Books

Dominic Pettman: Ghosting (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

Ghosting: On Disappearance is a treatise of nonbeing—or, perhaps more precisely, of unbeing. It is not merely about disappearance but about the existential tremors that ripple outward when presence collapses into absence. Placing his authorial thumb and forefinger on the touchscreen of this modern inevitability, Dominic Pettman enlarges its finer gradations across emotional, social, and technological contexts. He pinches and stretches the phenomenon until its translucent membrane reveals something more fundamental: that to vanish is to be human and that to experience the vanishing of another is to feel the sting of impermanence.

While the titular concept has haunted language for centuries through folklore, spirit mediums, and psychological estrangement, it has, in our present age, acquired a peculiarly digital valence. Now, “ghosting” refers most commonly to the quiet, sudden severance of connection between friends, lovers, or kin. The gesture is at once devastatingly simple and infinitely complex: a single tap on a block button, a name fading from a chat log, a conversation frozen by the unrequited ellipses on the book’s cover. Technology makes the act almost frictionless. We already interact daily with people who are physically absent, replaced instead by avatars, text bubbles, and disembodied voices. To ghost someone is merely to withdraw the illusion that they were ever really there to begin with.

Pettman calls ghosting “a form of symbolic suicide,” if not also of violence, a dual wound inflicted upon self and other. It kills the relationship from both sides, leaving the ghosted “gasping at the silent vehemence of the act.” In centuries past, a ghost was thought to be an uncomfortable presence: the whisper in the night, the chill in a boudoir. Today’s specters, however, are defined by the unread message, the unanswered call, the untraceable unfriend. The modern ghost mocks us not with its return but with its refusal to reappear. What once demanded ritual now requires only signal and silence.

Ghosting has become, Pettman suggests, a modern luxury of the unencumbered self, one that allows us to discard what feels burdensome with the efficiency of deleting a file. Yet, what artifacts remain in the wake of such apparently clean erasures? The book’s modest yet densely packed 110 pages attempt to reckon with these residues, drawing out the historical and technical filaments that bind our vanishing acts to canonical anxieties.

Pettman walks us associatively through a gallery of geist-types, beginning with romantic ghosting. Once upon a time, the rules of engagement in love were dictated by proximity and propriety; now, they are replaced by rules of disengagement. The refusal to reply, the closing of a digital door, has become the reigning leitmotif of romantic punctuation. Where a lover might once have ignored a letter and let absence ferment over time into torment, today’s nonresponse hits instantaneous and permanent. Yet, as Pettman notes, the old dynamic persists despite our devices.

Romance has always been a theatre of projection, a negotiation between the seen and the unseen, the flesh and its fantasy. For all our bodies’ sweat and trembling, it is the embellishment that endures. Even in love’s most carnal moment, that fleeting dissolution of self into the other, there is already the seed of absence: the tiny death, the out-of-body vanishing we call climax. How curious, then, that the purest expression of intimacy is also an act of ghosting, the self evaporating in the ecstasy of its own undoing.

Ghosting also bears the battle scars of gendered terrain. Though often cast as an act of cruelty, Pettman reminds us that ghosting can just as easily be a form of survival, a necessary defense against the predations of aggression, stalking, or abuse. It can be liberation or surrender, sanctuary or exile. Either possibility, he writes, makes us acutely aware of our dependence on the other, the fragile scaffolding of recognition upon which our identities are built. In an age when partners must fulfill multiple roles once distributed across an entire community, the dissolution of a relationship casts us into a kind of social purgatory, suspended between connection and isolation.

Pettman insists, too, that ghosting is not an anomaly but a revelation of what we have always been: phantoms speaking to one another through the veil of mortality. Every “forever” whispered in the heat of the proverbial moment carries the irony of death; every “I love you” is also an elegy. Love itself unfolds under the shadow of the crypt. Perhaps this is why its rituals resemble religion, as both court devotion and doubt in equal measure, laying faith on the altar of inevitable loss.

I would add, by way of illustration, Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away, a love story indelibly marked by absence. Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), presumed dead after a plane crash, clings to a pocket watch containing his lover’s photograph, a relic of connection that fuels his will to live. When he returns after surviving for four years alone on a deserted island, he finds life has moved on without him; his beloved has remarried, rendering him the rarest kind of ghost, one who walks among the living, uninvited. His resurrection is itself a disappearance, a return that negates the meaning of home.

When lovers become projection screens for our own incomplete scripts, separation becomes not only likely but inevitable. The one left behind suffers not merely the withdrawal of a person but of the narrative that sustained them. In our culture of curated selves, ghosting has even acquired a perverse glamour as a badge of autonomy. One might recall Elaine Benes’s “spongeworthy” calculus from Seinfeld: who is worth the risk, the effort, the finite resource of bodily attention? Ghosting may be seen as a reversal of this privilege, a self-anointed freedom to choose extracourse over intercourse.

How, then, does one navigate the 50 shades of this phenomenon in an ecosystem already saturated with specters? As Pettman observes, “The paradox of the streaming age applies also to love: there are a million shows waiting to be watched, and yet none of them seem worth committing to.” In such a world, ghosting is less an exception than a rite of passage, a sacrament of connection where fulfillment is as fleeting as a notification bubble.

From romance, Pettman moves to the familial and the platonic. Here, the stakes deepen. To be ghosted by a coworker is unfortunate; to be ghosted by a child is practically biblical. In the age of ideological polarization, even the Thanksgiving table becomes a séance for the missing. The empty chair may symbolize courage to one and betrayal to another. Ghosting thus becomes political, echoing across generations and belief systems.

Professional and social ghosting occupy the book’s latter thrust, and here Pettman’s insights cut to the bone. Having once taught as a professor, I recognize the spectral economy of intellectual labor, the endless treadmill of unacknowledged effort and unreciprocated outreach. In graduate school, “imposter syndrome” was our ironic communion, a collective haunting where each scholar feared being the least real presence in the room. Every unanswered email, every “no reply” rejection, each job committee that never called back—all were tiny funerals for the self. Eventually, I chose to ghost the profession before it could continue to ghost me, if only to preserve a flicker of something to call my own.

Of course, ghosting is by no means confined to ivory towers. It infiltrates every professional exchange: clients disappearing mid-project, employers denying promotion for no apparent reason, friendships fading in inbox drafts. Even places ghost us: favorite restaurants that shutter without warning, neighborhoods transformed overnight, ecosystems collapsing out of sight. The world itself feels like it is ghosting us, withdrawing one news cycle at a time into abstraction. The more we exist, the more unreal reality seems.

I would add two more iterations to Pettman’s catalogue. First is the phenomenological ghosting of presence without feeling. We find this in M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth, in which ghosting refers to the process of shutting down one’s emotions. This quality is a precious commodity in the film’s military-industrial complex, weaponized to render one invisible to alien predators who target their prey by detecting fear pheromones. To ghost, here, is to master disappearance from within. Second is Deanimated, an experimental film by avant-gardist Martin Arnold, who digitally erases actors one by one from the 1941 Bela Lugosi picture Invisible Ghost, until all that remains are empty rooms, doors that open by themselves, and dramatic music without diegesis. The world goes on performing, emptied of its inhabitants. The viewer, too, becomes ghosted, watching absence itself take center stage.

The loss of the one who ghosts us, Pettman ultimately suggests, is not merely a social wound but an ontological one. We lose not only another person but the mirror in which our own being once took shape. The terror of ghosting lies not in being forgotten but in discovering how easily we can forget ourselves when deprived of the other’s gaze. Technology did not create this fragility but has only revealed that relationships have always been provisional, sustained by faith, fantasy, and the flickering persistence of attention.

To be ghosted, then, is to confront the truth that love, friendship, and community are nothing more than brief illuminations against the endless dark of unbeing.

