s bed”.

The poems in the collection which are more focused, such as 'Cobbler’s Children and Divorce' and 'Mr. Circe', work better as instead of seeking to entertain, confuse and lecture us all at the same time, Gewanter demonstrates an effective tone. However, there is something flat about much of Gewanter’s writing - a lack of energy which means that what might be “an offbeat satire for an off-kilter age” is actually bloody boring.

Gewanter seems to possess neither an ear for the musicality of language, nor a mastery of form. Most of the poems in this collection take a vague free verse form, and on the rare occasion that there is a bit of variety, One-Page Novel for example, it seems tacked on and redundant.

The Sleep of Reason then is a disappointing collection. It sounded brilliant on the blurb. A poem about 100 rabbits with herpes?! Bet that’s brilliant, funny, quirky and off-beat. Well it’s not, not even a little bit.



Notes #1 -- Derrida's Writing and Difference in-the-world

Unveiling Deconstruction, and Working-Towards

It is evident from the beginning of Writing and Difference that the misinterpretations of Derrida’s work that still absurdly and doggedly remain in place, framed by the frankly moronic utterances of certain “philosophers, as well as literary critics” who believe it conveys the notion that “just anything is possible”, that Derridean philosophy is “a license for arbitrary freeplay in flagrant disregard of all established rules of...the interpretative communities”[1] are founded on nothing but misreading, wilful or not. As Derrida himself has clearly stated, “A written sign, in the usual sense of the word, is a mark which remains...in a given context” [my italics][2] – context, not text, as many have claimed, including Derrida’s former teacher, Michel Foucault, who, frustrated by the flaws he perceived in Derrida’s essay ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ in relation to his (Foucault’s) own work, reinforced this misconception, dismissing deconstruction as a “historically well-determined little pedagogy...which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text”[3]. Not only is this a patent fallacy, as the short reading of it I will offer should show, one that is exposed as so by even the most cursory close reading, but Derrida himself contradicts many of the accusations which have been flung his way in the first essay of the collection. After arguing that “to dream of reducing it [in this case structuralism, but essentially anything that can be read as a ‘text’] to a sign of the times is to dream of violence”[4], he writes:

By keeping to the legitimate intention of protecting the internal truth and meaning of the work from historicism, biographism or psychologism...one risks losing any attentiveness to the internal historicity of the work itself, in its relationship to a subjective origin that is not simply psychological or mental...one risks overlooking another history, more difficult to conceive: the history of the meaning of the work itself, its operation. (WD, 15) 

This is not stating that the only way of reading a text is by reading the text, ignoring its historical context; it is opening up the deconstruction of the absolutism of a historicist (or any ideological) approach to interpretation. Simply, history (or whichever discourse from which one works) is discourse, not fact. It is text, and subject to the same rules as any other text. His philosophy is not anti-history, it is against the blind assumption of a priori truth. Evidence for this appears throughout Writing and Difference, not least in the essay Foucault took offence to, in which it is explicitly stated that one can never escape historicity – “one can protest it [the logocentric view of history and Reason] only from within it”(WD, 42).

The early essays in the collection situate Derrida’s thought very much within historical discourse, I would say irrefutably so, before shifting their attention towards a deconstructive approach to reading and meaning. Also from the above quoted essay: “Philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness”(WD, 72). Madness, in Writing and Difference, stands for what a logocentric system, transdiscourse, has refused to confront “by virtue of the historical enunciation” through which’s absolutist lens “philosophy tranquilises itself and excludes madness [and] also betrays itself...enters into a crisis and a forgetting of itself that are an essential and necessary period of its movement”. Derrida’s philosophy refuses to tranquilise itself, refuses to be put off by the “other light” of ‘madness’, from a logocentric viewpoint seemingly “black and hardly natural”; it (in both senses of the word) admits play, deferral (differance) and shows it to be the truest position from which to think, to be: “I philosophise only in terror, but in the confessed terror of going mad”(WD, 75-6).

