An Evening of Music and Theater for Collin Walcott

| Tyran Grillo

Collin Walcott (1945–1984) belonged to that rare constellation of musicians for whom the boundaries of an instrument were never quite synonymous with the boundaries of its tradition. Among the earliest artists to bring the sitar and tabla into sustained conversation with jazz, he approached the possibilities of intercultural improvisation with a curiosity grounded in years of rigorous study, including apprenticeships with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha. Yet his genius resided equally in the silences he allowed to gather around those instruments, where the inherited structures of one musical language could become welcoming to the intuitions of another. That sensibility found one of its most enduring expressions in Oregon, the extraordinary quartet he co-founded in the early 1970s with guitarist Ralph Towner, woodwind specialist Paul McCandless, and bassist Glen Moore after their shared experiences in the Paul Winter Consort. Together, they fashioned a vocabulary whose intricacies were inseparable from its apparent effortlessness, allowing jazz, Indian classical music, European chamber traditions, and the folkways of distant cultures to coexist within an ever-expanding matrix of mutual attention.

Walcott’s association with ECM Records gave this vision an especially resonant home. His first album as a leader, Cloud Dance (1976), brought together guitarist John Abercrombie, bassist Dave Holland, and drummer Jack DeJohnette in a series of intimate exchanges whose rhythmic intelligence seemed to emerge from the very grain of their instruments. Perhaps the fullest articulation of his restless musical imagination came through Codona, the remarkable trio he formed with Don Cherry and Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos. Across three ECM albums, their collective inventions suggested an entire geography of sound liberated from the cartographic constraints of genre. Walcott’s contributions to recordings by Egberto Gismonti, David Darling, and Meredith Monk, whose early ECM projects he also helped produce, further testified to a musician whose most recognizable signature was his willingness to disappear into the shared intelligence of an ensemble.

The suddenness of Walcott’s death remains almost impossible to reconcile with the sense of continuity that animates his recordings. On November 8, 1984, while touring East Germany with Oregon, he was killed in a road accident near Magdeburg. He was thirty-nine. For his collaborators, the tragedy meant something more immediate than the disappearance of an artistic voice: the interruption of friendships and musical possibilities that had become integral to their understanding of themselves. On May 12, 1985, six months after his death, musicians from across Walcott’s overlapping creative circles gathered at New York’s Irving Plaza for an evening of performance dedicated to his memory. In returning to one another through the medium he had helped them explore, they gave audible shape to an absence that no individual could adequately express.

Organized by Walcott’s widow, Lanny Harrison Walcott, the benefit concert assembled an extraordinary community of artists whose intersecting histories offer a revealing portrait of the man at its center. The resulting evening, documented in Burril Crohn’s film An Evening of Music and Theater for Collin Walcott, moved through a succession of configurations, each one suggesting another possible arrangement of memory. Its proceeds established a scholarship fund in Walcott’s name. What emerges from this gathering is an understanding of remembrance as a generative instability, a condition in which inherited relationships must discover new ways of inhabiting themselves. The concert occupies a strange temporal aperture, simultaneously preserving the final reverberations of one musical world and anticipating the birth of another.

The evening begins with Trilok Gurtu and Vasconcelos performing Walcott’s “Margueritte,” a beautiful and humbling introduction that reaches immediately into the depth of his influence. Gurtu shifts from conga to tabla, lighting flame after flame within the composition’s unfolding interior, while Vasconcelos adds a West African talking drum whose vocal inflections seem to awaken some ancient narrative lodged beneath the skin of time. Vasconcelos eventually begins mimicking the drum with his own voice, dissolving the distinction between the human body and its acoustic extensions. His subsequent singing with the berimbau accompanies Gurtu’s movement into an earthen, mid-tempo groove whose humanity remains inseparable from its mystery. The encounter invokes something central to the proceedings, preparing the stage as a ritual of remembrance while refusing to confine that remembrance within a predetermined emotional register. Particularly striking is the implication that Walcott’s musical presence might survive through gestures he never personally made. Gurtu’s playing inhabits an inheritance without attempting to reproduce its former owner, introducing a freedom that makes the performance both an offering and an inaugural declaration.

Abercrombie, Holland, and DeJohnette follow with a trio performance of extraordinary tenderness and hard-won conviction. Abercrombie’s guitar sings over Holland’s peregrinations while DeJohnette traces the periphery, articulating an expanse in which the sands of time seem to slow sufficiently for us to contemplate the fragility of life. Holland’s solo is particularly moving, descending deeper into grief as though it were soil being prepared for planting, its subterranean wanderings uncovering small reservoirs of unexpected illumination. The trio’s subsequent, groovier number reverses the trajectory, emoting from the outside in as Abercrombie’s synth-inflected sound electrifies the proceedings. Having participated in Cloud Dance a decade earlier, these musicians carry Walcott’s history within the very architecture of their responsiveness. Their performance makes palpable the peculiar intimacy of collective improvisation, whereby the memory of an absent collaborator continues to inform decisions that appear entirely spontaneous.

That intimacy assumes an especially consequential form when Towner, McCandless, and Moore take the stage with Gurtu for Oregon’s “Waterwheel.” McCandless’s fluttering oboe is a vibrant and organic presence, endowed with spindly legs and remarkable agility as it navigates its immediate environment in search of sonic treasure. Towner’s gorgeous arpeggios provide a shimmering foundation, while Gurtu’s backbeat and Moore’s depth charges establish a wide berth of textural possibility. When McCandless shifts to soprano saxophone and Towner to electric keyboard, the ensemble opens into a richer and more fluid sound, its familiar contours becoming beautifully estranged from themselves. Gurtu would subsequently join Oregon, helping its surviving members establish a new chapter in the ensemble’s evolution. Hearing them together here, before that future had fully declared itself, reveals the music suspended between bereavement and renewal.

The subsequent duo improvisation between Vasconcelos and Cherry offers another intimate reckoning with Walcott’s legacy. As the surviving members of Codona, these musicians carry a particularly concentrated residue of his creative imagination, and their meeting becomes an exquisite negotiation with the spectral third presence inhabiting their exchanges. Cherry’s doussn’gouni lends a meditative undercurrent to his cathartic singing before he invites the audience into a call and response. Their dialogue recalls Codona’s radical generosity, its understanding of musical customs as an inexhaustible conversation whose participants need never relinquish the particularities of their own histories. This generosity expands into a formidable collective encounter featuring Jim Pepper, Steve Gorn, Baikida Carroll, and Marty Ehrlich alongside McCandless, Gurtu, Moore, Holland, Abercrombie, and Vasconcelos. Gorn’s wooden flute is a fluid and spiritual presence, threading its way through the ensemble with the delicacy of light entering a forgotten sanctuary. Carroll shatters that translucence with throaty cries amid a dense tangle of reeds, transforming the music into a turbulent organism whose conflicting impulses somehow sustain its coherence. An ensuing upbeat passage introduces an exuberance that complicates the evening’s elegiac foundations. Grief, after all, has its own capacity for unruliness, and here the collective body momentarily discovers the exhilaration of refusing to behave according to its presumed emotional obligations.

Meredith Monk’s solo appearance changes the scale of the proceedings, drawing listeners into a universe whose dimensions seem impossible to reconcile with the modest means of her keyboard and voice. Performing pieces that were particular favorites of Walcott, she begins with “Travelling,” a guttural and flowering example of ancient hymnody that seems to predate its own body by eons. Her detailed inflections and colorful programmatic turns evoke an entire civilization of imaginary vocal beings, each carrying some fragment of an ancestral language whose meanings have been lost while its emotional grammar remains intact. In “The Tale,” unbridled revelry breaks through these primordial structures, offering a glimpse into Monk’s extraordinary ability to transform the smallest vocal gesture into a complete theatrical cosmology. “Do You Be” subsequently introduces a more somber register, its funereal keening suggesting an intimacy between the birth of expression and its inevitable dissolution. Walcott understood Monk’s work as few musicians could, recognizing in her exploration of the human voice an extension of his own refusal to submit sound to conventional systems of belonging.

The quartet of Cherry, Holland, DeJohnette, and Pat Metheny brings an entirely different sort of intensity to two Ornette Coleman compositions. “Turnaround” goes deep and refuses to let up for the duration of its bluesy ride, Cherry moving between pocket trumpet and melodica with fluid care while Metheny navigates the shadows with pale fire. His solo gradually unfurls into a spider’s web of brilliance, its intricate connective tissue supported by Holland’s inexhaustible inventiveness and DeJohnette’s mercurial rhythming. “Congeniality” sharpens the proceedings into something altogether stranger, possessing the texture of a sea urchin whose innumerable spines have become independent conduits of electricity. The music’s incendiary energy becomes compelling within the evening’s larger context, suggesting that devotion to the departed can express itself through risk rather than retrospection. Coleman’s compositions offer particularly fertile ground for such a proposition, their restless interrogation of musical hierarchies resonating with Walcott’s own understanding of improvisation as an emancipatory encounter.

David Darling’s solo cello performance returns us to a more concentrated emotional terrain. Beginning with pizzicato figures that acquire the character of an almost raga-inflected prayer for healing, he moves into groovier strums and arpeggiated wonders before the bow fertilizes that soil with cathartic wavering. His extraordinary technique is inseparable from an equally astonishing sense of color, the instrument assuming the dimensions of an entire acoustic landscape. As the performance gathers momentum, Darling begins singing to reveal melodies concealed within the cello’s increasingly frenzied articulations, at one point matching the velocity of his bow with flickering movements of the tongue. There is something profoundly vulnerable about watching a musician allow his instrument to become an extension of those involuntary motions through which the flesh registers feelings that consciousness has yet to comprehend.

Abercrombie and Towner’s duetting on “Ralph’s Piano Waltz” is a gem of almost preternatural ease, their interplay revealing an understanding of musical friendship in which complexity becomes indistinguishable from affection. Pepper’s subsequent duet with Vasconcelos moves into more openly vocal territory, the saxophonist’s singing endowed with such depth of feeling that the distinction between lamentation and laughter gradually loses its authority. These performances prepare the way for the assembled musicians and audience to join in “Witchi Tai To,” whose Native American provenance becomes the occasion for a boisterous communal affirmation. The collective singing is overwhelming in its generosity, transforming Irving Plaza into a single, gloriously imperfect instrument. Contemporary accounts also recall Lanny Harrison Walcott performing a mime dance to “Caledonia,” a deeply personal gesture absent from the circulating film. Its unrecorded presence introduces another dimension of the evening’s history, reminding us that every surviving document contains its own allegiances to disappearance.

