Archive for October, 2007
Avoiding Museums of The Past and Effacing Territorial Space on a Hauntiquarian Tour of Western Suffolk
In the dusk I realised I wasn’t going to make it to Barton Mills on foot, due to detouring way east off the Icknield Way path. A little despondent at the lack of fleetness in my feet, I was cheered by the sight of the square Norman tower of West Stow parish church partly obscured by the trees surrounding its walled enclosure and the growing understanding that by taking a left-hand path some hours earlier I’d avoided having to pass by the recreated Anglo-Saxon village at West Stow. I’m not so keen on museums of The Past.
Happy that I’d avoided regionalised national heritage propaganda, I called to mind the Anglian Wolf Society, located in the west of the unmandated region of the East of England. The imaginary sector of West Anglia has already been annexed by, among others, a rail operating company and a higher education institution. I’d avoided the Anglian Wolf Society’s lupine farm on a previous journey along the Icknield Way four years ago, albeit going in the opposite direction, starting from Luton. Having researched localisms, regionalisms, placeisms and other identisms for too long, I’d become infused with the affectivity of my own fictions — notably, Vegan Reich, originally published in Suspect Device, edited by Stewart Home (Serpent’s Tail, 1996) — and decided to refrain from visiting the AWS lest my physical and monetary support gave succour to an organisation that was virtually attempting to reintroduce the wolf into a revisioned region of East Anglia from its liminal western extent, in tandem with other regionalist re-enactments, including the Anglo-Saxon village, located further east.
I wasn’t the only one to grok the power of my fictive anti-regionalist interventions. Andrew Jordan picked up on their effectiveness and affectivity in his 10th Muse review of my now long-gone organ, Proletarian Antiquarian, written when I was the driver of the West Anglia Survey.
Regionalist politics in England hasn’t evolved much since the start of devolution in 1997. The current state of play can be appreciated by visiting here and here. There’s also a legacy English regionalist site from around 2002 here. But despite the extreme liminality of regionalist political and cultural discourse in respect of the eastern counties, the branding of the Government’s East of England region and attempts to sell the regional identity relating to that space are galloping ahead under the aegis of the East of England Development Agency, through its cultural arm, LivingEast, and by the unelected East of England Regional Assembly. The BBC’s regional broadcasting idents are there, too, doing the business.
Do you go still want to wait for international gatherings of idealisms to potentially burst the bubble of state nationalism or regionalism? Or do you want to politicise specific spaces and go for a lower-case approach, along with David Harvey and others who think that locality discourses — effective self-representation, fundholding, etc. — can do the job?
Hauntiquarians remain aloof from decision making at this and any other level, whether in relation to the hard choices taken by the time-travelling spy/magus, Giordano Bruno, and other state leaders that cause suffering to millions or in respect of choosing a dainty confection. Due to having no discernible identity and having becoming a invisible nobody — the better to become everybody — a hauntiquary tends not to worry about standing up to be counted. In any event, I can’t face being ignored by the ignorant again. However, when it comes to taking evasive action to avoid heritage sites, ignoring signposts to veer off heritage trails and then having to navigate by moonlight, a keen hauntiquary will generally plump for the route that best effaces cultural and political boundaries and bursts regional territories and historicised versions of places and pasts.
In the dispersal time of dusk, a hauntiquarian, on regarding a haunting scene, will reimagine it as it were a perceptional mistake in all versions of simultaneous space-time, rather than haunted as it were by themself, and will then proceed to investigate how they might have come to go about perpetuating the dubious existence of such an entity in myth-time. A hauntiquary like me will, when discussing spiritous interventions, always speak of hauntings rather than haunted things. Describing stuff as being haunted suggests dumb ghosts caught by evil empiricist psychic pspooks, then stuffed and mounted steampunk science-style. Understanding hauntings means comprehending the equisimulataneity of experience.
If you’re slotting and categorizing on perceiving hauntings or haunted vistas, based on cultural encounters in The Past, you’re missing the point. It’s not experience coming back to haunt you, but experience happening to you.
