Retreating To A Useful Position (5)

30.EPILOGUE.68: November 15, 2003.
"Retreating To A Useful Position (5)."

Irial: "What would happen if you dug out of the universe?"
Me: "I don't know-- no one's ever been there."
Irial: "Somebody told me that a whole new world would be there."
Me: "Did they tell you what would be in that world?"
Irial: "God would be there! And bears. Just bears and God."
-- Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices
I am the crow of desperation,
I need no fact or validation,
I spin relentless variation,
I scramble in the dust of a failing nation.
I was concealed, now I am stirring
And I have waited for this time.
I am the termite of temptation.
I multiply and fly my population.
I am the wheel, I am the turning,
And I will lay my love around you.
I am the sea of permutation,
I live beyond interpretation,
I scramble all the names and the combinations,
Penetrate the walls of explanation.
I am the will, I am the burning
And I will lay my love around you.
I am the will, I am the yearning,
And I will lay my love around you.
-- Brian Eno, Lay My Love

AFTER THE HEAT         After that, it was no going back.
        Full speed ahead.
        Eno was the be-all and end-all.
        I scoured the city for Eno cds. I found almost nothing more.
        I read up on Eno in the local libraries.
        This was before the Internet was everywhere, so I had to look at magazines and newspapers-- hold real tangible books in my very real hands, and spend hours flipping though pages digging up data.
        I learned about his ideas of "holographic music" and that was the most fascinating thing in the world.
        I traveled to different cities, looking for Eno cds. When friends went to different cities, I gave them lists of Eno cds.
        When I could find it, I bought Eno on vinyl.
        I wanted to have all the Eno, in every format.
        Eno became the soundtrack to everything in life.
        It was amazing.
        I would listen to Music For Airports and sip tea and look at the trees.
        I would listen to here Come The Warm Jets and fill with manic, demented energy.
        I would listen to some of his side projects with people like Cluster and Harold Budd and Jon Hassell and just feel alien.

SPIDER AND I

        I found it hard to explain why I loved Eno so much. A lot of my friends didn't get it. To them the ambient music was just sort of boring, mellow nothingness. To me, it was like being immersed in a world of infinite colour, a place where no matter how deep I looked, there would be more detail. It was like a representation of the entire universe, from the large to the small, in sound. The places I imagined were almost always alien, sometimes like Rothko or Pollock paintings where I could zoom in on a corner of the painting and see more detail. Zoom in again, and see even more detail. And so on. It was like having an electron microscope in my head, like directly experiencing fractals as physical objects.
        Sometimes I found Eno's ambient stuff soothing, other times sad, and other times infinitely mysterious and dark. The idea that each piece was "holographic" appealed to me. And the fact that each piece was in a sense non-linear, having no beginning or ending, just an eternal middle, also consumed my mind.
        I tried to apply the theories of ambient music to writing, creating abstract short "stories" that were all-- or at least mostly-- mood. No real narrative development, no real character, just an eternal fictive "now." Some of the pieces were successful, others were not. Most of them were, also, very alien. Lonely and dreamlike, mysterious and personal. Dark in a way that cannot be nailed down because they seemed to be about so little and yet filled with strange meaning.
        I studied Eno's lyrics, and I found that they, too, were holographic, opening up to new levels of depth and meaning the closer I looked. But then again, all language is like that. No one sentence means only one thing. No one word means only one thing. And when it comes to collections of words and sentences the sky's the limit. And, as I studies Eno, I discovered that Eno is always very aware of this. His lyrics are more than just experiments in personal meaning. They play with the very mechanism of language itself.
        And even the more narrative-centred fiction I wrote was inspired by Eno. And it was also strangely calm. And yet, because the darkness of Eno's lyrics were always in the back of my mind when I wrote more traditional stories (if my "ambient" fictions were an attempt to convey an "instrumental" mood, my "narrative" stories were about the power words have to communicate a world, so it's only fair that I'd have Eno's words fueling my rage), the stories became excruciatingly violent. Sinister, sick, and bloody. Opaque. And yet, the writing was somehow always striving for a kind of peace-- through both its author and characters seeking oblivion in different ways, mostly.
        A lot of stuff about the end of time and the obliteration of identity.
        Now, when I write fiction, I still try to think in terms of mood, and scene before everything else. Somehow, establishing the mood, making a painting in the reader's mind-- it seems important.
        And, the end of time and the obliteration of identity is also there, too. But usually in more restrained ways.
        I haven't mellowed. I've just become more strategically subtle.

