I am a sick man. I am a jealous man. Endowed with a certain Mediterranean vigor I am spiteful, sickened to death by Tom Brokaw’s shit-eating grin, disgusted with my family and former friends, fearful of aloof dot-commers in a Biblical way, their SUV’s, their palm pilots, their material stink swarming around me. But I will be honest with you. I harbor such strange opinions because I have fallen into the literary life. A noble calling, you might say. But I did not choose this hell, this torture that even the most vile of Chinese sadists couldn’t stomach. I have yet to find my own voice. I have yet to be original in any sense of the term. I am a garden-variety critic, a poetaster with no skill, only taste. I am a scab, aware at all times, night and day, that I am derivative, the new and improved version of what already came before. I want to be an artist, a sayer of truth. But I am blocked. Hindered and haunted by the words of another. To make a long story short, I am obsessed with Don DeLillo.

A confession, gentle reader, of what lies behind.

I have been in contact with others who share my obsession, chat room buddies, friends of friends who pick up used copies of White Noise to give away at parties, and last but not least, The Don DeLillo Society, an academic clique of which I was once a proud member. Founded in 1999, we organize and sponsor panels on DeLillo at various literary conferences. We are the gauntlet of DeLillo criticism. If you want to say something about DeLillo you must first go through us. We are in the know. Nothing that DeLillo writes, says, or does eludes our grasp. We understand how DeLillo relates to contemporary issues of race, gender, and class. We have come to realize the subtle workings of his mind and how they relate to our own.

I was recently forced to resign from the DeLillo Society after a colleague suggested that we write a book together about DeLillo’s depictions of media violence. I had thought of this already! So I punched him in the nose. I was soon fired from my University post and he is suing me. I am suing the University for wrongful termination. The Chronicle of Higher Education has gotten involved (too involved if you ask me!), milking the story for its salacious metacommentary.

I am now unemployed, a stay-at-home dad with no prospect of gainful employment. But in order to maintain appearances, I will let you in on my imaginary—where I am coming from and what I take for granted when I speak of things DeLillo. I have never been to prison. I was born in Akron, Ohio but tell people I’m from Cleveland. I love cats. When I was twenty-two I applied to law school but was rejected by every goddamn one, a sign, I believe, of things to come. I am quick to anger. A victim, plain and simple.

My life can be summarized by my cultural obsessions beginning with my mother’s soap operas in the summers between second and third grades—Days of Our Lives and Another World— intrigue, murder, and sex whose narrative was jointed and deferred. I quickly moved onto KISS—KISS tapes, KISS jacket, KISS dolls, KISS cards and the prized #18, a solitary Ace Frehley on guitar, a sparkling, spacey vision of silver and white. Only my friend Brett Beadow had been blessed with #18, at that time a point of contention and awkward jealousy. I then spent five years thinking about nothing but baseball cards, arranging and rearranging them in plastic pockets, stealing packs from the drug store, memorizing statistics and perfect mint prices, going to card shows and collecting every Pete Rose card there was, every year, all mint, all Charlie Hustle, from the 1963 rookie card to the 1984 Fleer update. After the cardboard heroes lost their luster, I moved onto more sophisticated fare. Before DeLillo there was Galaga, Prince, Led Zeppelin, and Bon Jovi, Civil War battle reenactments, Laurie Anderson, semiotics, and Moby-Dick to name only a few.

I fell into the words of Don DeLillo on November 16, 1997 (now a family holiday). That was the day I first began reading Underworld. It took eight days of slow, methodical turns, one page at a time, copious notes, tears, and illumination. I would read sections over and over again. I would spend hours on a single paragraph. The first line a coded message, a direct challenge to the reader, hanging there, waiting for me to decipher it.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.

Since then I have read everything by DeLillo at least three times, collected all the first editions, written fan letters to DeLillo on a weekly basis (Don DeLillo, c/o Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, 10020), lurked around chat rooms dedicated to his work under a myriad of user names, sometimes picking fights with myself in order to assure victory. I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “If You Love Don DeLillo You’re Too Close.” I have used Americana (DeLillo’s first novel) as a bedtime story for my sons. I hope to pass on something special to them through DeLillo’s linguistic code. My orange tabby, Barbara, is named after DeLillo’s wife.

