![]() The Caretaker’s careful blocking stacks of unremembered 78s means we hear the needle scratch, as the vinyl shellac spins. An art of memory/self loss means building an artifact in destruction. What gets stuck in our heads? What gets lost?Įverywhere at the end of time mines the sounds of a past to imagine a gradual apocalypse of a self. And I remember switching the Radio Shack stereo on and hearing her alto like a small voice in a big chamber coo every word and melody along with Bing Crosby. I am at work, in the shower, on pavement, and I can’t shake its ballroom lines I’m always humming “It’s just a burning memory,” that first lilt from Stage 1 rewilting here as “What does it matter how my heart breaks.” What gets stuck in our heads, and what can’t we lose? I remember walking into my grandmother’s house, seeing Skittles in the cat’s bowl, being asked how a dead uncle was. You know how this movie ends.Įverywhere at the end of time aches me. If Stage 1 is the Gold Room irremembered, an imagined recall, Stage 2 is Grady in the bathroom wiping Jack’s coat, both spreading and dulling the stain. It’s an endlessness, “the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive, (Derrida, Spectres of Marx). Stage 2 is more wound-up samples, stopping and re-stopping, an ambient hauntology. The scrolls unfurled, the only things behind our bodies are pretty flowers from a rotten rock. By collating and colliding past remembrances, it’s thinking what memory loss sounds like: the songs cut and fold because transition is a choice to change and loops are an inability to change. Stage 1 felt like that scroll, the thing to be unfurled, the reminder that the only thing behind our bodies is us. It’s a collage, a manipulation, a piece no more penetrating than an erudite sermon or a well-knead sonnet or the original gramophone 78s that backbone it. It’s James Leyland Kirby as The Caretaker, a project of collected loops and samples, pieces of pre-war histories captured on gramophone 78s. It isn’t my grandmother or me, and it isn’t diagnosis or cure. It’s not unbeautiful or unnatural, just quiet internal rebellions, quiet dusk coming early.Įverywhere at the end of time by The CaretakerĮverywhere at the end of time isn’t decay or beauty. ![]() #Everywhere at the end of time vinyl fullWhen my grandmother, strong back and full frame and pink cheeks, poured two half-and-half creamers on her Belgian waffle one day at lunch, it was watching the tibia snap, the shoulder jut out of socket, the glaucoma settle on the lids. And the way down to terminus is ruthless random. ![]() We think of memory as above time and history, an always-retreat for making sense of life. The beauty of decay is how efficient it is. Even in breakdown and breakage, I am and I am myself, I still feel as though I am me. The memory is our story, looking at a self and recognizing it. An act of remembering asserts an existence and a self reacting to it. It’s how we get around breaking down, through categorizing sensation observation into places we can’t lose called memories. History is life in a line, and memory is every direction at once, misplaced in time. It’s the way our brains categorize lives and the way we insert our selves into our history. We ameliorate history’s constant marshal with something we call memory. Things are beautiful and transient, everywhere at the end of time. Bad back, bum knee, lost vision decay means death. Every sprained ankle might be the last sprained ankle, until it’s not the ligament that tears but the ability to repair that’s decayed. But the march of it all has to end somewhere: lifelines are timelines, and the beauty fades. There’s beauty to the body’s ability to reconcile errors, its agility in correcting aberrations while keeping step with time. It feels like our bodies betray us, and it feels like history as a one-way street. Ashes and dust to ashes and dust: the march of it all, the progress process should feel comforting, natural. Decay and beauty occur in every instant, were contracted in the same lifeline. For every moment of flexed muscle’s triumph, there’s a strained tissue, the pinching of nerves, the breakage of body. The sun comes up about as often as the sun goes down. Cells die and cells are made, and that’s decay. Wellness isn’t opposed to illness, because bodies are getting worse and better in every instant. We register our bodies in languages of beauty, this sensory aesthetic: we see the strength of muscles and the acumen of thought, and we call it grace. They were born together, contracted in the same lifeline. ![]() It’s so beautiful I don’t want to talk about decay.īeauty and decay weren’t separate, not at the start. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |