Dear L,
I don’t know how many people around me are reading enough; if they are, they are certainly not talking about them enough. I learned that it is okay to talk about sex, death and food in one book. That’s what I read recently, that stuck in my head. Mathais Énard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, the length it goes on about death, pairs well Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive your plow over the bones of the dead, which is maybe a murder mystery. How do you talk about death outside of a medical journal? How do you talk about people going missing outside of a newspaper? What do you think about when you look at a photograph and that person there, is no more? I try not to dwell on death, but one can not help, when reading Murakami. Norwegian Wood comes to mind, followed by the Rat Trilogy. How does one deal with the death of a friend1? I naturally come to the conversation between Sam & Charlie in Perks of being a wallflower.
When I hear the words genocidal jaw of Lucifer, in Nick Cave’s Higgs Boson Blues, it keeps me up at night; I do not know why Nick Cave wrote those words in 2013 but I know the state of particle physics of the time turned into that bold existential groove that one thinks of listening to at 3AM. Turns out in 16th century Italy, Jerome Cardano faced what we these days call Complex Numbers; he didn’t know what to do with them. Michael Brooks, in his book The Quantum Astrologers Handbook, with much flair added a time traveller just to have a conversation with Jerome Cardano. Was Jerome Cardano existentially challenged in the face of the wild untamed mathematics he stumbled upon? How do we deal with existential questions when no time traveller comes to visit us in our prison cells?
I suppose, one can look to Brian Eno.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” — Brian Eno, “A Year With Swollen Appendices”
Are our ugly existential questions, questions we cherish because we can avoid them; burying ourselves in self-care, yoga mats and pilates? Or are we failing in our questions; spinning out of control? Are we Brian Eno's "mediums"? To answer that, I tend to prescribe myself two songs, Godspeed, You Black Emperor’s Dead Flag Blues and Paramore’s Hard Times. You’ll see when you hear them.
“We are trapped in this horrible machine and the machine is bleeding to death”, comes in the song Dead Flag Blues; it is also the exact same thing that one might think of, about the machine in Karin Tidbeck’s Jugganath. Karin Tidbeck also wrote about a child being born in a tin can; a child, to be nurtured & cared for. But what of a child born in war and persecution. In the video game Ghost of Yotei, the developers gave me a chance to name my characters’ horse Mochizuki, I believe that means full moon in Japanese. By doing so, they gave me the choice to impart a tiny bit of humanity in the character who is very much, if not only, driven by rage, revenge and blood.
Rage, is alien to me; I have trained myself out of it, much like the society around me; we have succumbed to manufactured rage, the smartest people in the world have managed to synthesize it, almost out of thin air, and shove them to our screens. We even have some words for it, "ragebait", for example. But, now the only way left for me to connect with rage, would be to condemn myself in a deeper circle of hell with an electric guitar and a distorted amplifier for eternity; something that I hope would sound like the album Pink by Boris, slow and regulated. Eternity sounds like a long time to be stuck in a noise-metal performance; but these days don’t we complain that we don’t have enough time?
Beyond the edges of materialism is the question of time. I am not yet sure if Everything Everywhere All At Once asked that question, but it came very close. Answers to the question of time is a particularly complicated, because the answer costs time. How do we know if our time is well spent?
Some people around me read only fiction, some people only non-fiction. Some people only read self-help books, some people research papers. The protagonist in The Marble Hall Murders has a nerve injury that her reading time have been restricted to one hour a day. Would I think too much about what I am reading time if I could only read one hour a day?2. The most strategic answer is obviously, yes, one would read what brings the most value to them. But then again, if one had to carefully pick what they read because of their limited time, one could also say it does not matter what they read because such limited time won't bring them anything substantial anyway, so why bother.
When I was reading Benjamin Labatut's book When We Cease to Understand the World, I thought the same about Werner Heisenberg's outing to the countryside to recover his health, and him churning out physics in a feverish trance. Did he think it would be a waste of time go out in the country? Do we every think about going out in the country to recover? In all honesty, I don't even know if the stories are real, how much of the fever dream of quantum physics actually happened. In his book, Benjamin Labatut weaved bits of fiction between real events. I suppose that's one way to write "non"-fiction; like Morten Skørsnes's Shark Drunk. Starting from Shark Drunk, I stopped separating my books on the shelf into non-fiction and fiction. My bookshelf is now completely devoid of any established organisational system, except it's recency. I am happy to interlace Perceval Everett's James between Gödel, Escher, Bach & Oliver Sacks' Everything in Its Place. When I look at my bookshelf, I think of the bookshelves in the rooms I grew up among. If I ever lost my memories, including my name, I would like the keep memories of what I read, watched & listened to. Much like what happens in Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
But all of this sounds like a brag about my taste, ironic, when I can barely remember the moonlit rice fields in Saratchandra’s Srikanta.
Best, A