Across these performances, remembrance gradually acquires the character of an unfinished grammar, one whose rules must be invented anew with every utterance. Perhaps this is where the concert finally takes us, beyond the intimate circle of those who knew him and into the far more mysterious territory of those who never would. The scholarship fund established in Walcott’s name introduces an almost imperceptible reversal into the logic of remembrance. What begins as an attempt to honor a vanished musician becomes an investment in someone whose music does not yet exist, whose hands have yet to discover the instruments through which they might one day articulate their own impossible understanding of the world. Within this gesture lies an ethics of listening more profound than preservation, because it grants the future permission to exceed the memory from which it emerged. Walcott’s greatest legacy may ultimately reside in this beautiful relinquishment of ownership, this willingness to make audible a world from which he himself has disappeared.

As of this writing, the concert is available to watch here.

Only Silence Is More Beautiful

| Tyran Grillo

ECM has altered the possibilities of listening. Founded in Munich in 1969 by Manfred Eicher, the Edition of Contemporary Music advanced the conviction that a recording studio could participate in the invention of music, its architecture becoming a second instrument whose strings were strung across the space between a note and its disappearance. From Mal Waldron’s Free at Last onward, the label cultivated an ethics of attention capacious enough to accommodate the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s ferocities alongside the concentrated stillnesses of Paul Bley. By 1987, when Norwegian director Jan Horne made Bare stillheten er vakrere (Only Silence Is More Beautiful), that conviction had acquired the heft of an institution while retaining the beautiful precariousness of an experiment.

Horne’s film begins with a paradox of direction. A road recedes from the camera as Eicher revisits the familiar aspiration to make “the most beautiful sound next to silence,” his words yielding to “Soria Maria” from Jan Garbarek’s Eventyr. The landscape travels backward into an unfolding present, giving visual form to a music whose advances depend upon successive acts of recollection. In ECM’s Munich offices, Eicher resists the designation of a conventional jazz company, describing instead a place animated by a vision. Horne takes that seemingly weightless word seriously, following its migrations northward until the abstract becomes audible.

Norway emerges as ECM’s crucial second center of gravity. The partnership with Garbarek, inaugurated by Afric Pepperbird in 1970, helped establish a new vocabulary for European improvisation, although astonishing footage of the saxophonist tearing through George Russell’s “Oh Jazz, Pooh Jazz” in 1967 complicates any retrospective mythology of immaculate Nordic restraint. There is molten unruliness in this earlier Garbarek, the future already smoldering beneath the historical surface. John Surman, whose “Doxology” (from Withholding Pattern) backgrounds his interview, reflects on the abundance of European musicians whose work ECM brought into international circulation. Arild Andersen recalls the almost unimaginable transformation of finding himself within the same musical constellation as Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea. The 1976 Oslo footage of Jarrett’s European quartet makes that cross-pollination tangible, its members communicating with the uncanny intimacy of minds meeting in real time.

If the musicians give this film its pulse, the recording engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug reveals its nervous system. Inside Rainbow Studio, established in Oslo in 1984, microphone placement becomes a species of metaphysics by which the distance from an instrument determines how much of its solitude may enter the recording. Horne catches Kongshaug preparing the sessions for Terje Rypdal’s Chaser in 1985, the trio’s performance of “Imagi” emerging from choices that might otherwise remain buried within the finished record. Rypdal’s electric guitar seems to excavate electricity from the mineral deposits of silence, while Bjørn Kjellemyr and Audun Kleive give the current a body through which to travel. Eicher speaks of the necessity of arriving empty at each new session, an extraordinary discipline for someone with so unmistakable an aesthetic commitment.

Other archival passages disclose the fertile instability of collective identity. At Molde in 1978, Ralph Towner’s Solstice quartet moves through “Oceanus,” the performance unfolding as a negotiation among incompatible forms of gravity. Eberhard Weber’s observation that the group coheres through differences of taste rather than agreement illuminates the strange generosity of improvisation, in which another musician’s resistance may become the most intimate form of support. Footage of the Mágico trio at Molde in 1980 extends this international circuitry, as do Surman’s reflections on Eicher as a producer who contributes to music precisely because he listens. For Horne, these passages are more revealing than an exhaustive history could be. They preserve a fleeting geometry of bodies whose relationships can never be wholly reconstructed from the albums they left behind.

The camera also wanders toward the less audible labors of this enterprise. ECM’s office staff numbers only seven, yet the modest rooms contain a geography of listening that continually exceeds their walls. Printing presses set the material world in motion, while Barbara Wojirsch shapes the visual identity of Garbarek’s It’s OK to listen to the gray voice and Dieter Rehm works on Rypdal’s Chaser. Such images remind us that the famous ECM sleeve is a threshold rather than an illustration, preparing the eye for an encounter the ear must finish for itself. When Eicher confesses that ideas arrive through cinema or an unsuspecting glance out the window more readily than through listening to other music, Horne’s own work seems to answer him. The film’s patient editorial breathing belongs to the same family of decisions as Kongshaug’s microphones regarding when to let an image vibrate and how long to withhold explanation.

The arrival of Arvo Pärt and the ECM New Series enlarges this conception still further. In Tabula Rasa, issued in 1984, notated composition encounters improvisation across a common discipline of expectancy, and the label’s familiar taxonomies begin to lose their authority. What unites these artists is neither a sonic trademark nor an allegiance to a genre, but an insistence that sound bears the imprint of the attention extended toward it. Horne’s documentary is precious because it witnesses this philosophy before the sediment of retrospection hardened around it, catching a living practice in the vulnerable act of becoming itself.

Near the end, Eicher speaks of the time required to discover a musician’s secrets, of following a person through reversals until some deeper presence shines through the notes. There is a delicate danger in that language, for a secret can suggest something waiting to be possessed. Yet the film quietly proposes that patience teaches us how much of another being must remain beyond our grasp. The real masterpiece here may be the interval in which judgment is suspended, a small human refusal to mistake familiarity for knowledge. What begins in a recording studio ends, unexpectedly, in the courtroom of ordinary perception, where we sentence strangers to identities before they have finished speaking. Listening becomes a form of clemency, the gift of an unfinished future to someone we will never fully know.

Only Silence Is More Beautiful is available to watch here:

Rafael Anton Irisarri: Points of Inaccessibility

| Tyran Grillo

The distance between two points is ordinarily a problem for geometry. On Points of Inaccessibility, it becomes a pathology of attention. A chance encounter at MUTEK in Mexico City in 2024 brought Ibero-American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri into conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp, whose invitation to the Uncloud residency in Utrecht the following spring led their inquiry into the abandoned carcass of the Pieter Baan Centre. Once a forensic psychiatric prison, the building had specialized in extracting intelligibility from captivity; now its emptied rooms hosted a different form of interrogation. Irisarri stretched bowed-guitar notes through looping circuitry until each gesture acquired the dimensions of a corridor without an exit, while Schilp’s custom point-cloud software translated the live sound into visual constellations perpetually failing to hold their shape. Here, the apparatus designed to render experience legible produced its own exquisite illegibility, a digital Rorschach in which perception caught itself manufacturing evidence. The building’s carceral history seeped into the circuitry, lending each disintegrating image the afterlife of something forcibly remembered.

Returning to New York, Irisarri approached those improvisations as ruins still inhabited by their makers. He mapped fragments into MIDI, insinuated Prophet 5 harmonies and Moog undertows beneath the bowed strings, then enlisted Abul Mogard’s editorial ear to preserve the encounter’s original volatility. The album’s title borrows from remote coordinates whose identities are determined by distance, but turns the cartographic conceit against our supposed culture of perpetual contact. Every algorithm promises a shortcut to intimacy while manufacturing fresh interiors of estrangement; every simulated acknowledgment arrives carrying the faint bureaucratic odor of an absence already processed and filed. Irisarri calls these compensatory rites “digital shamanism,” although their sorcery belongs to capitalist realism, which has taught alienation to impersonate its own cure. Across four movements, Points of Inaccessibility listens for the human pulse inside that recursive deception, excavating a hauntology of suspended futures from the detritus of technological communion. Memory persists as interference in a system increasingly incapable of remembering what its connections were meant to connect. Presence becomes the vanishing point of its own transmission, leaving consciousness to wander the immaculate circumference of an intimacy whose center has been quietly outsourced.

“Faded Ghosts of Clouds” is the voice of an unborn generation emanating from a realm that, despite being right beneath our feet, is all too easily ignored in the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives. The painful irony is that, while technology blinds us to the details of existence that make it so beautiful, it remains the apparatus by which such music becomes possible, gathering otherwise estranged elements into an orbit so internal that we have forgotten how to make physical contact with it. Drones of electronics and string-borne songs creep toward the edges of our collective waking dream. Across their slow ebb and flow, we are implicated as mere driftwood in the cosmic tide, reaching our arms out in slow motion toward the shore but coming up with only sand slipping through our trembling fingers. And while the textures mount and the notes appear to go skyward, our bodies sink in proportion, never knowing what light might await above the surface. There is something embryological about this inversion of gravity, as though the music were gestating an entire civilization within the amniotic darkness of its own forgotten origins. Each swelling frequency brings us closer to an inheritance we cannot claim without first acknowledging how much of ourselves we have surrendered to the machinery of recognition.

“Breaking the Unison” emerges as a child thereof, possessed of its own rebellious streak and a grittier electric guitar sound that magnifies its voice beyond fleshly containment. The more it cries out to be heard, the less defined it becomes, drowning in a sea of its own making as the world swarms inward over and over, until the face ceases to function as an individual marker and identity becomes one final exhale of illusory fixity. Yet there is a strange tenderness in this erosion, a willingness to inhabit the wound of differentiation before language cauterizes it with a name. Irisarri allows distortion to assume the dimensions of an unfinished autobiography, its pages written in the granular debris of sensations that never achieved the dignity of recollection. What remains is a kind of prenatal dissent, the terrible freedom of a consciousness discovering that the boundaries protecting its singularity might also be responsible for its loneliness.

With parent and child brought under the same galactic umbrella, their home is constituted by “Signals from a Distant Afterglow.” The title is prophetic, speaking in a language of arcs and pulses that, ordinarily too minute to be held and regarded, suddenly become knowable in human terms. The music extends its feelers into the interstices of perception, where every vibration seems to contain a small archaeology of the future. Then something miraculous happens, as vocal loops provided by Karen Vogt permit the possibility that something familiar may yet be found in the great unknown. Although wordless, her presence speaks volumes about the soul and its tender cage, suggesting that even the most intimate utterance must pass through a labyrinth of estrangement before reaching another consciousness. Her voice acquires the fragility of an artifact excavated from a future extinction, bearing the fingerprints of someone whose existence has yet to occur. The resulting intimacy is almost unbearable because its object remains suspended just beyond our capacity to identify it. We recognize the yearning before we can remember whom we have been yearning for.