David Rothenberg: Secret Sounds of Ponds (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

“The pond is the teacher, underwater lies the source.”
–David Rothenberg

Near the apartment complex I once called home, before I migrated to my present dwelling, a pond would awaken each night in amphibious utterances. Frogs, crickets, and invisible choir members released a polyphony of chirrups and croaks that spilled into the humid dark. It was alluring enough that I found myself inventing post-meridian errands just to step outside and listen. I remember how the air trembled with that sound, neither wild nor domestic, a liminal language that both invited and eluded comprehension. I never tried to categorize it then; it was enough to be absorbed. What struck me most was its irregularity, a music without time signatures, and yet, the longer I listened, the more I could discern the soloists from within, the deliberate from the accidental. What I did not realize, however, was that this was only the surface of a deeper, secret orchestra playing just beneath my feet.

It was during the stillness of the pandemic that musician, philosopher, educator, and animal collaborator David Rothenberg turned his own attention downward. He found that ponds, those apparently placid mirrors of sky and branch, are paradoxical entities: tranquil to the eye, yet pulsing with invisible sound. Above the water, a hush. Below, a thicket of sonic life. But how does one hear through liquid? Rothenberg, already attuned to the songs of whales, found his usual instruments inadequate. He commissioned a hydrophone capable not merely of recording but of touching sound, translating the tactile shimmer of aquatic vibration into something audible. In doing so, he discovered not merely a pond but a pulse, a murmuring node within the living organism of the planet. In this submerged language, he recognized that the world itself is always breathing, whispering, and improvising at the edge of consciousness. The recordings discussed and contextualized in Secret Sounds of Ponds feel like a revelation, a form of listening that brushes the hair of the mind, a continuous and organic ASMR channel that one can tune into and out of at will.

Yet the music is not only animal. The flora, too, contribute their delicate speech: plants releasing oxygen bubbles as miniature offerings, each a syllable in an ancient conversation. “The plants keep time,” Rothenberg notes, “and the beasts carry a tune.” One hears this and realizes how naïve our auditory hierarchies have been. We’ve long believed that sound belongs to the realm of motion, of bodies and breath. Yet here are rooted beings, singing through photosynthesis, metronomes of life itself.

Rothenberg reminds us that “even in this century where everything seems possible, morphable, changeable, hearable, findable at a moment’s thought, there are still sounds around us… immediate sounds that we still don’t know.” If we are ignorant of our surroundings, perhaps we are equally ignorant of our origins. We imagine that knowing where we are going requires understanding where we’ve come from, yet Rothenberg suggests the opposite: that both the departure and destination are wrapped in the same sonic fog. Thus, we meet the limits of our perception and the possibility that such limits are spiritual. The indistinguishable becomes indistinguishably beautiful. Insect, fish, turtle, plant: all’s fair in love and pond life.

This mode of listening is not a science but a humility. It compels us to ask impossible questions. If technology must translate these frequencies for us, were we ever meant to hear them? When we call this music, do we consecrate or colonize it? Is it communion or interference? Somewhere, I imagine, John Cage laughs from the beyond, his silence perforated by the croak of a frog.

“For all the millions of hours we have spent together with animals,” Rothenberg observes, “we still cannot speak with them.” The task, then, is not to translate but to collaborate, to become co-musicians in a score that predates our language. Sound may have no intention, no recipient, and yet we crave both. We are instruments yearning for meaning, resonating for a moment before fading into the dissonance of time. Listening, as Rothenberg reminds us, “reveals things alive before we can claim them.” This is the ethical heart of the project: listening not to possess but to participate. Without that transformation, we remain voyeurs; with it, we become apprentices in the grammar of existence, learning not to compose but to decompose, to take apart what our words have wrongly fused.

I think here of Bashō’s immortal haiku, in D.T. Suzuki’s translation:

Into the ancient pond
A frog jumps
Water’s sound!

It is easy to romanticize this image, to see it as a vignette of simplicity. Yet the poem’s true profundity lies in its inversion: the pond, not the frog, is the voice; the frog merely the activator, the finger on the cosmic key. That the frog is jumping into a pond is never in doubt, yet translators have long struggled to articulate that final sound—“splash,” “plop,” “water-note,” “kerplunk”—but perhaps that indeterminacy is the point. The sound eludes capture because it was never meant to be caught. Like Rothenberg’s recordings, made accessible via QR codes throughout the book or online in album form as Secret Songs of Ponds, it dwells in the space between articulation and silence, between perception and being.

Hence the human impulse to name: to label every ripple and rustle—scratching, blipping, bubbling, warbling—as if taxonomy were intimacy. Rothenberg resists that impulse by layering his own clarinet into the watery mix, joining a chorus rather than leading it. His collaborations with Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu, whose deconstructive poetry conjures an invented language of resonance rather than reference, push this further. Her contributions hover like dreams, vocal fragments rising from the mire of the unconscious. Listening to “I Still Don’t Get How Distance Works,” one feels time dissolving; her voice becomes an echo of the pond itself, diffused and omnipresent.

In other tracks, Rothenberg’s clarinet drifts like an inquisitive creature among the bubbles and squeaks—curious, reverent, never dominant. I am reminded of Ornette Coleman’s philosophy of sound as motion through possibility: music as exploration, not arrival. Elsewhere, the pond alone is permitted to speak, recalling early electronic composers like Ilhan Mimaroglu, who inverted futurism into introspection, aiming their microphones inward to locate the primordial hum within us all.

Most of all, I think of Akifumi Nakajima, a.k.a. Aube, whose sonic investigations of fire, air, blood, and brain waves sought the inner pulse of matter itself. To engage with Secret Sounds of Ponds is to place a stethoscope against the earth’s waterlogged chest and hear it crackle. Rothenberg confesses, “I don’t play with the pond, but the pond plays with me.” That inversion, again, is key. The artist becomes the instrument, the listener the medium. This is not music about nature; it is nature using us to make itself known.

There is a sacred vertigo in such encounters. What begins as fascination turns toward reverence, even dread, as one senses the immensity of what vibrates beneath the apparent stillness of the world. Ponds, like temples, are mirrors of our incomprehension. They draw us inward until we see that to listen is to surrender.

And so, whenever I pass a pond now, I find myself wondering not merely what lives there, but where it came from. Science offers its explanations of erosion, accumulation, and equilibrium, but the heart refuses to hear them. The mind insists on something older, more mysterious: that the earth itself opened a small mouth to breathe, and we, by accident or grace, happened to hear it.

Rebuilding the Fourth Wall: Toward an Ontology of Vision in Trevor Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations

| Tyran Grillo

To think of vision as truth is to confuse perception with revelation. Every image born of pigment, photon, and pixel is already a technological interpretation (the #unfiltered hashtag is a lie). Artificial intelligence magnifies the primordial compulsion to externalize thought into form, mirroring our metaphysical anxieties in the intricacies of ocular logic. Yet when AI begins to dream, no longer are we the authors of representation but the represented. Instead of marveling at the shadows in Plato’s proverbial cave, we become the shadows themselves. Artist Trevor Paglen has turned this reversal into both method and critique, exposing a precarious ontology of vision.

In practical terms, AI is fundamentally trained to recognize faces, objects, and places with mundane equivalents. Paglen, however, decided to do something different by feeding AI “irrational” subjects like philosophy, history, and literature. Using a generative adversarial network (GAN), an AI model that creates images based on what it has analyzed and absorbed from existing datasets or “corpuses,” he wondered what might happen when AI hallucinates an image. As Paglen explains, the process involves two networks engaged in a kind of aesthetic duel: a “Generator,” which draws pictures, and a “Discriminator,” which evaluates them. The two AIs play a game of deception and refinement, cycling through thousands or even millions of iterations until the Generator produces images capable of fooling the Discriminator. The results of this strange symbiosis are entirely synthetic images with no real-world referent, yet both AIs believe them to be genuine.

Here, Paglen discusses the project in more detail:

The fruit of these efforts is Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, an ongoing series begun in 2017 and documented in this book of the same name. Published by Sternberg Press as Volume 4 of the Research/Practice series, it features a conversation between Paglen and editor Anthony Downey, preceded by Downey’s essay, “The Return of the Uncanny: Artificial Intelligence and Estranged Futures.” Downey reminds us that because AI lacks embodied experience, it produces only “disquieting allegories of our world” at best. Its outputs expose the opaque workings of machine cognition, parallel to the brain’s own trial-and-error rehearsals toward getting something “right.” Here, the fourth wall is not merely broken but rebuilt in its own image. Downey asks whether AI is training us to see the world machinically, and whether we already do. Thus, Paglen’s series explores how machine learning “functions as a computational means to produce knowledge” and, in doing so, outs AI as a heuristic device, “capable, that is, of making sense of, if not predefining, how we perceive the world.”

