I have been to more concerts in the past month than in any other of my life. The intention is partly to do more things, and partly to better understand the difference between ‘recorded’ sound and ‘live’ music.
Last night, I went, alone, to see Tamino perform.
The opener was a woman whose name, whose music, I had never heard before. She sang of a dream, in which some unknown person–addressed directly, ‘you’–was holding her. Perhaps it was the way she leaned over her guitar. Perhaps it was the way the smoke rose and fell about her bare shoulders. But I responded to these lyrics more than I suspect I do most others’. I felt the warmth on her skin, as someone held her from behind–like Klimt, a body folded over hers. I was not feeling the desire to hold her; I was feeling the coldness on her arms, the way the touch of another body warms us. I was not feeling that customary, mechanical attitude, whereby doctors can make prescriptions in much the same way that a mechanic does not need to know how the car feels. And this mattered to me; for, as a therapist-in-training, I worry that I have habituated some empathic responses, that I may know what to say to people who are distressed, without so much feeling what to say.
The next song, a cover, repeated the theme of dreams, but much differently. “I dreamed you dreamed of me.” The juxtaposition between this and the previous song was profound. Dreams may be irresistible to songwriters because there is a strange way that our bodies trick us, that we may feel, for unknown reasons, our desires most tightly in our skin as we descend to sleep. Perhaps this is what artists strive to achieve, to make the false felt, as we are deceived in dreams. But no touch is felt in the dream of being dreamt. This “dream of being dreamt” seemed a great way to describe the numbness behind much of everyday life, the way that I can hear so many lyrics without feeling the warmth on my skin, without feeling a sincere desire–mine, or another’s. Desire itself feels routine, knowing the right thing to do, knowing what to say. And is it all for appearances, for the sake of being seen, rather than seeing?
Still, the dream of being dreamed is a sincere one. Your love of me must be in your body, if I am the one who finds you in the infinite possibility, the ultimate privacy, of sleep. It’s worth giving up one’s own feeling, one’s own dream, to achieve such a thing.
I dreamed you dreamed of me.
In this light, when Tamino came to the stage, I felt his lyrics much differently than I had through recording. He began with “A Drop of Blood.”
“One day I fell//And broke my wrist//And lay still on the ground//Ants were carrying little twigs//Over my still hand
Some kids around were scorning me//Yet I heard no sound//Then as they started to kick my back//I sank into the sand
[vocal shift]
Deep down, sank deep down//Till I was part of everything//And in a grain of sand, saw peace in holy hands//Saw you right in front of me//Shapeless, sacred dust, beaming light and trust//covering all harm in shade
Then in a drop of blood//saw wars be fought for good//and saw you make way for man’s truth//just for a while//though just enough//to lose my youth//
From that day on…I’ve held on to faith//And I’ve been knocking at its gate//to let me see you one more time//Begging to never speak the truth more than I speak of you.”
It seems only fair to suggest that something mystical is the object, the intended target, of these words. That mysticism, since it is located in a drop of blood, derives its contemplation from smallness (a drop) and embodiment (of blood). This contemplation is passive: one’s control over the body has been lost; the wrist is broken. Only under such conditions of stillness are ants and all their minute movements made visible. This passivity is also painful; the blood suggests violence: a sacrifice “fought for good,” a beating by strangers. The strangers are kicking one from behind; one doesn’t see it happening. Perhaps one retreats like a turtle, turning one’s back into a shell, curling elbows and knees together, in a fetal position. Navel-gazing–the pain makes one retreat further within oneself. There is an impossible distancing; space distorts, as if one’s soul lay some several miles from the skin. Kicking and beating–the sounds do not reach where one goes, “deep down.” Knocking at the gate–when one is in a more central chamber.
And the vision of this mystical, unnamed “you” is achieved through swirls of dust, a protean shape. Grains of sand have an infinite possibility of textures. In rapid succession, the swirl displays stories, images, friezes–montage before film editing. And here we get the symbolic resonance of sand; it represents more than space, more than the holy land; it represents the movement, the decay, time itself. Time: a mere moment, when one’s capacities for empathy–a blood, a skin we share, eternal and universal–are heightened. Just as I felt the coldness on her skin, the desired warmth of touch. Boundaries that can only be dissolved through faith, the faithful song.
“Indigo Night” reprises this theme with a modern, technological twist. Tamino feels robotic, or, at least, he narrates the story of a man who does: “I have seen the world’s most beautiful places//Still I feel, as If I’m a walking machine//Watching it all through a screen.” The remedy for this postmodern depression is a return to community, perhaps religious. A group of women “gather around him;//so many of them, they all sing//about the pleasures of life.”
But he is like a man dreaming of being dreamt; he is far from some real present. The women, failing to reach him, have the mislaid hope that presence may be achieved through song. “Why can’t I sing along with some feeling, or some meaning?//It feels like I’ve always been blind.” He is far from reality. He is not the one, really, who mourns: he is just the memory of others whose suffering better warrants attention. “I don’t know why you girls are so kind,//For there are so many in line//Whose lives aren’t as lost as mine.” Even one’s sadness becomes inexplicable to oneself; nothing seems to make sense: “I don’t know why”.
Song comes to represent, especially the poetry of a well-sung lyric, the way of getting out. That night, Tamino performed a cover of Chris Cornell’s “Seasons,” which features in its chorus the lament: “I’m lost, behind//The words I’ll never find.” Now, it is not just that our words cover experience, like we are “watching it all through a screen”; instead, the problem is that desire has not yet risen to language, to song. I have not found, and will never be able to find, the desired words. What is the whole endeavor of language? A means of meaning, a faithful intimation of the divine, living proof of a true love? Even the day-to-day reality of choosing between notes, instruments, seems to resist obvious explanations, seems to require some still unknown answer. One hears Tamino’s words, and risks thinking about such things to the exclusion of hearing them, becoming one who dreams of being dreamed.
It’s possible to have a Lacanian reading of Cornell. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that the Real will never be accessed beyond some Imaginary realm, an Imaginary realm that has to do with language and the image of one’s self in the mirror. Not only does language fail to suffice (“I’m lost behind//the words I’ll never find”), but so does the mirror, because “my mirror shows another face//Another place to hide it all.” One’s continuous change in being means that this face in the mirror is just another face, another face among many; it does not capture what one is feeling, it’s just a temporary place, hiding. Although, I resist the Lacanian interpretation, because I find that Lacan is not always clear in what he means by the Real, and because the Lacanian interpretation gives up our access to reality: says that the Real is always not-yet here. I dreamed you dreamed of me.
Tamino is himself–reciting Chris Cornell–part of a lineage of alternative singer-songwriter rock-stardom. While much has been made of Tamino’s Egyptian ancestry, comparing Tamino to his grandfather Muharram Fouad–the supposed “Sound of the Nile”–the better point of comparison may be Jeff Buckley.
An American singer-songwriter in the 90s, Buckley found himself at the crossroads of various forces. First, he was the inheritor of a great wave of lyricism, pouring from Jazz and folk, genres which inspired a generation of singer-songwriters who had been granted, by history, the radio mic. Buckley is perhaps most famous for his covers of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Nina Simone.
