Obsolescence

Iannis Xanakis: Metastasis
Order to Complexity to Disorder

Kundera on Xenakis. Xenakis severed relations between himself and music. Music as defined by a certain tradition, a heritage. He was not "new" he was "other." Unlike.

Xenakis "does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all of European music, from the whole of it's legacy."

In this turn he locates a new origin for sound, not in the notes of man, but in nature. The sound the world makes, alive with rain, with dry heat and machinery.

Xenakis looks to the world of sound, sound with origins not confined to the heart of one man, or his intellect. In this turn he breaks with the authoritative notion that man is the heart of society, a person elevated above other life forms. In this turn from the lie of sentient beings, he takes his place within nature, where man and woman are small parts that do not define the whole.

Bakhtin also takes a turn from the I of writing to the world of speech. In his turn he locates the world of sound within an utterance— man at once a part of the grand dialogue, no more or less than a speaker.

About Xenakis' legacy: "Will he be remembered by music lovers?"

That is a question of music: what harmonies and scales are being agreed up, what instruments played, what opportunities for vocalizations, what beings expressed and realities explored.

They both fondle the dichotomies that have divided Nations, thoughts and music: man/nature; man/woman; oral/written; civilized/savage.

About Xenakis: "What will remain is the act of enormous rejection: for the first time someone has dared to tell European music that it can be abandoned. Forgotten."

So many parts of life are accepted as inevitable, events that cannot be avoided or evaded, certainties. This may be why some twist themselves around the barbed wire of free will and original sin. They are so certain,—as sure to follow as night follows day— of the story of their life, an appropriate score, an authority to empower their position.

Kundera mentions the circumstance of Xenakis' life: being sentenced to death, civil war, disfigurement. In his mind these circumstances "Led Xenakis to side with the objective sound of the world against the sound of a soul's subjectivity."

Many artists and many children of war (especially survivors of wars of extermination) break open in the attempt to understand. Arahon Appelfeld writes, "The numerous books of testimony that were written about the Holocaust are, if you will, a desperate effort to force the Holocaust into a remote recess of madness, to cut it off from life, and in other cases, to envelop it in a kind of mystical aura, intangible, which must be discussed as a kind of experience that cannot be expressed in words, but rather in a prolonged silence." (Beyond Despair)

The first time I heard Xanakis I thought of Beckett. I also think of Broch, beginning The Death of Virgil while interred by the Gestapo, finishing it in poverty and exile. None of these artists accept the inevitable. They have lost the certainty of day following night. And they respond with compositions: Metastasis. Pas Moi. The Death of Virgil.

Language

"Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with 'filler,' do away with whatever came from habit, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say.)" (Kundera, Encounter)

"Metaphysical angst, he had learned, could be profoundly disquieting and depressing but it was seldom life-threatening, except for those few individuals who could not live with their awareness of the void and committed suicide. Many of the features of Beckett's later prose and plays arise directly from his experiences of radical uncertainty, disorientation, exile, hunger and need." (Knowlson, Damned to Fame)

After recovering from surgery to restore his sight Beckett and Suzanne went on a trip to Malta. He saw one thing which made the trip worth the trouble, St. John's Cathedral in Valletta. He wanted to see the famous signed Caravaggio: The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.

He sat in front of the painting for an hour. It was "a great painting, really tremendous." He began Not I shortly later.

Sit in front of the painting for an hour yourself. Make a relationship with it. Don't let me tell you how you connect. Take the opportunity to connect yourself. Ask, what is my relationship to this piece of work? I know the Baptist. I have sat among the words. I have studied the holy cards from my Grandmother's collection so fully I can recall each image instantaneously.

The Beheading of St. John the Baptist is unlike any painting of St. John the Baptist I've seen. When I first read that Not I was begun after the work titled The Beheading of St. John the Baptist I thought, of course, "one of the most strikingly innovative pieces of modern theatre, an illuminated mouth, set high in the darkness to stage left, spews out words at an astonishing pace, telling of a sad, lonely silent life." (Knowlson, Damned to Fame)

I think of this play all the time. The first production nearly destroyed the actress (Billie Whitelaw) who played Mouth. She couldn't withstand the language—the pace of it, the lack of logic, the voice, the inflection (he wanted none, just the words in an ordered but incomprehensible stream), the physical delivery. She almost gave up. After a breakdown she tried again.

What Beckett said about her, Mouth in Pas Moi: "And I heard 'her' saying what I wrote in Not I. I actually heard it."

When asked about the voice, he said to read The Unnamable. The voice is there already. "It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can't stop it, I can't prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, this is all I know." (Beckett, The Unnamable)

When I read his work I am lost in the flood of words. I let go of the shores of reason and give myself over to the current. He is a loving and gentle writer and never holds me under. Something—his cadence, his vision, his compassion—keeps my head above, providing me access to air, and then I lift myself from his world, his vocabulary. I feel soothed. He has, in not answering, answered. Perhaps this is the most you can say to the void, "I have no voice and must speak, this is all I know."