Paglen draws on taxonomies of knowing akin to metaphorical or substitutive instruments of perception. His parameters constitute a cyclical echo chamber that nonetheless manages to step outside the bounds of acceptability while keeping one foot within them. He calls this “machine realism” because the images are recursive of the engine’s own hallucinations. As Downey observes, “the process is never totally predictable, nor is it reliable.” Then again, is reality itself reliable? Do we not also seek to document, catalog, and amplify that which defies predictability?

Because a GAN’s goal is to generate images that appear categorically relevant while simultaneously deceiving the system, its hallucinations blur distinctions between data and invention. Downey warns that such images, if treated as predictive, can easily become more real than real. For even though they do not exist, these errors and phantasms are not anomalies of image-processing models; they are their very foundation.

So, what does an AI hallucination look like? Take A Man (Corpus: The Humans):

At first, we recognize a human figure, yet the longer we gaze, the more the image unravels, raising a disquieting question: Is distorting coherence into chaos any different from coaxing coherence out of chaos? Is there a point at which the two converge?

This tension recalls the left panel of Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, where “inaccurate” men accompany flayed carcases:

Despite our aversion to inner flesh, it is the men, those still tenuously tethered to outward form, who disturb us most. When reduced to raw meat, we are more easily abstracted and dismissed; when nearing coherence, we ache for completion.

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that Paglen would venture into the supernatural. Angel (Corpus: Spheres of Heaven) borrows from Renaissance art but reassembles its tropes in a landscape unmoored from conventional metrics:

The context is blatantly parasitic, tugging at the figure with distillational aggression. Here, the “angel” is no divine messenger but an ambassador of categorial confusion.

The closer we get to the intimate, the darker the images become. In Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), the most legible face in the book is also the most “demonic”:

The vampire, parasite of parasites, stands as an agent of eternal torment. A Pale and Puffy Face (Corpus: The Interpretation of Dreams) elicits a similar flicker between attraction and horror that is just human enough to seem alive yet warped enough to feel forged:

Why, one wonders, do these visions feel not only unsettling but somehow sinister?

In anticipation of one possible answer, allow me to return momentarily to Bacon, whose Three Studies of George Dyer are a hallucinatory corpus in their own right:

These falsifications unsettle precisely because they start with a uniquely verifiable identity before marring it beyond recognition. Like a coroner’s report, they document the mutilation of everything we hold stable about the self.

Paglen’s systemic hallucinations similarly engage with another psychological touchpoint in the trauma of seeing and of being seen. Through trauma’s hallucinatory unfolding, bodies and landscapes become intertwined in a web of atrocity, where loss and recovery mirror one another. His images dwell in the rupture between memory and forgetting. 

A red thread through all this is the illusion of human control. Something nefarious always seems to pull the strings, an invisible force with its own agenda. Escape is made possible only through an existence maintained at great sacrifice. In this metaphysical tug-of-war, the line between the animating and the animated blurs; embodiment and disembodiment become indistinguishable.

Trauma, in this sense, fantasizes an impossible realization of recall, a form of omniscience forever out of reach. It is “locked away,” awaiting the right (read: wrong) invocation to bring it out in the open. But locked away where? In our will toward self-destruction? And what manifests that will more pervasively (if not perversely) than technology? David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, particularly Part 8, is a cinematic case in point. It reimagines the nuclear detonation of the Trinity Test as the birth of evil, a revisionist study in how atomic tampering channels the uncanny.

Lynch’s Inland Empire breeds like-minded logic when, in a moment of horrifying self-contamination, Laura Dern’s face is assaulted by the overlay of her nemesis, the so-called Phantom:

The film’s tagline, “A Woman in Trouble,” underscores her dissolution: corporeal integrity undone in a space of profound unrest. Similarly, Philippe Grandrieux’s La Vie nouvelle drags its characters through a ravaged Sarajevo, where language disintegrates and bodies seek reconciliation in ruin. The result is rebirth and a scream in which one finds only more broken sutures, anticipated by a terrifying night-vision interlude in which the human visage is excoriated of its sanctity.

Walter Benjamin’s dictum that “film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man” has never been more apt. AI-generated imagery likewise gnaws at the barrier between the natural and the supernatural. Its manifestations of trauma without selfhood render the body a vessel of moral and perceptual violation. Displaced from domesticity, it reflects irresolvable turmoil, and the more autonomy it achieves, the more humanity we scramble to recover. This explains why AI’s creations feel so spectral: we have seen their kind before. The only difference is that, whereas once we regarded them only in the mind’s eye, now they are actualized with excruciating pervasiveness.

The premise that benign technologies might beget horror reveals our lack of control more than it restores harmony. These hybridizations of natural and unnatural law force us to question identity itself, ejecting us from human-centered hierarchies into a dialectic with entropic nature. Even something as simple as Paglen’s Comet (Corpus: Omens and Portents) conjures narratives of missiles and imminent annihilation.

We fear not that “evil was born,” as Grace Zabriskie so artfully intones in Inland Empire, but that it never needed to be born. It simply is. It predates us and will outlive us, feeding on forces that nevertheless make us who we are. And so, AI embodies its own eerie vitality, a dead signifier born from the narcissistic desire to reproduce life and deny death’s power. Its synthetic offspring thrive on replication, nursing at the breast of finitude.

Diving once again into Twin Peaks: The Return, we find faces opening into voids inhabited by unclean spirits, golden orbs, and infinite darkness, each a portal instead of a mirror:

In his dialogue with Downey, Paglen explains that the Adverserially Evolved Hallucinations project lets us see inside the “black box” of image-processing models and think from within them rather than be guided by them. This, he suggests, might help us move beyond the temptations of perception. “AI models,” he notes, “actively perform processes of manipulation; they want you to see something.” That desire is itself hallucinatory, as well as dangerous. Just as ChatGPT can invent a nonexistent citation, generative image models can fabricate surveillance realities indistinguishable from fact. The imposition of the fake upon the real becomes so seamless that we cease to question it.

Once something takes the form of an image, it acquires an aura of inevitability. Like a lyric we can’t imagine written differently, the hallucination becomes fixed. These interdimensional images seduce with the promise of infinite variation yet horrify with their fixation on wrongness. In leaning toward the actual through rudimentary shapes and gestures (what Paglen calls “primitives”), we find that the only truth worth protecting is that which resists us. Such is the paradox at the heart of all AI-generated imagery: the more real it appears, the more counterfeit it becomes.

A Stone in the Water: Tracing the Ripple Effects of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

| Tyran Grillo

The highway of the upright is to depart from evil:
he that keepeth his way preserveth his soul.
–Proverbs 16:17

Most novels proceed as a river does—flowing from source to mouth, obedient to the order of time, accumulating its inevitable dams, docks, and diversions along the way. The Idiot, however, is no such river. Dostoevsky drops his protagonist into the current not to drift but to disturb, thus revealing the eddies and whirlpools that form around innocence when it trespasses into the murky waters of high society. That first drop lands Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin—and by extension, the reader—on a train bound for Petersburg. He is fresh from a Swiss sanatorium, where for four years he has been treated for epilepsy. His fellow travelers—Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, newly enriched and drunk on inheritance, and the gossiping Lukyan Timofeevich Lebedev—are the first to be caught in his wake. Rogozhin, with the tactless curiosity of a man ruled by appetite, asks whether the prince is a “fancier of the female sex.” When Myshkin denies it, Rogozhin replies, “[Y]ou come out as a holy fool, Prince, and God loves your kind!” Thus is the first stone cast into the still pond of Myshkin’s effect, its ripples reaching outward in mockery and awe alike.