ME, MYSELF, I... AND YOU, TOO.

Of course I know the painting I'm making is really first and foremost for my own mind. The pictures are of me, for me. You can come along too, if you like, though.

OBLIQUE STRATEGIES

        In 1975 Eno, along with artist Peter Schmidt, made a deck of cards he called "Oblique Strategies."
        "Oblique Strategies" cards look kind of like weird Tarot cards. I have never seen a real deck.
        There is a website, however, all about the cards
        The URL for the site is:
        http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/
        The purpose of "Oblique Strategies" cards is to provide random inspiration, to get you to think around mental blocks when making artistic-- or really any other kinds of-- decisions.
        Much of the advice is, well, oblique. Cryptic. Strange.
        There is also a website that contains the text of the cards. If you press a button, the text of a random card will appear in a small window. The site is:
        http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique.html
        I have clicked on the button that reads "Random Card" 10 times. Here are the 10 random texts that have appeared, one after the other, in the small window. Make of these what you will:

Use filters.
What is the reality of the situation?
Give the name away
Bridges --build --burn
Is the information correct?
Not building a wall but making a brick
Lost in useless territory
What wouldn't you do?
Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them
Repetition is a form of change

A MAXIM

        Eno said something, once, in an interview I read. I can't remember it word-for-word, but here is a paraphrase:
        Go out to extremes and then retreat to a useful position.
        When I first encountered this little philosophy McNugget, it seemed kind of wimpy. (It still does, sort of.) Kind of an anti-art, anti-advancement attitude. This is because you have to go out to the extreme and then retreat. And nothing really progresses through retreat. And I like to live at extremes. Think in extremes, anyway. I like my physical existence to be extremely comfortable.
        However, on retrospect, it actually turns out to be pretty good advice. It's good advice because it contains one saving grace.
        The saving grace is that the "useful position" is subjective, as is the extreme. They both depend upon you.
        Go out as far as you can go, and then come back with something you can use.
        If you can stay there out in the extreme, that's your useful position. If you don't like it there, retreat, find a nice little perch somewhere where you can be comfortable, and use what you learned out there in the extreme.
        But make sure before you set up camp at your useful position you go out as far into the extreme as you can go.
        At least once.

MISTAKEN MEMORIES OF THURSDAY AFTERNOON

        Eventually, my friend Alex tracked down copies of the Thursday Afternoon and Mistaken Memories Of Mediaeval Manhattan videos. Both videos are more like paintings than what we normally associate with videos. There is no narrative, so to speak, and little action.
        In the (if I remember correctly) seven segments of Thursday Afternoon a nude woman realaxes, brushes her hair, and does a few other banal things. Each segment is filmed in a different way, filtering the image using computers or special lenses. The "action" is very slow. You are not meant to watch it, as much as let it play in the background like a moving painting.
        Mistaken Memories Of Mediaeval Manhattan shows a building while tracks from On Land play. Occasionally, clouds drift by. The building is (if I remember correctly) seen on the cover of Discreet Music.
        Both these videos are filmed in "vertical format"-- in other words the tv set has to be turned on its side in order for the image to be viewed properly.
        It's an interesting artistic conceit, I'll give Eno that, but "vertical format video" is actually hell on television tubes. Tvs just weren't meant to be turned on their sides. Whatever mechanical crap is inside the tv screen tends to break pretty fast. I'm guessing Eno didn't think of this.
        Neither video has been released on dvd.
        This is actually a shame because they're both kind of neat but especially because the regular cd release of Thursday Afternoon is way too short and the video is about 90 minutes long.

