FLURRIES

The Windows’ Leave (Ligatures for the Lovesick)

Rob Stone

“Love is his own architecture” Richard Crashaw

i) A Thief’s Virtue

“... their Sweetnes and unusual beauty made my Heart to leap, and almost mad with Extasie, they were such strange and Wonderfull Thing: The Men Immortal Cherubims Boys and Girles Tumbling in the Street, and Playing were Moving Jewels [....] Eternity was Manifest in the Light of Day, and Somthing Infinite Behind evry thing appeared: which talked with my Expectation and moved my Desire. The Citie seemed to stand in Eden, or to be Built in Heaven. The Streets were mine, the Temple was mine, the People were mine, their Clothes and Gold and Silver were mine, as much as their Sparkling Eys Fair Skins and ruddy faces. The Skies were mine, and so were the Sun and Moon and Stars, all the World was mine.” Thomas Traherne

There is a passage in Revelation: “And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God”. It means a lot, much of it virtuous, a kind of infusive morphology of good. Having fretted, for long enough, over such one-liners, and the virtual character of the meaning of urban space, a person may come to speculate on the comportment of inherent, rather than applied virtue. It depends, partly, on how archaically you take your virtuality, and on your willingness to exercise veins of fancy. To virtually love the city, its jostling temporalities, its sights not seen quite with eyes, and, especially those sounds not heard really with ears, may implicitly demand a necessary avoidance of the dismal. Something like a redemption or a transfiguration. To be somehow civicly-minded may mean to meaningfully lyricise ardency, gorgeousness and ecstasy; conciliation and fidelity, too. What would be wagered, in such a virtual figuration of the city, is sentiment. A politics, from here, would have to be a careful one. But, in any case, what would transpire from it would probably be an aesthetics; one which included a grammar of deportment, and not just a visual one either, an acoustic one, too, at least. Urban soteriologies, and the risks involved in toying with exaggerated, even spurious devotions to the city, are familiar (a thousand novels, a thousand poems, as it were). But, in the lovingly allegorical substitution of a city, for the city, so many – Genet, de Sica, Pasolini, Lawrence, as much as Traherne and Crashaw – have tellingly managed to evade both the grotesque and the saccharine. Genet’s jails, and Pasolini’s; de Sica’s suburbs, even Sidney Gilliat’s, have each had the city as a kind of civic stage on which everyday acts of malice, tenderness and misconstrued ambition become heroically historic, tragically significant moments of, perhaps, the recalling of virtue. And, in the regarding of such acts, comes a preferred language of ethical interpretation. Glory, inspiration, gravitas, justness, modesty, generosity, strength, prudence, truthfulness, dignity, continence, personal excellence, the recognition of a greater unified good. It is a long list of terms; the material of epitaphs. If this smacks of manly Christianity, that is hardly surprising. The rhetoric of the embodiment of civic virtue, has a long history, which embraces antique discourse as well as aspects of renewed, modern Christian thought. And, points between. It is not an unchanging history, though, and even at specific and describable historical moments, the meaning of civic virtue has never been selfsame. Like love, it has been different in each moment of its commitment. Interestingly, however, one thing has stayed with it; the idea of biography. It is difficult either to be told of, or to tell of one’s selves, without recourse to conventionally understandable conceit. The moment of biography implies a moment of the recognition, sometimes, of the unsatisfactory proximity of a self to a virtual, a literary, a poeticised self. An avatar. Part of biography is the understanding that even the description of a self, let alone the understanding of a self and of others’, comes through morphologies. The meaningfully unique, personal, private or idiosyncratic either evaporate into a nimbus, or become clearly, typically formal, as soon as a consensual biographic image is animated. At the same time, as a virtue, and in highlighting the simultaneity of selflessness and concuspience, that is, the ability to recognise another and to refer that other to its own significance, as well as, reflectively, to one’s own, love supplies the poetic architecture of tolerance and difference. Just as Genet. Biography then, is pivotal, and autobiography, no matter how formalised, is the biography, par excellence, of another. This is important in ways, because, strictly, and other than fictionally, the contemporary usage of the term virtual has only the littlest uses for notions of virtue and biography, civic or otherwise. There is a historical picture that may redeem and refigure this hiatus, though.

The Christianisation of virtues has involved a poetic movement, historically, from things remembered to things given and revealed, to things substituted, one in the place of another. This kind of immodestly schematic philology isn’t often useful, but the squabble between Socrates and Meno, as counted by Plato, as a description of civic virility, may be worth it, for now. This was a conversation to do with the realisation of the civic virtue as a relationship arising between Manliness and the City. Suggesting love as the virtue of the virtuous, the question was and remains one concerning the means of making virtue manifest and livable. Here, unteachable, virtue may only be conjured by reminding the soul that having seen it all always already it knows what virtue is. And it is achieved through allowing another to remind themselves, through small performances; each one pertinent to the individual and each one articulating a fidelious affection and attentive concern for the other. The civic domain here is again one dreamed as a stage populated by great actors, familiar enough as an image from the Eighteenth Brumaire. These are actors construed as those who have engaged consistently with this politics of love, as a matter of cognition of the city, as a state of relations which embody and realise the virtues of which governance is constituted. It is one of the reasons, perhaps, for the significance of a special mode of post mortem biography in late antiquity; the epitaphs monumentally listing the apparent virtues, the civic identity, of the dead.