The key essay is, of course, the much-anthologised ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in which, via a masterful reading of Levi-Strauss, Derrida outlines the ‘two interpretations of interpretation’:

1) The first interpretation seeks to decipher, “dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile”(WD, 369).

2) The other disregards the notion of true origin, “affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism”, man being he who “has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of play”(WD, 370).

Why the need for to look at interpretation rather than simply interpreting? Because, much as pre-Heidegger the notion of Being was always simply assumed, and “the question of the meaning of Being” was held “to be superfluous”[5] due to the assumed obviousness of the ‘answer’, interpretation and the act of reading, what it is to derive meaning from a system of signs, has been “neutralised or reduced” by its being given “a centre or [by] referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin” – “to orient, balance and organise”. All of which served to limit the “play of the structure”, gave it a “total form”(WD, 352) . Derrida deconstructs this idea, drawing on the “Nietzschean critique of metaphysics [and] concepts of Being and truth”, the “Freudian critique of self-presence” and the “Heideggerian destruction [destructuring] of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of Being as presence”(WD, 354), to expose the centre as a myth, to decentre it, as this centre was never “anything which had somehow existed before it” was defined as the centre: merely a “process of signification which orders the displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence”, “not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play” – no longer can we think of it as a “present being”(WD, 353-4) . Because in language there is no transcendental signified, because language is a system of differences and binaries, deconstruction works so effortlessly: “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” [my italics][WD, 358]. Thus, the two interpretations of interpretation.

It is worth looking more closely at the two interpretations, for they are very much key to understanding what Derrida’s work is doing throughout his career. The first interpretation aims to “question systematically and rigorously the history” of discourse, to concern itself with “the founding concepts of the entire history of philosophy” – “probably the most daring way of making a step outside of philosophy” – which is “much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined” and tends to result in being “swallowed up in metaphysics” never actually “disengaging from it”(WD, 358-9) .

The second interpretation, which, beneficially, may “avoid the possibly sterilising effects of the first one” involves accepting the need but inadequacy of the discourses we have, conserving them while “here and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools which can still be used.” We remove from them their “truth value” and are ready to “abandon them” should “other instruments appear more useful” – this “is how the language of the social sciences criticises itself”.

Of course, Derrida never sets this up as an absolutist binary – “there is no question of any choosing” between the two interpretations. Instead, ideally for Derrida and, in my opinion, for all discourse, one accepts the enlightened pragmatism of the second interpretation as a kind of default position (while obviously not ceasing to question and deconstruct said position) while working towards and believing in the first, difficulty or even impossibility aside. This is deconstruction – not a systematic negation, wanton nihilism, but a truth-seeking tool; not an end in itself, nor anything in itself, but a way of seeing as clearly as one can see from an essentially postlapsarian state.

So far, so explicatory. I am not interested in merely pointing out what Derrida is doing; it’s been done before, far better than I could hope to. What I am interested in is using deconstruction authentically, in both the Heideggerian sense of the term and in relation to the context (i.e. Derrida’s philosophy) from which I’ve taken it, and there is one very small part of Writing and Difference that offers the beginning of a framework towards doing this. It is a very simple statement from early in the book relating to the ‘silence of madness’, the neglected state otherness – the unknowableness of the ‘essence’ of things outside of language, away from their names – was, and still is, consigned to by an essentially logocentric society:

to state the difficulty, to state the difficulty of stating, is not yet to surmount it – quite the contrary. (WD, 44) 

It is not enough, especially now, to merely point out that there is no absolute, no transcendental signified, no way of accessing ‘essence’, the pre-sign; now we must do something towards it, we must move forwards, we must approach the borders, the “walls which all discourse runs up against”[6], and not simply stop. We must bang our fists against them and swell in the sound, and look for the flakes that may or may not crumble from it. This is what I want to begin to work towards in my dissertation, and what I will work towards in my life, be it academically or otherwise. It is this exhausted, damaging logocentric and essentially capitalistic prohibition of ‘madness’, of otherness, of whatever word you want to give it, that is the reason for the pitiful state of our society, or at least for our education system, which, improved, would stand a chance at actually making a difference in changing our society for the better. For opening up learning, and allowing it to be for its own sake, not simply as preparation for a job. Not simply because that’s just what you do: school, exams, gap year posing with little black children (photos taken on a camera the money you paid for which could probably, for a short while at least, radically improve their lives), university and light alcoholism, job marriage kids. Again, this isn’t a novel proposal, is barely different, as far as I’m aware, from what Derrida and Foucault and many others have been arguing for years. But I consider it important, valid and valuable in that it’s an area that is neglected by universities at an undergrad level. Surely we should be better teaching students to think for themselves, and exposing them to the work that can enable them to do so, that can provide them with the necessary tools. I would like to be a part of working towards this.

