The Most Ordinary

The Ship of Death

A dream, rather than an argument.

Malte looks back to the death of his grandfather, surrounded by family and servants at the family home, and laments the fact that we are, today, too insubstantial to die … But for Malte, who lived in the substantiality of the literary past – of the unity of a culture – it was still possible to write and to as though gather the whole of your life into that writing. Sincerity – is that the word?: I think sincerity was possible then, as it is not now. As if it was the substantiality of culture, its omnipresence, that made a literary sincerity possible.

It is by now a commonplace: Rilke, like Heidegger, supposes that we have lost death – our relation to death. And I think of D.H. Lawrence, building with his last poems a ship of death … Something has been lost. Ours is an age of mass death; death is everywhere – but nowhere, for no one dies in the first person. Who can rise to their death when death – the power to die – has fallen away from us? Death is nothing; to die is insignificance itself. But that means storytelling is dead too, says Benjamin. Flies circle an empty room until they die, but the next year, it is the same flies that circle, mortal, but immortal, every one the same.

The Simulacrum

But what of writing, the relation of writing? I wonder whether that, too, is not also lost. As though the power of expression were likewise taken from us. As if no one were strong enough to say a word. As if no one could speak deeply enough, or impassionedly enough. As though there were no authority to speak and no one who might become an author through writing. Or that authority had already been usurped – that the speaker, the writer is always a simulacrum.

Then the writer is no longer a membrane that quivers between the past and the present, or like the spread sail full of the collected wisdom of the past. Tradition does not rise behind us like a plateau. The past has broken from us in some crucial sense; ours is an age that does not know itself as adrift, that lives in the eternal present with the last world war (repository of all nostalgia) a cut off point between history and the boom that seems in our ignorance and amnesia to have lasted forever …

A Voice From Elsewhere

But perhaps there is another side to all of this. That authority speaks in another voice; that sincerity is alive in a new way. It has become impersonal. It has retreated from authority, from authenticity. That it has fled as though to the back of speech, not to the throat or the chest; it is not a matter of a throat-voice or a chest-voice, but of what is there nevertheless in all voices. Something weak, something not quite personal. Something upon which we cannot make good.

Signs circulate. The roundplay of signifiers. Is it to indicate another order altogether … or rather to attend to the fact that there are currents in this drifting, and vectors: that something is moving, communicating, from one to the other. That speech is not simply a matter of pouring your utterances into the great sea of signs which slop indifferently against a thousand shores.

There is too much communication, says Deleuze. How to break the circuit of speech? How to interrupt speech? Another, similar question: how to reveal that communication is already something; that there is a thickness to speech, and more than that, that speech is directed; that one of us speaks to another, or writes to one, whence the optimism of the most pessimistic book as it places faith in the possibility of speaking, telling.

Flies circling, every one the same. But how to experience the same, and the same of the same? How to experience the everyday, the ordinary? What doubles up that same everyday, that same ordinariness is not the uncanny, which remains bound to an outmoded dramatics, to the ghosts of M.R. James, to adepts at a seance …

Nor, too, the horror film. Romeo’s films offer themselves too readily to allegory. And the zombies are never ordinary enough. Imagine for a zombie to look exactly like us – in the same way as Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym says the Knight of Faith resembles an ordinary individual in his Sunday best, only he dances rather than walks and sings instead of speaks (his walk, like any other’s is a dance; his speech, like any other’s is a song).

But this the Knight is too virtuosic; it is not a question of an expansion of power, but of power’s dimunition (the existentialist reverses Aristotle’s formulation: higher than possibility is actuality, until possibility is the highest of all). Isn’t it that same sense of possibility names Heidegger’s notion of the uncanny, of the self haunted by the indefiniteness of the future – or Sartre’s vertigo of freedom?

No, instead of this, think an impossibility that is lived and endured. An impossibility of possibility lived as the present; a choiceless action; the cry of an animal caught in a trap. This cry – absolute pain, the ‘to cry’ separating itself from any particular cry – shows how the moment itself is a trap, that being is disclosed (is that the word?) here, and not (as for the existentialist) in the future (in the relation to the future).

Power’s dimunition: why is unemployment included by Levinas among the list of horrors of the twentieth century? Because it is here the everyday seems to grant a mysterious density, a thickening of the air. Not a calamity, but the serenity of an afternoon that has absorbed everything into itself; that is actionless, purposeless; a dough that can be kneaded into nothing.