But this remains far from the kind of understanding of Christianised virtue, the ecstatic capacity for salutary action, that perhaps people like Traherne and Crashaw knew. In those mildly pornographic pieces cited above: Crashaw’s erotically charged On a Prayer Book Sent to Mrs. M. R, and Traherene’s famous passage from the Third Century, is always a sense of virtue waiting to be bestowed rather than remembered. Crashaw’s “luminous trances … soul-piercing glances”, and “pure and subtle lightning” which does not “ask the windows’ leave to pass that way”, as well as his celebrated and absolute committment to the ugly turn of phrase, evoke both an at once furtive and irresistible amorousness, as well as a supernatural visitation of good. In the western, Christian reinterpretations of antique philosophy and civics, via, at various moments, Gerome, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius Loyola, unsurprisingly in each case, perhaps, though the mode of epitaphic biography remains largely formally unaltered as a listing of appropriately telling virtues, the perceived source of virtue changed. The figuration of virtues as things miraculously bestowed as evidence of divine relation occurs dually. Once as one of the choirs of the celestial heirarchy, and again as the proof of saintliness. I’ll come back to the former. However, it is in the evidence on earth of the divine virtue of a saint, in the form, biographically, of postmortem miracles, where the more contemporary understandings of virtuality may be seen to be paralleled. A poetic realisation of a trait, or essential character, a defining virtue, substituting on earth for the moribund body of the saint: it could be a modern definition of virtuality.

ii) Enthyrhythmy

“but whether you play or stop keep listening to the others” Karlheinz Stockhausen

“I do not want the Other to speak of you”. Roland Barthes

At the very least, Barthes took love to be a sting, and sometimes something worse. In any case, regarding a thing to be cherished, probed, licked, endlessly interpreted and re-interpreted, continually drawing one’s varying modes of attention, he occasionally indebted himself to Loyola, and his loquela. What is clear from everything that has gone above so far, is that recalled, bestowed, or both, the mutuality, here in the figuration of the civic is one between virtue and manliness. In Machiavelli, for instance, when talking sourly about the imaginatively embodied reintegration of divided cities, the female embodiment of virtue doesn’t amount to its figural feminisation. It remains as a kind of bloodless impersonation; a lending, only, of the tailoring of manly composures. With Loyola’s loquela, Barthes’s highly personal injuries, as matters of ceaseless and perpetually self-contradicting consideration become, not objects, rather somehow musical locations of redeemed sentiment. His somatic virtualisations of love work their way between the endlessly typical words of attachment to some continuingly unsayable state of devotion, and to the dreamed sound of an instanced kind of unrepeatable truth. This something known to be there, and only wickedly, purposefully, romantically forgotten.

Listen, again, to the impersonations of Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson. (Hear file #4, at http://www.nickcrowe.net/robstone). As with biography, one of the things that this piece captures in its attentions to the virtue of voices, is the difficulty of avoiding formality; in this case the musicalisation of the world. As a fact, it revels in this music. Two Manchester accents, just different enough from each other to signify, have been somatically schooled, paced to a regular and synchronised interrogation, one scheduled, in its conventionality, to elicit the conventions of autobiography. “In which city do you live? How long have you lived in that city? Can you name some of the people that live in that city?” This is just a pair from a series of interviews, subsequently overlain, that itself grows from career-long artistic interests in ways of being in the city. The close-reefed nature of those Manchester voices may try to signal a characteristic urban commonality, or a mien, even the interior logic of an ongoing and integrated body of work, a typology, the cognitive consistency of an artistic oeuvre. But even as this precentorial work goes on, insistently hastening appropriate responses, so the metrical dissonances between the voices start to describe, musically, the antithesis of their apparent authority. Utterly aleatorily, these male voicings may be regarded as ligatures; tied together, and in their very timeliness, in the deportment of the oddly elegant rate of their utterances, producing a kind of self-defeating musicality. It is a particular kind of musicality. It is a musicality both fully formal and made of conversational inconsistencies which, as contrapuntal entities, articulate obliquity.

And then, there are the voices of the women. No others, these spurred autobiographers of a city’s preferred demeanours play out respondance. Returning convention for convention, virtuously witholding some and at the same time relinquishing other kinds of virtual truths about the interpersonality of urbanity, these are improvisations on a known and ritualised theme of metropolitan intercourse. There is a continuing disruption and reforming of musical perspective, and there is an argument here. Male voices; dubious about Mancunity, female voices; telling the lie of whatever it is that should reasonably constitute a New York accent. But most importantly, the literary argument, the conventional one that talks just that bit too plausibly, with that fraction too much focus about hybridity, marginality and the other tropes of acceptable ratified urban difference, is supplanted by a musical one. This is something that might be understood as providing something like a raga, the articulation, here through the codes of voiced cultural identification, of a series of timbres, pitches and intervals, to which must be interpretatively lent rhythm, in order to exploratively foster and invent different understandings of harmony, some of them ugly, though not necessarily discordant. In the pursuit of the enthyremically unspoken, this acoustic gestalt is something that ought to be further improvised upon, loved, both listened to and listened with, and from which may be sifted the different and simultaneous truths of an epiphoric virtual urbanity: something that is made to be miraculously heard, but not quite with ears.