REPETITION IS A FORM OF CHANGE

        To review:
        1. I like Brian Eno.
        2. For a long while, I obsessed on Brian Eno.
        3. Eno is very smart, and thinks a lot. And even though he can't play an instrument, he makes that work for him.
        4. Hollographic music.
        5. The potential for synesthesia.
        6. Eventually, Eno references made their ways into my writing. And the fact that I played Eno when I wrote also coloured my writing.
        7. This isn't to say my writing became peaceful and serene. In fact it because even more dark, brooding, strange, and hyper violent than it already was.
        8. This is because Eno's music, even at its most peaceful, has a dark edge to it. Sometimes a sense of real menace, other time it just feels alien and weird, and this makes the listener feel unsettled. Sometimes it just sounds mysterious.
        9. And, as for as the songs are concerned, usually even the most peaceful of them are subtly dark.
        10. Nothing is ever cut and dried with Eno. The happy stuff is also a little sad, the sad stuff a little happy, and anger is tempered with calmness, while at the same time calm stretches somehow contain traces of anger. The fact that Eno's music never settles on only one emotion, or mood gives it an enduring quality-- as well as a depth that is seldom found in the realm of "ambient" music. Let alone the world of "new age" music-- an aesthetic scourge he unintentionally helped to bring into being.

NEWS FLASH:

!!!!BRIAN ENO IS NOT A NEW AGE MUSICIAN!!!!

WHY?

        Good question.
        Well, because New Age music is political and spiritual. Eno is neither. Eno is neutral.
        If you want to find politics and spirituality in Eno's music, you have put it there. If you must find meaning in Eno, you have put it there. Eno's atmospheres exist as atmospheres. That's it. Period. Even when Eno decides his pieces have a utilitarian purpose (such as his calling Neroli "thinking music") Eno has determined this purpose after the art itself has been created-- and thus, the purpose of, say "thinking music" is Eno's interpretation of that one particular piece of music; and even though it is Eno's interpretation, it is still just an interpretation. It is in no way authoritative. "Thinking music" is simply one way you can choose to interpret Neroli. If you have other, preferred ways of interpreting Neroli, those are just as valid as Eno's. Thus, part of the reason his music seems so damned mysterious is because you can never nail it down. You can never determine intent or meaning. Eno's pieces are, partailly, like Rorschach blotches. You look into yourself when you listen to Eno. And, thus, because there is no stable or defined hierarchy of authority imposing a meaning and purpose to Eno's music, it is not New Age music, which is totally based on meaning and hierarchy.
        Also, the emotions Eno's music generates-- and this goes hand in had with the above point-- are not always peaceful, or soothing, or relaxing, or even sometimes particularly pleasant. There is evil in some of Eno's music. There is no evil in New Age music. Harold Budd once said that the problem with New Age music is there's no room for evil in it. This is true. New Age music is all about peace, mediation, and blandness. And, while Eno's music (as well as Budd's) can sometimes be conducive to meditation, it is in no way specifically designed for meditation, nor does it direct meditation in "positive" (or even "negative") directions. Again, you choose to meditate to Eno's music, or not. And you choose how to meditate or what to meditate on-- if you want to meditate, or burn incense, or think about "Gaia" or whatever. It is all user determined.
        Thus, Brian Eno's music is about as New Age as The Rollins Band.
        There are no wise and peaceful dolphins, no rain forests, no hippy-invented Native American spiritualism about sweat lodges and "earth mothers" in Eno's music. Unless of course you have a burning desire to put them there. It's totally up to you.
        This makes it the antithesis of New Age music because New Age music is crippled by politics and spirituality and an excess of "meaning."

WHY DO PEOPLE THINK ENO IS NEW AGE MUSIC?

        Simple. Most of it's mellow and electronic.
        There are few beats and what beats there are, are usually calm.
        There's this idea that if something is mellow, and electronic it is somehow "New Age Music." This is an idea that was mostly started, and is still being propagated, by people who primarily grew up listening to assaultive Rock, Punk, Blues, and Rap, people who essentially don't know anything about music, or if they do have knowledge it's confined very narrowly to a couple of popular, mostly adolescent genres. Also, there seems to be an increasing number of "Electronica" folk who're falling into the same pit: if the music isn't traditionally "ambient" (i.e. has a slow-- but not too slow-- after all you still wanna be able to drop E to it-- house or dub beat and a few "trippy" samples scattered here and there), or if it's not some sort of House or Trance or sounds abrasive and self-consciously odd like Aphex Twin, or came out before they were able to notice music, or simply it was made before they were born, it's immediately New Age. Well, they're wrong.
        Essentially, if it doesn't either "rock" you or maybe you move in some way-- if you can't smash beer bottles over your head, murder homies, or curdle your brain with drugs to it-- it's "New Age."
        Sometimes these people also put Classical music in the New Age section, too.

