I ended one of my recent blog posts with the thought that music, like words and language, is a bodiless entity. We as physical creatures represent it in physical forms, creating simulacra that attempt to reflect it as closely as possible, but ultimately fail in that a map fundamentally is not what it seeks to represent.
Where a map seeks to represent an existing physical place though, books, records, lyrics seek to physically manifest ideas and concepts. To think about this in terms of the physical realm, the Flatland analogy seems appropriate.
Flatland video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8oiwnNlyE4
In many ways, music/language/thought are of higher level existences that only intersect with our three dimensional plane at certain points.
So what then are thoughts and words and music made of?
In that sound is the key component in transmitting and sharing most forms of music, thought and language and is indeed the host in which music lives and travels, sound is the main framework in which we must discuss them. Sound, however, faces the problem in that it is also intangible. One cannot hold a sound but sound is measurable. Like its twin noise, sound is how these intangibles interact with us and writing, as a visual form of sound, facilitates the understanding of these alterities (because let us not forget, in being with us and being part of us, but always remaining just out of reach, thought and music are Other).
Here, I pause, because in this exploration of the intersection between the intangible and spiritual and the physical, we must recognize a commonality, another intersection between these analogous realms. We must recognize the ghost.
The Oxford English Dictionary online gives fourteen definitions for ghost, three of which I would like to highlight below.
1. b) In philosophy, the ghost in the machine: Gilber Ryle's name for the mind viewed as a separate from the body.
3. a) An incorporeal being; a spirit. b) A good spirit, an angel. c) An evil spirit. The loath foul, wicked ghost: the Devil.
13. One who secretly does artistic or literary work for another person, the latter taking the credit.
It's mostly in this last notion, the act of ghostwriting that allows us to connect ghosts to music and thought. As a child of the nineties, I'm obviously influenced by the pop culture I was raised with.
Ghostwriter video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZxzPOUreME
But in returning to the childhood sprite who, with Levar Burton, helped inspire a desire to read, I'm struck by the Echo and Narcissus reflections we find in our ghostly friend. He can only communicate by using other people's words, by responding and mixing and matching and sampling as he sees fit, thereby creating something new, the message he wants to impart.
Ghostwriter then was a DJ even as contemporary DJ-culture was exploding underground to create an underworld even Hade could enjoy. And like music, through the processes of DJ culture (and even farther back the court minstrels and traveling jongleurs), the ghost operates beside and beyond us.
What makes this alterity so difficult to deal with is that we must translate it, or to go back to the meanings of translate's Latin roots, carry it across. Music and ghosts must be picked up and moved, but they are intangible and so a new process capable of moving the insubstantial must be invented. It is here that I question my inclusion of language in the above list mostly in that it is a tool by which we examine thought/music. Because it has the potential to be self-referential and even self-aware in how we use it, language is different from music or thought. In this way, language cannot exist in silence.
Because of the notion of rhythm, music in its circularity has a beat. It. Can. Pause. But it doesn't go away. Silence, the absence of sound is as essential to music as the sounds themselves because if we were to create music with no pauses in a continuous wave, it would overwhelm us and we would habituate ourselves so as to regulate it to the periphery (in other words, make it noise) so it can be dealt with.
What the ghost does in haunting reflects this. It is the absence of ghosts that make their appearance relevant.
In particular I want to go back now to "DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid." In this context he is not only an alter-ego, but in that these kinds of Other identities don't exist outside of the mind because they must be separate in order for there to be multiplicity between minds and body, they very much embody the Ryle definition of ghost. Which Miller seems to imply by naming his DJ Spooky.
It's the Subliminal Kid part that pushes this for me though. Music and ghosts have a tendency to subsume. Music in that it elicits a kind of silence with sound and ghosts through the physical embodiment of ectoplasm.
Ghostbusters video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te-koapjzd8
Which goes directly back to Burrough's notion of schlupping, that sound by which the body, specifically the gelatinous forms of the body, ingest and take in others. In this capacity music, this alterity of sound, schlups by encompassing and taking over. Music pulls us in and --
We're no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I
A full commitment's what I'm thinking of
You wouldn't get this from any other guy
I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling
Gotta make you understand
Never gonna give you up,
Never gonna let you down,
Never gonna run around and --
interrupts us. But unlike the parasite, which we associate with the lower levels, this connotation of the rebel leader and underdog, music and ghosts interrupt from the higher order. Rather than coming from beside us, they come from above or beyond.
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