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Notes

1. Rodolphe Gasché, "Infrastructures and Systematicity," in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 3-4

2. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 317

3. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 573

4. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Oxon: Routledge, 2008), p. 2

5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, J. Glenn Gray and David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 8

6. George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (London: Phoenix, 1998) p. 64

One Essay - Joshua Jones

Building an Argument Towards Being: Dwelling in and on music


In ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’[1], Martin Heidegger formulated a model of Being around the interconnectedness of ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’. Simply put, “Building is really dwelling” and “Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth”[PLT, 146]. Building and dwelling are not separate activities: “to build is in itself already to dwell”[145]. He sources this theory through situating his meaning of the word bauen, to build, in the Old High German word for ‘building’, buan, which primarily means ‘to dwell’, and signifies ‘to remain, to stay in place’ . From this he traces the “original meaning” up to contemporary German: “ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be”. Bin belongs to the old version of bauen; thus, “ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling” . John Burnside, in The Asylum Dance[2], draws heavily on this concept: the idea that mortals “must ever learn to dwell”, that we are perennially homeless and that this homelessness is our home, a continual searching for and deferral of “the essence of dwelling”[PLT, 160-1]. Burnside incorporates this idea at and as the collection’s core, creating a poetry that is continually moving, continually finding and losing ground in time and place, seeing and letting the seen dissolve, documenting the yearning for “anything/we can use to make a dwelling in this world”[AD, 8]. The motion of deferral is the only stasis, and it is only in this never completed ‘building’ that we can truly dwell, can truly be. But how does this relate to music, and, more specifically, how does this relate to the music I would like to discuss in this essay? By looking at a selection of songs, as well as work by Roland Barthes, all the while bearing in mind the shared ontological stance of Heidegger and Burnside, I would like to show their interrelatedness; how, despite using different language (or no language at all), they are all, so to speak, playing in the same key, and when considered together coalesce into what is, for me (for what else, ultimately, is music, but for me?), an acceptably complete aesthetic-ontological approach to experiencing music.

Of all the Sunset Rubdown (Spencer Krug) songs, ‘Coming to at Dawn’ features the least instrumentation. It consists solely of Krug’s vocals and piano, the two interweaving each other’s minutely varied melodies. It is precisely this minimalism that makes the song interesting to look at here. Krug is the kind of songwriter whose lyrics matter very much in terms of appreciating the music as a whole, and despite the disparity between performance and page, the poeticity of his writing is evident even on paper. Nonetheless, it is his delivery that fuels the song, and it is the way the voice wraps around the words alongside the piano’s chords and arpeggios that renders ‘Coming to at Dawn’ important. The song conveys the sense of having compressed words and music down to their most naked form, their most bodily, which is reinforced by its lack of production. There is a tone of intimacy, of confession – not ‘confessional’ in an autobiographical sense (his songwriting is more mythological than personal), but in the sense that a body is performing. The term ‘body’, as used by Barthes in his later works, acts as a reinscribing of ‘the subject’, in opposition to, say, the conscious Cartesian self and, as in its famous cogito ‘I think therefore I am’, its focus on the ‘mind’. It is the ‘something other’ than conventionally logical and logocentric modes of understanding: “there is a chance of ‘avant-garde’ when it is the body...that writes”[3]. In music, Barthes listens not for what is “articulated” but what “is at once outside of meaning and non-meaning”[4], for signifiance over what is signified. He listens for the ‘grain’ of the voice, for “the body in the singing voice, in the writing hand, in the performing limb”[5]. The word ‘grain’ implies physicality, bodiliness, but it also signifies, for Barthes, something unquantifiable, unknowable, something one reaches for and simultaneously experiences and constructs – in this case in the act of listening to music – but which cannot be logically proven or even adequately explained.

