SONAR FOR IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES, PT.1

Perception, by the time that we turn it over in our minds, is already dead. The occurrence of a given image in the stream of consciousness is like that of a spark sent up from the anvil at the strike of a hammer, and whatever admixture of stimuli impressed upon us at the moment of its birth (and death) passes in an instant; all impressions are immediately severed from the conditions of their arising. But though time advances like a guillotine of the senses, the mind trawls close behind, gathering, retaining. The thinking human is native to the plains of the past, and we have our tools and our methods for keeping – in some way or other – what we want to carry forward.

The best of these tools is language; through it we have tried to arrest transience red-handed in some stable form. By fixing names to things we became able to use them like counters on the board of the imagination, and with these things we told stories – first orally, and later, when cultures began to lose faith in the solidity of the spoken, through the written word. Human beings built out of language museums of thought, cultural deposits of shared memory ossified into myth, that existed long before brick and mortar museums. We also enchanted the world, because language can build upon itself, and the imaginal can outstrip the actual in richness (if not in sustenance). Language adorns the objects it signifies, for better or worse, until they can hardly be perceived naked of its vestments. The root of designation is design. Wilhelm von Humboldt, as quoted by Ernst Cassirer in Language and Myth, tells us:

‘Man lives with his objects chiefly – in fact, since his feeling and acting depends on his perceptions, one may say exclusively – as language presents them to him. By the same process whereby he spins language out of his own being, he ensnares himself in it; and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another.’

But though with words we can condition our perception and build secondary experiences of enormous depth, language will always fail if we ask of it an accurate account of what was known only in the instant of its passing. Each word is an essay, as per the definition ‘To try, or attempt’, and because of this no one word is truly synonymous with the object of its designation, or even with itself; in its pronunciation, in the sequence of words in which it is spoken, in the resonances that it has come bearing – each instance of its use is translatable across neither language nor time. It is a singular event in a succession of events, as are all of the moments that make up our lives. In The Principles of Psychology William James writes:

‘The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow… Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo of penumbra that surrounds and escorts it – or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh…’

If speech is the fossil of experience, then the written word is the fossil of the spoken, and so a transcribed account of a thought once lived is always twice distorted, once by its muteness, twice by its tongue. This does not mean that expression is necessarily condemned to an absolute death, however. There is a form of speech which is neither writing nor speaking: singing. Singing is the art native to the voice, an elevated speech behind speaking, as there is an artful listening behind hearing, and a higher seeing behind sight – but since the ear and the eye are merely receptive, the mouth is the only organ (besides the body as a whole) that we can express ourselves with instantaneously. Singing and dancing are the two arts whose expression is entirely unmediated. We need no canvas to sing with our voices, or to move with our bodies.

Singing is a kind of ritual for amplifying experience, and it does not necessarily have to be far removed from speech to achieve this. What matters is the rhythmic vibration of the voice in the throat, or the received vibration in the ear. Even a written work can be imbued with a latent musicality, in the extent to which it retains the magic of the oral tradition from which it emerged – the magic of rhythm, pace, phrasing – but when this is retained it is not in the letters themselves, but in what they instruct us to do with our mouths. Read these two stanzas from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott in your head, and then read them aloud:

'The gemmy bridle glitter'd free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.
The bridle bells rang merrily
               As he rode down from Camelot:
And from his blazon'd baldric slung
A mighty silver bugle hung,
And as he rode his armour rung,
               Beside remote Shalott.
All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather,
The helmet and the helmet feather
Burn'd like one burning flame together,
               As he rode down from Camelot.
As often thro' the purple night,
Below the starry clusters bright,
Some bearded meteor, trailing light,
               Moves over green Shalott.'

After intoning it aloud, the room has changed. The bearded meteor has trailed its light. Not to say that reading a poem silently can’t be powerful too, but it is a power borrowed from speech – the inward pleasure of private reading also has its root in the verbal. Our linguistic imagination is shaped by the muscular limitations of the mouth. We can’t speak a word in our heads that it wouldn’t be possible to speak aloud, and when I try I find my tongue instinctively straining along with my inner voice.1

Not so with singing. I can sing melodies in my head that I would not be able to sing out loud (though I can only ever sing with one voice; harmony can never be imagined, only heard)2. Our body vibrates in awed sympathy when we hear a virtuosic singer; they are doing what we know that we could do, even if we can’t do it. And if words are being sung then all the inertness of language on the page is sent back into flight – but the voice is no emptier a vessel without language, it is more than capable of bringing us to tears by its sounding alone. It is pure expression.

Through song we can exult in our circumstances, or we can escape them, to venture deeper into the world as it is given, or to wander on some higher plane above ourselves. An example of the first instance is the musical relationship to the land experienced by the natives of the central Australian desert, as described by Belden C. Lane in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes:

‘Aboriginal peoples traverse the sacred landscape by following invisible song-lines, singing – as they walk – the songs first sung by their ancestors in an ancient dreamtime beyond memory. They name (and “re-create”) every characteristic of their hard and thirsty land – rocks, caves, desert brush, and waterholes – through the habitus, or ritualised way of perceiving reality, they bring to it. They know that to “dwell” in a place creatively over an extended period of time is to conduct oneself according to a custom or habit that draws meaning from the particularities of environment.’

They sing songs that are maps of their land, and their land is a map of the self – in that their selves are branches on the tree of their culture, and their culture is a construct of memory, and their memory and the memory of their dead contains a repertoire of myth reawakened daily in songs, which are of the land. It is a respiratory existence – the land, even in such harsh conditions, provides sustenance, and the individuals sustained by it collectively praise the land and in doing so a kind of twofold passage of selfhood opens between person and landscape. To refer again to Cassirer:

‘The mythical form of conception is not something super-added to certain definite elements of empirical existence; instead, the primary “experience” itself is steeped in the imagery of myth and saturated with its atmosphere. Man lives with objects only in so far as he lives with these forms; he reveals reality to himself, and himself to reality, in that he lets himself and the environment enter into this plastic medium, in which the two do not merely make contact, but fuse with each other.’

This mythic intermingling of person and place is not a quirk of a specific set of people, nor is it a defence of the national borders scored across our maps, it is a way of living that was, and is, common to all who did, and do, enjoy direct relationship with the land. The mythic is what exists between the inbreath and the outbreath of the imagination; it is the forms of the world and the moulds of our minds coming together, and as both change, so too do its forms shift. It is the seed of art, and therefore the seed of song.

I have written previously about humanity’s fundamentally creative nature, and Henri Bergson’s labelling of our species as ‘homo faber’.3 The creative urge in the human manifests both practically and artistically – though have its two faces ever been more divorced? The simplest and healthiest artistic urge in us can be thought of as gratitude given for sustenance gained. Think of a child kicking its legs and humming a happy melody while enjoying some food, or a satisfied lover singing to themselves as they go about their day. The soul is sustained by its environment, as the body is sustained by the produce of its environment.4 Because we take, we want to give, and because we give, we feel that we have earned our take.5

This is spontaneous creativity as gratefulness, but it is an incidental or naïve kind of art, without the necessary labour through which lasting artworks are born. But they are not works, nor are they supposed to last. They emerge like a potato from the soil; to be offered up to the moment in thanks for the satisfaction it has given us. It is simply that we have taken, and we have to give, but to give we have to create. This subsidiary and spontaneous kind of song is breakfast song, or bath song, or play song, as short lived as a bubble bobbing around in the air. If this kind of life-accompanying singsong seems anachronistic, maybe it is an indication of how unsatisfied our average daily routine leaves us – how unritualised and unsanctified the little milestones of our days have become. But if we want some kind of record from the bucolic milieu that this kind of singing evokes, it is the work songs that are the most lasting. Agriculture is so intrinsically associated with song it is as if music emerged from the tilled ground of the land workers along with its vegetables. When the body is occupied the mouth can still sing, but the strain on the body during hard labour means that the key to the crucible of art – struggle, often synonymous among artists with suffering, though exertion doesn’t always have to be – is present, and so labour and song are bound together throughout history, and those songs meant to accompany the toil of a day’s work have passed through the formative fire that has ensured their standing the test of time.

But there are songs of dissatisfaction too, and they have endured even more. The starved body desires even more to take, and the deprived soul desires even more to give. We know that blues music has its roots in the songs sung by slaves working plantations – their lives were torture, drudgery and dreams of escape, and though it is said that they wove maps of escape routes into the braided scalps of their daughters, they could not all themselves hope to escape in body, but they sought through song an escape in soul. The songs – called spirituals – had to be substantive enough to exist as a door might exist. Shanties serve a similar purpose for those restless at sea, and their melodies too are simple and repetitive to allow for communal participation, and passage into the dream.

