last night a DJ held my hand
Weird one this time, probly stupid, I dunno, sorry gang. (The Sorry Gang is the name of my crew. It’s a crew of one. Just me, wandering round the bar mumbling about the most recent Propagandhi record
and giving everyone eyes that say I’m absolutely wishing for but not gonna find the guts to say ‘so you wanna be friends?!’ Whoa, that joke took a sad turn. Sorry gang. For the record, I talk to motherfuckers all the time, I’m real annoying! Anyhow…)
Like, I think, most people of conscience I sometimes find witnessing the fucked up shit generated by the hellworld we’re trapped in sort of exceeds my pain tolerance, accompanied by the shameful recognition that if it hurts this much from the distance afforded by the position as witness then the suffering for those in the frame, so to speak, must be of a whole nother order. In those moments I find I mostly need to move around (I end up taking a lot of walks, gardening’s good as well), though I often could use a hug or similar - the cats are nice too.
I also take a lot of solace in music, though here too there’s some guilt on reflection (guilt on reflection would be a decent title for a memoir about going to catholic school, eh?), two flavors, the first a variation on what I said a moment ago to the effect that participant pain surprasses witness pain, a kind of ‘oh, so YOU get to take a painkiller...?’ kinda train of thought, and the second an objection to treating music like a tool to be put to use, rather than a form of relationship or something.
Part of the issue here really is just that in the face of the death machine in any of its demonic versions smaller things all feel uselessly small sometimes. Pointless. Why bother? Here’s Brecht on the matter:
Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
(“I ate my food between slaughters” is hitting like a sucker punch these days too. The rest of the poem is very, very worth reading.)
As an art lover, as someone who is to a significantly degree the product of a bunch of songs (and I don’t mean that as a joke, to some degree I feel like I was raised by “music’s power to describe, compel, renew.”), I’ve never been one to think ‘art, who cares, why is this valuable’ etc - I’ve felt intuitively for a very long time the need for roses as well as bread, and I continue to do so. At the same time, in these intolerably painful moments ‘why bother?’ is easy to think about nearly anything, and it feels at a gut level like a need to justify things, like art, that don’t need justification. That felt need is really something like distress referred from elsewhere (like how a problem with the hip can lead to pain in the knee or back; if I remember right psychoanalysts call that displacement?), but it can help to tamp it down to just answer it, if there’s answer to hand.
The answer I’ve arrived at lately with music is in part that bands are friendships, practices of friendship. Of course I know some bands hate each other personally but never mind that, and at least some of the time those bands can still enjoy the act of playing together. Related, I’ve been thinking about music as tactile, especially played through speaker instead of headphones: a person’s body parts move leading to moving air which reachers the hearer, it’s a mediated hug, it’s holding hands from a distance. I don’t mean that as a joke or flippantly, I - as the crank proprietor of a carefully curated menagerie of pet theories and preoccupations - think that part of the power of music is in its tactile character (or maybe its multiple tactile qualities?), and I think this is part of why music can help provide the needed hug, and if there’s dancing involved then it gives the benefits of a walk, like a walk holding hands with a loved one (I took one of those tonight with my youngest daughter, it was nice).
Again, I don’t think art needs justifying and yet, again, looking at more waves of blood I feel at a gut level like art does need justifying because what’s the point of anything at all, and so I’m really just intellectualizing here to ride out the gut feeling (which is, like I said, I think mostly or entirely just referred distress from witnessing the horrors), but for me personally (and at the of the day I only want what’s best for me - that’s a joke, I absolutely to not live like someone who wants what’s best for myself, my god.... anyway) this intellectualizing does the trick sometimes, so I keep it up. But yeah. For now this justification works for me: music is in effect people touching people, and of course in such bloody times one wants and is entitled to a hand hold, and arm around the shoulder, and that contact doesn’t fix things but it very understandably helps at least in the sense that living through such horrors without any hand hold would be even worse. Likewise since bands are a practice of friendship (and if I remember correctly, Aristotle, the famous Belgian ape, said that friendship is a form of love, and, I mean…) that means music is the product of that practice, a product that in effect gives us a way to watch (well, hear) friends being friends, just being together for the sake of being together.