It seems as though I was born to be a critic, zeroing in on different chinks in the cultural armor, deconstructing them, looking for an opening, always searching for a way out. I am a tragic and pathetic figure, an angry young man who resents giving you, dear reader, the literary facts of the day:

Born on November 20, 1936, Don DeLillo was raised in the Bronx, attended Catholic high school and later Fordham University. Like Salman Rushdie, he worked as a copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather before moving onto fiction. Unlike Rushdie, however, DeLillo has never been the target of an Islamic fatwa. He has never been buddy-buddy with Bono or undergone cosmetic surgery. DeLillo usually passes on such pomp and circumstance for a reason. Great writers and their work, he says, are “too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.” In keeping with his professed outsider status, DeLillo rarely grants interviews. He does not appear on Charlie Rose. He doesn’t write book reviews or participate in writing workshops or the academic life.

Last summer my DeLillo mania grew progressively worse. I experienced unexplained blackouts, alternating episodes of depression and euphoria. In July I made a DeLillo kachina doll out of old New York Times and scraps of cloth, perfectly proportioned to his thin, 145 pound frame. I began to experiment with DeLillo scratch-n-sniffs, a different smell for each of his books. In August I set up a small lab in my basement, complete with beakers and Bunsen burners. I have yet to complete my chemistry project but I imagine a gamut of literary aromas, each sticker in its own way a summation of plot, characters, and denouement. Here is what Ratner’s Star smells like. Go ahead. Scratch your screen:

I know this smell.

You know this smell.

Because we have slipped into the stream of DeLillo’s sensorium—the writer who once described himself as a literary terrorist; the writer who does not ruminate over subtle emotional shifts or the minor grievances of domestic life; the writer who does not deal “painfully and honestly” with the latest political crisis.

But as DeLillo prophecies, the culture that contains us eludes our desire to mark it, to use its content to remind us of our formal freedom. We are ever haunted by visions of a more complete self, an identity fully realized—a kinder, gentler, more articulate version—someone who volunteers, who makes a difference, who sinks the three-pointer at the buzzer, who publishes brilliant tomes, who captures the zeitgeist, who is loved unconditionally and bravely chooses a fate. This is the “naked shitmost self” that we believe, desperately, tragically, is there, somewhere. “Even when you self-destruct,” cautions a DeLillo character, “you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”

I know exactly what he is talking about. Because I am a humble apprentice. Because I have absorbed and digested Don DeLillo. Because I am the fungus that lurks between his toes.

This is my demonic side, the part that goes without saying, the part that is controlled from without, the part that we, dear reader, don’t like to admit to ourselves because we can’t. Like Livia Majeski from Valparaiso, “We feel things. We become addicted to things because life, itself, is habit forming. We start things and can’t stop.”

We seek comfort in the never-ending stream of gadgets and digital doo-dads—all those products endowed with a life-force independent of the human touch. The NASDAQ soars or plummets, money talks, your new iMac works for you. All the while the individual is reduced to an inanimate object at the mercy of market forces. On your knees, beckons the radio man, bow down and breathe in that new car smell, the smell that soothes the wounds of childhood. This is what it’s all about, the otherworldly scent of densely pressed aluminum and vinylized leather that brings you closer to God.

This is the spiritual spiral that has led to my scratch-n-sniff experiments, breaking the world up into signifieds and signifiers, the way things smell and how I talk about these ways and these smells.

But I am ready to be healed, to begin to refuse analogy, to deny that everything is connected to everything else. To move across, away, and beyond DeLillo.

This condition, of course, was depicted brilliantly by DeLillo in chapter 39 of White Noise when the narrator Jack Gladney becomes aware of his own cynicism and confronts Willie Mink, the mysterious inventor of Dylar, an anti-death-anxiety drug to which Mink has become addicted. The main side effect of Dylar is linguistic decadence in extremis. When Jack says “Falling plane,” Mink panics and grabs the arms of his chair. When Jack whispers “Hail of Bullets,” Mink dives to the floor and begins “crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of design but showing real terror.”

I want to someday say these words and know, in a visceral way, that they are not my own. I want to be redeemed, bathed in the blood of Latin letters. I want to jettison quaint, well-behaved narratives with neat plots and worked-out endings, to feel the incoherency of modern life on a deeper level, to write as a form of religious meditation in which language is the flawed and final recourse to enlightenment.