The bars of that tender cage are comprised of “Memory Strands,” whose enveloping textures seem to originate in a place that has already held us in its hands from conception. As tender as it is clear in its delineation of heart from mind, the piece provides just enough order to arrest our fear of falling over the cliff of uncertainty. A portal within a portal, it opens a pathway into itself, ad infinitum, serenading us through its recursive slipstream. There are echoes here of Stephen Scott’s bowed piano works enmeshed with William Basinski’s loops and filtered through Tim Hecker’s incandescent abrasions, although such coordinates offer only provisional access to an interior that continually redraws its own perimeter. So much depth resides in these pieces, so many corners in which we might cower in awe at the immensity of this reality in which we find ourselves. Their beauty emerges from the possibility that memory, in preserving our intimacy with what has vanished, also perpetuates the original violence of its disappearance.

Perhaps this is where Points of Inaccessibility makes its most unsettling proposition. The Pieter Baan Centre was once dedicated to determining the contents of human interiority, converting the bewildering opacity of another person into something admissible as knowledge. Its former inhabitants were subjected to an institutional faith in the legibility of the soul. Irisarri returns us to that predicament through the spectral machinery of a world increasingly devoted to making every consciousness available for inspection. Yet the music carries within its fractures a quietly radical possibility: that our deepest obligation to one another might involve protecting what cannot be accessed. What if the ultimate intimacy were the recognition of another’s right to remain unknowable, even to those who love them? The geography of isolation would then disclose an unsuspected ethics of hospitality, one in which distance becomes a form of tenderness and the uncharted core acquires the sanctity of a home. At the remotest coordinate of this extraordinary album, we discover that the first act of love is to leave something in another person forever undiscovered, so that even the universe, with all its instruments of detection, must learn the humility of approaching a closed door without turning the handle.

Free Will and Testament: The Grammar of Deliverance in Dostoevsky’s Demons

| Tyran Grillo

And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them.

Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked.

When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country.

Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.

They also which saw it told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils was healed.

Luke 8:32–36

In Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky draws us into an unnamed Russian provincial town where the wounded pride of an older generation meets the revolutionary impatience of its children. What begins amid the familiar absurdities of social life gradually exposes a more troubling intimacy between belief adend the desire to possess another person. We come close enough to these people to laugh at their vanities before hearing, beneath promises of liberation, the demand that someone else surrender the right to exist on his own terms. That demand gives the novel’s title its spiritual weight and draws us toward the above passage from Luke that Dostoevsky places before the narrative. Beside the lake into which the herd has rushed, a man sits at the Savior’s feet, released from the voices that had occupied him. His quiet presence offers a first glimpse of freedom whose meaning the novel’s contending voices will struggle to comprehend.

Luke places the encounter under Christ’s authority before the herd even begins its descent. The devils ask permission, and Jesus suffers them, allowing what they cannot authorize for themselves. Their multitude has occupied a man without becoming his rightful owner. Although the preceding verses name that multitude “Legion,” Christ addresses a life whose identity survives its captivity, and the healing restores the person whom the voices have crowded out. The distinction pulses throughout Demons, where the appearance of limitless power repeatedly conceals dependence upon something borrowed. It also governs the violence of the epigraph. The swine are choked, but Luke does not say that the devils have been annihilated in the lake, nor does their departure commission human beings to purify a community through catastrophe. Our attention belongs finally to the man who has been healed. To make the precipice the passage’s center would already concede too much to those who confuse deliverance with the grandeur of destruction.

Clothing gives this restoration a bodily tenderness, while “in his right mind” describes a freedom intellectual brilliance alone cannot furnish. The man can remain in the presence of another without being consumed by it. So opens a horizon beyond the novel’s occupied selves, whose thoughts so often demand the surrender of whatever they claim to liberate. Yet the analogy requires discrimination. Luke supplies no history of wrongdoing that would justify blaming the afflicted man, whereas Dostoevsky’s characters make storied choices for which they must answer. Neither illness nor disability proves evil’s presence, and biblical devils possess a reality that ideology cannot exhaust. The novel brings spiritual captivity into view through human relations, asking what happens when a conviction receives the allegiance owed to God. Even the witnesses are implicated. Their fear before the healed man suggests how readily a community may prefer a familiar misery to a restoration that unsettles its understanding of itself.

Such understanding remains precarious in the hands of Dostoevsky’s chronicler, Anton, a local observer whose affection for his acquaintances survives his exposure of their absurdities. News travels through the province more quickly than anyone can comprehend it, gathering motives as it passes from mouth to mouth. An intimate disclosure seemingly becomes public property before its speaker has finished speaking. Anton notices these appropriations with a sharpness that never quite excuses him from them, especially when another person’s distress inconveniences his own desires. His eagerness to meet Lizaveta Nikolaevna, the wealthy young woman more affectionately known as Liza, quietly enters his account of other people’s concerns. Liza’s proposed compilation of Russian life makes this difficulty explicit when Ivan Shatov, a former student searching for a faith he can call his own, observes that the selection of facts will indicate their meaning. Demons proceeds under the same difficulty, arranging lives whose unfinished claims keep exceeding the arrangement. We must listen through a teller whose limitations belong to the world he describes, without imagining that our awareness of them places us beyond it. A convincing account may leave its subject unheard, just as an unreliable speaker may suddenly recognize something his listener has refused to see. Reading becomes an exercise in the attention the town so often withholds from its inhabitants, and our impatience to arrive at a verdict begins to resemble theirs.

Nikolai Stavrogin, the enigmatic son of a wealthy local widow, becomes the disturbing center of a book initially conceived as a political polemic. The introduction traces its emergence from Dostoevsky’s engagement with the revolutionary organizer Sergei Nechaev, yet the novelist’s admission that he might once have become a Nechaevist gives the inquiry an inward exposure, which helps explain why the finished work rubs up against so much beyond its originating argument. As Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of embodied ideas suggests, a conviction changes when someone must speak it to a person whose recognition he needs. Translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky thus preserve the resulting interference between thought and its speaker. A qualification betrays the appetite it was meant to conceal, while a French phrase protects cultivated feeling from the indignity of sounding ordinary.

Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, a liberal intellectual and Stavrogin’s former tutor, has cultivated that demand into a way of life. His scholarship matters chiefly as an occupation he has magnificently postponed, while the possibility that nobody has been persecuting him threatens an essential distinction. His belief in God follows a related arrangement. “I believe as in a being who is conscious of himself in me,” he declares, giving the divine somewhere suitably cultivated to become interesting. Such inwardness reaches painfully outward when he wakes the young Stavrogin to pour out his grievances, burdening his pupil with a care he owes the child. Meanwhile his actual son, Pyotr, grows up elsewhere. One boy receives his helplessness and another his absence, leaving both to reckon with what the father has mistaken for sensibility. Dostoevsky allows this inheritance its weight without making it a destiny. Pyotr will answer for his own conduct, even as his father remains answerable for a neglect that eloquence has made easier to endure. Their connection unsettles the comfortable division between a cultivated generation and the barbarism of its successors. The younger man discovers what can be done with the evasions the elder has taught himself to admire.

Varvara Petrovna, Stavrogin’s mother and Stepan’s patron, finances this helplessness with a devotion whose generosity grows inseparable from its demands. “She invented him, and she was the first to believe in her invention,” narrator Anton observes, locating within affection an ambition to create its object. Stepan’s independent life consequently offends Varvara whenever it departs from the person she has cherished into existence. Yet her concern for his humiliation prevents an easy verdict, and Dostoevsky makes us feel the tenderness through which domination finds its most persuasive language. The difficulty expands around her young ward Darya Pavlovna, a.k.a. Dasha, when she proposes the young woman’s marriage to the fifty-three-year-old Stepan. “So, you consent! Wait, don’t speak,” Varvara announces, allowing consent precisely the silence her design requires. Stepan contributes his fear of marrying “someone else’s sins,” and Dasha disappears beneath the uses others have prepared for her. A room furnished with such exquisite intentions has somehow acquired its lock on the outside.

Stepan’s defense of beauty carries more conviction than this conduct might suggest, which makes its inadequacy harder to dismiss. His insistence that Pushkin stands above boots preserves something a crude worship of utility would destroy. Still, aesthetic discrimination cannot settle the accusation concerning Fedka, his former serf and now an escaped convict, whose life has entered the accounting of a gambling debt. The discussion brings an actual person into a sensibility accustomed to admiring humanity from a comfortable distance. When Stepan invokes the shaking of dust from his feet and adds a curse, sacred language becomes a stage direction for wounded importance. The Gospel gesture concerns the rejection of Christ’s messengers, a commission his injured vanity has quietly awarded itself. The comedy begins to hurt because the distinction he defends deserves a fidelity his own life has withheld from it.

The established authorities offer little protection against this discrepancy between profession and conduct. Von Lembke, the provincial governor, treats official restraint and revolutionary agitation as mutually necessary activities, provided decent appearances can be maintained. Karmazinov, a celebrated writer, lends cultural prestige to an expectation of collapse whose consequences he can contemplate from a safe distance. Their apparent opposition conceals a shared confidence that other lives may be managed without bringing their own standing into question. Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, now a revolutionary organizer, understands this confidence well enough to make himself appear beneath it. His performed ineptitude invites listeners to enjoy their superior understanding, and that pleasure soon becomes his protection. “Those who know how to speak well, speak briefly,” he quips, explaining how verbosity can hide an intention within the audience’s exhaustion. The harmless fool they congratulate themselves on recognizing has already begun delineating the parameters of their regard.

Pyotr’s ingenuity gives dramatic force to the introduction’s observation that demons are unoriginal. Evil must borrow the goodness it cannot originate, making fellowship serve control and the desire for justice furnish excuses for cruelty. Even its promise of emancipation depends upon capacities it intends to enslave. Stepan’s suggestion that truth requires an admixture of falsehood supplies his son with an inheritance more useful than paternal care. The lie may now announce itself as truth’s necessary preparation, postponing indefinitely the moment when its own authority must end. Dostoevsky lets this corruption enter speech so intimately that accuracy itself offers no guarantee of innocence. A fact can be perfectly correct while serving an intention that deforms the person hearing it. Our laughter becomes precarious here. Having enjoyed Pyotr’s absurdity, we may find ourselves defending the impression he has encouraged us to take for knowledge.

Shigalyov, a revolutionary theorist in Pyotr’s circle, bolsters the same ambition. His reorganization of humanity removes the will from nine tenths of its members, whose equality will consist in an administered helplessness. Luke’s herd has entered a political program. The minority charged with securing liberation receives the privilege of deciding how little freedom everyone else can bear, while the grotesque proposals of Lyamshin, a postal clerk in the same circle, reduce troublesome human beings to quantities that may be subtracted. Their reasoning regards the creature’s resistance as a flaw in the design, then discovers in that resistance a justification for further force. Its paradise has a tree whose roots have been cut to prevent disobedience. Against this completed world, the man seated at Jesus’s feet retains the disturbing particularity of someone who has received his life back without becoming an instrument of mundane supremacy.