Soon, the prince finds himself in the home of Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, though it is toward Epanchin’s wife, Elizaveta Prokofyevna, that his lineage tenuously connects him. Within moments, he becomes an object of curiosity, as if his very simplicity were some divine riddle. The Epanchins and their daughters draw near him not from affection but fascination; his every word seems to hang in the air long after it has been spoken. So begins the novel’s great fractal of human encounters, each scene branching into another with the stubborn logic of fate.

Translator Richard Pevear observes that, though The Idiot is unanchored to place, it is never abstract. Every room, every parlor and garden, serves as a shell into which the living organism of the narrative crawls. The spaces are cramped, yet within them Dostoevsky builds an architecture of the soul. Each wall is a moral boundary, each window a glimpse into depravity.

The most cavernous of these shells is Lizaveta Prokofyevna herself—“a hotheaded and passionate lady,” who, “without thinking long, would sometimes raise all anchors and set out for the open sea without checking the weather.” In her temperament, we glimpse the embryonic forms of her three daughters: the sensible Alexandra, the artistic Adelaida, and the beautiful, capricious Aglaya. Orbiting them are other satellites of this anxious universe: Rogozhin, the merchant whose newfound wealth becomes license for cruelty; Lebedev, the self-proclaimed “professor of the Antichrist,” who reads the signs of apocalypse in the iron veins of Europe’s railroads; and, most haunting of all, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, the fallen specter, whose trauma becomes the crucible of the entire tale. She is distance made flesh: adored by men, despised by women, yet pitied by both.

At the trembling center of this constellation burns Myshkin himself—a sun both fragile and inexhaustible. His presence exposes others as a mirror does, revealing the distortions they cannot bear to face. “I really came only so as to get to know people,” he says to the Epanchins, a confession so plain it becomes profound. In that aim to understand the human heart lies the novel’s central pulse.

From his first conversation, Myshkin unveils the spiritual burden of consciousness. He speaks of men awaiting execution, drawing on Dostoevsky’s own brush with the firing squad: “Take a soldier, put him right in front of a cannon during a battle, and shoot at him, and he’ll still keep hoping; but read that same soldier a sentence for certain, and he’ll lose his mind or start weeping.” The words tremble with prophetic weight, foreshadowing the undoing of characters condemned not by law but by their own desires.

Lizaveta and her daughters listen as if to a visitation. Myshkin, recalling his lonely youth, declares, “Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they’re little and it’s too early for them to know. What a sad and unfortunate idea!” Yet the world he enters treats him precisely as such a child: harmless, ignorant, to be humored and dismissed. “The risen sun,” the narrator tells us, “softened and brightened everything for a moment,” and so it is with Myshkin: his light briefly transforms, though it cannot redeem.

When he first beholds Nastasya’s portrait, he perceives in her a soul both contemptuous and simple-hearted, “filled with suffering.” Her name, from anastasis (resurrection), bespeaks her torment: the lamb whose innocence was traded for the amusement of nonbelievers. Like him, she is called “crazy,” though her madness is but the logical end of a world that mistakes cruelty for sophistication.

Even Myshkin’s name bears contradiction: from mysh, meaning “mouse,” and Lev, or lion. In Dostoevsky’s notebooks, beside sketches of the novel, appear two words umbilically connected: “Prince-Christ.” And yet, Myshkin does not forgive sin; he merely reveals it by existing. To Nastasya, he says, “I am nothing, but you have suffered and have emerged pure from such a hell, and that is a lot.” Thus, he grants her what theology cannot: recognition.

His influence spreads like contagion. “I believe God brought you to Petersburg from Switzerland precisely for me,” exclaims Lizaveta, and though she speaks in self-interest, she unknowingly sheds veracity. Myshkin is brought not for one but for all. When he visits Rogozhin’s home, he beholds a copy of Hans Holbein the Younger’s Christ in the Tomb, that merciless painting of the dead Savior, devoid of light or transcendence. “A man could even lose his faith from that painting!” says the prince. Rogozhin, missing the irony, takes him at his word. Myshkin explains: “[H]owever many books I’ve read on the subject, it has always seemed to me that they were talking or writing books that were not at all about that.” He concludes that “the essence of religious feeling doesn’t fit in with any reasoning… there’s something else here… that atheisms will eternally glance off.” Dostoevsky thus holds up the Russian heart, trembling with contradictions, as both the disease and the cure: a heart that forgets the Father even as it cries out for Him.

If The Idiot has often been called satire, it is only because its realism is too acute to endure. It captures the narcissism of the upper classes with the precision of a surgeon and the patience of a saint. Myshkin’s self-awareness is his shield: “What sort of idiot am I now, when I myself understand that I’m considered an idiot?” he asks, deflating mockery by acknowledging it. Like Eminem’s self-flagellation in 8 Mile—if one may indulge a modern echo—he disarms his accusers through confession, transforming insult into revelation. What they cannot abide is not his foolishness but his love.

This love, however, is tested to absurdity. When an impostor by the name of Antip Burdovsky demands a share of the prince’s inheritance under false pretenses, Myshkin offers it anyway. Though exposed as a fraud, Burdovsky still receives the prince’s charity, for in Myshkin’s eyes, deceit and misfortune are twins. Such naivety is his virtue, his madness, and his crown of thorns.

In a later gathering, one Evgeny Pavlych recounts a murder trial in which the lawyer excuses the killer’s actions as “natural” under poverty. This comment provokes nods and murmurs of agreement among those assembled, to which Lizaveta responds by accusing them of being vainglorious madmen who have turned their back on God and Christ. She lambastes them for harping on the “woman question,” which haunts the novel with its articulation of women’s desires vis-à-vis the men in their lives: “You acknowledge that society is savage and inhuman because it disgraces a seduced girl… But if she’s been hurt, why, then, do you yourselves bring her out in front of that same society and demand that it not hurt her!” It is a sermon worthy of record, and yet it vanishes in the noise of polite indifference.

Among the assembled is Ippolit Terentyev, a dying youth whose intellect burns as his body fails. His “Necessary Explanation,” a swan song in letter form that he insists on reading aloud, is both confession and defiance. “People are created to torment each other,” he proclaims. Confronting the same Holbein painting, he asks, “[H]ow could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect?” and later, “Can something that has no image come as an image?” For Ippolit, faith is cruelty postponed. “Let consciousness be lit up by the will of a higher power,” he muses, “and let that power suddenly decree its annihilation… let it be so.” His despair is a dark parody of Myshkin’s compassion: both see too clearly to live comfortably among men.

Myshkin, whose “head worked quite distinctly, though his soul was sick,” stands apart. Love is denied him not by fate but by incompatibility with a world that feeds on contradiction. His tenderness for Aglaya withers into disillusion; his pity for Nastasya curdles into dread. Like a puzzle piece that almost fits, he must be left aside until the picture itself changes.

And what of the others? They collapse one by one under the weight of their vanity, leaving the prince almost alone, a gold-foiled icon among ruins.

In one of the novel’s most terrifying moments, Dostoevsky describes Myshkin’s seizure: “A dreadful, unimaginable scream, unlike anything, bursts from the breast… it may even seem as if someone else were screaming from inside the man.” The cry is metaphysical; it is the scream of all creation recognizing itself. To read The Idiot is to experience that seizure, to awaken, trembling, in the aftermath of one’s own delusions. Its absurdity, like its truth, is more real than reality itself. Dostoevsky does not offer resolution; he offers revelation. And when we close the book, the echo of that scream remains: terrible, holy, and alive.

Getting Some Air: Gasping Through Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

| Tyran Grillo

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
–Matthew 6:6

Rodion Romanovich Raskalnikov is a murderer. To say as much is to betray everything and nothing about Crime and Punishment, the plot of which he is the central protagonist. But what has he—and will he—become? Such is the bigger question Fyodor Dostoevsky examines throughout his 1866 masterpiece.