The speaker in ‘Coming to at Dawn’ seeks to “Obliterate the memory of coming to at dawn, knowing only that the night has gone”[6], and the song itself is a performance of this act of obliteration. As the song progresses, “the night” as signifier and concept expands, becoming the passing of something both ‘natural’ (“wipe the grass stains from the cloth”) and primal:


Obliterate the raspberries and the wild cherry juices
That you trailed along the floor of the whore-house that you used
As a store room for your fox furs[...]

It becomes a site in which the conventionally ‘natural’ mingles with the underbelly of desire, the hunger of the id, and the impossibility of reclaiming a lost presence. The act of failing to remember exactly as it was is the obliteration. But it is not so much the specific content of the lyrics that expresses this as the phrasing. One example would be: “o-BLITerate the/MEM-ory of/COM-ing to at/ Dawn”, the way the stressed syllables slowly soften, linger on into the next stress, until there is the slightest pause before ‘dawn’, on which the piano line concludes itself and the voice sings just a note or two higher, reflecting the remove from “the night” in which “dawn” resides. Another example would be the way two different lines are elevated from the rest of the song due to the emphasised descending chords on the piano and vocal melody, each occurring once, in which an attempt to remember is made and celebrated but acknowledged as futile, before returning to the refrain of “Obliterate the memory...”. One listens as much to what is being said as how it is being said: the unconventional, impassioned lone voice, its tremors and flights around and via the sole piano track, the lack of an established self and, in its place, a body yearning to escape from the absence of a lost presence and into something else, into something other. All of which builds towards the song’s final assertion that

There is a tower with a winding set of stairs
You will descend into the absolute light.
Into the absoluteness of light
And become aware.

It is a desire that echoes the Barthesian notion of the aesthetic experience of listening to the grain of the voice, and is the point the song is building towards, the state of “becom[ing] aware”, which recalls the Heideggerian notion of Being equalling building/dwelling. One follows the song’s moving body, its building body (again, the word ‘grain’ seems apt in relation to the physicality of building), toward its own ‘completion’, which of course it and we can never really experience: the “absoluteness of light” ends the song; it cannot be depicted truly in all its absoluteness. Instead it is experienced via the ending of the song, which is now no longer essential – it is no longer concerned with forgetting/obliterating what was before, and has reached the inexpressible present moment, its dwelling place, its home; and the listener’s experience replicates this: they are directed towards a state of being one can attain via art by a song that itself yearns to build a site, a home, in which it can dwell. And while at the end of the song one can point out that it never really arrived at the place it sought, instead stopping just before it at “the walls which all discourse runs up against”[7] , it is in experiencing the body of the music that we experience the song’s building – in which all the keys necessary to comprehending the song’s dwelling reside, and in which a listener can experience a feeling of Being despite not necessarily being able to adequately explain it.

Burnside’s poetry, reaching for this same site (or non-site), echoes the song’s urging. Whenever his speaker encounters the possibility of a moment of Being, a moment of dwelling, he defers the impossibility of expressing it into talk of music and light (“head tilted to a night-sky packed with light/I waited for a music I could feel”[AD, 11]), in the process reinforcing the potential music has to situate Being. The other prominent theme in The Asylum Dance is childhood; or rather the absence inherent in any recollection of childhood, the remembrance retroactively altering that which is being recalled – one will never be able to remember the past as it was. The second song I would like to look at, Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘King of Carrot Flowers Part One’, expands on and provides solutions to the difficulty of reconstruction. It begins with a series of whimsical non-sequiturs:

