Thoughts on an Unrealized Character
Visions of hopscotch, interrupted by patterns, gathered on the cutting room floor.
This text is neither fact nor fiction. There is music at the end of it. There always is.
It was not clear nor would it ever be clear what drew him to the least coherent, the most purely sensual processes of air and water and primordial creatures and plants, or of seeds blown by the wind and deposited into loam, organisms who lurk in the mud growing more robust and silent in the thick stillness. We were capable then of telling him what was what, of fingering and turning over in our hands the evidence, the pebbles and smooth stones, the detritus of his stubborn wanderings, his refusal to cooperate, to dress neatly and debate, to argue a point of view, to make sense, to provide clear context and explanation and — what he most of all dreaded — to say what happened. But being clever and strategically advanced we stayed quiet and waited.
We left him instead to stew in his own philosophies, his own ecstatic visions, to marinate then bake in the worldly barrenness of it all, the dry clay pot of the universe, so hot, to make the sting of his want more keen and the keening much louder in the mix until it could be said, as Morton Feldman reportedly said of a maddeningly clumsy and inept performance of his own work, "It's too fucking loud. It’s too fucking fast!" For Feldman wanted music to emerge unbidden from the silence, to stop time with his conjuring, wished the pure products of his own quiet madness to turn breath into song. Feldman also once asked: “Do we have anything in music, for example, that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?” — an idea that left us breathless in its purity, its cleansing blast, its striving toward nothingness, until only whispers could be said to be there.
Feldman also said when speaking of acoustic instruments, with all their individual qualities and quirks, "I like the imperfections" — in this case in coversation with John Cage. We immediately but perhaps haphazardly thought of Julio Cortázar, he who made Horacio and La Maga out of the dust of his overgrown bones, because he said this, too. His intention to leave the imperfections be, to accept them as Feldman embraced the rasp in the voice of an aging soprano, the resonant buzz of an old pit musician's violin of warped blonde wood. We always admired, even adored, the way Feldman surrendered to chance, bringing his oversized self to the table as it were before artfully letting it all go, then breathing out in great horn blasts of dissonance, again and again and again, sometimes with a wheeze. And he did this in a way that Cage, who, in his sullen yet playful austerity seemed to simply disappear, did not.
When speaking of the alchemical nonsense that pulsed through his notes and cards and letters he swore that he would prefer to avoid the terms "dictation" or "exorcism" to explain how this work happens and really, why bother? We, too, wish to make ourselves spectators, witness to our own wanderings, to erase ourselves in the act of speaking as the chameleon or octopus, after mating, dies. To write the song of ourselves in invisible ink. In the cult of self-help, to which we all must admit to belong, we say, "get out of your own way.” But we never do.
The coherent self is the one with your name, who goes to work in the morning then eats lunch alone, speaking to his colleagues in pleasing tones by the water dispenser afterward, he who rides the train home although he lives close enough to walk, who eats dinner and mindlessly caresses his wife, whose consciousness goes slowly dark in the middle of the third beer and the third nearly identical crime procedural. Cliches are cliches for cause. But the man who inhabited the body that carried out these tasks despised the body, as expressed in these tasks. Eventually he would become obsolete, the energies dispersed into mist, a soft light, an evening sadness. But until then, he could persist. In the morning before sunrise, before anyone he knew was awake, he would get out of bed, throw the front door open and let his spirit go out to play.
Listen to '“Body of Evidence,’ composed, recorded and performed by me at Thoughtless Music on Soundcloud.