Somewhere beyond the last remembered melody, a room is waiting for us to remember that no human being belongs entirely to memory. Its confines continue to breathe long after the drywall of experience has surrendered to oblivion, while the invisible inhabitants of its past move through one another with the exquisite indifference of ghosts who have misplaced the circumstances of their deaths. Perhaps memory has always been an elaborate misunderstanding between presence and disappearance, a clandestine negotiation through which consciousness persuades itself that what has passed remains available for retrieval. We inhabit the ruins of our own becoming, adorning their corridors with images whose origins grow increasingly illegible, trusting in the fragile hospitality of recognition to shelter us from the terrifying possibility that our lives have already begun to forget us. Music offers a particularly seductive refuge from this predicament. Its repetitions confer upon transience the illusion of permanence, allowing what has vanished to return under the auspices of a familiar cadence. Yet beneath every recurrence lies an infinitesimal displacement, a subtle estrangement through which the present discovers its inability to coincide with its former incarnations. The melody remembers something its listener cannot, even as the listener attributes to its unfolding an intimacy that may never have existed. Such is the beautiful treachery of nostalgia, whose most enduring achievement consists in transforming absence into an almost tactile substance. And somewhere beyond that substance, where the distinction between recollection and invention becomes impossible to sustain, an entire universe awaits its own unmaking.
Into this labyrinth of vanishing correspondences, James Leyland Kirby, under his spectral alter ego The Caretaker, deposits the extraordinary six-and-a-half-hour Everywhere At The End Of Time, a monumental undertaking whose six stages unfold across an increasingly unstable geography of remembrance. Conceived as an artistic meditation on the progression of dementia, the work excavates the exhausted glamour of antique ballroom recordings, letting their melodies circulate through successive degrees of distortion until the possibility of musical recognition begins to disintegrate. What initially glimmers with the tarnished elegance of an abandoned social ritual gradually submits to an acoustics of ontological bewilderment, where every recognizable fragment carries within itself the premonition of its eventual illegibility. Here, the phonograph becomes an instrument of metaphysical excavation, unearthing the remnants of experiences that have survived their own intelligibility. The grain of a recording acquires the density of an ancestral wound; a half-obscured orchestral phrase opens upon an abyss of unremembered tenderness. We hear these sounds through an elaborate inheritance of absences, for their original listeners have long since relinquished their places within the world. Even their anonymity acquires an almost unbearable intimacy. Somewhere a trumpet continues playing for a woman whose face has disappeared from every photograph, its metallic throat preserving an affection no living witness can authenticate. A piano bends toward an unfinished dance, waiting for the hands that once taught its notes the meaning of proximity. The music circulates through an impossibly elaborate genealogy of vanished encounters, offering itself as evidence for experiences whose existence we can neither establish nor deny. We recognize something. Perhaps we have always recognized it. Perhaps recognition itself is the first symptom of an error whose consequences have yet to disclose themselves.
When we push ourselves through these lenses, it is astonishing what details are revealed in the in-betweenness of light. There are windows of time, each a flushed cheek embarrassed by the hint of love, yet perpetually on the edge of awareness. Pianos reveal their inner organs, each atrophying at its own pace, so that marking the passage of life becomes an exercise in futility, its cessation indistinguishable from its inception. “It’s just a burning memory” opens upon an almost indecent tenderness, a melody whose apparent familiarity arrives already contaminated by the possibility of its disappearance. Its repetitions provide the illusion of reassurance, although each return seems to have misplaced an infinitesimal portion of its own history. The horns emerge from the depths of our hearts and lungs, transformed by their passage into the outside world, where the first touch of air begins to corrode their cause. Sometimes there is scarcely a melody to shelter, only the tragedy of old vinyl caught in its own unresolved crackling, a tiny mechanical caesura endlessly rehearsing the circumstances of its infliction. Yet how strangely beautiful this damage becomes when heard through the fragile hospitality of reminiscence. We begin to desire the deterioration itself, listening for scratches as evidence that something has endured the violence of time. There is an almost erotic confusion in this attachment, for the aggrieved recording offers us the impossible pleasure of approaching what we cannot restore. One might even imagine that every remembered life consists of a similar arrangement, its coherence sustained through repeated encounters with the places where coherence has already failed. Still, the melody continues, while in the back of the room, a person is standing beside a window. The window faces a garden, or perhaps the garden is a photograph. It is difficult to tell from this distance. The person turns. We know the face. We have seen it before, although the circumstances escape us. There is a name for this feeling. There must be.
The intervening stages make increasingly uncertain demands upon the grammar of recognition. “Misplaced in time” suggests an estrangement that has penetrated beyond the boundaries of any particular recollection, while “Denial unravelling” seems to describe a consciousness losing the very instruments through which refusal could be articulated. These compositions are extracted from their own cellular makeup, rendered into a serum to be circulated back through the self, where their supposed restorative properties disclose an intimate toxicity. An orchestral phrase begins with the conviction of arriving somewhere, only to discover that its destination has withdrawn from existence. The same interval returns, carrying a slightly different account of what preceded it. The ear attempts to gather these irregularities into a recognizable sequence, but the sequence has forgotten the principle by which its elements were once related. We might call this confusion, although the word assumes an earlier condition of clarity whose existence becomes increasingly suspect. Perhaps identity has always amounted to a provisional arrangement of memories whose coherence we mistake for an enduring self. Perhaps the assurance of consciousness depends upon the willingness of yesterday to answer when today calls its name. Yet something remains troubling about these formulations. Their elegance seems to presume a spectator capable of contemplating the erosion from an intact position of knowledge. How easily philosophy transforms another person’s vulnerability into a mirror for its own anxieties. How readily the aesthetic representation of dementia risks confusing the collapse of recognizable form with the disappearance of the person who once inhabited it. I want to preserve this distinction. I remember wanting to preserve it. There was something important here about the distance between listening and knowing, about the danger of imagining that another consciousness becomes available to us through the very act of depicting its inaccessibility. I had been following a thought through the music. It concerned the person beside the window. No, there was no person in the music. There was a window. I think the distinction matters.