OTHER ARTISTS
WHO ARE NOT NEW AGE MUSICIANS
AND YET WILL BE FREQUENTLY FOUND
IN THE NEW AGE SECTION:

        John Fahey
        Tangerine Dream
        Ryuichi Sakamoto
        Jean Michel Jarre
        Robert Fripp
        Pete Namlook
        David Van Teighem
        Penguin Café Orchestra
        Philip Glass
        John Hassell

POSITIONING

        More than 10 years ago:
        A hot, muggy summer night. I have just walked home, after buying a cd of Another Green World. In my room, I put on my headphones and press "play" on my cd player. "Sky Saw" starts up. It's jagged, discordant, oddly funky in a choppy way, and the lyrics seem to come from another world. Then, "Over Fire Island," an unassuming instrumental. Then "St. Elmo's Fire," a love song filled with apocalyptic imagery: bleached bones, a blasted desert, and halos of radioactive atmospheric effects.
        And I'm thinking, this album is perfect. It's eternal.

A FIRST USEFUL POSITION

        And Another Green World is eternal, now. It is on cd. And it will live forever in a format that can be infinitely duplicated.
        And it should live forever. It should not degrade. It should be physically eternal.
        People who say that art has value because it is impermanent are full of shit.
        Art has value because of the art, because of the information conveyed, and the ideas and emotions that art inspires in others. Not because it will some day crumble.
        Everything should be recorded, and recorded in the most permanent technology possible. Everything should be infinitely reproducible. And it should be available all the time, always at all of our fingertips. All art must be allowed to resonate forever.
        People who say records are better than cds because records degrade and let entropy into the music do not value the music, they value the entropy; they value destruction, not creation. People who say that plays are better than movies because plays are different each time and cease to exist when they're over and can never be replayed, and so are fragile, and are beautiful transitive things, are idiots. Plays should be recorded, and played back, and watched and studied. Experiences must be repeatable. All aesthetics must be shared.
        Improvised music should be caught in time. That way we can all listen to the music and not rely on our faulty memories to capture the past. Because memory always makes things better than they are, or worse. And, again, that way the music can be shared.
        The best thing that happened to literature was the printing press. That way books could be reproduced. Stories could break out of the faulty, imprecise, impermanence of oral traditions. And become things people can study and refine and edit, things with shifting viewpoints and levels of depth, art that is are actually worth enjoying. Not just little fragmentary moments by the fire listening to someone tell an unrefined story with half-realized contents that never really amount to much. The next best thing was the word processor because the word processor allows infinite iterability, and perpetual editing. You can go back and repair damaged writing. People was that Tolstoy never used a word processor when he wrote War & Peace, and it's "the greatest novel eve written". Well, War & Peace has serious continuity errors that would have been easily corrected if Tolstoy had had a word processor. He may have also been able to keep track of thematic elements better. Just imagine how much better "the greatest novel ever written" would have been if its author had been able to revise and edit at a fingerclick.
        And, also, now paintings can be reproduced. Everyone should be able to see famous paintings, and own them, and study them on their walls. There is nothing wrong with reproduction.
        In fact:
        Not reproducing things is a form of elitism, a way to keep the general public from knowing anything about art, a way to keep them from experiencing beauty. Or also a way of stopping them from making up their own minds about what's good and what's bad. Keeping them uneducated. Stopping them from learning and growing.
        (Unless they don't want to learn and grow. Which, honestly, most of them don't.)
        And recording things in impairment, degradable media is similar-- it's also a form of entropy-love. It allows the experience to only be experienced within a small window of time. Only a few generations can enjoy something when it is recorded on magnetic media. And even a vinyl record wears out a little bit more each time you play it.
        And yes, cds do degrade, but if the information on them is duplicated before the foil wears, that new information is identical to the old.
        And even Eno, when he talks about the beauty of entropy, he's spouting out his ass.
        If the art is about decay, let it decay. But even people who prattle on about decay secretly want their decay to last forever. Otherwise, they wouldn't bother.
        Because the only reason to do anything is to be remembered, to reproduce a little bit of yourself, to seek as much immortality. Or at least a long, long life-after-death.
        So:
        Why shouldn't everything be kept forever?
        Why shouldn't information be allowed to proliferate?
        Art and beauty are the only things that really make life worth living. So we should be always surrounded by both. Maybe then, life will be worth living.
        Also, until we can actually achieve real, physical immortality this is the best we can do.