The scientists responsible for curating hauntology prefer to backfill the haunted spaces of their regarding with images from their versions of the past and represent those naughty absentees as figurative exhibits in their memory theatres or kinemas, their academic articles or conference papers, or their Museums of The Past.
Posted by Neil
on October 4, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Tags: Eastern counties, Regionalism, Spatiality, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
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The Glass Harmonica: Liminal Instrumentation, Affective Harmonics and the Dubjective Absence of Hauntology
I was having a coffee in central Brighton yesterday when I stopped mid-conversation to try to hear more of what sounded like tiny bells, high-pitched organ notes or a soft but insistent soprano voice — but not quite any of those things — cutting through the industrial noise of a busy coffee shop. Having worked out that it was music playing, rather than the sound of my soul, I asked at the counter.
The woman operating the froth machine didn’t know what the tune was, saying they just played the CDs given to them by HQ. So I went to the Classical Longplayer in Duke Street, where I always go to ask about music I don’t know much about. I still prefer this method of finding out — drifting towards someone who’ll know — to searching the internet. The owner told me immediately what it was: I’d been hearing the sound of the glass harmonica. But he didn’t have anything to sell me.
Back in the dry indoors, a few minutes of searching hooked me up with loads of weird trilling and head-aching harmony. As you’ll see, the sound is much as you’d expect: it’s the high chime of fingers rubbing glass rims.
William Zeitler’s Hong Kong performance of “Venus” has got the lot: exoticism, Orientalism and even hauntiquarianism in the shape of re-enactment in sound, vision and language (he prefers to call his instrument it by its alternate olden name, the glass armonica).
His version of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” melds weird camp and popular musical historicism. Adorno would have loved this.
“The Glass Harmonica” (1968), an allegorical short feature by Russian animator Andrei Khrjanovsky, silently ventriloquises the affectivity of the human will amplified through creative interventions (see part one and part two on Youtube). Khrjanovsky refigures the instrument as a glass lyre, virtually dematerialising the glass harmonica as constructed by Benjamin Franklin and replacing it with a portable cipher suitable for an itinerant bard. Its harmonics are reimagined in a score written by Alfred Schnittke, with the unique and unwieldy industrial instrument represented by more accessible and versatile instrumentation, including flute, violin, celesta, organ, piano, tubular bells, tape effects and, way down in the mix, a suspicion of glass harmonica.
Vera Meyer’s folksy renditions of the glass harmonica “pops” keep her feet firmly on the street, from where she presents a pleasing mix of music and historical factoids.
Not affected by the keening of glass vibrations, Meyer tells her ever-changing audience that the weird harmonies of the glass harmonica might cause “convulsions in dogs and cats, marital disputes and wake people from the dead.” The pitch and harmony of Meyer’s performances are significantly different from Zeitler’s: Zeitler makes melifluous sounds, while Meyer produces tones that are hard to endure. I can believe that the dead would wake up if Meyer was playing outside their place.
Some 18th century critics suggested that exposure to the glass harmonica’s harmonics might be injurious to nervous people and could potentially induce morbid feelings and depression. The same could be said of any musical instrument. If you’ve a tendency towards depression or obsessions, you’ll find a focus for those feelings in your environment.
The weird sound of the glass harmonica produces an effect in the listener beyond the movement of air. As a recorded sound, it’s familiar due to its nearness to the noise made by a wet finger on a wine glass. But with such clarity of tone and available combinations of harmonics, it’s the sound of nothing you’ve ever heard before. It’s not the start-up sound of a difference engine. It’s a recalibrated machine from The Past that affects the weirdness of our immediate perception. It is being and becoming and was and is the sound of the thing that it is. Familiar, yet unknown, its sound lies a little further off in experiential space.
Now play the brittle armonica yourself, courtesy of The Franklin Institute Science Museum, Philadelphia, PA.
Posted by Neil
on October 2, 2007 at 7:20 am
Tags: Music, Sound, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
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