Craig Smith

Dear [redacted],

I enjoyed our walk the other day and was sorry I could not meet again for lunch. It was so enjoyable to take you on my tour of isolation through the dejected quarters of the city we both once frequented as younger men. I enjoyed the mixtape you left me with, too. I’ve never understood how dreampop and shoegaze were considered interchangeable genres, and I’m glad you don’t either.

We had so much time in the late nineties. Endless hours that, as infinite as they felt, also seemed to be leading to a conclusion, or at least a series of punchlines. It felt like we were standing in front of a corridor of closed doors all waiting to be opened. I'm forty this year and you turn the same twelve months from now, and from our talk it seems as though we both wonder, from time to time, where exactly those doors have gone.

This is all Nietzsche’s fault, really. He raised the idea. If he hadn’t have pointed out that god was dead, perhaps - but no, it is better to know the reason for the void rather than simply feel it.

It is about knowing how to save oneself through sober recitation of the structure of reality.

These days, when I think about the architecture of our subjectivity and how to live within it, I refer to the familiar crowd - Nietzsche and the visions delivered by his antagonists, Kant and Hegel, and to the least mechanically intentioned neuroconstructivists of our age, Hofstadter and MacGilchrist.

Kant's idea seemed too basic to be revelatory, that our reality comprises both what is internal and external by way of a dialogue between the two states. But of course our minds, dualistic to a fault - always thinking in pairs, either this or that, even framing colours as having perfect inversions due to the computers we created to mimic our binary reveries - harboured an unavoidable gap between knowable reality and what that reality actually might be. This gap was Kant's gift to the future.

Think about what MacGilchrist says about his portrait of the brain as being two hemispheres always in dialogue between dualisms - those binary, concrete yes or no facts about the world - and infinitudes - impressions of the whole state of something, beyond discrete fact. Just sit with that for a moment, the idea that a brain in two halves can house one half of the brain that thinks in binary terms, and another half of the brain that thinks in infinities. A mirror structure that fosters a dialogue between dualisms and infinitudes.

All those conversations the earliest ancient Greek philosophers had about whether there is one or there is many, whether there is one core atomic structure to matter or a fluidly amorphous plentitude, whether there is a single reality or endless splintered varieties. Now we know why this was all so difficult to get a lock on, because the brain was structured to contain both answers at once, forever.

And of course this is Hofstadter too, isn't it - his two core revelations: first, that Gödel's incompleteness theorems provide a beautiful model for describing this state of flux by articulating that a system which tries to concretely and completely describe reality will always have a self-referential loop built into it that fundamentally undermines its truth, which come on, what is this if not a model for what MacGilchrist is describing for how the hemispheres of the brain talk between themselves about somehow knowing only all of something and only its discrete fragments in a cyclical loop that ends up knowing neither.

So too Hofstadter's other core insight, that analogies are the building blocks of consciousness, that thought always seek connection, sometimes as dualities where one thing is loud in relation to how quiet another is, or hot compared to cold, but sometimes as analogous multiplicities, where a concept relates to many disparate ideas, how music is enjoyed because of its relation to what we learned of heartbeat rhythm in our mother’s womb and by the sound of our name being said aloud, this is the brain talking to itself about itself, preparing for the future through panoramic images of the whole and the splinters of its bones.

Hegel had already tread this ground after Kant, the way he ontologised Kant's epistemological gap and pointed out how the breach was necessarily built in, that incompleteness is part of the fundamental structure of reality, that the whole cannot exist in absence of a breach that, in terms we recognise now, speaks directly to this ongoing conversation our subjectivity is having between something and everything. And of course the unspoken condition that all of this is alluding to - nothing.

Because we know this, don't we, that it is this conversation between something and everything that causes us grief, because of its relation to meaning. We know that there is not one ‘something’ that is definitely true and can provide our life with solid meaningful purpose, and we know that the moment we say that ‘everything’ can be an answer that it is absolutely not. So we exist in a state of nihilism - there is not one truth, and there is no truth to be found in a pluralism of options. So what then.

For me, it is about recognising the necessary motion that occurs between these two states. It is that state of motion between two voids that presents an opportunity.

Beckett once wrote, in a story, that "I've never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply one my way". I like that sentiment, and I might build on it and say that where I'm on my way towards is simply more "on my ways". It is the momentum I seek out, particularly trajectories that build and collapse to varying degrees.

That is the focus - it isn't about saying "the journey is the destination", it's about acknowledging from the start that the destination is empty and that the only reason to even call it a journey is that it provides a gradient to rub up against, a spectrum of colours and tactile feedback, providing a sense of motion, because let's face it, the motion isn't real is it - it's like that old movie making technique where the actor sits in a car and a projected film of travel up a highway or through a tunnel of trees sits in the background to give the illusion of movement.

That's what meaning is, the projected highway and the tunnel of trees. I've never in my life been on my way anywhere, I've simply sat still and felt like I was moving, and between the conversation the hemispheres of my brain are having about the devil in the details and the universal whole, it sure feels like I'm going somewhere.

Schopenhauer said that music is emotion. I like that. I'd say too that good music makes us feel like we inhabit our subjectivity more fully, more directly. Music replicates the conditions of this flux - this traversing of Hegel's gap, feeling the skip of Gödel's reflexivity, feeling left and right brain talk over, into, each other.

Bach understood it, not just counterpoint in terms of binary roles played by two interpolating melodies, but in the interplay between, say, tonality and atonality, but more than this, not just interplay between dualities, that's not it at all - it's more than just melody and noise, it's pause too, and silence, the difference between pause and silence, the knife edge they rest on in terms of what comes next.

And when I say silence you know I mean more than this - I'm talking about the sort of silence that is full of sound, a negatively charged potential, a pause to channel all sound. This is what good music is, a representation of this state of antagonism between the binary and the infinite, as an analogy for our subjective experience, more than just emotion, for the sensation of illumination - you know the grunge rock era cliche, 'soft loud soft loud' to describe the verse chorus structure, well that's fine, that'll get you through no trouble, but where some of those songs got really good, into the shoegaze era, was when the songs were both soft and loud at the same time.

Yours,

[redacted]