After a sound has faded, it can take a moment for quietude to regain its force. The ear stays where the sound has left it, as though something might still be communicated. That is how I find my way into William Basinski’s Passing the Cup of Sorrows. He spaces his piano phrases with something of Morton Feldman’s patience, allowing a note to arrive late enough to change what one might easily mistake for an ending. Over the course of this single, nearly forty-minute piece, I grow attentive to those small revisions. A pitch I could have sworn was alone acquires a neighbor as it decays, a faint vibration the electronics seem to have picked up through the skin of the note. Sometimes a figure returns so subtly that I wonder whether it has sounded again or whether I’ve been carrying it all along.
Basinski took the title from a video about Life Between Lives, a form of regression hypnosis in which souls are said to meet between incarnations. In the exchange the video describes, a person comes to understand someone who hurt them well enough to forgive. The accounts moved Basinski to sit down at the piano. Listening to the time he leaves between gestures, I find myself thinking about the moment when the cup is still in somebody’s hands. Understanding the person who hurt you may be something you learned long before you had a category under which to file it. From the other side of a wall, a slight change in their voice could tell you what sort of evening lay ahead. There is a peculiar cruelty in asking someone to give freely what they once had to give to stay alive.
The click of a latch can carry two addresses. You hear it where you’re standing, and a muscle answers from a house that may no longer be habitable. Basinski’s recurring figures make room for that kind of displacement. Detuned strings give the dissonance a grain you could almost follow with a thumb. A figure comes back with its outline intact and its intention altered. The first time, it seems to be asking for something. On its return, the question has worn thin enough for me to hear the wood.
As the piece goes on, the air inside the piano seems to move even when a tone holds steady. A creak at the edge of its decay gives me the sense of a chamber wider than the one I can picture. There is something corporeal in the way that space keeps opening, as though stillness were a posture that required innumerable small adjustments to sustain. Halve the distance between two notes, and there is another distance to halve. Somewhere in that diminishing interval is the time it takes a body to realize it can heal.
I keep coming back to a piece of furniture missing from the account that sent Basinski to his piano. There ought to be a table between those souls, ordinary wood with a wobble in one leg, somewhere for the cup to go when the person holding it has had enough. The little sounds that travel through the piano’s cabinet make me wonder how that room would sound from beneath the table. A child hiding there, with an ear against the wood, would have a hard time making out whether anybody had been forgiven. What the child might hear with extraordinary clarity is the small knock of the cup touching down, and what comes through the grain in that instant is the news that something besides flesh can bear the weight.