The Muted Voice

Then how to reach the everyday? Perhaps only by a kind of lightness, or neglect … Perhaps similar that to non-actors employed by directors so as not to distract by way of their star quality. I am not thinking of the ‘models’ of Bresson, who are so unactorly they also act, the ordinary escaping them, too (although it is close to them, very close). Perhaps Tarr’s drunkards come closest of all, The Werkmeister Harmornies opening on a scene in which people have lived. No one is more alive than Tarr’s ‘actors’ – they are his friends, he insists – and why do I think here of what Tarkovsky’s Stalker calls the writer and the scientist with whom he has journeyed through his films? They are, once again, his friends.

Here I would insert what has been recently called hauntology and all of dub. It is not a question of letting sound a lag in time – extraordinary effects, I’ve no question of that, but these are still special effects; unless your voice – my voice speaking now – were already to be understood a voice in dub, that is, deprived of itself, and subject to the most cavernous reverb.

Listening to The Drift, it is still that Walker’s voice is too dramatic, too trained (Whether or not it has, in fact, been trained). Listening to Sinatra’s Watertown – another favourite – I always think: his voice is not ordinary enough. Here, an interesting excursus on the late voice, a topic beloved of my friend R., where the voice, towards the end, becomes muted; unless this voice seemed to vanish to become something like a rock or a leaf: completely ordinary, a voice like any other.

Dub is not sufficient to set a lag into time, doubling one event upon another, as though the creation happened before the creation, and what we know now is only its echo …

The Most Ordinary

I am thinking of the ordinary, the most ordinary. Not a voice that is trained; but nor as it is roughly untrained.

What does it take to see a voice? I think of Bacon’s violent faces that allowed us to see a face. To return the face to the dramaturgy of painting, which reveals abstraction to have been a dreary escapism. And now, rather than a voice, a song – a song carried by a voice, or a voice carrying a song.

What kind of song is this? Once again, I wonder if something has occurred with the song. That folk music does not speak of a folk – although this is not to say the idiom of folk cannot be renewed (who can doubt that, said R. of Alisdair Roberts on his recent tour), but that renewal belongs to what is only an idiom – a language to learn and speak alongside other languages, and idioms of languages.

What, then, is the most ordinary song? I can’t answer this question. What is an ordinary voice? That, too, I think is impossible to answer. But here, as usual, I think Kafka was ahead of us. We remember the Josephine of his story, whose voice was the most ordinary of all. Nothing set her apart from the other mice, except for her voice. Except for what, then? For the doubling of her voice in her voice, the ordinary in the ordinary. The Same, as Heidegger would say, capitalising the word, so it can no longer be udnerstood in terms of identity – that is given each time. The Same: As it allows itself to be discovered as the ordinary.

The Ordinary Voice

I think I am drifting close to the thematics of the everyday in Lefebvre, or Certeau – or that I am remembering, more distantly, the investigations of the Surrealists or the new field discovered by Heidegger and Lukacs that lent to the everyday its consistency. Then it is not a question of the revolution of everyday life. For there is nothing upon which we might seize, or it is that the most ordinary seizes us …

It is a question of a voice, or of what a voice also is. What are its characteristics? It is indiscernable. It lets itself be known by a particular trait – by a quality of the voice, an accident, as philosophers would say. That is to say, it is not reached through another kind of experience, like the sound the planets and stars make for the Pythagoreans. All the same, no particular quality is essential to it …

We hear it in singing along with us, or in a song played in the radio on the other side of the house. We hear it – do we hear it? is it only ever half heard? – on the edges of our awareness, heard whenever we do not strain to hear it, when we neglect it just enough for it to make itself present …

It is not a lullaby; it does not lull us to sleep or into a kind of reverie like the sounds of the 40s we hear in the recreated rooms of Marlowe’s memory in The Singing Detective. No, rather, it awakens a kind of attention, keeping awake for us, keeping our place in some way not as this or that individual, but to pass the voice along and to be part of this passing …

Is it, then, like the singing that binds together family life in The Long Day Closes? Perhaps only like the wordless opening of the second movement of Vaughan Williams’ 3rd symphony, which Davies lets sound over black water, rippling with light. A wordless lament – for the dead of the first world war, as the symphonist intended? But also for the violences in the film itself. The drunken father breaking a window with his fists …

As I say: a dream, and not an argument.