Stavrogin lends these competing salvations a magnetism that belief alone cannot explain. His elegance unsettles the expectation that depravity will announce itself through a repellent surface, and the province’s fascination enlarges him beyond the measure of a person. Shatov, once his ideological disciple, still inhabits a conviction its former teacher can regard with a disconcerting distance. A disciple may spend years struggling within words their speaker has already abandoned, until the unequal investment becomes a wound argument cannot close. Stavrogin’s self-control intensifies this authority because even restraint seems to place him beyond ordinary dependence. Yet a will can govern its impulses while remaining captive to the privilege it claims over others. His apparent abundance of possibility keeps an accountable life at a distance. To become one person would mean relinquishing the intoxication of forever being otherwise. The soul becomes an observatory whose telescopes point inward, mistaking another conscience’s plea for a newly discovered star. The chapter title “The Wise Serpent” gives this inward sovereignty a scriptural edge. Christ joins “wise as serpents” to “harmless as doves” in Matthew 10:16, keeping discernment answerable to the life it encounters. The province admires a cunning released from that obligation, until intelligence itself appears to confer the right to decide whose suffering matters. Stavrogin’s brilliance can illuminate an argument without ever consenting to live within its light.

Nietzsche gives such solitude an unexpected interruption when Zarathustra, tracing his shadow with a stick, is startled because “beside his own shadow he saw another shadow.” The visitor is the soothsayer of weariness, and his arrival makes thinking alone suddenly questionable: a borrowed conviction may have been holding the stick all along. Dostoevsky follows this disturbance into the obligations influence has concealed, where a supposedly original will discovers itself repeating somebody else’s sentence. Shatov seeks release through an object too immense to abandon him. “God is the synthetic person of the whole nation,” he declares, making national belonging answer a religious hunger that humiliation has left exposed. When Stavrogin detects God’s reduction to an attribute of nationality, Shatov insists that he is raising the nation to God. The change of direction leaves the divine answerable to a people’s need for an absolute image of itself.

Shatov’s suffering makes his certainty understandable without securing its truth. His account of America reveals how ingeniously experience can be rearranged to protect an ideal, while the nation promises a belonging his borrowed convictions have denied him. His appropriation of “rivers of living water” brings the theological danger into focus. The Gospel identifies that water with the Spirit received by believers in Jesus, whereas Shatov transfers its source to national vitality. Scriptural radiance survives a change of allegiance that Luke’s narrative quietly resists. The restored man desires the presence of the Savior his frightened community asks to leave, and healing reaches an inhabitant without becoming the possession of his country. Shatov’s recollection of Stavrogin’s anti-Catholic teaching similarly condemns the surrender of Christ to earthly dominion, although his own national divinity threatens to reproduce that surrender. The charge belongs to a character’s polemic, whose force cannot excuse it from the scrutiny it directs elsewhere.

The remembered claim that Stavrogin would choose Christ even if mathematical proof placed truth outside him exposes a more intimate danger. Its devotion is moving because attachment appears willing to bear the cost of certainty, yet the separation it imagines cannot finally govern faith. Christ’s identification with truth gives us reason to question a proof that would divide them. The hypothetical discloses the speaker’s need while leaving open whether his love will accept an obligation beyond the beauty of its own declaration. Kirillov, an engineer preoccupied with human divinity, carries this struggle into the will itself. “He who overcomes pain and fear will himself become God,” he says, assigning the creature the impossible task of proving its independence from the conditions of its existence. His distinction between the “man-god” and the “God-man” reverses salvation’s direction. In the incarnation, God gives himself to humanity, while Kirillov’s apotheosis must be mass-produced by those who need it to be true. This burdens freedom with a demonstration no ordinary life can complete. Whatever depends upon another has become suspect before it can be loved, and fear must be treated as an accusation against existence itself. The man who would release humanity consequently struggles to accept the vulnerability through which anyone might reach him. His abstraction grows merciless at precisely the point where his conduct can be so tender.

Yet Kirillov’s delight in a leaf keeps his argument from enclosing him. A yellow leaf edged with decay remains good, and his childhood memory of imagining a green one preserves a tenderness no assertion of sovereignty can explain. Asked whether he speaks allegorically, he insists upon the leaf itself. For an instant the created thing is relieved of having to justify a system, its thin surface bearing a reality the surrounding metaphysics can scarcely touch. His affirmation falters when actual suffering enters the discussion, since the world’s beauty cannot absolve cruelty committed within it. Otherwise the injured person would have to accept the injury as a necessary embellishment of someone else’s vision. Still, Kirillov lights an icon lamp because an old woman wants it lit, responding to a need his doctrine has given him little reason to honor. Such attentiveness opens a narrow passage through the machinery of his thought, where an uncommanded goodness waits for the will to recognize what it has received.

Marya Timofeevna, an impoverished woman with a physical disability, brings a less orderly perception into the province’s cultivated arrangements. Her identification of God with nature gathers Russian earth into imagery associated with the Mother of God, allowing the ground itself to receive a mourner’s grief. Its beauty makes the confusion easier to welcome. Creation can bear divine meaning without becoming its Creator, and Mary’s place in the incarnation does not make the earth identical with her. Yet to dismiss Marya along with her errors would repeat the respectable world’s refusal to hear anyone it has already classified. Her vulnerability leaves her exposed to people whose distortions possess the advantage of impeccable manners, even as her troubled perception detects something their polished appearances conceal. Dostoevsky asks us to remain with this uncomfortable difference between theological discernment and the wish to be rid of a difficult person. Patient attention can acknowledge her confusion without treating her existence as an inconvenience to the truth.

Such attention acquires a searching severity in “At Tikhon’s,” the suppressed chapter in which Stavrogin encounters the eponymous retired bishop. Tikhon hears how a disclosure may continue concealment through the very form that promises revelation. Whoever arranges his own disgrace can retain a terrible authority over its reception, preferring condemnation when it confirms an identity he has already prepared. Mercy threatens that certainty because a changed life would require actions whose meaning he cannot determine in advance. Tikhon’s attention to the writing’s aesthetic character consequently reaches beyond literary judgment into what its author expects another person to become while reading it. Even remorse may keep the guilty self enthroned, making those it has harmed supply the material for its spiritual distinction. Their suffering retains claims no exquisite account of guilt can satisfy. Repentance begins to loosen this possession when the offender consents to a reality his interpretation cannot consume, accepting the possibility that love might require an ordinary duty rather than a magnificent verdict upon himself. Tikhon leaves open the possibility of a future no longer organized around the spectacle of guilt. To accept it would mean surrendering the distinction misery has conferred, along with the imagined right to decide that forgiveness can have nothing further to say. The smallest act of amendment may ask more of pride than the most eloquent confession, because it must be performed among people who remain free to answer.

Sofya Matveyevna, an itinerant seller of religious books, brings that ordinariness into Stepan’s reach. A Gospel costs thirty-five kopecks, and after so much expenditure of cultural importance its modest price feels almost indecent. Stepan has not read the book for at least three decades, allowing his acquaintance with other people’s interpretations to spare him the disturbance of its words. Sofya’s care makes their encounter exceed a transaction, although his concern with her delivery and his own preparedness allows the performer to interfere with the emerging listener. The movement toward attention remains halting enough to be credible. “I want to recall it literally. I need it literally,” he insists when requesting Luke’s passage, and the insistence carries a hunger that cultural familiarity has ceased to feed. He needs words capable of arriving from beyond the elaborate persona he has persuaded others to maintain. For once, another voice may enter without being assigned a part in his performance. She gives Stepan room to be embarrassed without making that embarrassment the price of her kindness. The man Varvara has sustained through an elaborate image of him encounters someone willing to attend to what he needs. Her unassuming company permits a gratitude that has no audience to impress and no invention to defend.

Revelation’s address to Laodicea carries this newly urgent reading into a painful recognition of need. A prosperous church claims to “have need of nothing,” while Christ reveals its nakedness and counsels it to receive “white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed” (Revelation 3:17–18). Luke’s recovered man begins to emerge through the language of a rebuke addressed to people convinced that they already possess what they need. Stepan remains tempted to make the words illuminate somebody else’s failure, although their demand for repentance reaches the listener first. Religious confidence offers no exemption from that address. Sofya’s practical concern gives its clothing a material weight the surrounding rhetoric cannot dissolve. The person who needs care has a body, and love must remain where the inconvenience begins, without requiring that its presence become memorable. The Gospel finds its way into this small commerce of attention through a woman whose importance depends so little upon being noticed.

“I never spoke for the truth, but only for myself,” Stepan admits, acknowledging a corruption that accurate words have been powerless to prevent. His recognition unsettles our pleasure in recognizing him, since sound judgment can serve our wish to appear sound. The interpretation of Luke acquires a corresponding force when accusation finally includes its speaker. Where Dostoevsky’s polemical account identifies the herd with the Nechaevs, Stepan places himself at its head, allowing a changed pronoun to breach the architecture of exemption. His hope for a healed Russia becomes credible insofar as he ceases locating its sickness exclusively elsewhere. The national analogy must nevertheless remain answerable to the Gospel, which authorizes no country to secure its deliverance through the destruction of selected inhabitants. The lake cannot be allowed to eclipse the Savior. Stepan’s words move us toward the seated man only while they acknowledge the need of the man who speaks them.

Pevear and Volokhonsky let us hear these changes of scale without smoothing away the voices through which they occur. A salon’s humiliation exposes an appetite a political program enlarges, while a single leaf arrests a metaphysics intent upon refashioning humanity. The comedy never becomes safely separable from dread because the person we have laughed at can return with a need our laughter cannot answer. I come back to Luke’s lake carrying that unfinished claim. The novel’s most imposing wills would purchase freedom by determining what a life must surrender, but the man at Jesus’s feet has received his life back from a power he did not invent. His stillness has room for a future the witnesses’ fear cannot cancel. Beyond the herd’s terrible momentum, he remains clothed in a mercy that leaves him human, his face at last available to another’s sight. Freedom begins to breathe where the soul no longer has to become its own creator in order to consent to being alive.