A SECOND USEFUL POSITION

        For some reason, even though Eno's music is beautiful, occasionally, it reminds me of madness.
        There is something dark about his soothing tones, something mysterious, something odd and alien and occasionally frightening. Partially it's because the music (or at least the ambient stuff) doesn't settle on any kind of centre. It just drifts and repeats without ever actually repeating.
        Also, there are his lyrics.

A THIRD USEFUL POSITION

        Always remember:
        Even though Eno thinks a lot, and a lot of what he thinks about is quite interesting and well thought out, sometimes he thinks and says stupid stuff.
        Some half-remembered instances of Eno thinking and saying stupid stuff:
        He once expressed a wish that we could have computers we could use with our entire bodies, instead of just our hands-- because pointing and clicking, and typing on keyboards somehow seems uninteresting, or something like that. He wanted "African" computers instead of "European" computers, or something. That's stupid.
        Also he once said he hoped we were alone in the universe, that he forced himself to believe there were no other intelligent beings in the universe, for reasons I didn't quite understand, because they seemed vague, pretentious, and nonsensical.
        Eno's pragmatism is also stupid. Sorry. For a while he aligned himself with American Postmodern Philosophical Pragmatist Richard Rorty. While both Rorty and Eno are subtle, intelligent thinkers, pragmatism stops you from advancing both intellectually and socially because under pragmatism you only focus on what you can do. If, however, you try to focus on what you can't do, and try to do things you can't do, you start to be able to do different things you never thought you could do. (Eno should know this-- that's how he makes his music.) If, however, you only focus, very pragmatically, on what's possible, you force yourself to stay within certain safe parameters-- because doing what you know is possible establishes a series of limitations you already understand in advance and thus there is no real room for discovery. Pragmatism, or "common sense", much like Occam's Razor, is often a hindrance to discovery. Eno, however, does embrace chance operations and happy accidents, and that saves him. (Much in the same way that the :useful position" is determined by context.) But his aligning himself with pragmatism is still, fundamentally, sort of stupid.

KOAN

        Eno is fascinated with a piece of software called Koan. Koan creates "generative" music based on parameters inputted by the user. This means it makes pieces that change within a series of variables, music in flux. Sometimes you can use Koan to create endlessly repeating structures, other times to create music that never repeats at all. You can make a Koan piece that sounds different each time you play it, yet simultaneously strangely similar to the last time it was played. Kind of like a program for making holographic music.
        In fact, Koan was inspired by Eno. And it makes some pretty good Eno tunes.
        (It can also make music that is as rigid and unchanging as anything programmed with a sequencer and drum machine, too.)
        Koan is interesting because it implies that eventually music will be able to be automatically generated by a machine, and not just Eno-style ambient music either. The implication is that the musical output of human beings simply falls between sets of parameters, that Beethoven's music falls within Beethoven parameters and that Rammstein between Rammstein parameters-- it's just a matter of getting a piece of software that can determine and then emulate these parameters.
        Of course, this kind idea is only in its earliest, most theoretical, stages, and the emulation works best with someone like Eno who uses an electronic palette in a series of very identifiable ways.
        However, Koan is also kind of frustrating.
        In an interview Eno once said something like: in the future people will find it hard to believe that music in the past was unchanging, static, that a piece was a piece that stayed the same all the time. The implication, here, is that everyone will have versions of software like Koan and they'll be able to create music in all styles-- and, of course, that none of the pieces will ever exist in the same form twice. You want some new Brahms, just point and click, you want some Skinny Puppy, just do the same. And each time you play the piece, the music will be brand new, not just a repetition of a static series of notes locked forever in time and space.
        Of course, this does not take into account that sometimes people want to listen to the exact same piece of music again and again in order to pick out subtleties. And, sometimes they just like it and want to hear the exact same thing again. Sometimes people do want a song to be exactly the same each time they play it. Most of the time, in fact.
        After all, I never would have developed any appreciation for Eno's music if I hadn't been able to repeatedly listen to the same, unchanging, copy of Thursday Afternoon-- and pick out the astonishing number of small sounds and layers that were encoded there-- over and over, the exact same series of events unfurling each time, exactly the same each time, I played the cd. Again, and again, and again....