A version of this entry was originally published in SPEAK 20 (Fall 2000): 12-17.

The word spirituality fills me with anxiety. As the member of our department of religious studies who teaches contemporary religion, (New Age, popular culture, Asian religion in America, that sort of thing…) I should be a spirituality expert, ready to use the word as a clever retort for my cynical family members, as a piece of sage advice for my sincere, confused graduating majors, or as a contextualizing quote for the religion writer from our local paper.

In other words, I feel I should have a handle on this whole spirituality thing, but I really don’t. When I think about spirituality, I ask myself, throat tightening: what do I need to know? What conversations about it should I be injecting myself into? Who’s writing about it? Whose brilliant new definition of it is so broad, or so narrow, or so unexpected, or so obvious, or so self-conscious, or so un-self-conscious, that we academics can no longer talk meaningfully about spirituality without nodding metaphorically or literally in the direction of this exciting scholar?

I can toss off an article on a particular religious group in contemporary America, or put together a chapter about how some artifact of pop culture is, in fact, religious. But if I want the security of a tenured position at the best possible institution, and the prestige of having written a serious work of scholarship, I need to write a book whose title uses big words and that does not evoke any particular time or place.

I need to write an academic book about spirituality.

The word spirituality fills me with anxiety. Sometimes as I work on my laptop (or pretend to) late at night, my wife will ask what I am writing. An article or an entry or a book review, I’ll tell her.

“What are you doing that for?” she’ll ask.

“Well it’s part of my job.”

“So are you getting paid for it?”

“No, but I get to keep the book.” Or: “They should send me a copy of the encyclopedia when it comes out, plus $60!” That fails to impress, as does my monthly paycheck.

“You’re a good writer and you know a lot about religion. Write a book that will sell,” she says, “Make us some money. Get famous.”

Why not? If professors of economics serve as consultants to the very banks they study and professors of medicine are paid by the companies whose drugs they test, why can’t professors of religious studies financially exploit the subjects of our investigations? What is wrong with a little money and publicity? Why can’t we cash in too?

I need to write a popular book about spirituality.

The thought of writing a book about spirituality, whether academic or popular, fills me with anxiety. Shouldn’t these kinds of books just write themselves?

In the academic book I’d like to write, a smooth and vague language, full of whispered half-promises, conjures the free-floating theorizing that can only happen when the discipline of religious studies merges with postmodern theology and cultural studies. The popular book I’d like to write could be found in any of a dozen sections of the local bookstore: New Age, Self-Help, Eastern Religions, Psychology, Fitness, Humor. Or better yet: next to the cash register.

Shouldn’t these kinds of books just write themselves? Maybe not, but the titles can. And that’s a start.

So Louis, the Webmaster, and Laura, the Instructional Technologist, helped me create an automatic, random title generator, which has inside of it over one and a half million possible book titles about spirituality. At last I am no longer anxious about spirituality; I might even feel a little bit spiritual myself, for the first time. Because I have harnessed the power of randomness and automation, which are unthinking, productive, and modern, like spirituality itself.

I created this generator for myself. In using it, I have noticed that in all these potential book titles, the word “spirituality” stands like the eye of the hurricane, the vacant signifier, the placeholder, the empty vessel…

And now I invite everyone to partake.

http://sieglere.people.cofc.edu/title.php

Let me be perfectly frank: I’ve loved each one of the Walkmans that I’ve owned. I even loved my discman and my MiniDisc player, and I’ve loved each of my iPods and now, I love the fact that my cellphone can play music. The invention of mobile music has probably been the most important technological advancement of my lifetime, and it has undoubtedly added a complex layer of mediation between me and the worlds I inhabit.

There are days when I can’t wait to get my headphones in, and other days when everything I choose to hear seems painfully out of tune. There are days when “shuffle” seems cruelly calibrated to chafe against my hearing, and other days when it seems smarter than I am.

Occasionally, I use mobile music as armature, guarding me against a social world I don’t want to get too close to. Often, I use it as accompaniment, to embellish a familiar walk or repetitive task. But always, mobile music is something that’s going to get in between me and wherever I am. Sometimes, it blocks out what’s out there, and sometimes it can invite in what is out there by opening up new ways of hearing spaces, places, and pieces of music that I thought I knew.