Donda Retrieved: Inquiry Into a Disappearance (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

A film can survive its disappearance. Preserved in a collection, it continues to occupy physical space while its place in cultural memory contracts to an illegible point. This peculiar interval, where existence persists without recognition, gives Stefano Miraglia’s Donda Retrieved: Inquiry Into a Disappearance its intellectual urgency. The inquiry began in 2019 with a print of Ellis Donda’s Engel und Puppe held by the Collectif Jeune Cinéma in Paris, a surviving work whose author had become difficult to locate. With Cecilia Ermini’s assistance, Miraglia found the filmmaker and began reconstructing the dispersed circumstances of his practice. Published in 2026, following Donda’s death in November 2023, the resulting volume makes recovery itself available for critical examination. What emerges exceeds the satisfaction of returning a neglected name to circulation. A name has to find its way through the institutions that authorize it, while an image requires someone capable of receiving its address. Between those contingencies, a life can become a locked room whose key remains in plain sight, catalogued under another word.

Born in Terzo d’Aquileia in 1947, Donda entered intellectual life through the sociology faculty at Trento, participating in the upheavals of 1967–68 before graduating in 1971. His early research on the dance halls of Friuli Venezia Giulia’s Case del Popolo already attended to the traffic between bodily experience and collective organization. A dance floor supplies an especially suggestive beginning for an artist whose later work repeatedly asks how a body acquires meaning within an arranged space. Approached through Lacan, this sociological attention opens onto the subject’s dependence on a symbolic field already in operation before any individual reckons it. The customs of a community establish positions from which one may become recognizable, even as desire troubles the adequacy of those positions. Donda’s subsequent passage into cinema carries this tension with it. The camera enters a social world that has already staged its inhabitants, and the filmmaker must decide what to do with the residue that their assigned roles cannot accommodate.

His training at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, completed in 1974 under Roberto Rossellini’s leadership, sharpened the problem into a practical struggle over education and production. Miraglia’s account brings the period’s pedagogical ferment into focus alongside the disenchantment it generated. Freedom from established procedures could expose students to a bewildering absence of coherence, and Donda’s efforts to organize a group of committed cinephiles suggest an attempt to give purpose to that uncertainty. Rossellini’s presence (or lack thereof, as he was famously never around) mattered without determining the contours of the younger filmmaker’s independence. The affinities with Visconti, and especially with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, belong to a formation that continued through Rome’s Filmstudio and the journal Fiction, which Donda co-founded. His encounters with Jacques Lacan in Paris, together with his work translating the psychoanalyst, gave a more exact vocabulary to questions already inhabiting his practice. Across these associations, commitment assumes the form of a difficult apprenticeship in divided authority. One inherits a language from the master and discovers, in using it, that the master cannot guarantee what it will mean.

This division animates Engel und Puppe (Angel and Doll, 1974), his graduation film, presented at Oberhausen the following year. Known within the Centro Sperimentale’s records as La Modistin, it already possesses the double existence that would later complicate the identification of his work. Passages from Rilke’s Duino Elegies enter a deliberately constructed cinematic encounter involving the French poet Jacqueline Risset and the young avant-garde performer Rossella Or, photographed by Tonino Nardi. Moving images meet stillness, and theatrical performance exposes the uncertain border between a person and the form through which that person appears. The film’s multilingual texture continually alters the coordinates of reception. Friulian and Italian occupy one set of relations; French and German extend the disturbance. Translation becomes an internal force of influence, preventing a single linguistic perspective from establishing sovereign possession of the image. Even the inscription of Jean-Luc Godard’s name on a school locker folds affiliation into the filmed environment, giving cinematic ancestry a strangely provisional lodging. The school furnishes a cupboard for the name of an insurgent, and the image quietly asks who has been entrusted with the key.

The angel and the doll offer a particularly fertile entrance into Lacan’s account of the Imaginary, where an image of coherence helps organize an experience that remains divided. Read in these terms, Rilke’s figures tease cracks in the fantasy of an integrated human presence: transcendence beckons from one direction, fabricated completeness from another. Donda’s concern with the productive machinery of cinema keeps that fantasy attached to its material conditions. An image has been made, and its apparent autonomy depends on arrangements that spectators are usually encouraged to forget. Distinctions between the eye and the gaze further unsettle the viewer’s authority. Seeing takes place within a visual field whose effects exceed conscious control, for the gaze names a disturbance in our presumed mastery of that field. Donda’s exposed constructions invite such a reading. The spectator’s position becomes available for interrogation alongside the figures on screen. A doll has acquired the dignity of a metaphysical problem, while the person contemplating it discovers a seam running through the apparatus of contemplation.

His educational work gives this formal restlessness a social consequence. Through the Venice Biennale’s decentralization initiatives, Donda participated in filmmaking workshops with schoolchildren in Mirano in 1976. The resulting projects, including Come cinema and Non vado a scuola, located cinematic invention inside a struggle over who could produce an image and under what conditions. Here the relation between psychoanalysis and pedagogy becomes especially delicate. An adult can offer access to a medium while also imposing the terms through which the child’s contribution will count. Donda’s experiments invite us to consider how instruction might loosen that enclosure. The classroom contains a surplus of possible utterances, and the teacher’s task includes making room for an expression that exceeds the lesson’s anticipated result. A child behind a camera introduces a small insurrection into the distribution of visibility. The world, accustomed to assigning that child a place within its picture, must endure a moment in which the picture is being made from elsewhere.

Miraglia’s essay, The Critical Film-Work of Ellis Donda: CSC, La Biennale, RAI 1974–1986, supplies the institutional articulation of this journey. Its value lies partly in allowing the aesthetic questions to remain entangled with the circumstances of their production. Donda’s transition into Italian public broadcasting in the early 1980s places a singular artistic intelligence within an apparatus designed to address a broad public. Parigi ’50: L’esistenza immaginata (1981), co-directed with Ruggero Guarini, revisits the intellectual life of postwar Paris and the existentialist debates surrounding Jean-Paul Sartre. Its interview with Roland Barthes, identified by the researchers as his last, gives the documentary a further temporal complication. A voice recorded for an encounter with the present becomes evidence of a presence that the future will receive differently. Recording preserves words along with a bodily insistence that their transcription cannot fully convey. Across the documentary’s historical distance, the voice retains a minute sovereignty, an inflection that refuses to become entirely obedient to the knowledge subsequently assembled around it.

Il corpo rubato (The Stolen Body, 1982), produced for RAI’s Micromega, makes the relation between interpretation and possession more explicit through its treatment of psychoanalysis and suggestion. The title places an accusation inside the promise of explanation. Whoever claims to know the body may also claim the right to speak on its behalf. Lacan’s divided subject offers a way of reading this danger without imagining that an untouched self waits beneath every imposed description. Language participates in the constitution of the subject, and the terms through which a person becomes intelligible can also estrange that person from lived experience. Donda’s analytical attention thus concerns the authority exercised in the act of making sense. His work across radio and performance extends the question into other arrangements of presence. Patmos (1983) relocates it within the gallery, and the staging of Spinoza’s Praefatio (1984) gives it a theatrical setting. In his writing, Il segno e il corpo di Zorro (1980) and Metafore di una visione (1983) pursue neighboring investigations, while Invocazione (1986) draws autobiography toward poetry. The movement between media becomes a sustained inquiry into the price a presence pays for receiving a form.

That inquiry acquires an especially resonant literary interlocutor in Altre epifanie (Other Epiphanies, 1985), co-written with Luciana Sacchetti, who also performed in the film. Made for RAI’s Emilia-Romagna regional service and presented at Salsomaggiore in 1986, the film brings Joyce’s epiphanies into contemporary locations, carrying the writer’s exile and his love for Nora across unfamiliar arrangements of space. Joyce also provides a consequential connection to Lacan’s later thinking about the sinthome: a singular manner of binding experience through an invention whose value need not depend on deciphering a concealed message. Within this review’s interpretive frame, Donda’s transformations of literary material can be approached as experiments in sustaining an encounter through form. The epiphany becomes a local alteration in the relation between an utterance and its surroundings. Something acquires an intensity that explanation cannot exhaust. Set beside Engel und Puppe, the film suggests a conversation between writers whose trajectories passed through the Adriatic borderlands, each received by a cinema willing to disturb the apparent security of literary inheritance. A recording retained by Sacchetti eventually enabled Altre epifanie to return from obscurity, giving its history an almost unbearably concrete hinge: the continued availability of an epiphany depended on someone keeping a copy.

The unpublished Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Language, the Land, included in the volume as an unrealized multimedia performance project, brings the issue of inheritance into sharper political focus. Its conjunction of theatrical guidance with philosophical argument locates myth within the labor of construction. A myth must acquire a form through which it can act upon the world, and that making exposes the contingencies concealed by any claim to an immaculate origin. The relation between language and land becomes especially charged when considered through Lacanian desire. The imagined homeland can promise a coincidence between the speaking subject and the place that would finally recognize it, yet the terms of recognition have already introduced a distance. Donda’s attention to performance allows us to read the project as an inquiry into how such promises are produced. The stage gives longing a structure without resolving its contradiction. Beneath the dream of belonging, language continues its excavation, opening a hollow in the very ground asked to certify identity. Miraglia’s decision to reproduce the project grants this unfinished thinking a renewed occasion for encounter while preserving the distinction between a proposed work and a realized performance.

The volume’s title nevertheless demands that these interpretations remain accountable to the circumstances of Donda’s withdrawal. During their first meeting in Trieste in September 2019, he told Miraglia that a deterioration in his mental health had contributed to his retreat from public cultural life in the late 1980s. That testimony places a limit on the critic’s freedom to turn disappearance into an alluring aesthetic gesture. So must we question the demand for complete intelligibility, including the critic’s own desire to make a life answer to a theory. Miraglia’s research locates additional stresses in the difficulty of Donda’s expressive style and the incomplete passage of his work into digital circulation. Inconsistent attribution compounded the problem, as names were misspelled, and works survived under titles that obscured their connections. Such administrative details govern the routes by which recognition can occur. A life’s public identity depends, at vulnerable points, on a stranger correctly copying a word; the symbolic order occasionally reveals its authority through the almost absurdly modest instrument of a filing error.

Withdrawal from public prominence also left room for a continuing pedagogical practice. Come cinema 2, presented at Pesaro in 2003, emerged from Donda’s work in schools, followed by Esercizi di cinema in 2007. Conceived with the students and teachers of Palmanova’s middle school from fragments of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, the latter returns to the classroom through the principle of variation. The educational trajectory gives the career a continuity that the language of disappearance might otherwise conceal. Someone who had become difficult for cultural institutions to locate remained involved in helping others acquire the means to see. In this late phase, Donda’s analytical rigor finds an intimate application. Teaching becomes a way of accompanying the emergence of another person’s expression without claiming advance knowledge of its destination.