When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers
And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees
In holy rattlesnakes that fell all round my feet[8]

sung over the top of elemental chords from a lone guitar. The singer’s (Jeff Mangum’s) voice is idiosyncratic and nasal yet loud and confident, throwing itself into the lines and holding notes seemingly for the sake of it. His singing, regardless of what is being sung, contains an undefined jouissance at simply being sounded, a relish for the creation of sound perfectly befitting the song, which, as the rest of the band kicks in, veers into slightly more locatable images. It becomes apparent that its subject is childhood, and it dips between lucidly unclear images of innocence stretching towards experience and the spectacle of parents’ relationship coming apart. Like an Ashbery poem, tense and speaker mutate, in the process decentring any stable self one could seek to find as well as disrupting the fictive present moment in which the song is being performed. As an unannounced ‘we’ “lay and learn what each other’s bodies were for”, it is revealed that “Mom would stick a fork right into daddy’s shoulder, and Dad would spill the garbage all across the floor”. This disparity in subject matter, sung triumphantly, is embedded within a woozy music, brass and wind instruments spilling everywhere, sounding like the internal experience of a drunken child at a parade being remembered by the same euphorically intoxicated adult. The song is its march, building towards something that will not be concluded – it is the procession, the spatter of memory and the movement of the music, that matters, along with the celebration that is the voice. Childhood cannot be adequately recalled as it was; Mangum’s lyrics, which on paper would lose a lot of their immediate quality, link with the voice and music to create a nonlinear impressionistic version of the wholly subjective experience of remembering what has gone, and it is only in the music that this idea can be understood. Which is, I believe, an important point for the efficacy of music: Burnside can indicate this reconstructive act’s need to operate ‘otherly’, but can only do so by reaching language’s limit points. Krug’s and Mangum’s music goes a step further, not dissimilarly to the idea of the divide between theory and practice. Their music acts out the ideas proposed by Heidegger and Burnside, becomes ‘living’ embodiments of the striving towards Being that is building/dwelling. ‘King of Carrot Flowers Part One’ creates a site in which what has gone can return, less hampered by the ideological problems posed by linguistic reconstruction. Of course, these ideas are obviously not inherent in the music, nor am I implying that Mangum and Krug are deliberately intending to convey Heideggerian theory musically – the ideas are reconstructed in listening and interpreting and, in this case, being elucidated and narrativised by my essay, filtered through my own ideological position and my subjective experience of life and of interpreting the abstract, and they arguably lose their force in the process of being diluted into the comparative finitude of language. This is unavoidable if one is to attempt to legibly express oneself. Language is continually building, continually deferring, always has the potential to guide and house Being (which, as established, is never static); music is too, albeit with different tools. It is for this reason that I would argue music comes closer to that which comes before the sign, the lost ‘original’ presence, the S[9]; that music can enact that which language can only point towards, even if language is very much essential to understanding music’s effects.

Sigur Rós are a perfect example of this. Their lyrics are to a Western audience largely incomprehensible: they are sung in Icelandic. More interestingly, a large number of the band’s songs are sung in ‘Hopelandic’, which is not so much an invented language as a “form of gibberish vocals that fits to the music and acts as another instrument. Jónsi [lyricist and singer] likens it with what singers sometimes do when they’ve decided on the melody but haven’t written the lyrics yet”[10] . While it is by no means original to describe vocals (and lyrics)[11] as just another instrument, Sigur Rós are interesting in that they’ve become very popular in this country, entering the mainstream charts and soundtracking any number of adverts and films, and yet they are singing not only in a language most people don’t understand, but also in a non-language, and it is very difficult for any listener without a knowledge of Icelandic to tell the difference. Listening to Sigur Rós becomes, from this perspective, a strange experience – the possibility of concrete signification is taken away from the listener. One has, so to speak, no idea what they’re going on about. The listener can, of course, simply apply a meaning to the ‘tone’ of the songs and neatly cross-out any uneasiness they may otherwise feel, but that would be beside the point. Instead, one can allow one’s control of the listening experience to be taken away from them, be cast into the realm of the signifier, of signifiance. But, unlike that Barthesian ideal, there is no body in their music. Or rather, the music is not so much nonhuman as unbodily. One cannot detect “the body in the singing voice” or in the otherworldly instrumentation. Instead, the band open up the possibility of a less immediately personal understanding of music. Their songs are a womblike site. One can be submerged in them[12] , can hear the trace of a time – unremembered – in which words did not yet exist. In many ways their music is re-enacting the ultimate lost presence, that of not yet being born – something every human being has (and yet has not) experienced. The music is thus not so much subjective as intersubjective, and yet never really explicable as such. It is a building, a homeseeking, a drive towards the originary dwelling place, a place, one could argue, of pure being. One listens to the words purely for the tactile pleasure of their signifiance the same way as one listens to the music: words/music ceases to be a binary. Of course, this place of ‘pure being’ implied by the song is just that – an implication. It is not something that can be attained. Rather it is the building towards it that constitutes the possibility of it and becomes, in the process, it, in the only tangible way possible.

