How did we end up here? How did we get to this point, you and I? And where are we to go from here? What are we to do with this day before us now?
When I was a child, and for far too long of my young adulthood, I naively believed that mature, responsible adults knew what it was they were doing—that their choice of career, residence, companion, interests and all manner of things were part of a well-chosen plan and that they knew very well why such a plan was worth having. It seemed to me that the most upstanding, accomplished, successful adults—the adults that seemed most deserving of respect and admiration, the adults whose lives seemed most inspirational—were those who appeared highly confident, secure, strong-willed, and brimming with experiential certainty. These seemed to be people who had grown up with questions, spent their early adulthood finding answers to these questions and then spent the rest of their lives living according to the discovered answers, some of them spending their energy relaying those findings to other people for everyone’s betterment. My attitude toward all of the complicated moving parts of the world that I saw around me and couldn’t quite understand or grasp was that I would one day be capable of grasping them just like the calm, cool, educated, self-assured adults that I encountered. I envisioned that I would become one of them.
Now, I recoil at the thought of becoming such a nightmare! I am appalled at witnessing so many promising young people turn into over-confident, comfortably self-assured adults who are far too impressed with themselves and their vain accomplishments. Their lectures of knowledge, statements of facts, and explications of systems seem less like useful road maps for dealing with the actual world and more like the actions of people who know of no other way to contribute to civilization than by continuing to blindly prop it up with nearly the same conventional building blocks that their confident, overbearing predecessors had in rote manner impressed upon them. Their devotion to careers, locales, ideas and ideals seem like nothing more than the frantic need to have something securely weighing them down lest they float right away from the world and its web of comforts. Their explanations for these chosen paths seem to be mere hind-sighted justifications and self-reassurances regarding the way things happen to have turned out.
Of course, it is only necessary, healthy, for us to prop civilization up to some extent. The members of a society can’t just run around willy-nilly doing whatever they feel like doing at every moment. We need dedicated farmers, butchers, grocers, auto mechanics, carpenters, dentists, doctors, nurses, physical therapists, teachers, pilots, politicians, engineers, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, barbers, tailors, astronomers, and what-have-you. And we need people in these societal roles to be competent and confident—they need to be narrowly focused so that they may perform their societal function effectively—and they need to begin by working off of the useful systems that are in place before them—and they need occasional diversions and time away from their societal roles. These sorts of roles are often thought of as “practical” or as “dealing with everyday reality”—but every one of these roles also works with some manner of abstraction, however rudimentary or however normalized into banality it may have become. Language, perhaps, is the king of our abstractions—and the one we might most take for granted.
A healthy society also needs general interpreters of culture or critics of abstractions. These interpreters perform their critiques in many different mediums and come in many forms—sometimes they too are narrowly focused, building or concentrating upon particular abstract systems. Others deal more broadly with the very notions of system and of abstraction—sometimes to remind us of what it is we are doing when we do things, sometimes to remind us that we may choose to do other sorts of things instead, sometimes to remind us that there may be other useful alternatives to our presently accepted systems and abstractions. Some of the people engaged in “practical work” cannot see any use to these deliberations regarding abstractions—but others are able to take inspiration from these interpreters and either apply it in some manner to the work that they are already doing or else find themselves compelled to step out of the systems and abstractions that they have been working with and try some new one in the hope that it will yield some fruitful progress, a temporary engagement with the void that encourages them to take steps in an uncertain but exciting new direction.
Some people, it goes without saying, are perfectly content with the societal role in which they find themselves—they are content with their work-life and with their other societal responsibilities—they are afforded enough leisure time providing them with a sufficient amount of enjoyable activities that distract them from their work and from the dark void. But others feel their societal roles thrust upon them, chaining and crushing them—they are trapped in jobs that they hate, they are yoked to responsibilities that are too great and that leave them no leisure time with which to enjoyably distract themselves—some of them pine uselessly for fame and fortune, wishing to be noticed or revered or remembered for something, anything. These people are also practical people but ones who feel a sort of sorrow, wishing to be able to live more like the content practical people, wishing to live the Good Life, which usually entails having better pecuniary circumstances.
But there is another sort of sorrow in this world. For some of the practical people it can be the feeling and lack of understanding of the dark void. They sense that it is there but are unable to fruitfully articulate it and, thus, have great difficulty in coping with it—leaving them to find ultimately unsatisfying activities (some negative, some positive) with which to divert themselves from feeling or sensing this dark void.
For the General Interpreter, it can be a feeling of being relegated to the outer fringes of the working world—being shut out from the world where “things happen”, where “life is lived”—but it is also the understanding, owing to a near-constant proximity to the dark void, that all activity (positive or negative—and even those activities that aim to deal directly with the void) is but a distraction, a diversion, a postponement of the inevitable return to the dark void and of our powerlessness to stop it or do much to change it—and the difficulty of coming to accept this and to go on performing activities in the face of it.
Sometimes, the General Interpreter turns to the activity of art, finding it to be a useful outlet for the sorrow of the world—and, despite that art can be an enjoyable activity for its own sake, a worthwhile diversion for its own sake, and that it may sometimes become work, a living, the perceptive General Interpreter recognizes that it must always fail to remove this sorrow. It may momentarily cause us to forget it or, perhaps, offer us a site in which we might be together in it for a time—but this sorrow is the inevitable sorrow of living at all.
