the blog race

We’ll all agree that catch 22 seems to hold some water weight. And by water weight we mean the weight of cerebral fluid, so it isn’t really water. It might be slightly more viscous, which of course means it takes more energy to flow. Regardless what does this have to do with anything? We can never know that we are crazy. If we know we are crazy then we are rational enough to talk about being crazy thus we are not crazy.

Fine.

But what about the act of speeding towards insanity. Perhaps not even insanity but the act of feeling your entire world fall apart. Perhaps into some sort of kirkegaardian angst or perhaps heidegger’s nothingness of angst. But are we talking about metaphysics, perhaps not. But perhaps. No. yes. Who knows. What is metaphysics? What is ontology? Let’s just say I am talking about Inderweltsein. Yeah I didn’t split the words up with the neat little hyphens. It shouldn’t be split un anyway. We are all about letting beings be…in the middle…voice. Freedom.

Okay so we can’t talk about being crazy, but even a rational creature knows when we are speeding towards the abyss. Most of us like to look out of the car window as we’re driving. This car just happens to be driving into the abyss, but it is an abyss that we really don’t know. We can’t talk about it. That is the madness. Madness is silent.

Okay, so the arts in their ambiguity allow us to describe what we can’t. they perform where words lack. They silently point to madness. That’s what I would like to talk about. John has supplied me with a great song. Why? God knows. He tries to torture me. Happiness is a warm gun. Well only for one of those bugs. Second hand smoke is a killer. Unless of course you get way too much of the real deal. That will also get you. As will the sun. And the moon. And air.

So here we have the song, “Why won’t you talk about it?” by The Radio Dept. So hopefully I have framed my discussion pretty lucidly. The answer to the title is, hey look you sell out English speaking Swedes, I can’t talk about it. That is the whole idea behind the dialog seemingly presented in the song. There is no dialog perhaps. Perhaps it is an internal dialogue. We all lose our minds, we know it, we see us falling into the abyss that we cannot describe, that we can’t talk about, that I can’t tell you about. It could be so easy to talk about this song as some cheesy break-up song with some nice distortion and that kind of teenage angst, but I think that misses the point completely. And it is boring. Life is worth a little more than that shit…if it is worth anything in the beginning. Well for argument’s sake let’s suppose it is.

So how do we point to ther trauma of the abyss, that whole that can never be filled? We feel ourselves pulled into it, we know that once we get there our memory and understanding of the ride will be erased. We look for words but as soon as we do, we cannot find them, even then we are sinking further and further into irrationality. What do we have left? Only the call, hoping that in said call we are understood. Yet as we get dragged deeper into this whole we forget even the meanings of our pleas, we just allow ourselves to fall in, repeating the same seven lines over and over again so by the time we reach the end of the song, when the music goes away and we are left in silence, the refrain meant nothing. We have the answer to our title with the silence that ends all.

So we can talk about losing our minds.

Is that not the most fascinating part of this song. That we can understand that part of this whole thing. We know when we lose things. The issue then is that we are there when it is gone. What is identity? I don’t want to go into some kind of Lockean critique of memory across time or that shit, but identity is neat. So we can feel our self moving in a particular direction. This of course would then require a specific critique of time, which at this juncture I do not want to provide. But seriously. We can feel ourselves speeding towards something, let’s just say an episode, death, the break-up of a relationship, or more interesting perhaps the foundation of a relationship. Eros is madness isn’t it? Why won’t you tell me? The need to know. The need to be sated of all desire. That is always a kind of madness, a blinding madness that leaves us repeating silly phrases over and over again until they lose all meaning. That happens doesn’t it. No? Just me? Not me at all.

Perhaps that is why the call and response of the song with a singular singer is fascinating. Is it a singular internal monologue. Is it a conversation that is ventriloquized by the same guy. It really doesn’t matter. I tend to enjoy the idea of the internal monologue. We know it is coming, we feel the eros pull us in. then silence

It always ends in silence.

Silence tells us something though does it not. Only that which we cannot know.