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 “music” 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 one’s instrument from the collective, harmonic homeworld. “Statelessness represents the lack of world,” Hannah Arendt wrote. “It is the condition of world emptiness … the deprivation of membership to a public life.”20 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. “As ‘agents cut off Mr. Khashoggi’s head and dismembered his body,’ ” a New York Times columnist contemplates, “a Saudi doctor of forensics who had been ‘brought along for the dissection and disposal’ had some advice for the others, The Times reported Wednesday. ‘Listen to music, he told them, as he donned headphones himself.’21 What music? The soundtrack to Sweeney Todd?”

The joke here—if one can manage to joke about such horrors, joke-work being no less vital in the face of trauma than dream-work—may in fact be onto something. In the backstory of its libretto, the eponymous antihero of Sweeney Todd has been twice expelled from human membership: “un-membered” when he is sent overseas to a penal colony by a corrupt judge on a trumped-up charge and “dismembered” 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, “My Friends”—among the most gorgeous pieces in the entire work and a contender for the most gorgeous among all of Sondheim’s—not 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 “trance-like quality.… He’s falling into a state of self-hypnosis, so it must have that feeling.… This is non-conversation. This is a ritual.”).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: “At last my arm is complete again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.