Though their voluntarily impoverished conditions are less fraught, monks in many monastic orders accompany their daily offices with plainchant – a kind of simple and monotonous speak-singing. In Harmonies of Heaven and Earth Joscelyn Godwin reports what happened when the monks of a particular abbey stopped this practice:

‘Like many good things, its value was only recognised in its absence… When after Vatican II the Trappist monks of an American abbey obediently discontinued the singing of their daily Offices in Latin, all manner of things began to go wrong. Most noticeably, they found that they could no longer survive with only four or five hours’ sleep a night, as some of them had done for years. Other troubles followed: sickness and psychological disturbances that threatened to upset the even tenor of their contemplative lives… The use of the voice is a human need no less compelling than sexual desire. The Trappists, forswearing conversation, nevertheless exercised their voices in song, and it was the removal of this sublimation that brought disharmony to their lives.’

Slave spirituals, sea shanties and plainchant all emerged in oppressive and inescapable places, from the mouths of people whose inner life was of more aesthetic vitality to them than their surroundings. These songs sang of lost homes – of distant African shores, of faraway loves, or of another world unreachable in this life. And they were as ephemeral and as without accoutrement as dreams; in their purest form unaccompanied by musical instruments, they were cobbled into being from nothing more than stomping feet, clapping hands and singing mouths. If they were doors they were doors only revealed when opened. They were summoned and dissolved to carry the singers through the working day, whether it was the intense labour on the plantations or ships, or the chaste sacraments in the abbeys.

But while the folk tradition invites participation, there is music that stands apart from its audience and attempts to reach instead for a sublimity that can only be witnessed. As far as vocalisation goes, opera is the zenith of this style. In no other genre is the voice as melodious, or the vocal performances as virtuosic. Opera emerged during the Renaissance in Italy, a land abundant in mountains,6 vistas and lakes, in which both eyes and feet had room to wander, and in which there was no dearth of budding artists free to indulge their wandering spirits. The opera houses that were built for its performance mirrored the grandiosity of the land so that the music might always resound as it would in a valley. Opera was always exclusive, and these days has sunk into relative obscurity in part due to this exclusivity, and in part due to its musical inaccessibility by modern standards. But even among many of those who do attend the opera, it is to enjoy a cultural symbol of a vanished past. Not that the mountains and valleys of Italy have disappeared, but the lens through which the artists of the Renaissance viewed them has, to all but the most anachronistic of aesthetes.

Music becomes old fashioned when the society that birthed it disappears. Manners of emotional expression change from generation to generation as the conditions of life change – which happens very gradually or not at all in tribal societies, but which has happened especially rapidly in ours over the last three or four generations. In the 1980s we saw the emergence into mainstream culture of a new genre: hip hop. It burst out of the claustrophobic streets of The Bronx, and its primarily rhythmic sound mirrored the harsh repetitiveness of its environment. Instead of melody, the conditions of life in this environment became the thing in most need of expression. Storytelling took precedence.

Nevertheless, geographical differences did soon become apparent in the evolving sound of the music. The rivalry between east and west coast rappers that flourished in the 90s was notable sonically as well as lyrically. The East Coast, championed primarily by New York, was characterised by harder drum samples (hence the name ‘boom bap’) and more jazz-inflected production, while much of the West Coast hip hop coming out of California sounded more spacious and open, more funk-inspired, and you can almost see the weed smoke drifting up among the palm leaves when you listen to it.

But the focus of hip hop was still, primarily, lyrical. Just like the blues songs and sea shanties that pined for a particular love, or bewailed a particular sorrow, as a proxy for the love or the sorrow of each voice in the choir, hip hop foregrounded tales of the individual as a means of articulating the life of a community, but unlike the old numbers chanted by those labourers bent to their shared tasks, it came with a strong streak of competition reminiscent almost more of professional boxing than of any previous musical genre – and in fact, the rhyming way that Muhammad Ali spoke in interviews, and the way that he conducted himself more generally, is considered by many a harbinger of hip hop’s emergence.

The competitive aspect of hip hop developed into battle rap culture, in which rappers tried to defeat each other by showing superior skill, and trying to dish out more humiliating insults than they took. The parallels with boxing also extended to gang affiliation and violence outside of the “ring”, and the one-upmanship of the rap battle scene spilled into the wider genre, with rappers taking shots at each other on record – the booth becoming a kind of enclosed shadowboxing ring – as well as in person, or if not calling out anyone specifically, then giving a general demonstration of their poetic or personal superiority. The lyrical predilection of the genre tended to veer quite widely between this kind of self-aggrandizing and deep introspective storytelling. Most rappers at any given time embody the spirit of the warrior or the elder. The warrior is decorated through combat – prominent examples of this style would be Big Pun, Immortal Technique and Big L. The elder is decorated through knowledge – examples of this style being Ka, Billy Woods and Mos Def/Yasiin Bey. Perhaps by necessity, the elder speaks as one who has been a warrior before, and may have to be again.

Competition is a means for competitors to bestow honour upon themselves. Bearing in mind that hip hop originated with the descendants of a displaced and oppressed people stripped of their heritage, Simone Weil, in The Need for Roots, might shed some light on the reason why this competitive spirit became so dominant in hip hop:

‘All oppression creates a famine with regard to the need for honour because the traditions of greatness belonging to the oppressed are not recognised, due to their lack of social prestige.’

Hip hop is like a broken mirror of the American Dream, spat from the mouths of a people already betrayed by its promise. It is music from the lineage of the slaves that sang the blues, the same slaves to whom the reaping of their own labour was denied. And it is embraced by a commercial industry that exists downstream from the same masters that oversaw that labour. The root of all evil is practically the ground upon which America was founded. It is the root that destroys all other roots, as Weil also reminds us:

‘Money destroys roots wherever it goes because the drive to make money supplants all other incentives. This drive easily overshadows all other incentives because it requires so much less attention. Nothing is as clear or simple as a number.’

Major record labels absorb hip hop artists and in doing so not only make money from them, but nullify their dissenting spirit. They package and present them as part of the same collective dream as the rest of the media, as product. This is not the fault of the artists – no artist worthy of the title considers their work primarily as a thing to be sold. But it is a game that must be played under our modern-day capitalism, which makes a game out of everything, even life and death. It invites us all to the bargaining table, no matter the vastly different hands we might have been dealt. We can, of course, choose not to play, but it is becoming more difficult to do so – the gambling table takes up most of the world by now. In its shadow the bounty that once bloomed natural and plentiful is becoming scarce, and harvests are hoarded by greedy hands.

As a natural extension of this, the kind of inner-city environment, along with the economic deprivation and social unrest, that fuelled hip hop in its infancy has only become more widespread since, and the music of that environment has grown in popularity alongside the spreading sprawl and dissatisfaction. The condition of the modern city-dweller is uprooted and without honour. It is not surprising that hip hop has been the musical zeitgeist for the past 20 years or so, although it hasn’t been alone.

Around the same time that hip hop was emerging, so too was electronic music. Most modern music is recorded (if not composed) on computers. Much of the output of the popular artists of the 21^st century reflects our digital milieu, because they, like us, have grown up with vicarious access to all kinds of real and non-corporeal places. In contrast to the kinds of shared inner and outer landscapes of peoples such as the natives of the central Australian desert, the current life of the average person in the tech-infused parts of the world puts a strain on our need for self-expression because our relationship with our environment is skewed or deeply unique, which is to say our relationship with ourselves is too.7 And the more we escape into the digital, the more the cries of our soul reflect this world more than the world of our bodies. Our uprootedness from the world means that our songs take stranger and more distorted forms. Being one such uprooted person, I understand that these songs, too, can be beautiful, even if the world that birthed them is a world that is doing everything it can to stifle the soul.

But not so long ago there was a collective dream of a not-too-distant future different to the one we have come to inhabit. Around the late 90s and early 00s, when the festivity of that millennial turnover from the 1 to the 28 had a hold on the collective imagination, a particular aesthetic emerged in pop music videos, a sort of futuristic, metallic, inorganic otherworld almost like the inside of the vast supercomputer that was about to swallow us all. And inside of it we danced. I’m thinking of videos like Try Again by Aaliyah, Virtual Insanity by Jamiraquai, No Scrubs by TLC, Bye Bye Bye by NSYNC, All is Full of Love by Björk, She’s a Bitch by Missy Elliot, 4 Seasons of Loneliness by Boys II Men, Scream by Michael and Janet Jackson…. These sci-fi environments look now eerily like the last dreams of a society on the brink of being engulfed by what it was desperately trying to adapt to. A celebration of what might have been.

My relationship to technology is something that I wrestle with every day and I feel its rot – or its rust – upon my soul. And then I go outside, and I see a tree, and I remember that there have always been two worlds, the inside and the outside. At this moment in time, both worlds are sick9, and the cure for each lies in the other. The technology of repair is us; and all the tools that we may have to use are incidental to what must first of all be in place – love of the world, which, once upon a time (and place), was synonymous with love of the self. Only through the intercourse between the inner and the outer worlds can we make ourselves well.

Read part 2, Songs of the other world, here.

If any generous souls feel like making a small donation, I’ve set up a buymeacoffee account: https://buymeacoffee.com/somethingishappening. I’ll probably use it to buy food, but I might occasionally buy a coffee for form’s sake.