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.***Our attempts both to embody Murmur’s elusiveness anddispel it at the same time are the means by which we tryto account for its core mystery: On Murmur there are words and there is singing, but there is no singer.Murmur has no I.As a young green stipe I’d listen to Murmur, and its songs gave flesh to the mystery of the act of saying“I.” In fact it still does, from time to time—a sensationof feeling worlds of meaning pivot on one vertiginousletter, and all that it assumes, and all that it conceals.The sleeping quotidian consciousness, as Holderbaum puts it,in speaking as I, momentarily rousted from its sleep.Speaking for myself again, the more embodied that Ibecomes in time, the more intimate my awareness of• 100 •MURMURMurmur’s disembodiment becomes as well.Murmur sings of disembodiment, which is why it’s particularly apt tothink of Murmur in dream terms.But just as well, singing is more than a kind of speaking; it’s also a particular modeof being, just as dreaming is more than a kind of thinking.The more I speak, the stranger singing seems.I want toinvent an equally strange way to think of this.Is Murmur being or dreaming? Let’s split the difference.Let’s makethem the same thing for a moment.Somewhere there’s an ongoing scroll of all the wordsI’ve spoken, and next to it, also scrolling out, is a transcription of all the songs I’ve ever heard, one after the other;some of them make numerous appearances.As the scrollsgrow, the common ground of shared words and grammarand turns-of-speech between the two scrolls also grows,but not toward any ultimate merging of the two.Themore similar they become, the more nuanced my recogni-tion of the differences between the two becomes, and sothis difference becomes more starkly illuminated.As Iwrite this book—itself a vain attempt to merge the two—both scrolls grow still larger, and so does the distancebetween the two, and my awareness of this distance.Thedistance isn’t a vacuum; it’s comprised of sounds, too.They’re dark sounds.When you illuminate the sublime,you get a sharper darkness.Back in the beginning, when the vacuum was thin andthe scrolls were short, I had an abiding sense that Stipenever sang as himself on Murmur, even as fictionalized a self as one could allow in the context of a pop song orthrough wildly dissociative adolescent ears.There was apalpable distance.• 101 •J.NIIMIIt wasn’t a literary kind of distance, like when youlisten to Gary Numan singing about rape machines downin the park and you know that the narrator inhabits afantastic realm but speaks as a genuinely human entitywho is an extension of Gary Numan who is an extensionof you, the Gary Numan fan, with the Gary Numanalbum, a pop record that you like.As a metaphor for expressing doubt about the biologi-cal basis of consciousness etc., “Down in the Park” isterrific, but as a pop song it’s still very literary, and de-pending on the degree to which old synthesizers floatyour boat, it’s convincing as well.But that’s only because“Down in the Park” is alienation making a place at thetable for its audience.The distance in Murmur’s language, by contrast, is extraliterary—a feeling that though there’s no observer to relate it there’s nevertheless an unname-able something that is happening or even just is in spite of what few verbs there are to shoulder any movement,and the fact that there is no figure on which to fix anypsychology, and the scale is all out of proportion.Proportion in Murmur hinges on that vertiginous I, or more specifically its absence.Across Murmur’s forty-four minutes the word I appears in three places.It figures most prominently in “Sitting Still” and its relatively conventional pop chorus, “I can hear you, I can hear you, Ican hear you.” The only other instances of I to be found in Murmur’s lyrics are marginal, peripheral to those songs’narratives; if you were to remove the I s, those songs wouldn’t change much.In “Perfect Circle,” there’s thelone I in the oblique construction “who might leave you where I left off [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.***Our attempts both to embody Murmur’s elusiveness anddispel it at the same time are the means by which we tryto account for its core mystery: On Murmur there are words and there is singing, but there is no singer.Murmur has no I.As a young green stipe I’d listen to Murmur, and its songs gave flesh to the mystery of the act of saying“I.” In fact it still does, from time to time—a sensationof feeling worlds of meaning pivot on one vertiginousletter, and all that it assumes, and all that it conceals.The sleeping quotidian consciousness, as Holderbaum puts it,in speaking as I, momentarily rousted from its sleep.Speaking for myself again, the more embodied that Ibecomes in time, the more intimate my awareness of• 100 •MURMURMurmur’s disembodiment becomes as well.Murmur sings of disembodiment, which is why it’s particularly apt tothink of Murmur in dream terms.But just as well, singing is more than a kind of speaking; it’s also a particular modeof being, just as dreaming is more than a kind of thinking.The more I speak, the stranger singing seems.I want toinvent an equally strange way to think of this.Is Murmur being or dreaming? Let’s split the difference.Let’s makethem the same thing for a moment.Somewhere there’s an ongoing scroll of all the wordsI’ve spoken, and next to it, also scrolling out, is a transcription of all the songs I’ve ever heard, one after the other;some of them make numerous appearances.As the scrollsgrow, the common ground of shared words and grammarand turns-of-speech between the two scrolls also grows,but not toward any ultimate merging of the two.Themore similar they become, the more nuanced my recogni-tion of the differences between the two becomes, and sothis difference becomes more starkly illuminated.As Iwrite this book—itself a vain attempt to merge the two—both scrolls grow still larger, and so does the distancebetween the two, and my awareness of this distance.Thedistance isn’t a vacuum; it’s comprised of sounds, too.They’re dark sounds.When you illuminate the sublime,you get a sharper darkness.Back in the beginning, when the vacuum was thin andthe scrolls were short, I had an abiding sense that Stipenever sang as himself on Murmur, even as fictionalized a self as one could allow in the context of a pop song orthrough wildly dissociative adolescent ears.There was apalpable distance.• 101 •J.NIIMIIt wasn’t a literary kind of distance, like when youlisten to Gary Numan singing about rape machines downin the park and you know that the narrator inhabits afantastic realm but speaks as a genuinely human entitywho is an extension of Gary Numan who is an extensionof you, the Gary Numan fan, with the Gary Numanalbum, a pop record that you like.As a metaphor for expressing doubt about the biologi-cal basis of consciousness etc., “Down in the Park” isterrific, but as a pop song it’s still very literary, and de-pending on the degree to which old synthesizers floatyour boat, it’s convincing as well.But that’s only because“Down in the Park” is alienation making a place at thetable for its audience.The distance in Murmur’s language, by contrast, is extraliterary—a feeling that though there’s no observer to relate it there’s nevertheless an unname-able something that is happening or even just is in spite of what few verbs there are to shoulder any movement,and the fact that there is no figure on which to fix anypsychology, and the scale is all out of proportion.Proportion in Murmur hinges on that vertiginous I, or more specifically its absence.Across Murmur’s forty-four minutes the word I appears in three places.It figures most prominently in “Sitting Still” and its relatively conventional pop chorus, “I can hear you, I can hear you, Ican hear you.” The only other instances of I to be found in Murmur’s lyrics are marginal, peripheral to those songs’narratives; if you were to remove the I s, those songs wouldn’t change much.In “Perfect Circle,” there’s thelone I in the oblique construction “who might leave you where I left off [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]