At all times Karl had felt music to be the counterworld to the frenzy of work and ruthless emotions. He had cherished the hope that his piano playing would have an immediate effect upon the American scene; he believed it would enable him to check the maelstrom of street traffic and alter the “circular” dynamic forces outside. And while he is in Klara’s room, in the face of this brutally erotic, ruthless female wrestler, as he is awkwardly playing that old soldier’s song of his native land, he becomes aware of the profoundest sorrow of his life, the abysmally deep chasm that separates him from all human beings; and in vain does he seek by means of this song for a different, more remote “end,” in which everything could perhaps be solved. “He felt a song arise within him that sought a different end, an end beyond the end of the song, and could not find it. ‘I really can’t do anything,’ said Karl upon the conclusion of the song, and he looked at Klara with tears in his eyes”.
Karl Rossman’s music is not “art” in the usual sense; it is deliberately described as primitive and imperfect, lacking in execution and masterly skill. But it is a kind of music that seeks beyond its “end” a “different end” in which the sorrow of this world might be able to fall away. For that very reason, however, this music is sustained by sorrow. For that very reason Karl, weeping, says, “I really can’t do anything.” The helplessness of true art in the face of the sorrow of this world—this is what was actually the most profound and intrinsic reason for the painful self-abnegation that Kafka practiced at all times in the disparagement of his own art, calling himself a dilettante and a bungler. Kafka’s art grew great because he himself did not consider it as art.
At the moment, I find myself on the right track—exploring this record collection, dreamily wondering what became of Echo, hoping it entails nothing gruesome, and pursuing the obscure trail of unauthenticated fragments of one Von Kriege. Not the track of certainty nor of truth nor of moral righteousness nor of social duty nor of selfish Will nor of Fate nor of cosmic destiny. Simply: on a track that I presently wish to be on.
I see now that everyone, whether they realize it or not, is just winging it—just finding occasional temporary stopping points and temporarily useful answers. The people who are most certain and confident in themselves—the people who claim to have the ultimate answers to the questions that they believe are the ones that matter—are precisely the ones of which I am now most suspicious. This manner of certainty is either ignorant, misguided hubris or else willful charlatanism. I no longer find myself worried about the uncertainties that used to concern me—and I no longer struggle to remove that sorrow that I know now to be inevitable and ever-present—I merely try my best to cope with it in ways that seem positive and constructive (or usefully deconstructive). What I now find troubling is the false sense of certainty in all its varieties—and a general inability and reluctance in people (myself included) everyday of facing and striving to positively cope with the genuine sorrow of the world.
True art is an effort of coping with this sorrow. And, as such, true art is as necessary and as helpless as the anguished scream of the protagonist in Kafka’s “Unhappiness”—that is, true art is a sort of screaming aloud in order that we might hear our own screaming that finds no answer or solution but rings out unendingly even once it ceases to sound.
Echo’s record collection has provided a fruitful sort of coping with the sorrow of the world. Indeed, Echo herself is encouragement, a screaming hope for the unknown future. I came here in search of Von Kriege, and I found the remnants of a lovely, sorrowful soul. Not a soulmate, really, just a person who seemed to enjoy spending time at similar sites—a person interested in general interpreting—a person listening closely and hearing the ancient silence still present within the things which bloomed out of it. She has made me think differently, feel differently. Allowed me to feel a part of something that genuinely moves me rather than feel excluded from something that I alternately love and hate—though those somethings are the same thing. We seem somehow to be moving in the same new direction, not one aiming to completely make-over civilization but one hoping that its people might be a bit more honest with themselves, that they might be less full of themselves, that they might be capable of admitting uncertainty and of renouncing the need for certainty where it has no place, that they might admit that they don’t ultimately know what they are doing, only that each of them does what seems best at every moment and is capable of reevaluating what is best at any given time.
These hopes are doomed to fail, of course. People who have such hopes are not people who do much acting or convincing. The world is run by other sorts of people and largely inhabited by people who complain loudly about the people running things but who are effectively and obliviously no different from them. For people like myself and Echo, the visible world shrinks down to a little corner where sometimes there is only the two of us breathing quietly, trying to improve ourselves, trying to keep one another honest, and exploring another world that expands out forever into nothing…
But Echo is gone now, disappeared, poof. Maybe the whole world, too. Perhaps a way of ensuring that I don’t become complacent. She is gone and yet she is here—in these records, these invisible worlds, in my investigations of Von Kriege. I hope to see her some day. To share more sites of sorrow. And to thank her for the joys of sharing.
The Living You
(For Echo, wherever you may be. Thank you for Roky and thank you for the living you.)
Crazy crazy mama
The mother of all witches
I’ve never known this ’til now
You were mine mine mind
You had starry eyes
You stood for the fire demon and
I was your creature with the atom brain
But before in the beginning
On a cold night for alligators
Were you shaken by Lucifer?
Haunted by the wind and more?
Revealed as negative vibrations?
Am I now the Interpreter? I am
And shall I pray to the two-headed dog?
Slip inside this house with the bloody hammer?
I had to tell you (but you left your body behind)
I think of demons and wonder if you have ghosts
If you live in a time of your own
If you’re an unidentified flying object
If you’re gonna miss me
If you’re on the right track now
If we’ll never say goodbye
The square root of zero is something smaller than zero which keeps getting smaller
I love the living you
Wish you’d be and bring me home
But on the night of the vampire
Birds’d crash pushing and pulling
To think of as one: they can’t be brought down
Sweet honey pie, I have always been here before
You saved me something extra
But I have nothing in return
Just click my fingers applauding the play
Promise my green and blue eyes to you
And if you’re not dust
I hope you’re like a zephyr down the right track now
The crescent silver moon is mine
the arc swooped marble cool
never say goodbye
never say goodbye.
Sand does not blow breeze my soul
stars shine right
honeysuckle mingle Moscow night
never say goodbye
never say goodbye.
Sweet define, I may dream unasleep
Moscow’s prayer solid I keep
never say goodbye
never say goodbye.
-Roky Erickson
{ } VK Arkiv 