Miraglia’s closing Ellis Donda Archive: A Preliminary Inventory brings the inquiry back to the material obligations from which it began. The word “preliminary” bears much of the volume’s critical honesty. This is a recovery that continues to require work, and the book’s achievement includes making that incompletion legible. Its limit is also productive. An initial inventory cannot supply comprehensive access to the oeuvre, yet it establishes the conditions under which more adequate judgments may become possible. The Lacanian wish to avoid the fantasy of total knowledge finds a practical counterpart in this provisional form. Archival care therefore possesses a peculiar double discipline. It requires accuracy in the service of an encounter whose consequences remain unknown. The hand that labels the container must keep steady even while the history inside it is preparing to move.

From here, the book opens onto a possibility more disquieting than posthumous recognition. Donda’s return to the classroom suggests that transmission reaches its fullest significance when the recipient acquires the freedom to depart from the intention of the giver. The same freedom may belong to an archive. We preserve a work so that it can enter relations its author never sanctioned, and so that a person still unborn may find a use for it that our own interpretive systems cannot authorize. Lacanian attention to the subject’s division makes such an inheritance conceivable without requiring fidelity to become resemblance. To give something a future entails surrendering jurisdiction over what it will mean. Donda’s dispersed work, painstakingly made available again, leaves us before that difficult generosity. Somewhere beyond the inventory, a child turns the camera toward a door the teacher had never noticed. What we owe the dead may include the material freedom to cease resembling them, a future that has learned, from our careful keeping, how to disobey us.

Enrico Rava Fearless Five with Joe Lovano: Corners (ECM 2868)

| Tyran Grillo

Enrico Rava
Fearless Five
with Joe Lovano
Corners

Enrico Rava trumpet, flugelhorn
Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato
Matteo Paggi trombone
Francesco Diodati guitar
Francesco Ponticelli double bass
Evita Polidoro drums, vocals
Recorded July 2025
Auditorium Parco della Musica
Ennio Morricone, Rome
Recording engineers: Angelo Mincuzzi, Massimiliano Cervini,
and Roberto Catucci (supervision)
Mixing engineer: Stefano Amerio
October 2025, Udine
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 16, 2026

On Corners, Enrico Rava’s lyricism acquires fresh contours in the collective imagination of his Fearless Five. Melody enters a studio whose occupants can move the walls, and the trumpeter’s familiar eloquence discovers unfamiliar dimensions within its own breath. Formed after an impromptu concert outside Rome in 2022, the quintet takes its name from a composition on his 1978 Enrico Rava Quartet. Guitarist Francesco Diodati, trombonist Matteo Paggi, bassist Francesco Ponticelli, and drummer Evita Polidoro bring distinct compositional identities to the ensemble’s ECM debut, joined by guest saxophonist Joe Lovano, whose partnership with Rava yielded Roma in 2019. Diodati alone had worked with Rava in other groups; their intuitive rapport helps make freedom a practical condition of the music. Recorded at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica on July 21–23, 2025, and produced by Manfred Eicher, the album gathers contributions from every participant. Shared authorship becomes an invitation to alter the terms of belonging. Rava’s language passes between generations, acquiring shadows with anatomies of their own.

His flugelhorn introduces “Certi angoli segreti” with a supple assurance that lets the melody reveal itself by degrees. There is something clandestine in its poise, a private staircase descending through the center of a public gesture. Diodati’s delicate marbling deepens the rhythm section’s contours, giving Lovano ample space to carve airborne trajectories without losing the grain of his sound. The tenor’s robust delicacy holds ascent and gravity in the same phrase. Around Rava’s unraveling lines, the ensemble adjusts its proportions, allowing a melodic turn to become an opening through which the whole group can pass. Paggi’s solo burns through that space with exhilarating conviction, its lower register lending physical force to the gathering intensity. Diodati, too, pursues distortion, summoning a brilliance reminiscent of Terje Rypdal: the guitar’s radiance has teeth. Across nearly 12 minutes, the piece establishes how freely this ensemble can change direction while keeping each player’s presence sharply audible. Even the most fugitive line leaves a pressure mark.

That expansiveness makes the intimacy of Diodati’s “Sin peso” especially arresting. Its cinematic sensibility allows the open distances of a western to fold into noir’s troubled interiors. Rava’s muted trumpet moves with the composure of a figure carrying an undisclosed past; each phrase seems to know which door would be dangerous to open. The guitar supplies a landscape whose horizon has been confiscated, leaving the melody to negotiate distance through touch. Polidoro’s “Le mie gambe” draws that inward movement closer to the body. Sung by its composer, it is one of the album’s most affecting performances, her voice finding a passage through the instruments that seems scarcely wide enough for speech. Slinking guitar and tender bass give the song a palpable warmth, while the horns bring its emotional implications forward through their intimate harmonies. Feeling becomes audible at the point where the individual timbres begin to soften into one another. The voice inhabits that threshold, lending the ensemble’s abstraction a pulse beneath the skin.

Lovano’s “Sun Rava” unsettles the ground again. Its abstract blues opens onto freer exchanges, with momentum repeatedly finding and relinquishing its footing. The tenor’s conversation with drums and bass is particularly enthralling: Polidoro and Ponticelli make motion responsive enough to accommodate Lovano’s changing inflections, so that each rhythmic decision has consequences for the next breath. Freedom here involves the vertigo of being heard with such precision that an impulse can alter the entire group’s direction. Rava’s “Hitchcock at the Beach” concentrates its drama into a much shorter span, Polidoro’s vocals adding a silver sheen to its nostalgic atmosphere. Lovano’s melancholy points toward tragedy with remarkable restraint, leaving grief suspended at the threshold of articulation. The ache resides in that withheld disclosure. On “Tone, Shape and Colours,” a collective improvisation sparked by a Lovano motif, the tarogato gives contemplation a reedier edge. Bells and gongs float across the surface as tensions gather beneath them. Their eventual surrender to rest feels almost anatomical, a clenched hand discovering the space inside its palm.

Ponticelli’s brief “Ça va sans dire” distills these roaming impulses into a melodic aphorism. Its nocturnal wanderings leave Diodati a generous surface on which to work, the guitar giving depth to a statement whose brevity invites close attention. Rava’s “Bowery Dance” then turns toward the remembered streets of his New York years. Guitar fuzz and pliant bass introduce an abstract opening before a harder groove assembles itself, interrupted by stops and starts that keep its momentum alert. Lovano and Rava exchange phrases with lived experience in their jaws, allowing memory to find fresh musculature in the present tense. Their ease carries the knowledge of musicians who can recognize an opening before it has fully formed. Paggi’s “Mamma” brings this restless company into a tender close. Its gentleness gives the ensemble’s responsiveness an unexpectedly vulnerable meaning, reaching beyond the bandstand toward the strange beginnings of personhood. A child enters a language already in progress, addressed long before it can answer. Someone lends significance to a cry; a sound acquires a place in another person’s life. The musicians’ mutual attention gives that ancient transaction an adult complexity, their experience deepening the risk of allowing a phrase to need an answer. Fearlessness becomes unexpectedly fragile here, entrusted to another pair of hands. Rava’s lyricism, so articulate throughout Corners, approaches the obscure tenderness from which articulation first emerges. The first person begins in the second.

A Tragicomedy of Defiance: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

| Tyran Grillo

Published in 1864, Notes from Underground enters the nineteenth century through a wound in its confidence. Russia’s arguments over human emancipation had become arguments over the human creature itself, over whether an enlightened understanding of self-interest could make goodness inevitable. Dostoevsky places a solitary voice inside that promise and allows it to gnaw through the floor. The result anticipates the estrangement of later modernist fiction and the problems existentialism would make its own, yet its historical force remains inseparable from its peculiar intimacy. The novel makes consciousness a place where the future can be refused before it arrives. Its speaker possesses enough intelligence to expose the arrogance of a system and enough vanity to turn that exposure into an excuse for tormenting others. These capacities occupy the same cramped body. Their coexistence gives the book its terrible vitality.

Even its chronology refuses the reassurance of a straight line. The first part presents the underground man at forty, elaborating the convictions with which he has upholstered his seclusion. The second, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” returns to his life at twenty-four. We encounter the philosophy before the experiences against which it has hardened, then discover how much flesh has been concealed inside its abstractions. This reversal changes the meaning of what we have already read. Arguments that initially resemble a defense of human freedom acquire the odor of an alibi, while episodes of humiliation expose the needs that theory has learned to disguise. His earlier life never becomes a simple explanation of his later consciousness, since the older man retains control of the telling and continues to dispute his own evidence. Memory enters stage left under escort. The book’s two halves form a struggle over interpretation in which a life keeps escaping the conclusions imposed upon it. The philosopher has delivered his speech. Now someone must pay for it.

“I am a sick man…I am a wicked man.” Between those declarations, the narrative opens its cynical caesura. Sickness might solicit care, whereas wickedness seems to forbid it, and the speaker cannot resist arranging both possibilities before us. Translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky preserve the nervous immediacy of a voice that has scarcely announced itself before beginning to revise the announcement. The man believes his liver is diseased, although he admits uncertainty about what ails him. His refusal to consult a doctor becomes an act of spite whose only injured party is himself. Already the comedy has begun its patient work upon our sympathy. Who is supposed to suffer from this magnificent refusal? The doctors will survive it. He knows this and insists upon it anyway, extracting sovereignty from the prospect of getting worse. His body becomes the hostage of an argument addressed to nobody who needs to answer. In that opening hesitation, a whole existence curls around the pleasure of making its own misery ungovernable.

Pevear’s introduction cautions against mistaking the narrator’s proximity for a direct statement of Dostoevsky’s beliefs. The caution matters because this man knows how to recruit a reader. His “gentlemen” are an imagined audience whose objections he can supply before they arrive, a tribunal assembled from the educated assumptions he despises and the approval he cannot stop desiring. They often embody the rationalist confidence associated with Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and his followers, although their function exceeds any single historical party. The reader who laughs becomes another occupant of that audience, while withholding laughter merely invites speculation about the motive for our refusal. Whatever we do, he has already begun discussing us with himself. We are invited into his consciousness under conditions that make every response available for confiscation, and his apparent candor gives the confiscation its charm. He courts attention through declarations of indifference, finding in our resistance another reason to continue.

Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, published in 1863, supplied the radical imagination with a utopian fiction that became a formative text for revolutionary readers. Its rational egoism proposed that a proper understanding of self-interest could bring individual benefit into harmony with the common good. Notes from Underground attacks that assurance and parodies the confidence that human life can be reorganized according to a comprehensible plan. A proverbial crystal palace condenses the promise into an architecture of perfected satisfaction. From the underground man’s corner, its transparency looks suffocating. The danger he identifies concerns the reduction of lived existence to a calculable mechanism, an arrangement in which human flesh remains present while its freedom has been explained away. Yet the rival he installs beneath this edifice is hardly a trustworthy liberator. A grievance has seized the emergency exit and declared itself the guardian of the soul.