He was also amid the burgeoning technology of not-quite digital music, where guitars and voices began to undergo distortion. Buckley’s paramour, Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, bridges this singer-songwriter and the tradition of “shoe-gaze.” The term “shoe-gaze,” of course, arose from the way that bands like My Bloody Valentine were criticized for staring at their feet, their distortion pedals, instead of providing a visual performance. A genre that is dedicated to sacrificing the visual in its atmospheric ambit may therefore be critical to understanding how sonic space is constructed. What’s it like to be at a concert, anyway? And why music?
Buckley and Frazer together wrote the unfinished song “All Flowers in Time Bend Toward the Sun.” The title suggests mysticism, a faith in love. Faith, first, in an optimistic sense, because lovers will always meet, just as flowers will always, in time, reach the sun. Faith, second, in a theological sense, because love provides an inexplicable means of direction, of feeling one’s way through life, like a heliotropic plant. The themes of Romance and religion converge, as the lovers sing out: “my eyes are…baptisms”.
The idea of baptized eyes, perhaps awash with tears, would be fitting within the many poems of Dante Alighieri, whose love for Beatrice brought him, over the course of his Divine Comedy, through hell, to purgatory, to heaven. Each stage of the Comedy features a lightening of Dante’s soul and an increased capacity of his senses, and it is his love for Beatrice which brings him to great contemplation, to achieve the heights of poetry.
So it’s worth dwelling with Dante’s words on love and their relationship to the contemporary singer-songwriter. Preceding the Divine Comedy (La Commedia), Dante had written La Vita Nova, a self-aware collection of poems that addressed the condition of being a poet in his time at court. The title, The New Life, or The Modern Life, suggests that Dante wants to identify what is novel about his words, about his time. The central theme of La Vita Nova is the way that the poet attempts to find new ways of expressing love, and does so always within the courtly context, where he must earn favor from those noble families who support his work.
The ending of La Vita Nova is worth repeating, as Dante explains that, “if it be pleasing to Him who is that for which all things live,” he will wait to write another work, in which he will “say things about her [Beatrice] that have never been said about any woman.” For now, he’s “lost behind, the words [he’ll] never find.” Dante’s La Vita Nova therefore comes to represent a mystical tradition that binds the themes of a romantic love, a divine, ineffable inspiration, and a powerful command over, close connection to, one’s medium of expression. These themes continue to persist beyond Dante’s day, and have a direct bearing on the contemporary tradition of singer-songwriters.
Together, some centuries later, Frazer and Buckley sing out:
“My eyes are…baptisms
Oh, I am fuse
And sing her
Into my thoughts
Oh, phantom elusive thing.”
In “Tangled Up in Blue,” Bob Dylan is slightly wiser than I have been, in that he is not quite so bookish, does not name Dante directly:
“Then she opened up a book of poemsAnd handed it to meWritten by an Italian poetFrom the thirteenth centuryAnd every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coalPouring off of every pageLike it was written in my soul from me to youTangled up in blue”
So, it is worth taking into consideration the interrelation of song, love and divinity from an anthropological position, such that certain words–depending on how they are performed–may be able to ring true across centuries. But, it would be unfair, if not invalid, to think of this mystical tradition of songwriting solely from a Christian lens.
In addition to Dylan, Buckley was also influenced by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; as Buckley explained at Sin-é: “Nusrat, he’s my Elvis.” Nusrat was the most famous Qawwal of the twentieth century, the most famous performer of Qawwali, a Sufi tradition of devotional singing. Buckley even made sincere, though limited, attempts to learn Urdu in order to understand Nusrat’s music. At Sin-é, trying to mimic Nusrat’s pronunciation, Buckley performed the song “Yeh Jo Halka Saroor Hae,” which, he explains, was the first song by Nusrat that he had ever heard. An important song, because, in an interview, Buckley claims that hearing Nusrat “saved [his] life.”
In that interview, Buckley remarks how difficult it is for Western listeners to understand Nusrat’s music without comprehending Urdu, even if they can feel Nusrat’s emotion in their hearts. (And how do they achieve this, if they do?)
Buckley: “For instance, few people know that halka means ‘drunkenness.'” Nusrat: “It is not drunkenness in terms of alcohol. It is like when somebody is in love and is drunk in the eyes.” Buckley: “Yes, but it’s impossible for English speakers to tell this from the translations of the Sufi poetry, which are always very dry. If one has any sense of Urdu, one knows that the English translations lack a little soul, they’re like wood.” While “halka” risks being mistranslated, Buckley’s use of the term “dry” comes from its own Western philological context, a context where to drink wine, the blood of Christ, is to be divinely inspired, and where an absence of sanguineous humors was thought to dim one’s spirits, and where alcohol, as a “spirit,” acquired metaphysical properties.
The term “halka” is therefore a good example for the difficulties of understanding; within Urdu, there are various terms for the intricacies of intoxication, so that “halka” can mean a kind of enchanted inebriation, a dizzying outward spiral, getting more only to need more, like a lover transfixed by the sight of a beloved. The ghazal tradition of Arabic poetry, which influenced Sufism and Qawwal, often compares the taste of kissed lips to a heady brew. So does Buckley access this feeling, or is he lacking a little spirit, “a little soul”? Live like a tree, or dead “like wood”?
Is something lost in translation, like dreaming of a dream?
Buckley asks Nusrat: “You once had a dream that is now very famous. Can you describe it to me?” Nusrat: “My father [the Qawwali singer Ustad Fateh Ali Khan] died in 1964, and ten days later, I dreamed that he came to me and asked me to sing. I said I could not, but he told me to try. He touched my throat, I started to sing, and then I woke up singing. I had dreamed that my first live performance would be at my father’s chilla [funeral ceremony], where we would all sit together again and read prayers from the Koran and so on. On the fortieth day after his death, we held the ceremony, and I performed for the very first time.”
The dream was important because Nusrat felt that he needed paternal permission before he could become a Qawwal. “I was just studying with my father, a very difficult task for me since he was a great, great Qawwali singer. He didn’t want me to become a musician, he wanted me to be a doctor, because he said singing was too hard. You see, many people can sing without any basic background. But this [improvisational] style of Qawwali is what my family does, and to do it well, we have to go through many difficulties.”
Nusrat’s friend, Rashid Ahmed Din, also present at the interview, adds that Nusrat “used to listen to his father teaching his students and secretly, he would go and practice, hiding his gift. One day, his father discovered him while he was practicing and he got a bit cross, but he found out that Nusrat had a talent, and then he started teaching him, too. Unfortunately, his father died not long after that. After he did though, he said to Nusrat in the dream, ‘This world will hear a new voice, which will surprise them all.’ But he didn’t know whose voice it would be.”
Buckley explains that Nusrat’s dream had been especially meaningful to him, because he “also hid from my father [the late singer Tim Buckley].” “He had died by the time I started, but I hid from him the gift that I was born with. There was a period when I was frozen for about three or four years, starting when I was eighteen. In my dream at that time, the ghost of my father came smashing through the window.”
