Program #123, December 5 2002: Harnessings of the sacred series, part XI: The splendor and misery of bodies,...

For this last program of the HotS series, I couldn't resist poaching the first part of his title for the second half of his diptych that began with Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand -- a volume that, nearly two decades later, is still uncompleted, though a small part of it has been published. (Added later: at a lecture by Delany in Seattle in the summer of 2003, he suggested the book may be ready within the next couple of years.) I think it's quite possible that good dialogue could be forged between the memes of this program and the memes of that novel, but we'll have to wait and see. For the time being, what made me want to steal the phrase was the sense it evoked within me on first hearing it, and the isomorphy of that sense with my vision for this program: the depiction of the body as the ultimate foundation and reference point for experiences of the sacred.

For a long time I'd wanted to use the track "Go Film" by the industrial dance band Covenant, just because I love the sound of it and the bursts of conflicting associations that spring from the refrain: "we can all be gods... we will all be heroes... we are all immortal... we will all be safe... we are all illusions... and we can never touch..." I decided to use this track (and more particularly, the sonically inferior live version of the song) as my starting point because (thinking back two programs to the installment that dealt with my fundamentalist background) learning to move my body in public dance mode, and appreciating the ecstasy that could come from such acts even without chemical alteration, was a significant ingredient in pulling away from my fundamentalist background -- a key part of comprehending spirituality as a fundament of embodied human experience over and beyond the experience encoded in any particular religious system or (word play intended) body of doctrine. But at the same time, I have often felt the loneliest and most aware of myself in an existentially naked way when transcending in that mode: surrounded by sound but curiously absent from it, perhaps because of being dissolved into it, I can feel ethereal and disconnected, expansive and untethered, face to face with a moment where the last two phrases of the refrain quoted above feel just as relevant as the first four. So it was absolutely natural to combine this track with Cage's 4:33, here performed by Frank Zappa. The process (not "silence") of that piece, to my mind, interrogates the structures of dogma just as thoroughly as do the thrumming beats of Covenant -- and, to judge by the anger demonstrated at some performances of the piece, perhaps makes just as many demands on the listening body. What quality of the sacred is so potent that being placed in the position to attend to the world around oneself with the capabilities of the body both calls them into being and simultaneously provokes reaction against them? I contend it is fundamentally the same quality called into being by the likes of Covenant and all the other facilitators of rhythmic bodily movement in darkened public spaces, although of course the memetic accretions around them differ. I believe that at many points, "sound" and "silence" loop around to meet and interpenetrate each other; here are two. And I also believe that all of our notions of the sacred ultimate depend on, and are constructed from, these qualities of the body. So for this program, I did not really seek out music that was about "religious" or "spiritual" things per se, but concentrated on articulating a vision of the body as a tableau through which all such sacred things are instantiated and vivified -- the ultimate wellspring from which all the other qualities discussed in this series flow.

After that beginning, for the next hour and half or so, I played a variety of pieces about embodiment, some making use of the body in some way, others merely designed to capture its predispositions. Multi-modal artist Lauren Lesko inserted a contact mic into her vagina and walked around Manhattan to craft her soundwork Thirst, designed for a multimedia installation (and here excerpted); Alvin Lucier's work involved hooking up his brain (via relays) to percussion instruments that vibrated in particular ways depending on his patterns of neural activity. Stelarc's use of his body in his art is legendary, working forward from his suspension by hooks placed in his skin to the biological/electronic interface works that now lie at the center of his practice: in various works, sound art components have been added, usually requiring the creation of sound from datasets that are transduced through his biological processes and converted to sound via relays. The group Matmos put together an album based on sounds sampled from surgical procedures, that comes out hovering near the edge of dance music; and then we moved back to dance music per se with Praga Khan before coming to rest again with Thirst -- putting that piece in a rather different light this time, at least for those of us who went to dance clubs looking for supplementary forms of transcendence that involved vaginal contact.

Then a new arc began, focusing on the existential valence of the body's fragilities. For me, Tod Machover's brilliant Famine for voices stands out from much of the rest of his œuvre, finding the right marriage between form and content; and Einstüzende Neubauten's Redukt, one of their most stunning pieces ever, never fails to give me the chills. (I'll add a link to the lyrics as soon as those guys rebuild their lyric site.) If you don't know the song, just go find it now -- although it will affect you most if you're familiar with EN's early work.

And then, penultimately, the last work of film director Derek Jarman: the deeply moving Blue. At this point, just a few days after the yearly commemoration of World AIDS Day, it's a good (if somber) time to look back to Blue -- not a conventional film, but a very personal one constructed shortly before Jarman's death from AIDS, it consists essentially of a blue screen and voice-over by various interlocutors, mostly Jarman himself. This points to the final ground of the sacred: being alive itself, the presence of the body as a living, experiencing thing. To underscore this, I returned to Cage's 4:33, this time performed by myself. Just as was the case with the reframed second presentation of Thirst earlier, the "silence" following Jarman's valedictory work places it in a whole new light. To listen, to hear, to live: this is music, this is the sacred. In the end, perhaps we need nothing more.