In its opening act, we see enough of Raskalnikov’s contemplations to know that he is an unsettled individual, one who lives in the shadows because there is so little light to be had. Stepping out from his rented closet one hot July evening, “as if indecisively,” he is already waist-deep in melancholia. His modest lodgings do not constitute a place of rest or meditation. If anything, he has turned the Bible verse quoted above on its head. Rather than pray to the Father, he throws the doors of his heart wide open to the Devil, whose ever-encroaching impulses are given the freedom to sow themselves in his soil and absorb the tainted nutrients of his self-aggrandizement.

It is no surprise that the first words he utters are not to a friend, a person on the street, or to us. Rather, they are to himself. Internal dialogue is his magnetic north, and in following it, he leads us by proxy into a web of characters so electric and alive (even, if not especially, those hurtling toward death) that his fate can only be an object of our curiosity. Before we get to know him, he is already wondering: “Am I really capable of that?” thus alluding, of course, to the murder he has already contemplated and played out in his head and which, almost in the same breath, he dismisses as fantasy. And yet, fantasy is more than the realization of a desire. It is the very force by which he learns to desire. So strong is this drive that he begins to question whether it comes from within or from without. “If not reason, then the devil!” he spits forth, pitting the impulse to kill in a false dichotomy. So, too, does the Devil cloak himself in reason.

Or, more accurately, if not pure reason, then its tainted cousin of casuistry, the process by which the baseless effort to justify immorality becomes a self-fulfilling Ouroboros. This is why we so often find Raskalnikov talking to himself and why passersby take him to be a careless drunk. In his mind, the answers to all moral questions have been primed and ready but must be taken by force to ring true. Ironically, this may just be the most genuine thing about him.

Of the catalytic murder, the victim of which, Alyona Ivanovna, is universally hated for her shady pawnbrokering and abusive nature, we are given a relatively brief and merciless account, so that by the time the deed is done, we are invited to regard it with visceral dismissal. In the subsequent adrenaline rush, he becomes enchanted by its unfolding, as well as by the fact that an unsuspecting second victim had to be involved after walking in on the scene in progress. The translator’s introduction rightly puts it this way: “Crime and Punishment is a highly unusual mystery novel: the most mystified character in it is the murderer himself.”

That said, one would be mistaken in thinking that Raskalnikov’s torment is a result of his heinous crime. He has been in its clutches long before we first encounter him. It did not come pouring in from a tear in the fabric of time the moment he wielded that fatal axe. It is the result of the exhausting back and forth between his heart and soul that has besought him since childhood. Hence, the dream he has early on in the novel, in which he takes the form of a boy regarding a crowd of drunken rabble-rousers in the rural town where he grew up. Fearful of their coarseness, he clings to his father, a figure now absent in his life and perhaps already a model of indifference then. One of the men launches into a verbal tirade that culminates in him beating a horse to death in full view of the assembled onlookers. Young Raskalnikov cannot bear the sight, and neither can his adult self. After the dream, “the mere thought of it made me vomit in realityand plunged me into horror,” even while knowing that the manner in which the horse was dispatched reflects his desire to carry out the same. Furthermore, on the night of the murder, we are told, “never for a single moment during the whole time could he believe in the feasibility of his designs,” as if this were an excuse for their imminent manifestation.

It is significant, too, that the killer in his dream should be named Mikolka, a diminutive of Nikolas that means “victory of the people.” It conveys, in no uncertain terms, that if the destitute are to find a way out of their predicament, it must be done through violence. All of which points to a sociopolitical subtext that becomes more familiar as the narrative progresses. It is the very idealism that has buried its talons in Raskalnikov’s mind to the point of needing to overthrow the established mechanisms of power under which he knows order and, to risk belaboring the word, reason. He wants so much to rank among the “geniuses” who inhabit his waking thoughts, when he is still nothing more than the dreamed-of boy seeking refuge in his father in the face of senseless killing.

Various names, it turns out, are equally emblematic of inner tensions. Raskolnikov, for one, comes from the word raskolnik, meaning “schismatic,” referring to religious separatism while also implying a splitting of self. And then there is the friend from his university days, Dmitri Prokofich Razumikhin, whose surname means “to bring to reason.” Indeed, it is Razumikhin who cuts to the quick of our antihero with almost indulgent aplomb as he strives to “make a human being out of you, after all.” It is also he who helps us throw the parameters of his decrepit reunitee’s worldview into relief. According to said worldview, he observes, “crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social order—that alone and nothing more.” So it is that Raskalnikov’s justificational acrobatics trace a roadmap of interpretation for our benefit. As his enthusiastic acquaintance goes on to say, “Nature isn’t taken into account, nature is driven out, nature is not supposed to be.” Which is entirely accurate because Socialism, in its quest to vanquish hierarchy and oppression, fails to recognize that we are always at war with ourselves. In rejecting the notion of a living soul, it reduces the human condition to unalloyed materialism.

Others are quick to interject their own opinions on these nascent ideals. Among them is Porfiry Petrovich, lead investigator of Alyona’s murder, who is duly fascinated by an article that his main suspect once published titled “On Crime.” Porfiry summarizes its thesis as follows:

“The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because they are, after all, ordinary. While the extraordinary have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary.”

To which its author replies:

“I merely suggested that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right…that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to…step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea—sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind—calls for it.”

Here, we are given insight into his intellectual straw grasping. For even as Raskalnikov expresses this sentiment, he must already know that the philosophy of fulfillment is, at best, a phonetically borrowed loan word in the translation of his life. Still, he is insistent on one thing:

“I only believe in my main idea. It consists precisely in people being divided generally, according to the law of nature, into two categories: a lower one, ordinary people, who are, so to speak, material serving solely for the reproduction of their own kind; and people proper—that is, those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment.”

Phrased differently, instead of simply reproducing through what is natural, the extraordinary creates something out of nothing through what is supernatural. Raskalnikov fancies himself, or at least would like to be, one of those “extraordinary” people who reject God yet wish to hold His power.

And so, his search for redemption ends up being a recapitulation of what makes him so flawed in the first place: namely, his humanity. Unable to take Nihilism to its most logical conclusion yet incapable of playing the role of the young radical, either, he is forced to choose between himself and…himself. With nowhere left to run but inward, he cracks his conscience open like an egg, scrambles the contents, and throws them into the gaping mouths of his listeners. Among those caught in his defenestrations is Sonya Semyonova Marmeladov, the daughter of a former official-turned-alcoholic.

During a climactic meeting with Sonya, Raskalnikov asks her to read to him the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, as recorded in chapter 11 of the Gospel of John. In listening to it, he is met by his greatest adversary: God himself. He may not believe in the Bible, but the weight of it is too much for his feeble shoulders. Even in a mind pierced by existential ennui, he has to admit that some things are best left untouched. Either way, the “second chance” offered in Lazarus’s resurrection is undeniably alluring to the bedraggled idealist, who leverages this intimate connection with Sonya as an opportunity to impatiently unlock too many doors in the advent calendar of his heart far ahead of Christmas, so to speak. When he tells her that “it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!” he is at once revealing his weakness and the fact that his remorse has nothing to do with the crime itself but with its aftermath. But no such act can occur in a vacuum, and this realization pains him to no end. In his attempts to blame the demonic for choices that were ultimately his own, he is no different than the “ordinary” people of his disdain.

At the same time, he is assaulted by an all-consuming apathy, which is, beyond the carnival laughter that is the novel’s leitmotif, the key signature of his life. As our narrator would have it: “Evil is the final ambiguity. Reason cannot accept it; rationalizing ideologies denies its existence.” In light of this, we can see that indifference is the greatest horror, as typified by the following narratorial observation: “His heart was empty and blank. He did not want to reflect. Even his anguish had gone; and not a trace remained of his former energy, when he had left the house determined to ‘end it all!’ Total apathy had taken its place.”

In reading this, I was reminded of what English preacher Charles Spurgeon, who was sermonizing at the same time Dostoevsky was penning his novel, and for whom indifference or lethargy was one of the most wicked influences on the convicted soul and something to be struggled against:

“I would far rather have a man an earnest, intense opposer of the gospel than have him careless and indifferent. You cannot do much with a man if he will not speak about religion, or will not come to hear what you have to say concerning the things of God. You might as well have him a downright infidel, like a very leviathan covered with scales of blasphemy, as have him a mere earth-worm wriggling away out of reach.”