This dense vignette brings together, with the theme of dreams, a notion of divine election as well as oedipal conflict in the legacy of a great singer. Is it really that singers are just born with “a beautiful gift”? Nusrat seems to suggest as much, when he says that “many people can sing without any basic background.” And it is true: pianists are not born with their ivories. Although, it remains to be seen whether the song can really be born instantaneously, or if it requires careful study.
Is the voice just a gift, genetic, transferred from parent to child? Or is it something learned, albeit often learned at home, under the tutelage of a paternal mentor? Even then, learned under such tutelage, the music’s not a neat line, not unbroken; there is conflict in the classroom. Parents do not want their children to be artists, even if they themselves have succumbed to an art. So Nusrat waits with his ear to the door, so Jeff learns all of Tim’s tapes.
Is the relationship to the divine really just a “drop of blood,” so that certain genealogies are holier than others? I doubt it, but this belief seems at play in these dreams, as fathers become the messengers of whatever divine power sources song. One cannot sing without a father who grants the power.
What does Buckley mean, when he says “[i]t doesn’t take a dream to make a singer, but yours was a beautiful gift”? It doesn’t take a dream?
It is possible that we are getting far afield of Tamino now–how are we to return? Well, we might stop along the way with Umm Kulthum, the “Voice of Egypt,” whose story is eerily similar to Buckley’s and Nusrat’s. Kulthum studied song in secret, listening to her father; only reluctantly did he support her career in music. The daughter of an imam, she was, eventually, considered by many to have a divine gift, sent down through the ages.
Kulthum provides yet another hinge, taking us from Nusrat’s Pakistan, his Urdu, to her Egypt, her Arabic. Though she was no Qawwal, there is an extent to which Quranic devotion pervades into Egypt’s musical legacy, mixed with romance, the ancient tradition of ghazal poetry.
And how, now, from Kulthum to Tamino? We might stop along the way with Tamino(-Amir Moharam Foaud)’s grandfather, Muharram Foaud: his namesake, and Kulthum’s contemporary. Foaud was a singer and a film-star, but Kulthum had a face for radio. Despite being a broadcast, ubiquitous sound in Egyptian life–Arabic life more widely–Kulthum did not succeed on screen; her filmic career was far briefer than Fouad’s. So, the comparison drawn between Tamino and his grandfather, as a supposed jewel in a family crown, may indicate an inheritance of appearances more than music.
In other words, the success of Fouad the elder comes at that moment in history when songs can survive through sex appeal. And so it is worth documenting how Tamino, Foaud the younger, is sold: with images of his brooding side-profile, swimming shirtless. And comparing the gift of appearances with the supposed gift of voice might be conducive for understanding the dangers of considering musicality as a genetic property.
I want to suggest, perhaps controversially to some, that the beautiful person, the model, the posed person, does little to generate attraction. The beauty does not lie in the intensity of their gaze; no amount of concentration–a furrowed brow and tightly held breath–could turn everyday Susie to a supermodel. Some bodies may be built, but faces are not constructed by mental effort.
In other words, the beautiful person does not need to create desire; they are just canvases for it. Desire is draped over the beautiful. Bodies become desire’s real estate. The model does not create the dress, the set; to the producers of the beautiful, commercial image, the beautiful person is sourced. Like a flower in a bouquet, not a florist. Under such conditions, it is a mistake to believe that the array of images that constellate around such people constitutes a story, is shaped by narrative. If any such narrative exists, it is the spectators’ projections, the common portrayals, rather than the models’ identities.
The captivating power of the star, the attractive quality of the beautiful, may ensnare within its orbit mere detritus, hangers-on. In the realm of music, there is an even greater risk; the most threadbare artifice may be wrapped wonderfully round the beautiful body, and so, too, beauty can voice banality. One often hears comments that a singer is so talented that “he could sing the phonebook.” The danger is that those who have not yet been able to discern the beautiful from the accidental (and who does develop such a capacity? when?), may waste long hours endorsing the lyrical quality of nonsense, of merely procedural language.
And now it might be due for me to defend, a bit, those who portray visual beauty, particularly in a cinematic age. Perhaps there exists grace in the choreography of everyday life, an artful kind of poising.
The visual earns its laurels by means of performance: time, controlled. The star cannot merely be, in an instant, beautiful. While the age of the camera may have enhanced the power of the visually appealing over broad swathes of spectators, there is still some service involved. The star is fascia more than face, a careful dance in layers of flesh–epidermis and muscle. The close-up sees the cheek’s every crease. Another frame isolates the tendons between neck and shoulder, the flexing bowstrings of stress. The synecdoche of sentiment means that any portion of the body may be used, as part for whole. The contemporary visual dissection of the body is as mystical as clinical, for even an MRI leaves mystery in the mind-body connection; indeed, the greater the scientific specificity of the image, the more strange, unanswerable, it may appear: how feelings are filed in flesh.
So what is the case, then, for Tamino? Is he merely a “drop of blood,” cast from Fouad the elder? Is he, inevitably, another “Sound of the Nile”? On a genealogical level, this seems unlikely, since Tamino was separated from his father, had no close connection to his father’s father, Foaud. He did not grow up in Egypt, or even speaking Arabic; he cannot understand the language of his grandfather’s recordings, even if he listens to them to learn the oud. To imagine Tamino as a graft of East and West is to fantasize. This is a patrilineal dream.
It is possible that Tamino’s song “You Don’t Own Me” is an act of rebellion against precisely this kind of superficial Orientalism. “You may have your thoughts//A sketch of who I am//A notion you’ve conceived//A sight you want to see//But you don’t know me//No, you don’t know me.” But then, when asked to explain the meaning of the song on French radio, he stated meekly that it’s a song about oppression, for “anyone who feels oppressed.” The irony is that even this protest song is superficial, plays into the contemporary proliferation of indirect direct addresses, of unnamed “you”s. Songwriters may be drawn to this unnamed “you,” precisely because it allows listeners to imagine whatever they want, appealing to every demographic. “For anyone who feels oppressed.”
It is incredibly difficult to figure out what exactly Tamino is protesting. The difficulty may inhere with the form of contemporary songwriting, as well as the superficial interviews and reviews that surround it, which prevent thorough communication. It is impossible to have a political program for “anyone who feels oppressed,” mainly because, by turning oppression into a feeling, the concrete reality is ignored. The only political event mentioned in the song is the plight of contemporary anti-Arabic racism, where Tamino rebels against no-fly lists that would “ban me from traveling.” Some online reviewers post that it is a feminist song against intimate partner violence. Others indicate that Tamino protests against the toxicity in his own relationship, where his partner feels that she owns him.
More than detracting from political messaging, the generality of the unnamed “you” sells sex. The singer serenades his sweetheart, who sits just behind someone else. He looks just past my shoulder, so I may imagine that he is looking directly at me. The idolizer’s magical thinking enables one to believe that each word of the phonebook has been chosen, with lover’s care, for one’s ears, alone.
One reviewer writes glowingly about this contemporary condition of the unnamed “you,” where it is impossible to know the source of a feeling: “That precise conglomerate of vague emotions that exists within Tamino’s work lends itself to creating connection. While the songs do tell stories, many of the artists’ [sic] true meanings are disguised. This leaves room for those who listen to fill in the gaps, to find ways to connect the music and the lyrics with the listeners [sic] perceived meanings. The emotions within the songs bleed into the listener’s own emotions. And while you may be saying to yourself, ‘Well yeah duh that’s kind of the nature of art,’ there’s something singular about the abstractions that Tamino creates in his songs.”
