Here I'm Alive by Adam Blum
Author:Adam Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
II
We are learning all too well nowadays what happens when this to-and-fro collapses, when the tether snaps, as the opportunities for personal isolation multiply. At the extremes of not enough membership, or never having been membered, emerge the phenomena of alter-worlding, the often subtle reconfiguring of otherwise shared, material reality, intended precisely to withdraw and distance oneself from the communal, resulting in isolated and alienated isotopes of music, irreducibly dissonant to all but the most attentive and musical DJs. There is always some version (or perversion) of âmusicâ playing in these alter-worlds, but the orienting, unifying potential of musical experience, which normally draws the psyche-soma into the weave of humanity (the work of the Muses themselves), is now mobilized in reverse, as a sound blocker, a hazmat suit, to buffer the dissociated body from the terrifying, threatening voltage of being alive, to sever and cauterize the sensory conductors of human contact, detuning oneâs instrument from the collective, harmonic homeworld. âStatelessness represents the lack of world,â Hannah Arendt wrote. âIt is the condition of world emptiness ⦠the deprivation of membership to a public life.â20 One need look no further than the daily news to find nightmare visions of this inhuman alter-world, the Upside Down, charting its parallel universe before our very eyes, right under our noses, under the skin, in noise-cancelled chambers of unholy cruelty. âAs âagents cut off Mr. Khashoggiâs head and dismembered his body,â â a New York Times columnist contemplates, âa Saudi doctor of forensics who had been âbrought along for the dissection and disposalâ had some advice for the others, The Times reported Wednesday. âListen to music, he told them, as he donned headphones himself.â21 What music? The soundtrack to Sweeney Todd?â
The joke hereâif one can manage to joke about such horrors, joke-work being no less vital in the face of trauma than dream-workâmay in fact be onto something. In the backstory of its libretto, the eponymous antihero of Sweeney Todd has been twice expelled from human membership: âun-memberedâ when he is sent overseas to a penal colony by a corrupt judge on a trumped-up charge and âdismemberedâ from his sartorial blades, the instruments of his craft, hidden and preserved for him over the decades by the unsavory Mrs. Lovett, who now runs a bakery beneath his old tonsorial parlor. Sweeney sings the first love song in the musical, âMy Friendsââamong the most gorgeous pieces in the entire work and a contender for the most gorgeous among all of Sondheimâsânot to Mrs. Lovett (to her aching chagrin) but to the blades themselves. The musical result is undeniably hypnotic (Sondheim insisted that actors perform this song with a âtrance-like quality.⦠Heâs falling into a state of self-hypnosis, so it must have that feeling.⦠This is non-conversation. This is a ritual.â).22 One hears in the mesmerizing poetry of these lyrics about the rhythmic, unison, identificatory love of re-memberment, of being made whole, routed not in this case through other people but through a kind of cultural object, a fetish: âAt last my arm is complete again.
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