For Science!

HEY!

Wet through, as though it had been licked,
the crowd.
The soured air fans with its mildew.
Hey!
Russia,
couldn’t you show us
something fresher?

Blessed is he who even just once could,
even with eyes closed,
forget you,
unneeded, like a head cold,
and sober,
like mineral water.

You are all so dull, as though
the entire universe does not contain a Capri.
But Capri exists.
From the shinning of blooms
the whole island is like a woman in a pink bonnet.

Look at you, you think you’re all that,
and I –
see how crude and brutal my hand is.
Time past, in jousts,
Time past, in battles
I might have been the most skillful of marauders.

Race like trains toward shores, and the shore
forget, our bodies rocked on steamships.
We will discover a score of Americas.
In uncharted antipodes loaf a vacation.

What a blast, having inflicted a great blow,
to look around, spreading your feet wide.
And the enemy, where his ancestors are,
there
he’s been sent to hell by the logic of the sword.

And after, in the fire of gilded ballrooms,
having forgotten the habit of sleep
spend the whole night through,
your eyes
buried in the yellow-orbed cognac.

And finally, bristling like a hedgehog,
from a hangover coming to in the morning,
threaten your unfaithful lover you’ll kill her
and discard the corpse in the sea.

Tear off the nonsense of jackets and cuffs,
color the starched breasts like camouflaged armor,
crank the handle of the table knife,
and we’ll all be, if even for a day, Spaniards.

So that all, forgetting our northerly minds,
fall in love, brawl, worry.
Hey!
Man,
call out the earth
herself for a dance!

Take it in and sew the sky anew,
invent new stars and strew them,
so that, scratching the roofs in a frenzy,
into the sky clamber the souls of artists.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

1916

with a battered
summer hat
on my knees
my vagrant life grew
accustomed to buses

- Shuji Terayama

translated by Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden

“You know, it doesn’t make sense to leave home to look for home, to give up a life to find a new life, to say goodbye to friends you love just to find new friends.”

1


Other than propaganda-


a police dog sniffs one; 
a German police dog
not responsible for Naziism? 
One is not sweet on him.

When one does not love animals, 
one’s concern is not respect.

Workers
you could
take time off
this March morning

trot out 
like this police dog

ambling critic
of spring

(the curse of the verse on him!) 

might make bare your eyes
to the white gull
astigmatically a launch

since it sits, distant
in the middle of the river: 

your value which enslaves you
in advance
has made your eye-pupils limited-

inanity
to prate
the injustice of it.

2

Can dogs
argue
injustices

Dogs in a vise
and a wood saw
can saw an anatomy
of dog

Such as you never saw.

If it yowls
shut the eyelid on a bad dream, 
let not the snarls take, 
With its virus in you
You are immune.

What hounds
you means to.
Not all woodsawyers
grow animal.

3

Shanty
on the river
with
one window

The unemployed
having 
a home
has no home

and no nag
protected 
by
the United States’ flag-

each animal 
his own gravedigger
almost
sings

who will
walk out
against
the

social
and political
order of
things 

Louis Zukofsky

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay- covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the 

wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Edipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What!—-by such narrow ways—?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

“The visitor enters and says: “How many books! Have you read them all?” […] I had once adopted the defiant answer: “I haven’t read a single one, or else why would I keep them here?” But it is a dangerous answer because it unleashes the obvious reaction: “And where do you keep those you’ve read?” A better answer is Roberto Leydi’s: “Many more, my dear sir, many more,” which freezes the opponent and plunges him into a state of stupefied veneration. But I find it merciless and anxiety-inducing. Now I have fallen back on the statement: “No, these are those I have to read by next month, the others I keep at the university,” an answer that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy, and on the other induces the visitor to anticipate the moment of his departure.” - Umberto Eco

‘Now that this most excellent and perfect concord of life does remain principally in the midst of a line drawn from Unity, or the fountain of form, to the Earth or duality, which is the fountain of matter, I prove it thus by the accords of Music…’ Robert Fludd: Philosophia Moysaica: 1638

1.That there is an area between other forms of music where all of the ‘rules’ which hold them apart cease to apply. All musics bleed into this Empty Quarter, some exist more within, and some more without, its bounds. i) Being beyond ‘music’, it is noise. ii) Being beyond ‘rules’, it is free.

1.1 In a universe of free choice, unrestrained by divine tutelage, received dominant ideas, or unshakeable norms of ‘civilised’ behaviour, one can do anything one chooses.

1.2 In such an ethically sceptical universe, a plurality of goods must prevail.

1.3 The tough question is thus unavoidable in its unmediated immediacy, ‘What exactly are you going to choose to do?’

2. Free music is so much a part of traditional folk forms that it is scarcely recognised as such. By definition it does not exist at all within the corpus of academic classical music, since the rules of that form do not admit of its existence.

2.1 Therefore we find that LaMonte Young has not been admitted to the pantheon of classicism - for expanding now into infinity.