We might easily lay this polemical transparency over Raskalnikov’s life, which marks time by the rhythms of a dank and battered city, itself a force of influence on almost every page.Appropriately enough, it takes the utterly deplorable Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, former employer of Raskalnikov’s sister and an unrepentant sensualist, to give us an accurate characterization of the same when he soliloquizes: “One seldom finds a place where there are so many gloomy, sharp, and strange influences on the soul of man as in Petersburg.”

Not one to be proselytized to, Raskalnikov is quick to call out Svidrigailov for enigmatizing an environment that feeds so readily into his lecherous lifestyle. To this, Svidrigailov replies:

“In this debauchery there’s at least something permanent, even based on nature, and not subject to fantasy, something that abides in the blood like a perpetually burning coal, eternally inflaming, which for a long time, even with age, one may not be able to extinguish so easily. Wouldn’t you agree that it’s an occupation of sorts?”

From the perspective of one who has no real occupation (when asked at one point what he does for work, he responds, “I think”), Raskalnikov knows there is nothing to be had in this dialogue. Svidrigailov’s solution to their intellectual quagmire is to proclaim that “what every man of us needs is air, air, air, sir.” However, this is a false proposition, for where can one find air in a place that suffocates by default?

As the most obvious foil for Raskalnikov, Svidrigailov exaggerates some of his traits while subverting others in aggregate. He makes no excuses for himself and, if anything, seems to rather enjoy his position of authority insofar as he, too, is able to deprive others of breath without apparent consequence. At one point in their exchange, he also offers the clearest characterization of Raskalnikov himself:

“You walk out of the house with your head still high. After twenty steps you lower it and put your hands behind your back. You look but apparently no longer see anything either in front of you or to the sides. Finally you begin moving your lips and talking to yourself, sometimes freeing one hand and declaiming, and finally you stop in the middle of the street for a long time.”

In addition to painting him in stark likeness, and because he renders what was once a private detail into a barbed fact, he exposes the hypocrisy of Nihilism, which is supposed to be a net positive by treating everything (and everyone) as expendable, liberating the self from the shackles of accountability. And yet, Raskalnikov is constantly seeking judgment, inviting it from near and far, all the while shocked at his own insolence for letting certain incriminating details slip. The effect is such that he constantly attributes meetings to chance and miracle (“it was as if someone had come to his service”) when it’s clear he had a conscious hand in their denouement. Even when he tries to rationalize his violence through some sort of Robin Hood complex (“For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption”), he goes against the grain of his faith by upholding a moral good.

What distinguishes Nihilism from the Postmodernism of today is that, where the former avows that everything is equally meaningless, the latter claims that everything is equally meaningful. Common to both extremes, however, is the broken promise that either can be a viable escape from the suffering of living in a world bound by sin. What he fears the most is being thought of as innocent, which is why he is so perplexed by how he attracts sympathy and affection without even trying. “But why do they love me so, when I’m unworthy of it!” he cries toward the novel’s conclusion. “Oh, how I hate them all!” If anything, however, his hatred is not of people but of the mercy they carry like a cross, for it is the middle ground he cannot bear to inhabit. By the same token, mercy is the only possibility for redemption and shows that he was never cut out to be a dutiful anarchist. As Dostoevsky so eloquently phrases it: “He would have given anything in the world to be left alone, yet he felt himself that he could not have remained alone for a minute.”

As Raskalnikov gets closer to the possibility of a turnaround, he cannot entertain his lack of resolve as anything other than a failure of principle. Unlike the men of influence he admires from afar, whose exploits were never punished and who “endured their steps” with profound and domineering indifference, he grants himself no right to take that step, and this he regards as his greatest crime: not that he took a human life but that he failed to endure his own steps, deferring instead to confession.

If the only chance at escape is to hit rock bottom, if appreciating life is built on denying its inherent value, then he must be willing to undergo the ideological detox that primes him for love’s fresh coat of paint. Because no matter how much he may deny it, we were never designed to live alone.

*The images in this review were created using artificial intelligence (specifically, ChatGPT). The words they accompany were created using actual intelligence (specifically, my own).

Windfall Light: The Visual Language of ECM

| Tyran Grillo
Windfall Light

“You wish to see, listen; hearing is a step towards vision.”
–Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1090-1153)

The act of looking has long been likened to that of listening. Visual art, by no mere coincidence, is often spoken of in compositional terms, as great paintings and sculptures may be likened to symphonies in complexity and coordination. In music itself, sight reading is the quintessential form of looking as listening: The studied mind can track attention across a score and hear the music without a single musician present. But what of listening as an act of looking? Such has been the ethos of ECM Records since its inception.

Although the label has come to have a certain “look” to its admirers, it achieves in its aesthetic presentation not a look but a sound. One listens to an ECM album cover—be it a somber black-and-white photograph, an abstract painting, or a typographic assembly—by hearing it through the eyes. Although the images themselves are not necessarily reflective of the music, and only occasionally of those performing it, they do provide a framework for the disc sheathed within. As was already demonstrated in this book’s predecessor, Sleeves of Desire: A Cover Story, an ECM album is a liminal reality in which the self before and the self after find cohesion at the intersection of life and art.

In the case of ECM, it’s not the cover that necessarily provides insight into the music but, if anything, the music that provides insight into the cover. One example that comes immediately to mind is the montage that graces Pat Metheny’s New Chautauqua:

What could Dieter Rehm’s photo of the Autobahn between Zurich and Munich have to do with such a distinctly American sound? Perhaps nothing when viewed from that POV. But flip the telescope around, turning it into a microscope, and the open road now becomes a universal call to nomadism and to the magnitude of the unknown, of which Metheny’s music is a maverick flagbearer. And herein lies the attraction of the ECM-album-as-object: It invites us to step outside our skins as a way of more fully inhabiting them.

“In terms of the gaze,” writes Jean-Luc Nancy, “the subject is referred back to itself as object. In terms of listening, it is to itself that the subject refers or refers back.” It may feel natural to separate these two acts. Still, the full package of an ECM album turns closed circuits into open ones, reconnecting us with something childlike, primal if you will, by allowing us to feel that tingle of excitement every time we press PLAY and, after five seconds of anticipation, are thrown into some of the most beautiful dislocations imaginable in recorded music. As La Monte Young once put it to Tony Conrad: “Isn’t it wonderful if someone listens to something he is ordinarily supposed to look at?” Indeed, we can be sure of reuniting with that same wonder when experiencing the unusual harmony that can only be found between such a counterpoint of sound and image. For how can one behold Jim Bengston’s stark monochromatic landforms on Lachrymae and not want to traverse them with Paul Hindemith’s Trauermusik as guide?

Not only is there a relationship to be found between covers and the albums they grace, but there is also much to discover in new juxtapositions. Because the images in Windfall Light are presented somewhat thematically, whether by photographer or visual motif, we are invited to explore associations we might not otherwise have made. One noteworthy spread, for example, pairs Robert Schumann: In Concert with Angel Song, thereby stimulating our curiosity for the unseen electricity between them.

Furthermore, the book contains five richly varied essays to immerse ourselves in.

In “When Twilight Comes,” German journalist Thomas Steinfeld dutifully expresses the viability of ECM’s visual identity as necessarily open-ended: “None of these pictures is an illustration in the narrow sense of the word. None of them refers to either the music or the musicians as a decoration. None of them pretends to give an interpretation or even to be interpreted on its own.” They are, rather, accompaniments. “Each is a hieroglyph,” he goes on to say, “free from much of its potential meaning, a work of dreamlike qualities, taken from nothing, a sudden objection against the profane and its often inescapable presence.” Steinfeld also notes the prevalence of water in ECM album covers—not as a reflective but a dynamic force—in addition to abstracts, street scenes, and less definable paeans to silence. Regarding the rare portraits of the actual featured musicians (Paul Motian, Meredith Monk, Keith Jarrett, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Charles Lloyd, etc.), he wonders: “Is this an accident, an honor, a matter of circumstance, or devotion?”