I well understand the irony here: my sense of the world around me rests on my ability to import a soundtrack of my own choosing and exert my sonic will on it. There is always another option: to forego my own desires and tune into whatever serendipitous sounds that circumstances generate. In the former, you can hear overtones of ids, egos and control freaks run wild. In the latter, strains of zen-like acceptance of one’s aural environment.

To be sure, an alternative reading of this kind of listening is possible: portable, personalized music echoes with a desire to not hear what everyone else is hearing, to build a sonic buffer from the sensory assault on contemporary landscapes. “If I’m listening to my musical choices,” goes the logic, “then, for a moment, I won’t overhear the overly-loud conversation of my neighbor, or the market-tested, consumer-calibrated, ‘coffee shop’ radio station on the piped-in sound system.” By that logic, not jamming ear buds in your ears is tantamount to sheepishly knuckling under to a world that is almost always under an aural assault (passing cars, car stereos, neighbors fighting, and other sounds you might rather not hear).

To critics, this is nothing but anti-social behavior. Cultural critic Allan Bloom wrote that the Walkman was little more than a distraction from the “great tradition.” Historian of religion Mark Noll described it as “one more competitor to the voice of God.”

Each of these authors uses the aural as a register, but really, they are upset by the broader, social context of the “personal stereo.” Concerns about the Walkman sound like they’re about music, but really, they’re about the culture of listening. The anxiety that the Walkman elicits is that people do not seem to be listening, or that they’re listening to one thing while they ought to be listening to something else. But most importantly, by listening to their headphones, they’re opting out of listening in a more social context.

Ironically, the first generation Walkman was supposed to be social. The very first generation of the Walkman had two headphone jacks, and early advertisements featured fit-looking young couples skating and skydiving together, while listening simultaneously, too. The dual headphone jacks represented an engineering response to the possibly apocryphal story of the president of Sony taking an early prototype for an informal test while golfing with friends one day. They all loved the technology but they found it isolating and antisocial.

It’s a strange technical solution to a social problem. If listening seems isolating, let more people wear headphones and listen to the same music simultaneously but separately. The dual headphone jacks were gone by the second generation of Walkman, but debates over the meaning of the Walkman were not.

Recently, in the New York Times, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh blamed iPods for keeping Americans from rising up in protest about America’s recent economic turmoil. “In public spaces,” he wrote, “serendipitous interaction is needed to create the ‘mob mentality.’ Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can’t join someone in a movement if you can’t hear the participants.”

We can again hear strains that the Walkman (or its more robust technological offspring) inhibits social interaction, impedes participation in civic life, and otherwise distracts people from paying attention to something more important than their favorite song. Cultural Studies scholar Rey Chow has written that this kind of “distracted listening” represents a political statement, of sorts, a refusal to participate in mainstream sonic-social discourse.

I disagree. Chow misses the fact that both the music and the technology on which it relies are embedded in other circuits of capital and power, thus making it impossible to be fully distracted—you are always “hearing” the technology as noise in the cultural circuit. If the technology itself were mute, then listening to a Walkman would be the same as listening to anything else (a portable stereo, a transistor radio, a loudspeaker).

It’s not. Listening to a Walkman is a particular kind of listening, and listening to an iPod is yet another. It is perfectly postmodern, insofar as this kind of listening always calls attention to the material condition of the act of listening itself (this is why Apple’s white earbuds were such a brilliant advertising move). Similarly, the Walkman is a beautiful artifact of late liberal culture, with its emphasis on individual choice and fulfillment; with my Walkman, I only need to hear what I want to hear, provided I’ve paid for it.

Yet, the beauty of the Walkman, further elaborated by the iPod, is that it is often mobilized as a refusal of those same cultural contexts. Every act of listening performs tensions between what one hears and how one hears it, between where one is and what one is attending to, between what one wants to hear (my music) and what one hears (the technology), between connecting with my environment and being distanced from it, with little or no hope for reconciliation.

Nevertheless, I keep listening, and perhaps those tensions keep me listening, so that I might hear a little better the spaces between the notes, the pauses between the words, the gaps between what I hear and how I hear it.

THE TJURUNGA

begins as a digging stick, first thing the Aranda child picks up.

When he cries, he is said to be crying for

the tjurunga he lost

when he migrated into his mother.