By Stage 4, distortion has assumed an authority that the surviving melodies can no longer challenge. Familiar tunes take on the inevitability of decay, wearing it as a new skin against the current of a relentless decline. String remnants collide within enormous chambers of sound, their former relationships compressed into a density that resists interpretation. Snippets of memory, fragmentary conversations and unfinished sentences become the new normal, flashing in slow motion as though signaling to some faraway vessel that never answers back. The compositions seem to stretch themselves across impossible distances while contracting around a center that cannot be located. There are moments when a recognizable contour almost escapes the tumult, only to be drawn back into the machinery of its own disintegration. The ear searches for continuity and discovers that continuity has become a demand imposed upon something no longer capable of satisfying it. Somewhere a phrase is beginning again. It has already begun. Perhaps it never reached its conclusion. There was a piano here, its secrets exposed, each note struggling to maintain its place within an increasingly unfamiliar body. But the body has become difficult to distinguish from the room that contains it. The window is farther away now. The garden has moved behind the glass, although there is no longer any certainty that glass separates these spaces. Someone is speaking from another part of the house. The words arrive without their beginnings. I understand the endings, or remember understanding them. It seems essential that I answer, since silence might suggest I have not heard. But the question has gone. There is a terrible intimacy in being addressed by a voice whose claim upon us survives the disappearance of its identity. It makes the room larger. It makes the room smaller. There should be a word for the distance between those two sensations. I had it a moment ago.
In the fifth stage, the music inhabits an almost geological disorder. Its remnants move through enormous folds of sound, crushed beneath the accumulating weight of their own discontinuities. A brass inflection surfaces from somewhere. A small brightness. Something metallic turning beneath the floorboards. The sound seems familiar because it was here before, although before has become an uncertain direction. There is no reliable way of knowing whether the phrase belongs to the present recording or to an earlier one, whether it has returned or never departed. I remember the orchestra. I know there was an orchestra. A room crowded with people whose faces have become the spaces between their faces. There were hands, I think, and someone had been waiting beside the window. The hand was familiar. It moved toward something. A door, perhaps. The door was there when the music began. The music began in a room. I am trying to remember whose room. It seems important to know because someone will ask, and there should be an answer. The answer has a particular shape. I can almost hear its syllables turning somewhere behind the sound. They are very close, close enough to hurt. Yet the closer they come, the less certain I become that they belong to a word. There is another voice now. It could be the same voice. It speaks with the familiarity of someone who knows me, although I cannot understand how that knowledge has survived when mine has not. I should respond. I want to. The music is very far away. The music is inside the wall. Perhaps I am inside the wall. There was a distinction between these things once. I had been writing about it. About the difference between a person and the memory of a person. It seemed possible to explain. I was going to explain.
By the sixth stage, even the disturbances have begun to withdraw. The great collisions of sound recede into a dark and opaque mirror that has nothing left to give. There is a vastness here without distance. The instruments move beneath the surface of something that cannot be named. Somewhere, almost impossibly, a choral radiance appears, carrying the suggestion of a human multitude into a place where the individual voice has become difficult to imagine. I want to hear consolation in it. But consolation requires someone who can receive it, and I am no longer certain who is being addressed. The voices seem to know. They are singing from another room. The room was here. There was a door. I remember the door because someone had been standing beside it. Or waiting beyond it. They had something to tell me.
The words were important.
There was a name.
I knew the name. It belonged to someone I loved, or someone who loved me. I can remember the feeling of being known. It has no face now. It is moving through the room without finding a place to rest. Perhaps the name belonged to me. Perhaps someone had been calling it for a long time and I had forgotten that I was meant to answer.
There is a hand.
I know this hand.
No. I know that I should know it.
The fingers close around mine. There is a warmth that has nothing to do with remembering. Someone is speaking. The voice has been speaking for a long time. I have been waiting for it to become familiar before allowing myself to answer.
But someone is here.
Someone has been here.
Why do I keep asking for the name?
The hand is still holding mine.
I think I was trying to understand what happens to a person when the world can no longer recognize them. There was an argument. Something about identity, about the strange authority we give to memory. I wanted to say that a life might persist beyond the stories used to establish its existence. That a person could remain worthy of being addressed even when the language of response had begun to disappear.
I cannot remember the argument now.
There is only this hand.
The room is very quiet.
Someone says my name.
I have no name to give them.
They say it again.
And again.
I can hear that they are calling for someone. I want to tell them that someone is here, although I do not know how to tell them who.
They are waiting.
I am waiting.
The name is somewhere between us.
They keep calling.
I am answering.
They keep calling.
I am answering.
Why can they not hear me?