Author and museum curator Katharina Epprecht goes a step further in evoking the term “Transmedia Images.” By the title of her contribution, she means to suggest that ECM’s covers possess an interdisciplinary adjacency. Rather than being tautological loops, they are part of a “vast puzzle,” each a doorway into other senses and materialities. Thus, it is not the image’s ability to illustrate the music but rather “the immensely refined way that it handles unexpected shifts of meaning” that any listener will inevitably encounter. And while the images may be “based on correspondence to the character and quality of the music,” they are not beholden to it. Hence their potential as catalysts for personal transformation. “[T]he carefully packaged silver discs,” she waxes most literally, “are light and portable companions through life, motivating us to engage in contemplation, to pause for a moment.” In that respect, they allow us to understand more about our place in the world by questioning the many borders we draw around, through, over, and under it. Epprecht even provides a quintessential example of her own in Re: Pasolini:

Of this cover, she observes the following: “All of the gracious Virgin Mary’s senses are concentrated on her child, while the ears of the donkey unconsciously and reflexively register every sound. The instinctive perception of animals is unbiased and undeviating. I can think of no other picture that more touchingly elevates maternal attentiveness and unadulterated hearing to a metaphor.” Therefore, it’s as much the choice of image as its content that inspires us to regard the old as new, and vice versa.

British writer Geoff Andrew takes us yet another step deeper into intersectionality in “Leur musique: Eicher/Godard – Sound/Image.” Here, the concern is with the cinematic awareness that has long been at the heart of producer Manfred Eicher’s approach to mise-en-scène. Because both he and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard are fond of “juxtaposing, combining and mixing up elements which most people in their respective fields would never dream of bringing together,” it was only natural that Godard’s work would come to be associated with such seminal recordings as Suspended Night, which features a still from his mangum opus, Histoire(s) du Cinema, and Soul of Things, which references Éloge de l’amour:

Where the latter film also gives us Norma Winstone’s Distances, we have the former to thank also for Words of the Angel, Morimur, Requiem for Larissa, Songs of Debussy and Mozart, and Voci.

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Perhaps not surprisingly, these are already borrowings from other sources—quotations of quotations (and is not classical music the same?). Other Godard touchpoints include Notre musique for Asturiana and Passion for Cello and Trivium.

And let us not forget the soundtracks of Godard’s own Nouvelle Vague and the above-mentioned Histoire(s) du Cinema.

One could hardly imagine such a book as Windfall Light without including the perspective of at least one ECM musician, and in pianist and composer Ketil Bjørnstad, we are given a most suitable ambassador. In “Landscapes and Soundscapes,” he looks not at the spatial but at the temporal. In speaking of the timeless quality of the covers, he notes a preference for monochrome and Nordic landscapes and atmospheres. “Being produced by Manfred Eicher is a purification process for a musician,” he reveals. In so doing, he leaves an implied question hanging in the air: Does a cover photograph or painting also undergo a sort of purification process? When disassociated from its original context, does not the image open itself to infinite possibilities? Bjørnstad again: “Just as great composers and painters are recognizable down to the smallest phrase or brushstroke, ECM’s music and visual world are recognizable without the slightest danger of anyone calling this stagnation.” Thus, the more this recognition settles in our gray matter, the more we come to equate the landscape with the soundscape.

Last but certainly not least is “Polyphonic Pictures” by Lars Müller, whose publishing imprint has given us this fine volume. His offering is a relatively zoomed-out perspective on the questions at hand. Going so far as to describe the covers and music of ECM as “libertarian”—at least in the sense that they elide the intervention of power structures that all too often infect recorded media—he characterizes them as “afterimages of memorized circumstances far more than they are depictions of things that have been seen.” In that sense, they grow with listeners in connection to lived experience. This take resonates with me at the deepest personal level, as even one glimpse of a beloved album cover invokes a reel of memories, associations, and impressions. Rather than their technical aspects, it is their eventfulness, their movement in stillness, and their visceral foundations that make them come alive. And so, in his ordering and layout of the images, he has created for us a self-avowed “visual score.” Ultimately, they are only as delible as the paper they’re printed on, and so they can only live on in the mind’s eye, which, if it’s not obvious by now, is more accurately depicted as an ear.

Charlie Rauh: Simply, Patiently, Quietly (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

It would be easy to say that guitarist, composer, and producer Charlie Rauh charts a territory all his own. But to fall into that cliché would risk eliding the tender graces that have fueled his endeavors from the beginning. He averts his eyes from the road less traveled, setting his heart instead on that still bearing the footprints of ancestors related either by blood or artistic heritage. Whether tuning his guitar like a microscope to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley or Anne and Emily Brontë or flipping it around like a telescope in the warmth of such albums as Viriditas and Hiraeth, he never lets go of the human condition as a central concern.

This debut musical treatise bears the subtitle “An Approach to Creating Intentional Music.” And yet, what is so refreshing about the narrative offered in these pages is that you need not be a musician, intentional or otherwise, to benefit from its insights. Central among them is that we tend to back down from the passion projects we hold dear in our youth. As time tempers these into rote platitudes (“hobbies at best, hidden out of embarrassment at worst,” he notes in the Foreword), we treat their recession as inevitable. This is, perhaps, one reason why literary works and all the paratextual experiences they entail have been integral to his oeuvre for so long. In that sense, he is as much a translator as a composer.

In the first section, “Simply,” he reflects on his time studying improvisation with jazz pianist Connie Crothers. Instead of bowing to the (relatively recent) convention that tells us simplicity is a bad thing, he embraces it as “a pure distillation of identifiable quality” that allows complexity to breathe. I cannot help but liken it to a line drawing of a wing versus a massive Baroque painting filled with saints and cherubim. The burden of proof on the creator of the former is deeper in the sense that every line speaks nakedly on the page, whereas in the latter, the margin for self-indulgence is greater yet more easily concealed. What Rauh realized at a key turning point in his growth as a musician was that complicating matters with business wasn’t the end goal. It was tapping into the childlike curiosity that such veneers, fragile as they are, do a surprisingly good job of hiding. This does not mean that one must “devolve” but that one must be willing to be vulnerable. And when we are vulnerable, we confront the question of who we are in spite of ourselves.

“Patiently” brings us into the spiritual weeds, through which every glimpse of sunshine becomes a tether to hope. More than that, it is the ultimate expression of love (think, for example, of the long-suffering God who stays his hand so that we might learn from our mistakes). And so, patience is not about proving your limits of tolerance but about faith as the evidence of things unseen. As Rauh humbly admits, “This is easier said than done, and despite my best wishes, I cannot claim that I am fully in tune with the concept as it applies to my life.” Amen, and amen.

Patience, too, is a mode of healing. It is the promise of strength fulfilled and renewed through the perseverance of the human (and animal) spirit. By tempering our fears, it gives room to stretch out our egos and cut them into millions of pieces. On the practical side, patience makes it “not only acceptable but optimal to leave spaces in your workflow.” Without those spaces, we lose sight of ourselves and what we are capable of. The moment we say we have arrived is probably when we need to check our assurance at the door and start singing again for its own sake.

The book’s third act, “Quietly,” is where the soul comes most readily into play. That said, quietude isn’t some mystical state of being in which one achieves unity with the universe but rather a recognition that the melodies of our lives need volition to seek one another out. And that is where the youthful essence from which we have distanced ourselves must be fished from within. Children are nothing if not intentional, and such clarity of expression is where we get our profoundest ideas. To be silent is to see ourselves no longer through the filters of camera lenses and computer screens but rather in the naked truth of the proverbial mirror. In so doing, we realize just how noisy we are inside.

I am reminded of an anecdote involving John Cage, who stepped into an anechoic chamber with the intention of experiencing true silence, only to discover that the faint sounds of his circulating blood and nervous system rendered that concept moot. This experience happened to be the inspiration behind his infamous composition 4’33”, for which the performer sits quietly in front of a piano for the titular duration without playing a single note. In hindsight, what was so disturbing about the piece’s premiere wasn’t necessarily that Cage was poking fun at the academy or even philosophically questioning the very definition of music; it was the fact that the performer ceased to matter. Thus, to experience 4’33” live is to be flooded with all sorts of internal voices. In wrestling with this same tension, Rauh concludes that the result of quiet music isn’t boredom or relaxation but power. It also tests our mettle as listeners and clues us in on the creed of patience. “When the rest falls away,” he observes, “all that is left is all we can give.”