Male elders later replace the mother with sub-incision.

The shaft of his penis slit, the boy incorporates his mother.

I had to create a totemic cluster in which imagination

could replace Indianapolis, to incorporate ancestor beings

who could give me the agility

—across the tjurunga spider’s web—

to pick my way to her perilous center.

(So transformationally did she quiver,

adorned with hearts and hands,

cruciform, monumental,
Coatlicue

understrapping fusion)

Theseus, a tiny male spider, enters a tri-level construction:

look down through the poem, you can see the labyrinth.

Look down through the labyrinth, you can see the web:

Coatlicue

sub-incision

Bud Powell

César Vallejo

the bird-headed man

Like a mobile, this tjurunga shifts in the breeze,

beaming at the tossing

foreskin dinghies in which poets travel.

These nouns are also nodes in a constellation called

Clayton’s Tjurunga. The struts are threads

in a web. There is a life blood flowing through

these threads. Coatlicue flows into Bud Powell,

César Vallejo into sub-incision. The bird-headed man

floats right below

the pregnant spider

centered in the Tjurunga.

Psyche may have occurred, struck off

—as in flint-knapping—

an undifferentiated mental core.

My only weapon is a digging stick

the Aranda call papa. To think of father as a digging stick

strikes me as a good translation.

The bird-headed man

is slanted under a disemboweled bison.

His erection tells me he’s in flight. He drops

his bird-headed stick as he penetrates

bison paradise.

The red sandstone hand lamp

abandoned below this proto-shaman

is engraved with vulvate chevrons—did it once flame

from a primal sub-incision?

This is the oldest aspect of this tjurunga, its grip.

Recalculating.

When I was six, my mother placed my hands on the keys.

At sixteen, I watched Bud Powell sweep my keys

into a small pile, then ignite them with “Tea for Two.”

The dumb little armature of that tune

engulfed in improvisational glory

roared through my Presbyterian stasis.

“Cherokee”

“Un Poco Loco”

sank a depth charge into

my soul-to-be.

This is a tjurunga positioning system.

We are now at the intersection of Coatlicue

and César Vallejo.

Squatting over the Kyoto benjo, 1963,

wanting to write, having to shit.

I discovered that I was in the position of Tlazoltéotl-Ixcuina.

But out of her crotch, a baby corn god pawed.

Recalculating.

Cave of

Tlazoltéotl-Ixcuina.

The shame of coming into being.

As if, while self-birthing,

I must eat filth.

I was crunched into a cul-de-sac I could destroy

only by destroying the self

that would not allow the poem to emerge.

Wearing my venom helmet, I dropped, as a ronin, to the pebbles,

and faced the porch of Vallejo’s feudal estate.

The Spectre of Vallejo appeared, snake-headed, in a black robe.

With his fan he drew a target on my gut.

Who was it who sliced into the layers of wrath-

enwebbed memory in which the poem was trussed?

Exactly who unchained Yorunomado

from the Christian altar in Clayton’s solar plexus?

The transformation of an ego strong enough to die

by an ego strong enough to live.

The undifferentiated is the great Yes

in which all eats all

and my spider wears a serpent skirt.
 

That altar. How old is it?

Might it cathect with the urn in which

the pregnant unwed girl Coatlicue was cut up and stuffed?

Out of that urn twin rattlesnakes ascend and freeze.

Their facing heads become the mask of masks.

Coatlicue: Aztec caduceus.

The phallic mother in the soul’s crescendo.

But my wandering foreskin, will it ever reach shore?

Foreskin wandered out of Indianapolis. Saw a keyboard, cooked it in B

Minor.

Bud walked out of a dream. Bud and Foreskin found a waterhole,

swam.

Took out their teeth, made camp. Then left that place, came to

Tenochtitlan.

After defecating, they made themselves headgear out of some hearts

and lopped-off hands.

They noticed that their penises were dragging on the ground,

performed sub-incision, lost lots of blood.

Bud cut Foreskin who then cut Bud.

They came to a river, across from which Kyoto sparkled in the night

sky.

They wanted to cross, so constructed a vine bridge.

While they were crossing, the bridge became a thread in a vast web.

At its distant center, an immense red gonad, the Matriarch crouched,

sending out saffron rays.

“I’ll play Theseus,” Bud said, “this will turn the Matriarch into a

Minotaur.”

