Nearly the last termly duties discharged, strange feeling as the campus empties as if this were also an emptying of my own heart. The opening of summer (though it is unsummery today): a day spent with books all around me. But a heart that is empty because I have no strong project to which to bind myself.
I cast about rather aimlessly, filling my notebook: should I write on Homer, song and the Greeks? I wonder, coming across some passages I had forgotten and which I’ll rewrite soon, I think, when I’m in the mood – or should I begin with Nancy’s reflections on music in The Sense of the World? Neither.
I look through my own books, wondering how I can discover a book over to music. Phrases come: the ‘there is’ of music, music as negative absolute, the usual stuff. But this won’t do either. I want a clean break with the past, a new leap. But it has to be a leap to something vast and new. Then the phrase comes: cosmic American music. Of course: I can write on kosmos, world, and on the phenomenological notion of world as well as its Deleuzian sense.
I take a break and go for a walk, half pleased with myself but still anxious because I haven’t really made a beginning. There’s Gram Parsons, of course, I think to myself, but shouldn’t I write about Sun-Ra – and what about Funkadelic? What about Albert Ayler and Alice Coltrane? Within twenty minutes or so the project becomes too vast and encompassing. But still, I want to write about something vast, to give myself a new vista …
Then, walking along Northumbria Avenue, the revelation: write on a fragmentary cosmic American music, the flag, as it were reversed, nor Americana in that broad, expansive sense, but something broken or half formed. It becomes clear and allows me rejoin my older interests: acosmic music, the negative flag, uncelebratory, minor and near voiceless. Now I can argue that an acosmic music (but I won’t call it that!) presses forward to be heard in Will Oldham or Smog, in Cat Power without having to concern myself with the new psychedelia of The Flaming Lips (too much plenitude! Too much simple happiness!) and the difficult-to-write-about Jazz of John Coltrane and his inheritors.
What does it matter? I still feel empty. It’s the 29th of June; weeks open before me. How I will give flesh to the vision of a music without a world? A music that would correspond to a new proletariat, to the great class of those without a formative relation to work? How will it form itself inside me? Little doubt that I will have to write part of it here, if only to mark the passing days with work. To date what I write so I can look back over a week at something done.
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