His strongest objection begins with the possibility that a person might knowingly choose injury. If human conduct follows enlightened advantage, what becomes of the pleasure of refusing advantage itself? “What makes you conclude that man’s wanting so necessarily needs to be corrected?” he asks in kind. The question pierces the benevolence that appoints itself curator of someone else’s desire. Wanting may embrace reason, but it can also insist upon a satisfaction that reason has no wish to recognize. To preserve this troublesome remainder, the underground man will defend even a ruinous caprice, musing to himself, if not also about himself, “I even think the best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.” The sentence is wonderfully indecent. Gratitude would acknowledge that the world has given us something worth accepting, and his creature reserves the right to spit upon the gift. Such ingratitude can expose coercion decoratively wrapped in generosity. It can also become the reflex by which every offered kindness is ruined before it has the chance to make a claim upon us. His defense of freedom carries both possibilities in its mouth.

Arithmetic therefore acquires a menace disproportionate to its innocence. Two times two is four, and the underground man hears in that result the shutting of a door. The equation becomes intolerable when its certainty is promoted into a model of existence, when the unresolved human creature is treated as a problem awaiting its final solution. A completed life would have no room left in which to want. “And though our life in this manifestation often turns out to be a bit of trash,” he goes on to say, “still it is life and not just the extraction of a square root.” Destruction consequently offers the strange consolation of reopening what completion has sealed. He suspects that people may overturn a perfectly furnished happiness simply to feel their own hands at work upon it. Here his argument finds an unsettling strength, for increased knowledge supplies no automatic moral improvement. A civilization can condemn bloodshed while becoming more accomplished at committing it. Reason may sharpen an instrument whose purpose remains atrocious. But the very force of this insight tempts him toward a disastrous privilege, allowing the refusal of reason to appear honorable regardless of what that refusal does. Freedom begins to resemble a house whose owner burns each room to prove that the keys are his.

Within that house, consciousness proliferates until movement becomes nearly impossible. Every intention produces a witness against itself. Revenge requires an injury that can be believed in long enough to justify acting upon it, yet analysis keeps dissolving the belief. A motive reveals another motive beneath it, and the excavation continues until the ground has vanished. His intelligence discovers contingency everywhere, then awards itself a distinction for being unable to stand. The “characterless being” he calls morally obligatory becomes a person whose capacity to imagine alternatives has swallowed the possibility of choosing among them. There is real anguish here, as well as a peculiar snobbery. He cannot become an insect, but even this failure can be made into evidence of exceptional depth. The confession keeps returning a dividend to the vanity that financed it. Each admission of worthlessness is quietly stamped with the assurance that an ordinary man could never understand such worthlessness so well.

The stone wall of natural necessity provides a further occasion for this divided pleasure. A direct person can accept a limit and proceed within it. The underground man continues to suffer against the wall even after conceding that he cannot break through. Acceptance would deprive him of the quarrel through which he feels himself existing. His “voluptuous standstill in inertia” is filled with imaginary reprisals, many of them exquisitely revised and none capable of exhausting the offense. Action would expose revenge to the indifference of an actual world. In fantasy, the grievance retains an obedient audience and a limitless duration. Even suffering becomes theatrical, as his reflections on toothache suggest. A cultivated sufferer can make a moan accuse everyone within hearing, turning pain into a demand that others should be inconvenienced by its existence. Dostoevsky lets us laugh at the grotesque ingenuity of this arrangement. The laughter catches unpleasantly in the throat when we recognize how easily the wish to be understood becomes a wish to punish those who have failed to understand us.

Dreams offer the apparent escape. There he can inhabit the “beautiful and lofty” without submitting his grandeur to the humiliating conditions of an encounter. His imagined heroism excuses his degradation, and the degradation gives his heroism something sufficiently immense to redeem. Ordinary decency would spoil the arrangement by asking for an action too small to furnish an epic. The dreamer needs humanity at a distance, where love can expand without meeting another person’s inconvenient will. This is one reason the novel’s collision of the sentimental aspirations of the 1840s with the rationalist programs of the 1860s feels so corrosive. Both provide languages through which a person can substitute an ideal for an encounter. The underground man inhabits their incompatibility, dressing his hunger in whichever vocabulary will make it appear most impressive.

That condition has a disquieting contemporary echo. The imagined “gentlemen” anticipate the audience before whom a person can spend an entire life preparing reactions to reactions. Social media gives such anticipation a visible apparatus, but Dostoevsky locates the deeper machinery in the desire to secure recognition while retaining control over what recognition may reveal. His protagonist rehearses exposure until it becomes another means of concealment. He can confess to vanity with such conspicuous intelligence that the confession begins to demand admiration. His contradictions draw us into a relation where we enjoy detecting the trap and continue supplying it with victims. To call him simply unreliable hardly reaches the problem. We often perceive his evasions correctly and remain susceptible to their pleasure. Reading becomes an experiment in how far insight can coexist with complicity. The man keeps asking whether we are laughing because laughter gives him both the wound he expects and the contact he requires.

Pevear and Volokhonsky make this entanglement audible through an English that permits the voice its awkward insistence. The repeated language of “profit” gives desire a commercial shadow, allowing the attack on rational self-interest to remain entangled with the terms of its opponent. “Wanting” preserves an ordinary bodily pressure that a more elevated vocabulary could too easily dignify. Even the phrase “little debauch” carries the faint absurdity of a speaker attempting to manage his disgrace through scale. These choices matter because the book’s thinking takes place inside speech that keeps slipping out of its speaker’s control. Sudden qualifications interfere with an assertion before it can settle into authority. A joke exposes an intention the narrator immediately tries to reinterpret. The intellectual violence depends upon these abrasions. In this translation, his voice retains the feeling of a thought catching on its own teeth, producing an eloquence whose injuries remain visible.

When the second part returns to the young clerk, those verbal injuries acquire a social history. “I was then already bearing the underground in my soul,” he admits. Office life makes his body a surface upon which he imagines everyone else reading contempt. Another person’s face can seem an intolerable judgment before a word has been spoken. The encounter with an officer who physically moves him aside crystallizes the misery of being treated as an obstacle without the dignity of an antagonist. His elaborate preparations to collide with the officer on equal terms make a small contact of shoulders bear the weight of an entire metaphysics of recognition. He longs to establish that his body occupies space with the same right as the body of a man whose rank makes room for it. The humor is agonizing because the desired equality has been reduced to a gesture that may scarcely register with its recipient.

His reunion with former schoolmates enlarges this collision into a social catastrophe. At Simonov’s rooms, he insists upon joining a farewell dinner for Zverkov, a man whose easy confidence he resents with the intimacy of an old scar. He needs these men to acknowledge his superiority and cannot bear to leave them to their indifference. When the dinner’s changed hour is not communicated to him, an hour of waiting becomes proof of the insignificant place he occupies in their lives. Their eventual arrival briefly relieves the loneliness that his pride has been preparing to denounce. As the evening deteriorates, he drinks and attempts to force the gathering into the drama he has rehearsed. His insulting toast brings ridicule, while his prolonged pacing gives the room a miserable pendulum. Everyone else possesses the terrible freedom to stop thinking about him. He remains, making his refusal to leave an exhibition of the dependence he wishes to conceal. Dostoevsky’s wit here works through duration. We feel how long it takes a man to discover that humiliation can continue after the spectators have become bored.

He follows them to a brothel with revenge still furnishing imaginary scenes, and there he encounters Liza, a young woman whose vulnerability offers him an audience he can command. His conversation with her borrows the moral intensity of sentimental literature. He evokes the tenderness of a family and confronts her with a future of abandonment, making himself the apparent bearer of a knowledge that might save her. Some of the feeling is sincere, which deepens the harm. A person can speak truthfully about another’s suffering while using that truth to establish power over her. He needs Liza’s tears to compensate for the contempt he has just endured, and his borrowed eloquence supplies the instrument. The human body he has defended against rational calculation is now being reorganized under the pressure of his own design. Her destination seems so clear to him that the use of fear to drive her toward it can pass for benevolence. His account of freedom has found a listener whose freedom it can temporarily forget.

Liza’s observation that he speaks from a book touches the apparatus at its most vulnerable point. She has heard the borrowed cadence beneath the apparent revelation. He resents the exposure because his authority depends upon the illusion that these words come directly from a depth inaccessible to other people. Literature has supplied him with a personality he can perform, and her remark briefly separates the performance from the person. Nevertheless, he gives her his address, extending the scene into the prospect of an actual relation. An address is a dangerous thing to offer when one’s grandeur exists mainly in speech. It translates a promise into a place where the promising person can be found. The underground man begins to dread the arrival that his own rhetoric has invited. Liza may come expecting the man who spoke to her, and encounter the room in which that man has never managed to live.

Her visit finds him in the midst of a degrading struggle with his servant Apollon, whose composure has become another provocation to his vanity. The ragged dressing gown completes an exposure that the narrator had anticipated with feverish precision. His fear of being seen as poor mixes with the more intimate fear of being seen as helpless. The rescuer has been discovered in need of rescue, and Liza responds to that need. She recognizes his unhappiness and embraces him. For a moment, something enters the scene that his rehearsal could neither produce nor prevent. Her compassion changes the relation between them without asking him to become impressive first. He sobs, then begins to perceive this reversal as another humiliation. The possibility of being loved in his misery threatens the superiority through which he has imagined love becoming bearable. Care reaches him at the very point where his elaborate defenses have made care seem an insult. To accept it would require allowing another person’s understanding to exist beyond his authority.

He answers by asserting mastery through their intimacy, then presses money into her hand in a final attempt to degrade what she has offered. The gesture tries to assign her a familiar price and restore a hierarchy in which he can remain the purchaser. Here the first part’s language of profit returns with an appalling material exactness. Having defended the human creature against every formula that would fix its value, he attempts to reduce Liza to a transaction the instant her tenderness exceeds his calculations. Her refusal of the money leaves his arithmetic stranded on the table. The banknote has become an object his interpretation cannot successfully spend. We should resist turning this refusal into a tidy victory, since the injury has already occurred and her future remains unknown. Yet it interrupts his dominion over the meaning of the encounter. He cannot make the gift into a purchase merely by deciding that it shall be one. Another will has answered him, and the answer survives without the argumentative extravagance he requires to make his own refusals feel alive.