So how do all of these approaches and interpretations relate to one another? And do they not simply highlight my failure to talk about music? In the case of the latter, I would argue not, and will do so in attempt to explain the former. Music, it seems, is both pre- and post-linguistic: it ‘better’ expresses the S, but at the same time can only do so in relation to language. It may offer up a purer (which is not necessarily what I am arguing) version of that which cannot be contained within words, but it only does so in the context of a linguistic society – we can only really understand it, or express it, linguistically, and it can only be purer than language if there is a language for it to be purer than. Perhaps that is not the case, though. Is not dance – the effects of music on the body – an expression of what music is doing? Of course it is, but even dancing, if it is to be discussed in a linguistic context (this essay), must be deferred into language. What the three songs I’ve discussed evidence is the way that what is arguably the purpose of existence – learning to be, building a dwelling – is so easily locatable in music, and so difficultly explained. If we listen for ‘the grain of the voice’, for the body of the music, we are searching for a recognition of the desire to be in another, for that ‘something other’ that resituates understanding. If, for example, I was to not write an essay drawing on philosophical sources and instead try and depict the same thing in a performative piece, would I not still be simply seeking to house my thought in a more fluid, less logocentric mode of understanding, trying to build a better place in which to dwell, from which to experience? That still wouldn’t bring me any closer to the music I love, nor would it bring the reader closer to it, to my subjectivity, to the possibility of an utterable intersubjectivity. Music makes this a possibility, and the songs, philosophy and poetry I have discussed enact and embody this possibility, each riffing in the same key. The movement of music and the building of dwelling echo each other, and the movement of a subject towards both is in many ways synonymous. One can sit passively and cower before “the not-pursued/each glimmer on the cusp/of touch/or loss”[AD, 18] , or one can pursue, can celebrate, as Mangum’s voice does, the moments of touch, of Being, and the moments of loss, as in Krug’s phrasing, that make possible the pursuit of Being. I don’t claim this to be any truer or falser than any other ontology of music – as stated, music is ultimately for me. Nonetheless, it is through language that we can come to terms with music, which is both diminished and furthered by it; and through music we can experience a jouissance that hints towards an experience of Being that language can only struggle to express. Understanding and articulating this is, I believe, as close to expressing what music is, subjectively, as is possible.

 

Notes

 

1. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) pp. 145-61

 

2. John Burnside, The Asylum Dance (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000)

 

3. Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985) p. 191

 

4. Roland Barthes, ‘Music, Voice, Language’ in Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representations, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) p. 284

 

5. Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’ in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representations, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) p. 276

 

6. Sunset Rubdown, ‘Coming to at Dawn’, Introducing Moonface (Global Symphonic, 2009)

 

7. George Steiner, George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (London: Phoenix, 1998) p. 64

 

8. Neutral Milk Hotel, ‘King of Carrot Flowers Part One’, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (Domino, 2005)

 

9. See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 2008)

 

10.  From http://sigur-ros.co.uk/band/faq.php#08

 

11. Any number of bands spring to mind, the most immediate example being My Bloody Valentine on Loveless.

 

12. It is not surprising that the canny Wes Anderson chose their song ‘Starálfur’ for the final underwater scene of The Life Aquatic