Aufheben

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 3 January 2013.

As for playing the old material...

There are certainly precedents for not playing it.  For instance, Gerard Manley Hopkins burned all of his pre-priesthood, secular poetry.  

I want to play the old stuff, even during the Brand New Life phase.  I want to because, whether he is lucid about this or not, even the most worldly of these songs originated in an impulse toward intimacy with the other...and, ultimately, with The Other.  

I don't want to get to the point where we are always parsing who "you" is in the various songs.  I love the mystery of Shakespeare's dark lady, of the feminine ideal Barry White is always serenading...  We need to allow a good amount of that to happen "in the dark" without always saying who's who, who did what with whom, etc.  

The bottom line is that Arthur turned his attention from The Other to the other (and more probably, the others).  This happens to a lot of saintly-seeming children when adolescence hits.  But with one is destined to be a mystic, it takes on its own character...in short, it becomes a distortion of the antecedent ideal.  Once the "fall" occurs, one has to go through something of a platonic process to get back to The Other again.  

As in sex, the speaker and spoken-to can get fused together in some seemingly paradoxical ways:  "The Treatment" and "Venetian Blinds" could be seen as Arthur speaking to some shadowy, unnamed woman (namely a certain past girlfriend), but they could also be seen as the words of a jealous God as his bride (namely me) prostitutes herself.  

My point here is that we should play the old material because it has been, in some sense, redeemed and--to use some Hegelian terminology--"sublated" into the comprehensive whole.  Not redeemed in the way that insipid Christian music and poetry tries to redeem itself all the time (thus making it impossible to be modern), but in a way that surpasses human understanding, rationality, or contrivance.  Words that were profane and mundane become pregnant with hidden mystic heft (I first wrote down "meaning," but, again I don't want it to be something to be analyzed or attributed or otherwise "figured out").  

More pragmatically, I think Arthur is past the point of falling back into sin again, broken as he is.  So playing his songs in a loose redemptive framework would not be putting him in any danger at this point.  

I think even our counselor priest would see the psychological/spiritual benefit in playing through the old material, if for no other reason that it has grounded Arthur back with his brother, given him something productive to do, has him going to Mass again, etc.  

But, again, I want that framework of redemption to remain fairly loose...I don't think we should downplay anything thing that was said/done by saying that it was all about The Blessed Virgin Mary or his wife or this or that cult member. 

Hope that helps.  And again, thanks for all your amazing drum work!