The review does not analyze, does not question its assumptions, its projections, in this dumb prosopopoeia: “duh that’s kind of the nature of art.” There is no question about the use or intention of art; the author can ignore the specific cultural and historical conditions which make it so that one cannot hear an artistic expression beyond more than a “conglomerate of vague emotions.” Indeed, though there remains a pervasive belief in the singer-songwriter, the auteur theory may, at times, be as inapplicable to music as it is to cinema. The great number of collaborators in contemporary film and music means that one is often witnessing a curation, a collage, more than an expression. Each person’s contribution is truncated, speaks in seven syllables.
Tamino may be aware of this kind of superficiality and stereotyping, while still playing into it. A GQ interviewer, noting the use of Tamino’s image to sell clothing, would suggest that Tamino’s career as a model is inevitable; who could deny “[a] six-foot 19-year old with a jawline that could slice butter?” The selling of sex is thinly veiled, because “Tamino’s most memorable look came from wearing hardly anything at all. In the video for his 2018 single Tummy, he appears as a nearly nude pharaoh swarmed by followers, wearing a chest plate and liquid eye make-up styled like the Eye of Horus, the Ancient Egyptian symbol of royalty and protection. Oh, and he’s covered in gold body paint which took 90 minutes to apply to every crease and crevice of his skin.” The message is mixed; is Tamino consumed, like a jaw dipped in butter? Do viewers partake in “every crease and crevice” of his holy body, his divine blood, his nationalist royalty? Or, as the interviewer suggests, was “[t]he aim of the video…to poke fun at lazy stereotypes of Egyptian culture”?
There is something problematic in regarding Tamino as an emblem of “true” Arabic or Egyptian culture. If the message is that Tamino is no more “truly” Egyptian than these images of pharaohs and pyramids, then this would go a long way towards understanding how authenticity, if it exists, requires a great deal of time and effort to be achieved, and exists outside of easy, ready-to-hand categories. But the video does not say this; the decontextualized visual message can be read in entirely opposite ways. The message remains trapped within an uninformed binary, and does not make didactic efforts to escape from these boundaries–Eastern or Western, royal or common.
We may see how the uninformed perspective is perpetuated when the interviewer affirms, with little qualification, Tamino’s identity: “[g]iven Tamino’s ownership of his musical lineage against a background of Western erasure – he also often plays his grandfather’s Resonator guitar onstage – the singer has become a symbol of proud Arabic identity.” While I agree with the existence of background forces which lead to cultural erasure, forces which predominate from Western influence, I take issue with how this statement leaves unspoken the exact process which leads to cultural erasure: is it technological, sociological, linguistic? The absence of such questioning permits the interviewer to possibly perpetuate such erasure, while thinking himself outside of it.
Part of the problem is the interviewer’s claim that Tamino is a proud “owner” of a “musical lineage”, of an “Arabic identity.” Who can offer the stamp of approval? Is it true that the deed, the proof of ownership, has been provided by those unnamed members of an Arabic diaspora for whom Tamino is a proud “symbol”? What is it, to take pride in another’s accomplishment? Is this an enviable course of affairs?
Of course, we might question whether history is something that can be so easily possessed. How has Tamino managed to conquer such a multinational musical lineage while living in Belgium, and at the early age of nineteen? Tamino himself has often had to explain to fans that he cannot speak or understand Arabic. And while he has made efforts to understand a broad array of Arabic cultures, and has supported artists in an Arabic diaspora, he is worried that the media may make him flat in their portrayal of “identity”:
“‘I wonder whether it’s a good or a bad thing,’ he says, suddenly pensive. ‘Maybe it’s not that good if it becomes the only focus. It can be used in a different way, which is kind of as the antidote to all the bad news we’re hearing of [Arab] regions. And then using that as, “Look, this is some good news!” I don’t want that to be the only reason why I’m invited on certain platforms. I don’t want people to go, ‘I don’t really like his music, but it’s important.’”
His own specificity is lost, he becomes emblematic for widespread themes of East and West that people know little about; his own music, his own experience, becomes buried by those who support him even though they “don’t really like his music”. “You may have your thoughts//A sketch of who I am//A notion you’ve conceived//A sight you want to see//But you don’t know me//No, you don’t know me.”
Tamino seems hesitant that his ‘identity’ may be used as a supposed cure, an ‘antidote,’ for cultural conflict, when there remains a great deal of ‘bad news.’ He could be used to present a false triumph, some ‘good news,’ when much remains to be done for causes of political and cultural preservation. Is his place within media a good or bad thing? Good, because positively presented; bad, because inaccurate. He is caught between the horns of the dilemma, the benefits and costs; within the labyrinth, he struggles to describe its shape.
All this to explain why the use of the unnamed “you,” lacking teeth to its political argument, is so disappointing. And to explain why the “purpose of art” may be more than to provide a “conglomerate of vague emotions,” “for those who listen to fill in the gaps, to find ways to connect the music and the lyrics with the listeners [sic] perceived meanings.” Contemporary (popular) criticism takes as a given that the goal of art is a kind of universality, a relatability, a poetic resonance where your feelings are mine, and you stating your feelings allows me to discover their place within myself: “There are some artists, some very unique artists, whose work bleeds…[t]he emotions within the songs bleed into the listener’s own emotions.”
To clarify, I do not mean to suggest that art cannot be used to demonstrate universality, to more strongly evoke shared experience. Somehow, when reading Dante, Dylan felt that “every one of them words rang true//And glowed like burning coal//Pouring off of every page//Like it was written in my soul from me to you”. Or, as Tamino expresses it, in “Cinnamon,” “[h]old on to my dreams, and I’ll come find them in your room…Hold on to my words, and I’ll come place them on your tongue;//the reason you recall them is ’cause you knew them all along”.
That being said, I do want to critically think the dream of another’s dream, the way that I felt more deeply when I was feeling the cold on the opener’s arms, not thinking about my own desire. I want to think of the ways that it is possible for difference to remain within feeling. Indeed, your difference, your novelty, may be precisely what is required to awaken my dormant sentiment.
There is a catoptric pleasure in difference, the multiplication of perspectives. Tamino sings to his lover, in “Fascination”: “I lack the colors//Reflected in your eyes//When you look up to the sky//To me they don’t seem to appear.” Tamino admits that his lover can see the world more beautifully than he. But, despite his personal deficits, the other person becomes a focal prism; while he cannot see the colors in the sky, he discovers them reflected in her eyes.
Seeing her seeing becomes a cornerstone of the lovers’ relationship. He cannot see himself as she does: “Your fascination [with me]//Has always fascinated me”. This spiritual understanding of loneliness has seeped even into popular culture; Ariana Grande, in the digitally-inspired song “POV,” sings: “You know me better than I do//Can’t seem to keep nothing from you//How you touch my soul from the outside?//Permeate my ego and my pride//I wanna love me//The way that you love me…I’d love to see me from your point of view.” I dreamed you dreamed of me.
But, while difference may be a requisite for escaping loneliness, it remains true that difference may itself be a powerful source of loneliness. Even as Tamino is fascinated with what his lover sees, there is pain behind the constant difference in perspective: “You make it harder to believe//that I was ever really here.” To differ may be to learn; or, it may be the cause of discord, a challenge, a doubt. Being witnessed affirms one’s existence; being alone may make us ask: “Was I ever really here?”
I had a dream, a nightmare: I was just your dream.
So how is one to create art, lyrical art, in such times? And “times” may refer to political and environmental failure, or it may refer to the specific circumstances of the industry, when artists are expected to create albums in a biannual cycle, with enough singles to populate algorithm-sourced playlists, enough songs to generate revenue from those streamers who open an album and just press play. Within this industry standard, the unnamed “you” may be an inescapable part of the modern musical landscape. Hence the great deal of speculation on singers’ love lives, as if putting a name to the pronoun could explain a song’s power.
The fact of the matter is that the nameless direct address is not particular to today’s troubadours, but can fit easily with the ancient themes of love, divinity, and a close connection to one’s means of expression. Let me explain.
One of the finer registers of the unnamed “you” is in the format of an overheard soliloquy. Accusations are heard across the hall. Startled, one only slowly realizes that there must be another addressed, reprimanded. One traverses the hallway, perhaps on tiptoe, perhaps perverse in one’s voyeurism, perhaps unabashedly curious, expecting to find some scene of conflict in the room whose vision remains, for now, a narrow, door-sized cut-out. But one reaches the room and is surprised to find a single inhabitant, directing his speech at some vision of himself, a shadow, a reflection, cast elsewhere in the room.
The singer who addresses himself as “you” may bring us to another, artful use of the unnamed direct address. Rather than eavesdropping on self-recriminations, it may be that one overhears the other’s prayers. The mode of prayer fits with that of songwriting, in that prayer is often a terse statement of desire in one’s own idiom. I do not need to provide exposition for myself, nor for the God who is supposed to be omnipresent. The further result is that spoken prayer may sound remarkably similar to overhearing an intimate relationship, a romantic form of devotion.
Let’s see some examples.
The tile of Tamino’s “The First Disciple” primes one to expect a relationship between student and teacher, religiously inflected. And so the song opens, “My old friend, these poems that you preach//They’re being wasted as you speak//Remind me once more how they came to be your calling//Do you even know you’re falling?” One might read these lyrics as coming from a disillusioned follower of a religion, fed up with preaching. The religion itself, supposedly a divine calling, is open to existential critique; the dogma ignores the reality, sinful or tragic, in which every body is falling.
It’s also a reiteration of the theme present within “Fascination,” where “Those modest sayings//That mean so much to you//With me they’ve never gotten through//I’ve always needed bigger words.” There is at hand a stubborn melancholia; attached to intellect, the depressed person wants reasons, answers–scorns simplicity. It’s a reprisal of those themes found in an “Indigo Night”: the man cannot find beauty in the songs of the women who surround him.
If “The First Disciple” is a religious critique, then, when Tamino sings that “lately I did wonder,//if you did it all to make you feel desired,//did it all to make you feel admired”, we might be hearing an atheist’s dislike of a jealous god, a divinity who would demand love, while doling out so much suffering. What is the beauty of creation, if you only “did it all to make you feel desired,//did it all to make you feel admired”?
But, as the lyrics continue, the recipient of the address changes again. Tamino seems to address himself. “Lately I did wonder//If you did it all to make you feel desired//Did it all to make you feel admired//For love to replace your shame”. This reading would suggest that Tamino feels publicity to be narcissistic, shameful, even as he wants to be loved. If there is still a religious theme intended, then the shame might be secularism, which one assimilates for sake of being loved, admired. The music video features Tamino supported by strings, connected to spectators who watch him play his guitar. The ambivalent nature of strings, as something supportive and constrictive, reveals that Tamino might feel himself connected, held up, or as a prop, a puppet.
Tamino criticizes himself, while demonstrating a kind of self-awareness about the way that he is portrayed: “That’s quite the group that you have gathered now//Most of them, they just want you somehow//They would pay any price to kiss your skin//Don’t tell me that is loving//You know that don’t mean nothing.” The end of the song switches to direct confession, affirming that he is the target of that unnamed address, is the “you” mentioned. “I’m afraid that no amount of fame//Will ever wash away the shame//Of knowing not how to love your only friend//Who will love you ’til the end.”
Who is the “only friend” mentioned here? Who is he not loving?
The title, “The First Disciple”, could refer to the way that one is one’s own most consistent companion, how one is born into one’s own presence, always learning from oneself, one’s experience. Since I am, always, my own company, I am the only friend who will be from birth to death. Although, there remains a religious resonance, in imagining god as an omnipresent entity, always watching, forgiving, loving us ’til the end. The intimacy of inner religious experience is thereby contrasted with being around others, and Tamino wonders whether fame is shameful, whether solitude is the better love.
When “My Dearest Friend and Enemy” continues this theme, the song’s unnamed “you” turns out to be a lover, directly addressed amidst a fight. The title is not about Tamino’s conflicted feelings about deism, grateful for the gift of life, outraged over the existence of suffering. Rather than suggesting the ambivalence of being one’s own most consistent companion (the famous dictum, akin to “the only thing to fear is fear itself”, which states that “you are your own worst enemy”), the title seems to address the friction of proximity, the way that the intensity of love begets greater extremes of conflict. Every love, no matter how sweet, will have its bitterness. Or so Tamino argues, to convince his lover to stay: “Don’t you leave me out…Will it be the same?//When you build your family,//with your next enemy?//Tell me: who’ll be next to blame?”
If “The First Disciple” hinges on a conflict between shame and self-love, mystical privacy and public spectacle, then the song “Only Our Love” takes this conflict between publicity and privacy in a different direction. “I’m a recluse and you, you love people//You say there’s no excuse for hiding away//Though there’s common sense in being a heathen//Only your love makes me stray//Yes, only your love makes me stray.”
The sentence signifies in different directions depending on how we punctuate the enjambment.
The first reading punctuates late: “I’m a recluse and you, you love people. You say there’s no excuse for hiding away, though there’s common sense in being a heathen.” This reading suggests that to be holy is to be loving, among others; to be a recluse is to be against god, a “heathen.” The lover reminds us, though there are “common-sense” reasons to be afraid of others, to want to hide away, it’s not excusable.
The second reading puts the punctuation earlier. “You love people; you say there’s no excuse for hiding away. Though there’s common sense in being a heathen, only your love makes me stray.” This reading would indicate that holiness exists at a distance, in isolated contemplation. To be among the masses is to forsake individual responsibility, independent thought. Though the appeal of being among people is commonly accepted, part of “common sense,” Tamino is able to resist it. Or, he would be able to resist it, but for his love, whose simple, extroverted nature makes him willing to sacrifice his independence, his cosmic contemplation of world strings.
Though this second reading might be more difficult, more awkwardly positioned, it fits better within the themes of the song, and of the album. “Fascination” remarks how “Those modest sayings, that mean so much to you–with me, they’ve never gotten through; I’ve always needed bigger words.” And so Tamino is happy to reject the “modest sayings,” the “common sense” of the crowd, “in being a heathen.” This reading of the song reprises the imagery of “Indigo Night,” where the depressed artist is stuck trying to understand suffering, but women try to snap him out of his stupor, make him aware of the world, “the pleasures of life.” Tamino’s isolation is continuously interrupted, lovingly slow, by the worldly detail of his love: “Cause I’m trying to find my reason, but I end up in despair.//And then I notice you doing that thing with your hair//And I got nothing on my mind but love.” Tamino’s overly intellectual approach to the world is antagonistic to the detailed experience of it; the lover can see the sky better than he. As much as he needs “bigger words,” he knows that “none of your colors//Can be found within the lines//Of the pages I made mine.” The literary experience of the world, mediated by language, is broken into colorless contours, is missing an essential experience of life. “I got my words and you got your feelings.”
Noticing the through-line from “Indigo Night” to “Only Our Love,” where women function as the beautiful solution to man’s intellect, we might want to develop a few feminist qualms. There is a peculiar way, in the Western literary tradition, that those men who lament the lack of meaning in this life tend, also, to develop a dependence on women.
A particularly potent example comes in Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus, specifically its “Appendix: Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka.” Camus was famous to most for his argument that life is absurd, and to some for his philandering ways, his attempts (successful or not) at seducing women. His writing tries to cultivate a public image as a kind of seducer, objectifies women: “During their entire youth men find here a life in proportion to their beauty. Then, later on, the downhill slope and obscurity. They wagered on the flesh, but knowing they were to lose. In Algiers whoever is young and alive finds sanctuary and occasion for triumphs everywhere: in the bay, the sun, the red and white games on the seaward terraces, the flowers and sports stadiums, the cool-legged girls.” Women are regarded as a prize, a retreat from the absurdity of the world; the boredom of a life without meaning is cured, mere moments at a time, through sex.
So one finds monogamy among the many beliefs Camus regards as absurd, and he appreciates Kafka for sharing that disbelief. In the appendix, Camus writes that Kafka’s best work is the unfinished novel The Castle, superior to the more famous work, The Trial.
The Trial describes a man, K., who finds himself accused of unknown crimes. K. spends the novel trying to discover the allegations against him, some way of defending himself, only to die, just as confused, unsuccessful. The Trial is most often read as a political commentary, a testament to bureaucratic alienation; but, within these social critiques, it also integrates theological themes of guilt, judgment, an unknown, higher power. As Camus explains: “A symbol, indeed, assumes two planes, two worlds of ideas and sensations, and a dictionary of correspondences between them…In Kafka these two worlds are that of everyday life on the one hand and, on the other, that of supernatural anxiety.”
The Trial features occasional, episodic love affairs, which are oneiric, surreal in their swiftness. When K. visits a lawyer in the hopes of clearing his name, he finds himself compelled by the nurse at the lawyer’s bedside. Something clatters; he leaves the room to check:
“Nothing has happened,” she whispered to him, “I just threw a plate against the wall to get you out of there.” “I was thinking about you, as well,” replied K. uneasily. “So much the better,” said the carer. “Come with me.”
Only occasional entries in The Trial, such romantic rendezvouses are ubiquitous in The Castle. Ultimately, Camus prefers The Castle because it maintains a triadic connection among themes of romantic love, institutional approval, and theological meaning. Its protagonist, the Land Surveyor, moves from partner to partner, seeking some relation which can grant him entry to the titular and enigmatic Castle. The Castle is a paradise guarded by confusion and inadequacy–a pervasive fog, rather than flaming swords of angels. As Camus describes it, “The Castle is perhaps a theology in action, but it is first of all the individual adventure of a soul in quest of its grace, of a man who asks of this world’s objects their royal secret and of women the signs of the god that sleeps in them.” “The episode of Frieda is significant in this regard. If [the Land Surveyor] takes as his mistress this woman who has known one of the Castle’s officials, this is because of her past. He derives from her something that transcends him while being aware of what makes her forever unworthy of the Castle. This makes one think of Kierkegaard’s strange love for Regina Olsen.”
And what does Camus mean, in this sudden reference to Regina Olsen? Famously, Kierkegaard decided to renege on his engagement to Regina Olsen, not for lack of love, but out of a desire for celibacy; his works Either/Or and Fear and Trembling describe his inner turmoil, deciding whether it is a worthy thing, to be married. Camus’s language describes a particular predicament, where “god sleeps in [women]”; the transcendental beauty of femininity is only passive, dormant, so that women are “forever unworthy of the Castle.” Camus has his own misogynistic perspective on women and their unworthiness; he assumes that the dane’s religious vocation prevented him from sullying oneself with a tainted sex.
Kafka regards women as something foreign and inferior, oft-objectified, treated as tokens on the road to somewhere better. Camus, too, has little faith in understanding women as human, rather than as something alien. But is this Kierkegaard’s perspective? Is this really why he chooses to stay celibate? Or is there a more profound statement about the relationship between lovers at work here, which the misogyny is masking?
Let’s look, first, to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The book, split in the middle, is designed as a conversation between two authors. Either is written by an aesthete, who argues that beauty, in its most sensitive and sensual forms, should rule one’s life. The author of Or, Judge Vilhelm, writes to the author of Either, trying to convert him to an ethical life.
Either features the diary of a seducer, applauds the sexploits of the titular character in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Or argues, mostly through modest anecdotes, that one ought to settle down, get married. Either favors the particular, the momentary. Or prefers rules, universal and timeless. Of course, neither side wins out, neither is wholly exclusive of the other–for both are contained within the mind of a single author, talking to himself, weighing the relative and simultaneous virtues of the instant and the infinite.
Late in the letters of Or, one finds the following passage:
“It happens sometimes that I sit down and inwardly collapse. I have taken care of my work, I have no desire for diversion, and something melancholic in my temperament gains the upper hand. I become much older than my actual years, I become a stranger to my domestic life almost; I see quite well how attractive it is, but I look at it with different eyes than usual; to me it is as if I were an old man, my wife a young sister who was happily married and in whose house I was now sitting. In such hours time itself naturally begins to drag. Now, were my wife a man perhaps the same would happen to her, and maybe both of us would come to a standstill. But she is a woman and on good terms with time. Is it a perfection on the part of woman, this secret rapport with time? Is it an imperfection? Is it because she is a more earthly being than man? Or more because she has eternity within her? You answer, for you have a philosophical mind. When I sit thus abandoned and lost, I look at my wife walk about in the room with light and youthful tread, always occupied, always with something to attend to, involuntarily my eyes follow her every movement and I join in everything she does, and it ends with my finding myself once more in time, with time acquiring meaning for me, the moment again moving swiftly.”
In the song “Cigar,” Tamino shares this view about the relationship between love, sex, and time. “You show me that life//isn’t all about extending your time.//No, it’s the perfect time for a bottle of wine.” Love, like a kind of halka, becomes a way of living in the moment, rather than seeking eternity. Indeed, in an atheistic world, the search for immortality seems absurd–enjoy some love, while you can: “And why, do I still care?//About all who might recall me//For everything dies, so does memory//And why, am I still surprised?//About all who pray their sins away//Aren’t they too a part of this grand ballet?”
Sex is a way of overcoming thought. In “Only Our Love,” Tamino croons: “I’m trying to find good reason//Not to end up in denial//And then I realize you’ve been standing there a while//Wearing nothing but your love”. In Cigar, “Right then, she kisses my skin//I don’t know what this is or where to begin//This fills me up with bliss//Don’t tell me this was a dream//And she, shows me that life//Isn’t all about explaining your time//No, it’s the perfect time to lay all night.”
Tamino’s description of love matches the judge’s, in that one’s relationship to one’s partner undoes the traditional need for logic and explanation, makes it suddenly possible to live without “explaining your time”.But the judge’s rhetoric is, rather blatantly, misogynistic. Women are regarded as something entirely foreign (“were my wife a man….”). While that otherness is of value, as the husband looks to his wife for guidance, it is not without condescension.
In explaining how women have a particular relationship to time, the judge decides that he must “recount a story”: “Somewhere in Holland there lived a scholar. He was an orientalist and married. One afternoon he fails to appear at mealtime in spite of being called. His wife waits expectantly with the food, she knows he is at home, and the longer this continues the less she can explain his absence. Finally she decides to go along to him herself and urge him to come. There he is, sitting alone in his study, nobody with him. He is absorbed in his oriental studies. I can picture it. She has bent down over him, put her arm round him, looked down at his book, then looking up at him, said, ‘Dear friend, why don’t you come along and eat?’ The scholar perhaps hardly had time to heed her words, but on seeing his wife he presumably replied, ‘Well, my girl, there can be no question of dinner, here is a diacritic I have never come across before – I have often seen the passage quoted but never in this way, and yet my edition is an excellent Dutch edition. Look at this dot here, it’s enough to drive one mad.’ I can imagine his wife looked at him half smiling, half deprecating, at such a little dot disturbing the domestic order, and the tale recounts that she replied, ‘Is that anything to make such a fuss of? It isn’t worth wasting one’s breath on.’ No sooner said than done. She blows, and behold, the diacritic vanishes, for this remarkable dot was a grain of snuff. The scholar hastens happily to the dinner-table, happy that the vowel point had disappeared, even happier in his wife.”
Notwithstanding the adulation in his voice, or his partial acknowledgment of his wife’s power over him, the judge fails to see the way that women stay trapped, unable to participate in intellectual exercise as does he. Her wisdom is limited to the needs of the stomach, or to cleaning–useful though her ministrations may be.
But I want to further suggest that this anecdote is of great relevance to the task of making sense of Tamino, of his music. Is he a misogynist, in his portrayal of a woman who is happy with “modest sayings,” even as she sees greater beauty than he? Or is it describing a particular kind of relationship, at a particular moment? What are we to make of the fact that Kierkegaard is describing an Orientalist, and pair that fact with Tamino’s own reception by Orientalist discourse?
Let’s start by noting that the anecdote critiques the construction of knowledge itself, mere words, mismatched patches of dust on a page. “Had that scholar not been married he might have gone crazy, and maybe taken several orientalists with him for I have no doubt that he would have raised an outcry in the literature.” Experts, academics, are shown to have their own madness. The men set everything down in permanent ink; some things are better off forgotten, just blown away. Within the judge’s binary, the masculine is momentous, the feminine fleeting.
Although, there are other dimensions to the story: the judge even proffers an argument that marriage is important as a kind of honest proximity, an opening oneself up to another. He imagines another man, who still loves a woman, but never marries her. Such a man would “have” a woman “whom he loved, yes, maybe worshipped, whom he could visit when his soul was rich and strong, but not a spouse who came in and called him to dinner, not a wife who could blow the dot away.”
As he continues, the judge’s compliments become more condescending: “Woman has, all in all, an innate talent and a primitive gift for clarifying finiteness, an absolute virtuosity. When man was created he stood there, lord and master of all nature’s pomp and splendour, the entire wealth of finiteness awaiting his beck and call, but he did not know what to do with it all…Thus he stood, an imposing figure, inwardly thoughtful but comic, for one must indeed smile at this rich man who did not know how to use his wealth, but also tragic because he could not use it. Then woman was created. She was in no embarrassment, she knew straightaway how to tackle the matter, and without fuss or preparation she was ready straightaway to begin…her humble comfort became life’s richest joy, her innocent pastimes life’s beauty, her childlike play life’s deepest meaning.”
Why must women be children? Are there not, already, children? If the point is that adults, in their capacity for questioning and self-reflexive doubt, need someone young and impulsive to guide them, why wouldn’t children be enough? And why is melancholia the property of men, and whimsy that of women?
The judge relies on a misogynistic argument as old as Plato: “Woman clarifies finiteness, man chases after infinity. So it should be, and each has his and her pain; for the woman bears children in pain, but the man conceives ideas in pain, and it is not for woman to feel the anxiety of doubt or the torment of despair.” Or, as Socrates argues, in the Symposium: “Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget children-this is the character of their love; their offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and giving them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future. But souls which are pregnant-for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies-conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions?-wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor.” Women, the embodiment of a more physical longevity, are therefore excluded from poetic practice; they can dust off the pages, not read them.
It’s important to remember that Kierkegaard is staging these letters, using them as a didactic conversation about the relation of the individual and the universal, the finite and the infinite. He is not siding with Judge Vilhelm, the author of Or, so much as he is using the character to voice the misogyny of 1830s Denmark. “The year before his death [Kierkegaard] wrote that what Vilhelm says about ‘the woman’ is ‘what you could expect from a husband defending marriage with ethical enthusiasm’. Kierkegaard seems to suggest the ethical enthusiasm is somehow false. He says that although man has a lust for life, left to himself he finds no way to awaken it. When the woman, however, in whom this lust is already alive, appears before him she awakens his ‘unspecified’ lust and specifies it.”
In other words, the judge does not indicate why he loves his wife, so much as his argument relies on the idea that a man must marry. He does not see the specificity of his situation, of his love. He relies on painting an idea of woman, and using his wife to fulfill that idea. For that reason he stays dependent on her submission, is “against all that contemptible talk of the emancipation of women.”
Even as he notes the personal fulfillment he achieves from work, he does not think about how it must feel to be divorced from meaningful work: “I perform my services as judge, I am glad to have such a vocation, I believe it is in keeping with my abilities and my whole personal being, I know it makes demands on my powers. I try to mould myself more and more to it, and in doing so I feel that I am developing myself more and more…I live a higher life and when in the respiration of my earthly and domestic existence I occasionally inhale this higher life, I count myself blessed, art and grace come together for me.” Meanwhile, he supposes that his wife “feels indescribably happy in being tied to [him]”.
The problem persists: one may love the rule over the reason. This is true not only for the monogamist, who loves being married more than he loves being married to his wife, but is true also for the seducer, who loves being with women more than he loves being with any woman. “For Don Giovanni every girl is an ordinary girl, every love affair an everyday story. Zerlina is young and pretty, and she is a woman, that is the peculiarity she shares with hundreds of others, but it is not the uncommon that Don Giovanni desires but the general, what she has in common with every woman.”