“And I’ll play Vallejo,” Foreskin responded, “he’s good at bleeding

himself and turning into a dingo.

Together let’s back on, farting flames.”

The wily Minotaur, seeing a sputtering enigma approaching, pulled a

lever, shifting the tracks.

Foreskin and Bud found themselves in a roundhouse between

conception and absence.

They noticed that their headgear was hanging on a Guardian Ghost

boulder engraved with breasts snake-knotted across a pubis.

“A formidable barricade,” said Bud. “To reach paradise, we must learn

how to dance this design.”

The pubis part disappeared. Fingering his sub-incision, Bud played

“Dance of the Infidels.”

Foreskin joined in, twirling his penis making bullroarer sounds.

The Guardian Ghost boulder roared: “WHO ARE YOU TWO THE

SURROGATES OF?”

Bud looked at Foreskin. Foreskin looked at Bud.

“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” they said in unison.

Then they heard the Guardian Ghost laughing. “Life is a joyous thing,”

she chuckled, “with maggots at the center.”

⁂

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I was first alerted to the tjurunga (or churinga, as it is also spelled) by Robert Duncan in his essay “Rites of Participation” (from The H.D. Book), which appeared in Caterpillar #1, 1967. Duncan quoted Geza Róheim (“The tjurunga, which symbolizes both the male and female genital organ, the primal scene and combined parent concept, the father and the mother, separation and reunion… represents both the path and the goal”), and then commented: “This tjurunga we begin to see not as the secret identity of the Aranda initiate but as our own Freudian identity, the conglomerate consciousness of the mind we share with Róheim… the simple tjurunga now appears to be no longer simple but the complex mobile that S. Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command saw as most embodying our contemporary experience: ‘the whole construction is aerial and hovering as the nest of an insect’—a suspended system, so contrived that ‘a draft of air or push of a hand will change the state of equilibrium and the interrelations of suspended elements… forming unpredictable, ever-changing constellations and so imparting to them the aspect of space-time.’”

Reading Barry Hill’s Broken Song / T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession brought back and refocused Duncan’s words. In Vol. 13 of The Collected Works, Jung writes: “Churingas may be boulders, or oblong stones artificially shaped and decorated, or oblong, flattened pieces of wood ornamented in the same way. They are used as cult instruments. The Australians and the Melanesians maintain that churingas come from the totem ancestor, that they are relics of his body or his activity, and are full of arunquiltha or mana. They are united with the ancestor’s soul and with the spirits of all those who afterwards possess them…In order to ‘charge’ them, they are buried among the graves so that they can soak up the mana of the dead.”

In my poem “The Tjurunga,” I propose a kind of complex mobile made up of the authors, mythological figures and acts, whose shifting combinations undermined and reoriented my life during my poetic apprenticeship in Kyoto in the early 1960s. At a remove now of some 45 years I see these forces also as a kind of GPS (global positioning system) constantly “recalculating” as they closed and opened door after door.

In the thick of breakthroughs often interpreted by my confused mind as obstructions in Kyoto, I was able to complete only one poem that struck me as true to my situation and destiny as a poet: “The Book of Yorunomado.” Thus I opened the poetry section of The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader with this poem and closed this section with “The Tjurunga.”

With bookends in mind, I see these two poems as the “soulend” supports holding the rest of my poetry in place. Thinking back to Vallejo pointing at my gut in 1963 and indicating that I was to commit seppuku, I was struck by the following quotation from James Hillman’s Animal Presences: “The theological message of the Siva-Ganesha, father-son pattern can be summarized in this way: submit that you may be saved, be destroyed that you may be made whole. The sacrificial violence is not the tragic conclusion but the necessary beginning of a passage into a new order… the God who breaks you makes you; destruction and creating ultimately spring from the same source.”

I went to Antarctica a little while ago to look at melting ice and to make music about it.