A FOURTH USEFUL POSITION

Deep space.

A FIFTH USEFUL POSITION

        When I listen to Eno, I feel like I'm touching something infinite. I can't describe it any better than that. Somehow Eno's music makes me feel infinite.
        It triggers some sort of awe-mechanism deep within my subconscious.
        I think about shifting colours and landscapes. I dive deep into the music and feel myself becoming surrounded by... something. Something I can't really describe. It's emotional, and tactile, and visual all at the same time.
        Often, when I listen to any music I experience something similar to what I've described above, but the experience is much more real and deeper and complex when I listen to Eno.
        I feel parts of myself shutting off, and other parts turning on. I can't really describe it any better than that.
        It's almost like I'm moving through some kind of other dimension.
        My sense of time changes, and sometimes it seems as if I've only been listening, immersed in his strange environments for a few seconds when sometimes it's been an hour or more.
        And sometimes it feels like I've been there forever.
        The universe feels deeper and more mysterious when I'm done.

ETERNITY
(a sixth useful position?)

        And I'm listening to Eno, now. I'm playing The Shutov Assembly.
        Everything around me has dropped away. I am surrounded by clouds of colour. Infinite stretches of pinks and greens, and sad blues. Little highlights of silver, like lines of living mercury snaking through the clouds. And the clouds change, shifting and bending into bright pastels and menacing blacks and purples. And then tiny bursts of red, like miniature explosions. And then silver rivulets.
        My breathing slows.
        I'm not here, anymore. Wherever "here" is. I don't even feel myself typing these words.
        I'm somewhere else, in some other space and time. And I've been here forever. I never leave this place, even though sometimes it seems like I do. The other place I was in, "before" I was here, that place is just an illusion. Sometimes I have to lie to myself, tell myself that I'm not here, living in colour, because it I didn't do that my work would never get done.
        I can't remember what my work is. I barely even know who I am.
        The sound and the colours are simultaneously inside of me, and out. They create the universe, they are the things that bind the atoms to themselves.
        I am nothing more than the effects of background radiation echoing and smoothening itself, the result of energy and gravity, tight bundles of infinitely spinning fluctuations of nothingness, the remnant of the big bang. The sound of what space feels like when we hear and fall though colours forever.
        In time, outside of time, time itself.
        Emmanuel Levinas talks about a third state of being. Something that is beyond both being and nothingness. A concept that is so abstract that neither science nor religion have a vocabulary for it. A thing that cannot be expressed through language, yet somehow through language we can almost intuit glimpses of it. He calls it "beyond essence".
        I have no idea why that popped into my head.
        I am inside my body and outside it. I can feel every atom in my body, the outlines of my shape in space, and my own diffusion and transparency. I feel like a superstring. I feel myself thinking about myself.
        There is no more anger, no more hatred, no more love and no more joy.
        The only thing that's left are these shifting washes of colours, and this eternal now that's both static and moving second by second to the end of this track, the start of that track, the last few seconds of the disc. And, of course, some sort of inexpressible emotion I'm trying so hard to express, but cannot.
        I feel like I can actually touch the emptiness in front of me, hold it in my hands, and softly crush it until it bleeds into something transcendent and beautiful.
        Good night.

Next: Zen and the art of infinite rage....

Epilogue 69.
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