In his advocacy of seduction, viewing himself as a Don Giovanni, a Don Juan, Camus even tries to defend himself against this accusation: “What Don Juan realizes in action is an ethic of quantity, whereas the saint, on the contrary, tends toward quality….Don Juan does not think of ‘collecting’ women. He exhausts their number and with them his chances of life. ‘Collecting’ amounts to being capable of living off one’s past.” Of course, Camus’s misogyny is precisely what prevents his “chances of life” from being successful. He says that he is sincere in each attempt: it’s only that the attempts are futile, and “he exhausts their number.” The truth is that his pessimism towards women is precisely what prevents him from building a relationship with them; each attempt is doomed from the start. As Judge Vilhelm describes it, “you reject people in an infinite sense, that it is the restlessness with which your soul strives for the infinite that makes you unfair to people.”
Vilhelm extols the virtues of giving up on individuality, which, apparently, is a kind of ‘womanliness’; his wife “sees clearly that what you[, the seducer,] lack is some degree of womanliness. You are too proud to be able to give yourself up to anyone.” The problem is that Judge Vilhelm denigrates femininity, the supposedly feminine virtue of being in relation to others; he puts attachment in the most negative light, as a way of giving control over to someone else, rather than being impassioned, inflamed, liberated by the presence of another. The wife is supportive of the aesthete’s vision, “she is really very fond of” him. And who wouldn’t prefer the aesthete to a husband like Judge Vilhelm? Who wouldn’t feel frustrated, wouldn’t wish his husband were more like the seducer, more passionate?
For Judge Vilhelm, to be willing to attach oneself to another is to sacrifice one’s pride, to be willing to look embarrassed. It’s supposedly more impressive to remain detached, but the very need to be impressive detracts from one’s virtue: “In the Middle Ages it was thought that in choosing the monastery one was choosing something uncommon and became oneself an uncommon man; from the heights of the monastery one looked down proudly, almost compassionately, upon ordinary people. No wonder people flocked to the monastery when it was possible to be an unusual man at such a reasonable cost!” “The truly extraordinary man is the truly ordinary man. The more of the universally human an individual is able to realize in his life, the more extraordinary he is. The less of the universal he is able to assume, the less perfect he is. Uncommon he may be, but not in a good sense.”
Ultimately, Judge Wilhelm feels that he has won out over the seducer, because he can prove that it is unfulfilling to be alone: “Do not think I wish to intrude on your secrets, but I have just one question to put to you, which I think you can answer without making too free with yourself. Answer me honestly and without evasion: do you really laugh when you are alone? You know what I mean – I do not mean whether you ever, or even often, happen to laugh when alone, but whether you find this lonely laughter satisfying? If not, I have won the day”.
Judge Vilhelm provides a rather articulate explanation for how life can be lonely, devoid of laughter. Of course, he does not answer the important question: how does laughter arise, under what conditions? Is it true that anyone can make one laugh? Or does one need the proper partner?
What Camus regarded as an obvious matter–why Kierkegaard did not marry Regina Olsen–turns out to be much more complex. Indeed, Kierkegaard continues to tell and re-tell the story, as he seems uncertain as to what precisely happened. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard likely uses the story of Agnete and the Merman as a masked metaphor for his own mishaps. The Merman is a monster who tries to lure Agnete into the sea, and Kierkegaard’s initial telling of the story indicates his self-disgust, the way he felt he was tainting her, would only harm her with his love: “Only as a prey can she become his, he cannot belong faithfully to any girl, for in fact he is only a merman.”
But then Kierkegaard rejects this argument on feminist principles. Regina wanted him, too, so that he was not simply corrupting her innocence: “generally speaking it is nonsense and coquetry and an insult to the feminine sex to imagine a case of seduction where the girl is not the least bit to blame.”
He retells the story. Maybe it was just that Regina did not love him enough, not properly: “The merman does not want to seduce Agnes, although previously he had seduced many…However, he knows (as the legend in fact teaches), that he can be delivered by the love of an innocent girl.” He can only love her if she, like him, is a contemplative soul: “The merman plucks up courage, he approaches Agnes, he wins her love, he hopes for his deliverance. But Agnes was no quiet maiden, she was fond of the roar of the sea…”
Noticing that Agnes differs from his expectations, he takes this as a challenge to change: “the sea roars and the waves foam and the merman embraces Agnes and plunges with her into the deep. Never had he been so wild, never so full of desire, for he had hoped by this girl to find deliverance.” Turns out she just wanted somebody to love, “she was fond of the roar of the sea…” It was a sincere effort, but just a bad fit: “He soon became tired of Agnes…”
He also wonders if he is doing justice to what happened. Maybe he is being overly simplistic, too proud? Just as Judge Vilhelm criticizes those who valorize celibacy, author of Fear and Trembling says to himself: “[s]o it is the Middle Ages would perform the movement, for according to its conception the merman is absolutely dedicated to the cloister.”
Ultimately, the many tellings and re-tellings of Kierkegaard’s decision seem to indicate the way that no explanation will suffice. To know even a finite thing would require an infinite power, so that such knowledge is untranslatable. And he explains this untranslatability with the metaphor of music.
“[I]t is not the uncommon that Don Giovanni desires but the general, what [Zerlina] has in common with every woman. If that is not how it is, then Don Giovanni ceases to be absolutely musical, the aesthetic calls for spoken lines; but then since that is indeed how it is, Don Giovanni is absolutely musical.” Why, if Don Giovanni was in love with Zerlina, alone, would that not be musical? Perhaps the aesthete is making a point that music cannot be monogamous, for monogamy is static. One cannot compose of a single note, and so favoritism is inimical to melody.
In the musician’s experience of composition, there is a moment-to-moment kind of prioritization, which does not follow an a priori plan, but which occurs in the flux of experience. So, too, Don Giovanni does not plan his love. To plan is to promise, and to promise falsely is to lie, to be a mere seducer. But, like Camus, Don Giovanni claims only to be living in the moment, not plotting another’s fall. “He desires and stays constantly in a state of desire, and he constantly savors its satisfaction. To be a seducer he lacks the time ahead in which to lay his plans, and the time behind in which to become conscious of his act. A seducer should therefore be in possession of a power which Don Giovanni does not have, however well equipped he is otherwise – the power of speech. As soon as we give him that power he ceases to be musical”.
To give one’s love a name is to say that one, for all time, will remain the object of one’s eye. Music exists in a temporality that is tighter than language, more miniscule. “[T]his force, this power words cannot express, only music can give us an idea of it, for it is inexpressible in reflection and thought.”
…
A power that words cannot express. Sounds familiar.
“Now I heard there was a sacred chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord.”
But they’re just sounds, after all. What if I were a musician, dedicating myself to such things, only to be uncertain if it was all a waste of time? In contrast, just the smile on your face, the certainty of that joy, would be enough. In a breath, you could blow it all over.
“Now I heard there was a sacred chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord.
But you don’t really care for music, do ya?”
Another “you.” Who?