The episode changes the philosophical stakes of the novel. A defense of unrestricted wanting has met the wanting of someone else, exposing the ease with which liberty can be made into a private license. The underground man can identify the coercion hidden in a utopian scheme while practicing an intimate version of that coercion himself. His failure complicates the defense of freedom without canceling it. Liza’s refusal gives that freedom a form he cannot bear to recognize. The later Crime and Punishment permits a path toward repentance to appear in its epilogue. Here remorse keeps getting recruited into the narrator’s performance, granting him the agitation of a conscience without requiring its obedience. Dostoevsky’s Christianity makes the encounter especially charged. In a March 1864 letter to his brother Mikhail, he complained that the censors had removed material in which he derived “the necessity of faith and Christ.” The surviving text leaves that stated intention without a fully preserved expression. Liza’s compassion nevertheless permits a Christian reading of the encounter, offering an answer to the self’s enclosure that the narrator cannot accept. Love would place him in a relation whose value depends upon neither his triumph nor his abasement. He continues to translate that possibility into a contest, then punishes the person who momentarily made the contest unnecessary.

The closing reflections on embodied life bring this failure into a stranger register. “We’re stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers,” he writes, extending his condition into an accusation against a humanity ashamed of possessing its own bodies. His “omni-men” pursue an existence purified of the vulnerability through which an actual person can be reached. Such a creature could possess every possibility while never enduring the irreversible smallness of one life. The underground man’s continual revisions enact the seduction of that fantasy. Each version of himself can be exchanged for another. But Liza has entered the record with a body he can hurt, and this body prevents his plurality from remaining an innocent intellectual abundance. His freedom of interpretation cannot travel backward into her experience and undo it. Time has preserved something his rhetoric would prefer to keep negotiable. A life has consequences even when its author refuses to settle upon a character.

Perhaps this is where the novel’s deepest unease passes beyond its humble cast of characters. His final wish to speak for everyone gives us reason to look toward the person he has struggled to make into an explanation of himself. Liza’s departure opens a space he cannot fill without further invention. We know almost nothing of the life that might await her, and the temptation to furnish it with a redemptive destiny would repeat his assumption that her existence owes us a useful meaning. Her suffering need not educate him in order to matter. Neither must she remain forever at the point where his cruelty left her. The thought becomes difficult precisely where it becomes generous, asking us to imagine a future while surrendering possession of its contents. Somewhere in that unclaimed possibility, the stillborn argument loosens its hold upon the living. There may be a room in which his voice has never sounded, where no sentence requires her to become the heroine of his unhappiness. We can grant her that room without furnishing it. The door remains hers.

Mediavolo: Live at the Novomax

| Tyran Grillo

Filmed on October 26, 2024, at the Novomax in Quimper, France, Mediavolo’s intimate return to the stage brings songs separated by years into bodily proximity. Guitarist and band composer Jacques Henry, keyboardist Fabrice Duhamel, drummer Lionel Prigent, and bassist David Carquet give compositions that invite solitary absorption in the studio the immediacy of people listening to one another as they play. Older material absorbs the experience gathered since its creation, while songs from Away Within find unexpected ancestors among earlier recordings. Throughout, Géraldine Le Cocq’s voice inhabits the delicate interval between a character’s predicament and her own emotional knowledge, drawing nourishment from both.

The concert begins where 2011’s Modern Cause begins, with “Dan,” though its position here gives the song a second threshold to cross. Its family estrangement grows from recognizable intimacies into an imagined future in which affection has become inaccessible to those who assumed it would endure. Small differences accumulate the mineral weight of an accusation; a familiar gesture returns bearing the seal of a foreign government. Gé enters that emotional jurisdiction with striking immediacy. Personal experience supplies the protagonist with a history that feels lived without demanding literal autobiography. Jac’s guitar and Prigent’s drums press against the vocal line, giving the estrangement a physical resistance.

That question acquires a technological complication in “Disembodied Vision” (Away Within, 2024). The severances running through its parent album turn toward the prospect of delegating human uncertainty to an intelligence promised as a cure for human limitation. What becomes of suffering when its supposed healer has no wound through which to recognize it? Duhamel lends the problem an insinuating beauty, his keyboard harmonies so persuasive that surrender briefly seems reasonable. The indictment travels through the seductiveness of its surface, beneath which unease gathers around the fantasy of infallibility. We have emptied so much of ourselves into our inventions that their answers can carry the authority of stolen organs. Yet Duhamel’s playing remains tethered to his bandmates’ responsiveness. The next chord still depends on a human decision, made within earshot of another person’s breath.

“Up Ahead” (Modern Cause, 2011) reopens the relationship between anticipation and remembrance. Its beauty has a peculiar temporal ache, moving forward while the chorus turns toward a life that cannot accompany it. Cocteau Twins affinities shimmer through the guitar, yet the emotional center belongs to Gé. She gives room for longing to develop its own logic, each phrase negotiating the distance between what can be imagined and what can be reached. Memory acquires a future tense, an impossible grammar the music makes briefly usable. A retreat into the band’s beginnings follows with “Wh/Amphibious Oblivion” (Soleil Sans Retour, 2003). Prigent’s skittering drums disturb Jac’s ostinato without dislodging its pull, and the harmonies spread a submerged luminosity. Carquet adds a gentle insistence beneath this aquatic reverie, touching the body before interpretation can intervene. Gé’s voice enlarges the water imagery into a condition of being that loosens its terrestrial obligations and articulates an existence without the hard punctuation of a shore.

Such permeability becomes harder to sustain in “Unbidden Truth” (Away Within, 2024), which reveals the cost of mistaking our field of vision for the dimensions of existence. Unexpected key changes alter the chorus’s proportions from within. A wall believed to be structural suddenly admits a passage, and the heart must revise its floor plan. The music’s insistent brightness brings responsibility, if only because seeing farther means acknowledging how much we have organized around a restricted view. Freedom requires the uncomfortable labor of revising oneself. “Rage” (Away Within, 2024) then enters a more obstructed interior. Duhamel’s spiderwebbed keyboards catch language before it becomes intelligible; the struggle to understand turns inward, loosening the masonry of certainty. Gé’s additional guitar increases the pressure until the arrangement seems to contain more force than its architecture can house.

My history with the band began with “Misunderstanding” (A Secret Sound, 2006), which I encountered through a Cocteau Twins station on Pandora while attending to some forgettable task. Whenever it returned, I stopped working. Each interruption asked for an attention my routine could not accommodate. Eventually, the task became incidental and the song part of my life. Hearing it live revisits that encounter with the knowledge of everything it opened. There is a pleasing complication in remembering that an automated recommendation delivered me to music whose human particularity has remained indispensable. The listener I was has somewhere to meet the listener I have become, and neither can pronounce the other finished.

The exacting construction of “Dr Quayle” (Unaltered Empire, 2008) brings another human experiment into view. Its compositional precision heightens the writing’s laboratory atmosphere, where intention blurs into the desire to control its consequences. Jac’s solo cuts across that precision with exposed anguish, and Gé’s powerful upper register carries the final stretch toward a startling vulnerability. Gothic and darkwave associations gather around these textures, though the performance gives such categories little time to settle. Wide musical appetites have always made Mediavolo open to grand stylistic possibilities, and the band’s precision keeps that breadth coherent. In “Walk Out” (Away Within, 2024), the dreamy guitar admits a brighter expanse whose openness unsettles memory’s authority. Experiences once held as certainties become translucent under the weight of living. Departure requires a body to move before the mind has ratified every reason, and the music honors the dignity of that delay.

With “Mass Anaesthesia” (A Secret Sound, 2006), public circulation enters the concert’s private anatomy. The echoing guitar opens a channel into the flanged congestion, where traffic acquires the troubling grandeur of a civilization rehearsing its own numbness. Gé floats above it with an aerial detachment that makes the ordinary uncanny. The anonymous procession contains countless interior lives, each passing beyond the observer’s reach. Every vehicle carries an unspoken argument with existence. The song’s eventual viral reach adds another dimension: a recording from 2006 traveled through contemporary networks to become an entrance to Mediavolo for listeners far removed from its release. The live version’s more upbeat, urgent energy gives that belated arrival a pulse. For those brought here through its wider circulation, recognition becomes a return to somewhere they have only just discovered. My encounter with “Misunderstanding” finds a counterpart in theirs. Our routes meet at the same improbable address via music that made room for us before we knew to look for it.

“How Does It End” (A Secret Sound, 2006) poses the concert’s most openly philosophical question. Carquet’s circling bass motifs invite us inward, while Jac and Duhamel lend liquid contours to the invitation. Prigent supplies enough traction for the changing harmonies to remain bodily intelligible. In this balance between seduction and footing, Mediavolo’s songcraft becomes especially vivid. Sparkle has weight; gloom admits motion. Gé gives the question a human duration, letting its implications gather within the time it takes to sing. Fear emerges as a possible organizing principle of a life, sustaining arrangements whose necessity we may never have examined. An answer would have to account for our pleasure in structures that also confine us.

The dulcet axis of “Fanciest Scheme” (Unaltered Empire, 2008) turns that difficulty toward the right to remain different. Its melodic grace accommodates an inward gravity that cannot be tidied into general agreement. Consciousness breaks into dots and dashes, sending imperfect signals between people, gaining force where understanding remains incomplete. After a concert so attentive to estrangement, this closing gesture makes fellowship a demanding proposition. Gé’s embodiment of other lives and her bandmates’ exchanges supply a practical measure of it by receiving another’s experience without requiring it to duplicate one’s own.

I find myself thinking of an undeciphered inscription. Centuries of attention may fail to recover what someone entrusted to a surface, yet the marks retain the fact of an address. A hand once pressed meaning into matter and left it for another consciousness. We might destroy the inscription by polishing it until it resembled an alphabet we already know. Something comparably fragile moves through Mediavolo’s music, especially when Gé gives breath to a life whose circumstances remain distinct from her own. Listening places us before another person’s opacity and asks what care can survive without the reward of complete understanding. There is tenderness in allowing the unknown to retain its markings.

Another ECM book…?

| Tyran Grillo

Dear readers,

I’ve been thinking about writing a new book about ECM. Before deciding what shape it might take, I’d like to hear from those of you who have made Between Sound and Space part of your listening lives.

My main concern is finding something new to say. There are already books that approach ECM from various perspectives, including my own, and I don’t want to repeat myself or revisit familiar ground without a compelling reason. I’d like a new project to fill a gap by exploring something you’ve wanted to read about but haven’t yet found, or to ask questions that deserve more sustained attention.

What kind of book about ECM would you like to see? Are there musicians, collaborations, or parts of the catalog you feel have received too little attention? Would you welcome more conversations with artists, stories behind particular recordings, or a closer look at how the music enters and shapes our lives? Perhaps you have something entirely different in mind.

I’d be interested in hearing what you feel is missing from the existing books. A question, a subject, or even a wish for a different approach would give me something to think about.

This is still an idea rather than a definite announcement. For now, I’m all ears, and I would be grateful for your thoughts in the comments below.

Thank you, as always, for reading and listening alongside me.

Tyran