2.2 This is Stockhausen’s ‘tendency to surmount finite time and death’. It is the Map of 49’s Dream in action.

2.3 This rebellion against ‘music’ from within the classical tradition takes the form of attacks on the parameters of accepted tonality and harmonic structure. These are prosecuted either by the co-option of non-European traditions or by the rigorous application of post-Pythagorean number-crunching to scored works.

3. In this way classical music can imitate Free by the planned manipulation of noise. By contrast Free music uses noise purely because it is the basic unit of all musics.

3.1 Hence Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Crumb, the ‘Minimalists’ (to name an arbitrary few).

3.2 ‘I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electric instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.’ John Cage (1937)

3.3 Here still noise and music are conceived as a dichotomy. Rather, noise is a superset embracing music within itself.

4. Free music last came into the light through jazz, hence the widespread illusion that the two are somehow necessarily related.

4.1 The sanctification of profane musics which was the goal of many of the Free Travellers of the sixties led many of them through jazz and out into a world music. This path ultimately converges in the Empty Quarter of ‘music’ with that followed by the academicians in revolt.

4.2 Distinguished by an elevation of feeling to a pinnacle as the weather vane of experience; Free jazz, while chewing up and spitting out many through the exigencies of its service, left enough marks behind to show others the way.

4.3 In this twin threat we see the actual peril of the traditional academy. Outflanked on the one side by the revolt of outraged sensibilities (Feeling) and on the other by the revolt of formalism into a florescence that destroys the very boundaries of the ‘work’ itself (Repetition, Repetition, Repetition - the Three R’s).

5. From the fringes of jazz, Free moved into rock music by a process of osmosis. Numerous zones of rupture can be identified in the period c. 1965-73.

5.1 An obvious exchange of this type occurred in 1968, just after Lou Reed uttered the words ‘… and then my mind split open…’. Later he was to acknowledge the priority of Cecil Taylor’s influence over the squall of amplified guitar noise that followed. The direct personal connections with the Theatre of Eternal Music are too well known to merit examination. They form an evident context for this aesthetic in evolution.

5.2 Throughout the catalogue of ESP (a label in many ways thoroughly representative of this moment of convergence) this ‘meeting’ between jazz, rock, classical and folk musics is exemplified. The influence of Free music is everywhere evident.

5.3 Market forces and the growing power of international music production/publication cartel interests combined to stunt the mass effect of this unique historical moment. Minds split open just in time to be crushed - the zone of discontinuity in ‘music’ was, in the public eye at least, papered over.

6. Free music is distinguished by the absence of exact premeditation, and therefore by the abstention of the musicians from planned repetition of the same music on subsequent occasions. Hence the abolition of traditional notation. Structured musics of whatever provenance by definition follow set patterns and parameters of rhythm and tone.

6.1 ‘We must let sounds be what they are’. LaMonte Young (1960)

6.2 ‘Notes’ don’t matter, the playing and the elapsed time do.

6.3 Such spontaneous composition demands a particular process of recording capable of coping with its rigors. Live stereo recording is ideal in this context.

7. In this way Free mirrors reality, while structured musics reflect the vain attempts of human subjectivity to impose itself on the blind flood of faciticity.

7.1 The pinnacle and epitome of this mistaken understanding is represented by the life and work of Robert Fludd. As a late-Renaissance neo-Platonist he took as basic the conformity of the Real to the Ideal, and the clearest expression of this for him was the relation between the harmonic ratios of the whole tones and the structure of the cosmos itself. His model of the universe was a monochord marked with an octave of notes. No clearer expression of the ‘musical’ weltanschauung need be sought.

7.2 We stand this dialectic on its head.

7.3 Our noise grows out of confusion.

8. Noise from amplified electrical instruments, especially from defective and/or ‘low tech’ equipment, opens immense areas of the audible frequency spectrum to exploitation by the Free musician.

8.1 The medium is (a part of) the message.

8.2 Broken machines distance the musician from the process of the music. In this way random factors are introduced, analogous to those which arise from the interplay of harmonic overtones in an acoustic environment (a factor in a later stage of the music process).

8.3 Form and content come together in an apparent vacuity. The mode of recording is a part of the process, and an integral part of the outcome. The artificial distinction between musician (Artist) and technician (Craftsman) is dissolved.

9. Free music which utilises rock instrumentation and aesthetics as its jumping-off point can harness a noise more purely random and less limited by subjective considerations than that of any but the most determined acoustic musicians.

9.1 Exceptions: the unamplified attack of the Borbetomagus reeds, Brotzmann, or many North African trumpet musics. Many other honourable mentions must be omitted.

9.2 Examples: Rudolph Grey, Donald Miller. Hundreds of others doing the same thing on a subconscious level.

9.3 If we can see it, we have here a chance to seize another Free Moment, and leap out. Let us not close our eyes and forget to jump.

10. Such is the authority of the academicians’ synthetic classical tradition that even those who do not embrace their premises and attendant prejudices instinctively reject the Free as ‘not music’. All the more reason to make more of it.

10.1 ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical when he has used them - as steps - to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it). He must transcend these propositions and then he will see the world aright.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)