No review of this superbly rendered meta-statement would be complete without mentioning the contributions of his sister, Christina Rauh Fishburne, whose illustrations are the glue that binds. By turns whimsical and contemplative, they work in counterpoint to the text without ever intruding. One in particular, which appears on page 24, speaks to the nostalgia of this reader/viewer. Its depiction of curiosity, stripped of all the baggage that adults bring to this impulse, teeters on the edge of interpretation. It is also the first of a sequence of images that home in on key aspects of the words preceding them.

Whether in the domestic comforts of a life without clear and present dangers or in the wider view of time and its inevitable entropy, Fishburne’s ability to pull out memories we never knew we had is a blessing and a comfort. As a segue into the scores included herein, they are denizens of a time capsule that is itself the curio of another time capsule. Of said scores, the musically inclined among us get access to a swath of moods. From lullabies to choral settings, they offer plenty of soil in which to plant and water seeds of communion, assuring us that we can rest our heads on pillows of wonder every night, knowing there is only more to come when day breaks.

Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

If I were to dump out a puzzle from its box and ask you to put it together, you’d likely start with the edge pieces, as we’ve all been taught to do. Recently, however, while watching my seven-year-old assemble one of his own, I realized this isn’t necessarily the best strategy. The puzzle he was working on was circular, and the circumference was uniformly white, surrounding a clear design in the center. From his perspective, it only made sense to start with what was fully articulated and work outward from there.

Arvo Pärt had the same effect on me.

Before encountering his Te Deum decades ago, I used to approach listening from the periphery, tracing the container from without before diving into the matter within. That blending of voices and strings, anchored by piano and wind harp, did not make its skin immediately obvious. Rather, it offered its heart front and center before veins, bones, and garments emerged through years of regard.

And now, Joonas Sildre’s Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Languagedoes the same for the Estonian composer who didn’t so much redefine modernism as turn it inside out to remind us of where it originates.

I recently spoke with Sildre, who had the following to say when I asked him about the genesis of this project:

“During the early 2000s, I became a huge fan and admirer of Pärt’s music through a friend who had gifted me a CD ‘mixtape’ of his music. At the time, I was also on a spiritual journey in the early phases of Christianity. This certainly heightened my admiration of this music, which became the soundtrack of that journey. I was never very interested in Pärt as a person because I had learned that if you like someone’s music, their personality (or the availability of that information) does not add much to it. In 2005, it became apparent that this was the opposite in the case of Pärt: There was a 15-part radio show on Estonian Classical radio about his life (made by Immo Mihkelson). Listening to it and him talking about life, art, and spirituality, I recognized these topics to be dear to my heart, but rarely did I hear anyone expressing these things in union. At the time, in the early 2000s, I was looking for a story to tell in graphic novel format—when hearing Pärt’s radio interview, things clicked for me. There was no question of a different format.”

Immersed in the result of that journey, I am reminded of my own spiritual awakening, for which Pärt’s music was always a leitmotif, a call (at times clarion, at others whispered) that inspired sympathetic resonance into my very core. It’s only natural, then, that Sildre’s book should proceed in a musical manner.

As a visual composition, Between Two Sounds proceeds like something Pärt himself might have constructed (and how can I not smile at the similarity with my blog’s title?). We meet the composer in the dark, walking a line from eternity to eternity, his musings floating almost unrealistically in space. It takes effort to admit that the words have meaning and are not tricks of draft and debris across the unswept floor of time.

Golgotha, a place of the skull, the hill where death for one offered life to all, reminds us of the dark well from which God draws light. Directing the gaze and ears thusward seeds a relationship between flesh and spirit that can only be articulated through art.

Beyond these introspections, which stipple the larger narrative with resounding grace, we leap through Pärt’s chronological development. From his birth in Paide and early childhood in Rakvere to his confrontations with Soviet censorship and flourishing under the tutelage of Heino Eller at the Tallinn Conservatory, we are gifted a dynamic biography that seems to leap from the page, if not sometimes also sink into it. While that story is astonishing in and of itself (a particularly tense scene finds Pärt nearly losing his scores and tapes on the verge of his emigration to Europe), key moments speak across the years and geographical borders to my heart.

In doing his research for the biographical angle of the book, I wonder how it changed Sildre’s perception of the man himself as they came to know each other from acquaintances to friends:

“Pärt talks of another level where the music comes from. I’d like to think that connections and friendships also happen on that level, and there, we were friends even before I met him personally. During the years the work took, of course, I learned much more about him as a person, his life, music, and spirituality. I saw Pärt as a regular human, yet he always remained ‘not regular’ to me. He could be very simple and very deep at the same time (or at different times)—I guess this is almost a scientific definition of a genius. What surprised me is that Pärt, whom I had seen and learned from his music and his words, was actually himself, not some projection as it usually happens to be among public personas. Like he says (paraphrasing): In order to put Tintinnabuli music to paper, he actually had to change as a human being.”

That change develops through listening in Pärt’s early years. As a boy who learned on a broken piano, he comes to seek an upright language in a fallen world:

The line between “public” and “private” disappears in these moments of abandon, much to the humor of those around him. And yet, he reveres the notes on their terms, allowing their credo to suffice for what passes as communication in his immediate environment. The more he hears, the more he and everything around him pass into silhouette, not so much under the loudspeaker as a part of it.

The graphic novel is filled with novel graphics. Most remarkable among them is Sildre’s explicit visualization of notes.

Despite the apparent aggressiveness of their passage through the air, theirs is not so much a spirit of confrontation as of enlightenment. With the premiere of each new work, those fortunate enough to have been present are shaken to the core by a thrum to which they had, until then, turned a muffled ear:

“I did not want to use notes as they are a specific language for musicians; regular people cannot read and understand them. If I used them, even in a decorative way, the average readers would always feel that maybe they were missing something. So, I needed to step away from that language, but not too far. I ended up with the ‘dot and line’ method that I developed throughout the book. The look of these symbols would hint at the emotion and content of any given musical piece. With dots, I could use many design language tricks: size, placement, quantity, light and dark value, and context. Lines would symbolize the time but also the emotion: jagged lines versus smooth lines. A circle had an extra feature. It could also be used as a speech bubble or thought. So, overall, this small invention became very handy for telling that story. It became an intuitively understandable visual language.”

Sildre creates a tapestry with blank patches that can only be filled through hearing. Perhaps the longest thread running through this tapestry is one of religion, as Pärt’s conversion to the Greek Orthodox faith unfolds in a chain of snow and spring. His composition Sarah Was Ninety Years Old is a recurring stitch, beginning with his first exposure to his grandmother’s Bible and continuing throughout his life. The drums are the rhythm of salvation, the rapping of Christ’s knuckles on the heart’s splintered door.

And so, we are invited to close our eyes, open our ears, and release ourselves from the bondage of our sins. Although everything we think and do is imperfect, Pärt seems to say, we should never stop reaching for perfection. Because there is One who is perfect, and every song we sing must fill the footprints He left behind.


Sildre echoes this sentiment:

“Upon meeting Pärt, I had a feeling that he had so much old cultural heritage in him; he felt almost like he was from the ancient world. I had never met a person who would have so many ties to the old. At the same time, as time passed, I was pondering that the mentality and love Pärt expresses must be the future of humankind. So, he is from the past and future at the same time! It may sound strange, but this is still my strong feeling about him as a person.”

All of which connects to his aspiration for the book:

“I hope that the people who have not heard Pärt’s music will find it. And I hope that people who know his music will learn that there is a miraculous story behind the miraculous music.”

If there is any miracle to be found here, it is in knowing that human beings are capable of glimpsing the divine, however temporarily, all the while knowing that eternity is the only altar on which our humility can be laid with blessed assurance.