My previous multimedia piece was about identity—I had secured the rights to DW Griffith’s 1915 film “classic” Birth of a Nation and applied the “dialectical logic” of sampling to the cinematic update of the “minstrel show.” Griffith had left his estate to Harvard and The Museum of Modern Art, and I found it intriguing to think of the eerie resonance that his film had with Bush’s election and Obama’s rise to power. I think of Birth of a Nation as the DNA of our crazy Hollywood tradition and our strange racial politics—a cinematic prism of propaganda in the same tradition as Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 The Battleship Potemkin, Abel Gance’s 1927 film Napoleon and Lenin Riefenstahl’s 1934 Triumph of the Will, but without the saving grace of having been consigned to the dustbin of history. The contours of the American imagination that Birth of a Nation shaped and molded are still with us today–the “minstrel” robots in Transformers or the “black” voices of characters in films like Men in Blackor Star Wars. That kind of thing is still going on.

William S. Burroughs wrote a novel called Nova Express. The Subliminal Kid was a major character and I “sampled” the name from Burroughs’s imagination. The “Spooky” part comes from a philosophical attachment to Sigmund Freud’s concept of unheimlich, the “uncanny.”

That’s what the original film evokes. A strange and ethereal recognition.

Sample: Cut + Paste

When I was a kid, I looked at art as a way of blending everything. I have since been influenced by the Dada Movement, Fluxus, artists like Jean Cocteau, and composers like Wagner (who coined the term Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art work”). If you look at Scriabin or John Cage or Burroughs, that’s where my music comes from: the haunting contours of cut-up tradition.

Sample: Cut + Paste

It’s always about dialogue, to be in a position to work with a variety of people and to explore how they put their work together. My work on Antarctica, The Book of Ice, was done with the quantum physics scientist, Brian Greene (author of the much discussed The Elegant Universe).

Antarctica is a huge, complex, and stunningly remote place. So I asked Brain to write about the physics of ice!

The Book of Ice is a graphic design project that combines music, art, and science. It explores how climate change will affect science. As a link in a chain of connection, The Book of Ice becomes a causal force. In it I wanted to figure out a lyrical side of topology and complexity.

As with Rebirth of a Nation I wanted to figure out a way to link some of the issues that we inhabit today in our information economy where reality itself can be remixed.

Sample: Cut + Paste

Nam Jun Paik once said “Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.” I agree.

Sampling, layering, collage.

And I keep thinking about Marshall McLuhan:

We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature. The people of the Earth are encouraged to engage in an experiment of utmost urgency. We must turn off the electric environment for a period of one week to perform a cleansing of mass-man’s mind, body and spirit. We must get back to our bodies, lest we forget they are still there! Imagine the freedom to be experienced as the top-down cultural control of civilization is eradicated for even the briefest period! If everyone did participate in the Media Fast, how would we know it happened? Stay tuned…

Is this MEDIA FAST really possible? Turning off Birth of a Nation, your computer, or the news means pulling out of the media economy. Is this possible at all anymore?

This is a question that I keep asking myself.

Sample: Cut + Paste

Film is a tool that’s an extension of economic and political processes. With the definition of “race” in the US comes a lot disturbing baggage—all of us are “mixed” in the United States—black, white, Asian, Latino. We all have places we have left, and we arrive in this place called The New World. The question of origins has become a matter of doubt.

Yet what happened with democracy in the United States was that it could not let go of its origins. It needed order and taxonomy, a sure way to trace the progress from past to present. The politics of the early America also hinged upon other suspect moves and motives.

Black people were not considered human.

Sample: Cut + Paste

Film: We invent tools, then they reinvent us.

Sample: Cut + Paste

McLuhan probed how sometimes the real learning happens outside the academic setting. We intend the building designated for learning to nurture, but sometimes it stifles.

Every tool has services and disservices. With suspended judgment, we can uncover the hidden effects of our tools, and get a better view of the environments that they create. With comprehensive awareness, we can better cope with their hidden effects. But, why do we ignore these hidden environments?

My remix of DW Griffith asks and responds to the following question: how can film shape, mold, and influence perception? That’s what art is about.

Sample: Cut + Paste

My first impression of Antarctica was the vastness, openness, and weirdly enough—the fact that the light of the day never went away. It changed my dreams—my sleep patterns got scrambled by the permanent afternoon light of Antarctic summer.

Dreams. It’s all about dreams…

I went to Antarctica for about 6 weeks, and I think of it as a life changing experience. But to make music compositions from the process, and then, be able to set up a gallery show with Gwangju Bienniale—these are experiences of influence. They resonate outward, extensions of my ongoing concern with human rights and their relationship to media, technology, and a rapidly changing world.